For international travelers, planning a trip to the U.S. has come with an extra layer of complications and caution due to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The full economic impact on the tourism sector is yet to be measured, but for the entertainment industry, some international acts with planned U.S. tours are feeling the fallout – specifically regional Mexican music.
Griselda Flores, senior editor at Billboard, recently painted a stark picture of the future of a budding international music genre. She joined the Standard with more about the musicians affected and where there music industry goes from here.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: This headline for your story is pretty stark: Revoked visas and canceled shows: How the Trump administration is upending the regional Mexican music market. Why specifically this market?
Griselda Flores: It all started when Christopher Landau, who’s from the State Department, tweeted that Los Alegres del Barranco were getting their work visas canceled, specifically because they sang about, or they portrayed images of, a narco cartel leader, right?
And that’s when we really thought, okay, they’re targeting corrido artists, narco corrido artists who sing about cartels and glorify cartels. So we thought that was the extent of it.
And it was really the first time that the U.S. government had taken a stance on anything like this. But then we started seeing domino effect and more artists of this scene and genre were being impacted.
You mentioned that one group. Could you name some others that have been affected?
Yes, so Los Alegres del Barranco were really the first ones, but the biggest one, I would say, is Julión Álvarez.
Julión Alvarez is a regional Mexican artist who’s been around for many years. At one point, he was the box office king here in the U.S. But then in 2018, around that time, he was having issues with the U.S. Treasury, and so they also revoked his visa then.
And he had since been cleared in 2022, and then he announced a comeback tour. So it was a big deal, and people had been waiting for this moment.
He performed in LA for three sold-out dates, and once he was ready to perform in Texas, that’s when he was notified that he no longer could travel. He was at the airport in Guadalajara ready to board the plane, and they told him that he couldn’t because his visa was revoked.
And this was a big deal. I would say this is the biggest artist in regional Mexican, and for him not to be able to travel, it really was alarming.
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Tell us about the reaction from fans and what reactions you’re seeing – not just this particular artist, but just generally.
From fans, I’m seeing that they’re kind of understanding because they’re seeing everything that’s happening under the Trump administration.
But I think industry leaders are getting very nervous about what can happen and how this can impact the live music scene, because this isn’t just an immigration issue anymore. This is an economy issue.
I mean, one of the people that I interviewed, Henry Cárdenas – who is from CMN, a promoter – he said, “we can be losing $2 million every weekend, because that’s what we lost when Julión Álvarez had to cancel his show.”
I know you’ve spoken with immigration lawyers, and I also know that immigration law can be rather subjective, especially when it comes to visas. What recourse do artists have, if anything?
I mean, it’s hard to say. Even the immigration lawyers that I interviewed, they’re saying, this is something we had never seen before, where artists, the reasons they’re being revoked because of what they sing, because of the genre that they sing.
So this is uncharted territory for a lot of immigration lawyers. What the ones that I spoke to said, I mean, I guess they just have to go back to square one and reapply.
But all of this can go into like a black hole. No one knows if they’ll be approved, when it’ll be approved, what they’re actually looking for, because they’re not giving them a reason as to “we’re revoking your visa because of what you sang.”
There is no specific reason. It’s just administrative processing, which is completely vague. And the lawyers don’t know what they are looking for.
What does this mean writ large for the industry? I mean, you have touring international musicians, maybe some other acts in the process of planning a U.S. tour, everything on hold. What’s happening?
I would say that a lot of these artists who are coming from Mexico specifically will have a very difficult time.
Some of the promoters that I spoke to who work with these artists, a lot them are trying to see if they can tour to other countries and focus on American-born artists here for touring, which is really impactful, because how do you leave out a whole bunch of these artists who are from Mexico out of the touring scene in the U.S.?
Again, it’s money lost. Fans don’t get to see their favorite artists. And it just derails a movement that we’ve reported on that has grown so much exponentially in the U.S. and across the globe. I mean, this is really something serious for the genre.
