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When MTV Latino Broadcast Latin Rock From Lincoln Road
MTV Latino’s arrival on Lincoln Road in 1993 connected a new television audience to the rock en español scene taking shape in Miami.
On October 1, 1993, MTV Latino began broadcasting from Miami Beach. Its first music video was “We Are Sudamerican Rockers” by the Chilean band Los Prisioneros.
The choice announced what the new channel hoped to do. A band could come from Chile, sing in Spanish and reach viewers far beyond its home country. The people introducing those videos were from different parts of Latin America, too: early hosts included Argentina’s Ruth Infarinato, Mexico’s Gonzalo Morales and Chile’s Alfredo Lewin. The network’s studios were on Lincoln Road, but the audience it was trying to bring together stretched across borders.
Rock en español was already thriving in parts of Latin America. In Miami, however, fans and musicians still had to work to find regular places for it. Spanish-language radio leaned heavily toward tropical music and ballads. Visiting bands could draw a crowd, but local listeners wanted more than an occasional concert. They wanted to hear those records during an ordinary week.
Colombian DJ Kike Posada was one of the people trying to make that happen. He and Argentine DJ Fabio Vallebona developed Boom, a weekly Latin rock show on Miami’s Radio Ritmo. It began in 1993, soon after MTV Latino went on the air. The channel put music videos in front of viewers; Posada and Vallebona gave local listeners a place to hear more of the music on the radio.
The connection grew in clubs as well. Sunday gatherings at La Covacha drew fans of rock en español to west Miami-Dade. DJs played records from across Latin America, and local performers had an audience ready to hear them. Television, radio and club nights each did something different. Together, they made it easier for people in Miami to find the music and one another.
From its Miami Beach offices, MTV Latino faced a larger version of the same challenge. A song beloved in Argentina might be unfamiliar in Mexico; an artist known in Colombia might have little presence elsewhere. A single channel could not assume that every viewer shared the same favorites. Its programmers selected videos and hosts with those differences in mind, then watched which artists connected across markets.
Over time, the network helped introduce bands including Café Tacuba, Aterciopelados and Los Fabulosos Cadillacs to audiences beyond their home countries. As it grew, MTV Latino added regional feeds and offices outside Miami to better serve those audiences. Miami Beach remained an important production base, but it was never the source of the music’s whole story.
That distinction matters. MTV Latino did not invent rock en español. The artists had made the records, and fans had built scenes around them long before the channel launched. Nor did one radio show create Miami’s audience for it. What happened here in 1993 was a meeting of people looking for ways to reach one another: musicians, broadcasters, DJs, promoters and listeners.
Today, a viewer can search for almost any music video in seconds. In 1993, seeing a band from another country on television, then hearing that sound on Miami radio or finding its audience at a local club, could open a much wider musical world. For a time, one of the doors to that world was on Lincoln Road.