"I started here at La Peña studying, I started playing and getting involved in music late in my life. And it was through La Peña I think that I started participating in some Afro-Cuban drumming workshops. I did that for a few years. After that I started performing and playing with different groups. Recently in the last couple of years since I put together my band, Son Borikua, we've had the opportunity to play [all over the Bay Area]. I've been playing in different folkloric ensembles, Venezuela and Afro-Cuban, Puerto Rican. I also like popular music but I guess it's more difficult to find places where you can present that other, more folk form."

"I always kind of try to make people aware, both people that play with me in my band, and people that study here in the workshops, and the people that come to the shows, first that you know, we play music that owes a great debt to the people that came before us. A lot of the music that we're playing is rooted in traditions that represent the experiences of previous generations. You know, the struggle of people coming together, and people that came from many different continents throughout the process of colonization of Puerto Rico. So I like people to understand that we owe something to those previous generations that created some of the sounds, and some of the songs, and some of these traditions and some of these dances. We're now taking them, and we're moving with them to a new place. And that's the other thing that I like people to understand. That we've got to respect those traditions and learn from them, but that our role, at least I see, my role in Son Borikua, in this band, is then taking that tradition further and putting our own contribution."

"I think La Peña has been instrumental in the whole process of developing an audience for Latin American music and Caribbean music here in the Bay Area. When I got here to the Bay Area it was 1989 I think, there weren't that many places that were actually presenting live Latin music. There was a salsa scene, in nightclubs, but outside of salsa there weren't that many other places that were presenting the wide variety of Latino music that we have here in the Bay Area available to us. La Peña was one of the few places that I saw was really kind of trying to present some of the diversity in the musical culture in Latin America and Latino communities here in the States, so I think through their work they have helped make audiences here in the Bay Area work up the richness and diversity of Latino Music in general."

Photo by Hugh Lovell