RHYTHM COLLECTOR

Eblis Álvarez's Meridian Brothers unites the many strands of Latin music.

- DANIEL ALARCÓN

When my parents moved from Lima, Peru, to the United States, in 1980, they brought with them the basics: three children, several suitcases of clothes, some books, and a small but cherished collection of vinyl. We were not a particularly musical family—no one played an instrument, no one sang—but the records came with us because it was simply inconceivable that they would not.

Like most family record collections from those years, ours was diminished by the arrival of CDs, by garage sales and the occasional cull. Through it all, though, my parents’ Peruvian LPs remained—it’s not surprising, I suppose, that a record of the criollo singer Eva Ayllón didn’t sell at an Alabama garage sale in 1992—and those were the ones I eventually inherited, or appropriated, depending on your point of view. In fact, my parents’ records make up an important part of the collection I have today, augmented over the years by jazz and salsa and cumbia; and, even if they aren’t my musical favorites, it feels like a real privilege to own these records, artifacts of an era and place that mean so much to the people I love that certain songs can still bring them to tears.

When I was in my early thirties, some friends and I started what could accurately, if somewhat ostentatiously, be called a d.j. collective. We named ourselves La Pelanga, and hosted an eponymous party that roamed from one house to another, and now and then to a local club, but whose truest home was the East Oakland loft where I lived at the time, which we’d pack with a hundred people or more, only a few of whom I knew. We liked everything, every kind of music, but mostly we liked how disparate styles sounded when played in succession. Rock