Proud as he is of his Chicano heritage today, that wasn’t always the case for Hector Flores when he was younger. It was learning to love his own history, and to accept that everyone has something valuable to bring to the party, that heavily influenced what he does today: front a sextet that melds revved-up Mexican folk with dusty Americana and African music.

“I was a first-generation Mexican kid who grew up in East L.A. in the San Gabriel Valley,” the singer says, on the line from the City of Angels. “I can remember being in the fourth grade, where someone said ‘Stop speaking Spanish. If you speak Spanish, you’ll go with all the dumb kids.’ I didn’t know what that was at the time, but they were talking about the ESL class. Teachers really pushed kids not to speak Spanish in school—it was looked down upon. Like, if you spoke Spanish, you were stupid.

“It’s a very real thing—that there’s an English superiority that exists,” Flores continues. “My mom always wanted her kids to learn English because of the racism that she received from people. That caused a lot of trauma for her, and I took on some of that. It wasn’t until later that I felt really proud to be able to speak multiple languages. That’s what moved me to this style of Afro-Mexican music.”

Las Cafeteras started with Flores bonding with like-minded progressives at community-activist centres around Los Angeles, one of their collective obsessions being Son Jarocho, a strain of folk music from Veracruz, Mexico. The singer notes that to consider yourself Chicano is to embrace the fact that you bridge different cultures. Flores and his bandmates do just that on last year’s great Tastes Like L.A. Las Cafeteras hits the Veracruz town square in traditional finery for the woozy “Vamos to the Beach”, captures the spirit of Cape Verde on “La Morena”, and lovingly embraces classic American hip-hop with “If I Was President”.

“What I liked about traditional Afro-Mexican music was that it was African and Mexican, but also indigenous,” Flores says. “It was like, ‘Whoa—I didn’t learn any of that growing up. Nobody was there to teach me, but now I’m learning about my own history through music.’ That was really powerful for me—being able to embrace it was a very healing thing for me to do. The same for a lot of people in the band.”

With healing, of course, come acceptance and the knowledge that sometimes one needs to do everything one can to find a better way forward. Given the endless bullshit that Donald Trump has been spewing about Mexico and its citizens ever since he started talking about building his still nonexistent wall, the members of Las Cafeteras have had no shortage of reasons to be angrier than golden-era Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine (both of which the band’s members are huge fans of). ­

What bleeds through on Tastes Like L.A., though, is positivity. Las Cafeteras isn’t afraid to make folks think, with the very act of covering the traditional “This Land Is Your Land” in both English and Spanish somehow brilliantly political.

Flores is of the mind that, at a time when everyone in America seems to be looking for reasons to hate their fellow citizens, maybe the best way to move forward is to bring people together, and not just on the dance floor.

“The beautiful thing about our group is that many of us have different spiritual practices which have really allowed us to ground our group in the kind of world that we want to build,” he says. “There’s a point, as an activist, as an organizer, as a child, as a brother, and, for us, as a band, where you make a decision. Do you want to be against things, or do you want to be for things? More than anything, we want to be for things. There’s a lot of anger in the world, which is justifiable, but what we’re really pushing for is love. We’re a band about building a world where many worlds fit.”

Las Cafeteras plays the Imperial on Saturday (April 28) as part of the World Music Festival.