It was the climate, and that's what we wanted to do, ... only when they didn't want us to understand what they were saying.

It was kind of tongue-in-cheek, a goof-off to surprise our parents, ... But we couldn't play it. It became a challenge. You could compare it to country blues, or bluegrass - there's a tradition of form, a high standard of musicianship. That really attracted us.

[Always mindful of their cultural history, Los Lobos jumped at the chance to record there, particularly since San Francisco, like their native Los Angeles, supports a sizeable Chicano (Mexican-American) populace.] Well, it's more of a mixed Latino community, ... There's a lot of Mexicans, but there's also people from Latin America - Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Hondurans and so on. There's an area called the Mission District, which is where they all live, that's pretty much the Latin side of town. They've always had a large Latin music scene up there, though it's more like salsa.

To find something comparable to that, but in our own culture, that was refreshing.

We thought it was mainstream, ... We said, do it mainstream. We're American. We grew up here with everybody else. We thought the music would appeal to everyone, not just a certain ethnic group or age group. We thought it was universal.

We haven't forgotten that, ... It's something we draw from always.