With its Los Angeles expansion, BelicoFest is regional no more.

The music festival will make its California debut at BMO Stadium on Sunday with headliner Tito Double P after two years in Phoenix. BelicoFest’s line-ups are built around both prominent and up-and-coming artists in the regional Mexican music scene, which is also referred to as música mexicana. The English-language term has received criticism from Latin artists such as Carín León and Helen Ochoa for its use of “regional,” which they argue is a misnomer that leads audiences to believe the sound is incapable of becoming global.

BelicoFest was created in 2024 by For The Culture co-founders Andrés Charvel, the promoter behind some of Ye and Shakira’s Mexico performances, and Ramiro Bojorquez. The festival is also produced in collaboration with 515 Entertainment – a Mexico City-based promoter agency headed by Charvel – and is expanding to new cities across the United States and Mexico. After LA, the Spotify-partnered festival will travel to San Jose in August where it will make history as the first live music event at PayPal Park.

Charvel spoke with the Daily Bruin’s Leydi Cris Cobo Cordon about creating a festival inspired by the música mexicana movement.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Daily Bruin: You mentioned BelicoFest is now entering its third year. Where did the concept of BelicoFest come from and what was it like trying to turn that into something actionable?

Andrés Charvel: It was one of those ideas that happened out of a necessity. There’s thousands of festivals happening around the world the entire year. The fact that there’s extremely large Latin communities around the world (and) Mexican communities in the U.S. that aren’t targeted or spoken to directly with any type of festival was pretty crazy to think about. For us, it was a no-brainer.

We did 7- or 8000 people for something we thought could be bigger from day one. We started relatively small in comparison to what the movement is now. It was a great response, because there wasn’t anyone targeting that market specifically. You would have the genre appear here and there in some festivals, but you wouldn’t have a fully dedicated festival for the genre.

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DB: Música mexicana is on the rise and has seen a 400% worldwide growth on Spotify across five years by the end of 2023, as reported by the Associated Press. That same year, Eslabón Armado, Fuerza Regida and Grupo Frontera accounted for three out of five of the Top Duo/Group nominees at the Billboard Music Awards. How does BelicoFest, which held its inaugural event in 2024, situate into that landscape?

AC: I strongly believe we’ve had a positive impact on the música mexicana market. Speaking directly with some of the artists, they have been really grateful and appreciative of this specific platform that gave them a stage with a statement. BelicoFest really represents what the movement is. The industry might look massive, but everyone knows each other, and it’s very small in certain regards. We’ve been hearing certain speculative rumors that the Latin GRAMMYs might come to Mexico City for the first time. It goes to show how this Mexican music movement has been grabbing more and more attention – and the attention of the academy to potentially host the Latin Grammys for the first time in Mexico City, after only being present in Las Vegas and LA, goes to show what this movement is really creating in the industry.

DB: Festivals across the board have seen critique for their lack of female performers. Book More Women reported that across 9 major U.S. music festivals in 2025 only 21.6% of performers were women, which was a drop from 23.7% in 2024. Across the 14 BelicoFest acts for Saturday’s event, there are two women compared to at least 26 men. In other words, less than 8% of your performers identify as female, despite the vital contributions of artists like Selena Quintanilla and Jenni Rivera to the música mexicana scene. Could you speak to that distribution?

AC: It’s funny you mention it because yesterday I was speaking to one of the bigger promoters in the scene about how there is a big gap between male and female performers. It really has nothing to do with anything but the genre itself. The amount of male performers versus the amount of female performers that are available or are really trying to make a name for themselves in this specific música mexicana genre is unlike any other. It’s very male-heavy, but not because the genre says it has to be.

We tried looking. It’s a genre that, for some strange reason I can’t pin down specifically, it’s more male concentrated than a pop genre or an indie genre, where it’s more balanced. I think it’s just a matter of the genre and the market that it attracts, because the market is also highly male. In the crowds, the percentage is usually more like 60-40 male-female or 70-30 – whereas in other festivals, the more the festivals have been growing, the more equal the crowds have become.

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DB: You’ve spoken a bit about the geographical expansion of BelicoFest, both within the U.S. and with Mexico City specifically. Apart from the California run, where else are you hoping to connect with música mexicana audiences in the long term?

AC: We have our eyes on Houston. Chicago is pretty much confirmed for next summer. We go to where the market asks us to, so we’ve been on the lookout on our socials to see where people are asking for Belico to come. We do a little market study to see the feasibility of actually taking the brand there and what partnerships could make sense for us there.

Other than Mexico City, we’ve gotten a few inquiries about taking this to Spain because música mexicana is really growing in Europe as well. There is definitely a lot of interest to expand the brand and expand the festival globally, so we’ll be doing that as the demand grows and hopefully after a few successful shows here in the States.