Oro Norteño

Norteño music -- a lively, infectious, hot-blooded mixture of Mexican ranchera and German polka -- was created in Texas by Mexican-Americans, who were exposed to the polka beat that German immigrants had brought to the Lone Star State from Europe. But the popularity of norteño (which is also known as Tex-Mex or conjunto) certainly isn't limited to Austin, El Paso, or San Antonio; there are plenty of norteño bands in northern Mexico as well as the Pacific Northwest and the southwestern region of the United States. California, which has a large Mexican-American population, has been a norteño hotbed for a long time -- and that includes Central California as well as Southern and Northern California. Fresno, which is in Central California, is the home of Oro Norteño, a popular norteño quintet that has been around since 1996. Oro Norteño (whose name means Northern Gold in Spanish) is not a grupero or tejano outfit in the strict sense; while the slick, urbane, polished grupero and tejano styles are essentially Latin pop with Mexican overtones, Oro Norteño has tended to favor a grittier, tougher, more hardcore approach to regional Mexican music