On a Friday night time, on the heart of the Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet, a big stage at this open-air California market stood in entrance of an expanse of picnic tables and meals distributors.

The swap meet, on the border of Los Angeles and Orange Counties, often hosts tribute bands that pay homage to Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame-enshrined acts like Metallica or Mexican American icons like Jenni Rivera. However that night in March, Juicebox, Southern California’s main Strokes tribute band, had gathered an enthusiastic, multigenerational viewers able to rejoice the group that has come to represent fashionable downtown New York Metropolis rock within the early 2000s. There have been leather-based jackets all over the place.

Deep into the present, when the group performed “50/50,” a forgotten monitor from the Strokes’ 2013 full-length “Comedown Machine,” a mosh pit began, incomes the gang a warning from the venue. As Juicebox left the stage after performing 47 singles, album cuts and B-sides over three units, chants started, calling out for yet one more: “¡Otra! ¡Otra! ¡Otra!”

The members of Juicebox, just like the crowds they draw, are predominantly Latino, although the band’s founder and drummer, Jason Sensible, is a 38-year-old self-described “Jewish dude” from Queens. He moved to Los Angeles in 2010 and fell in with a gaggle of principally Latino musicians he met by means of Craigslist who cherished early 2000s rock bands as a lot as he did. Six years in the past, Sensible began Juicebox, which now options the lead vocalist Edgar Rene Espino, the guitarists George Campos and Renzon Sanchez and the bassist Tony Perez (who just lately took over for John Leal). It often performs twice a month, reserving gigs throughout Southern California.

Sensible found the Strokes when he was in his midteens and so they’ve been his favourite band ever since. “They’re an enormous a part of who I’m as a person and to have the ability to be a part of spreading the fandom and the love of the Strokes to different individuals is one thing that I’m not uninterested in doing,” he stated. “If I wasn’t on this band, I’d go to those exhibits.”

The Strokes themselves stay a serious act in Latin America, which has an extended custom of supporting rock music. When the band performs “Reptilia” for pageant crowds, it’s greeted with stadium-size fútbol chants.

It’s not shocking that a spot like Los Angeles County — the place 49.1 p.c of respondents (or greater than 4.9 million individuals) within the 2021 census recognized as Hispanic/Latino — is house to a lot of Latino Strokes followers.

However Jeanette Diaz, a journalist and publicist from Los Angeles, believes that the pull of the Strokes is very sturdy among the many first-generation American youngsters of immigrants, who can have sophisticated emotions about their identities and which tradition they belong to. The band “might simply do what they wished to do and it was accepted, and lots of people attempt to discover that,” Diaz stated. “It’s this concept of becoming in by yourself phrases, which plenty of Latin children craved, perhaps subconsciously.”

Some members of Juicebox say they really feel a closeness with the Strokes that comes partly from illustration. (The drummer Fabrizio Moretti was born in Brazil, and the guitarist Albert Hammond Jr.’s mom is from Argentina.) “I see photos of Fab and I’m like, I play soccer with that man, he seems to be like somebody I do know,” stated Sanchez, the Juicebox guitarist whose personal background is half Lebanese and half El Salvadoran. “And a man like Albert, who has massive curly hair, that’s my brother. I can see myself within the Strokes.”

The obvious antecedent to this fandom is the one for the Smiths, the maudlin however melodious Manchester band that broke up in 1987 however continues to get pleasure from a passionate following amongst Mexican People at present. This relationship has been lined in articles, documentaries and books for over 20 years, and it too has impressed tribute bands, together with the long-running Candy & Tender Hooligans, fronted by Jose Maldonado, who is usually known as “the Mexican Morrissey.”

José G. Anguiano, an affiliate professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Research at California State College, Los Angeles, stated he has seen related phenomena within the area’s goth, steel and rockabilly worlds. “As individuals have moved away or they’ve aged out of sure subcultures or music scenes, it does seem to be in Los Angeles, Latinos have moved in to take the reins,” he stated. “What’s actually cool is that they’re taking the reins, not simply by way of being followers, but additionally fronting these tribute bands and producing their very own music. They’re absolutely taking part in each sense in these subcultures.”

In 2022, the rising El Monte, Calif., band the Crimson Pears lined the Strokes’ “Automated Cease” for Unquiet Dwell’s YouTube channel. Within the video, their guitarist and vocalist, Henry Vargas, launched the track as being by “Los Estrokes.” The Crimson Pears by no means thought it was unusual that they knew so many Latino individuals who had been into the Strokes as a result of all of them got here to the group by means of Latino pals. However it was every band member’s particular person love of the Strokes that helped carry them collectively and form their sound.

“In our metropolis there was plenty of punk, ska and steel bands,” Vargas stated in an interview. “We had been the one ones that had been branching out, making an attempt out completely different stuff.”

Earlier than becoming a member of Juicebox in 2022, Espino, the band’s lead singer, was in a distinct Strokes tribute band for six years, however he’s by no means seen the true deal play reside. He stated he’s all the time been a much bigger fan of the Arctic Monkeys, whose frontman, Alex Turner, famously began an album with the lyrics, “I simply wished to be one of many Strokes.”

“I’m dwelling his life proper now,” Espino quipped.

Sanchez, 26, is the Juicebox member most keen on re-creation. In a thin tie or a polo shirt, he performs a white Fender Stratocaster at practically chest-level, similar to Hammond Jr. His thoughts was blown open by the Strokes when he was 14, after two brothers he was once in a band with launched him to the track “The Trendy Age.”

However a fair youthful cohort has just lately embraced the Strokes by means of the Rick Rubin-produced album “The New Irregular,” from 2020, which spawned a TikTok hit in “The Adults Are Speaking.”

On a Friday night time in late Could, a crowd packed Knucklehead, a dive-y bar on an unglamorous block in Hollywood. Juicebox was on the invoice alongside an Arctic Monkeys tribute band known as Polar Primates for Room on Fireplace, a membership night time devoted to early 2000s indie and various music. The Strokes’ time enjoying tiny New York Metropolis venues just like the Mercury Lounge looms giant of their historical past, however in actuality, it lasted for barely a blip. Juicebox exhibits like this one let followers who had been born too late or on the alternative coast reimagine themselves in that second.

Throughout a cellphone interview a couple of days earlier, Room on Fireplace’s D.J. and promoter, Miguel Ponce, 29, defined that he discovered in regards to the Strokes from a pal on his highschool baseball crew, however it took a little bit time earlier than he really acquired it. “I heard the track ‘Ize of the World’ and I don’t know what it was, however swiftly it hit like a spark, dude,” he stated. “I didn’t understand how they’re doing it, the place they sound like they’re not making an attempt, however they’re actually making an attempt.”

Ponce began Room on Fireplace in March 2022, however the early installments didn’t draw a lot of a crowd. After he had Juicebox play for the primary time this previous January, the occasion started to take off. “I began seeing the true potential of what I can do,” he stated.

Earlier than the pandemic, Ponce used to e book exhibits with native acts in Downtown Los Angeles. He already knew how a lot of an affect the Strokes had. “A lot of the indie bands, they’d gown like Julian Casablancas,” he stated. “There’s no disgrace in that.”