Road To: Coachella with El Malilla Road To: Coachella With El Malilla

Road To: is our series spotlighting the journey of rising talent as they approach pivotal career moments or break into new scenes. Each edition follows a different voice on the cusp — capturing the hustle, the turning points, and the buildup to something big. For our first edition, we follow El Malilla on his Road to: Coachella. For many non-American up-and-coming artists, Coachella is a chance to reach an international audience and build a global trajectory. What began as a casual YouTube discovery for El Malilla became a full-circle milestone. We documented the events leading up to the music festival, piecing together when he found out he was officially headed to the desert to following him at Mexico’s Tecate Pa’l Norte, his last performance pre-Coachella.

The first time a teen Fernando Hernández Flores came in contact with the existence of the Coachella music festival was through a YouTube video vlog of Travis Barker’s 2009 performance with the late DJ AM. “It was that time when YouTube was really popular, and people uploaded vlogs, and I’d watch them,” the now 25-year-old recounts from a hotel room in Monterrey, Nuevo León, on Apr. 5. “I didn’t speak English, but I saw there was a backstage and that there were lots of people.” The random video came up as he was on the platform, at a time when YouTube’s algorithm allowed for more content discovery. “It was just like, ‘Ah, qué chido,’” he exclaims. It wasn’t until he became the reggaeton mexa sensation El Malilla, playing major festivals like Coca-Cola Flow Fest in Mexico City and knew more about the industry that he fully understood the cultural impact of the annual festival held in Indio, CA. “I then realized there was a Tecate Pa’l Norte, there was a Lollapalooza. But then I found out there was one called Coachella, and that it was like the ‘father of all [festivals],’ that it was one of the most important ones for a lot of people,” he says just hours before his set at Tecate Pa’l Norte. “But I never imagined I’d be on the lineup, really. Of course, at one point I said, ‘It’d be cool to be there,’ but not at 25.” Coachella was a festival that El Mali associated with bands and overall Anglo artists. “I saw it as something distant,” the Valle de Chalco native notes. But the far-off festival that has featured some of the biggest names in music like Prince, Paul McCartney, Beyoncé, and even Bad Bunny would shorten the distance and come right to him on his home turf.

Last August, El Malilla was set to play three sold-out shows in Mexico City’s Auditorio Blackberry, a launchpad venue that signals forthcoming superstardom for a Mexican artist. Backstage, he had a slew of guests, including friends, staff, media, and more. “I’m very friendly. I like to yap a lot, so I knew everyone except three people in a corner speaking in English,” Hernández says. On his first concert night, El Mali was awarded seven platinum records and six gold ones for his songs like “Dime,” “B de Bellako,” “Tiki,” and more. On stage, Mexican reggaeton pioneer Big Metra called him a “worthy representative” of the movement. For night two, the English-speaking mystery guests were back, and again for night three, but this time, they wore unofficial merch, including a T-shirt and a hat, a staple of Mexico City’s concert scene. Moments before starting the show, someone from his management team finally introduced him to one of the men. “‘I’m going to introduce you to Rene, [he] comes from the United States, and he’s very impressed with what’s happening; your performance, how you connect with the audience,’” he recounts being told. “Rene” ended up being Rene Contreras, who works curating the Sonora stage at Coachella. They exchanged pleasantries, and then El Mali headed onstage. After the show, they picked back up the conversation, and that’s when Contreras personally told him he’d take him to Coachella.

El Malilla remembers Contreras telling him he loved the show and how every night was different. Then he asked him if he was ready for Coachella. “I was like, ‘What? For real?’” Hernández says. “But that was it. That was the conversation, and the reality of this industry and business is that one thing is words and another is facts, so I left it at that.” The next few months brought his biggest hit “Vaquero,” becoming the most listened-to Mexican urbano artist on Spotify, racking up over eight million monthly listeners on the platform, and a dream collaboration with Nike’s Jordan. As he kept working hard — performing city to city across Mexico and releasing music nonstop — he was aware his team had signed the contract with Coachella. But having experienced things falling through before, he didn’t let himself get excited about the opportunity yet.

"There was a change there, a radical change in my life. I went from being a barrio artist, the guy everyone bet on in the barrio, to being an international product."

Though over the last couple of years, the rising reggaeton mexicano movement — commonly labeled as “reggaeton mexa” — has battled it out with corridos stars on Mexican charts, it’s a scene with deep roots. Like reggaeton in Puerto Rico, el movimiento arrived in Mexico in the ‘90s via the ports of Veracruz, bringing dancehall, dembow, and early reggaeton from the Caribbean, spreading mainly through clubs, local sound systems, street markets, and bootleg mixtapes. By the early 2000s, reggaeton mexicano had emerged by way of artists like Big Metra and La Dinastía, though their visibility remained limited due to a lack of support from the music industry and mainstream media. Despite this, reggaeton kept soundtracking the streets, and soon, another sound began to rise in the East side of Estado de México: cumbiatón. Underground DJs like Pablito Mix, DJ Mega, DJ Bekman, and crews like Under Style and Piripituchy began mixing cumbia sonidera with reggaeton samples. “In those days, you’d listen to reggaeton secretly,” El Mali notes. Alongside cumbiatón, it was seen as music for chacas and nacos — derogatory slang terms in Mexico used to describe people perceived as thugs and vulgar — and its stories and jargon would reflect life in the streets, narratives that would later become canon to El Malilla’s onstage persona. Thanks to the work of underground DJs, artists, and producers keeping cumbiatón and reggaeton alive, el movimiento persisted and continued to grow long before the mainstream took notice. Since then, artists like Bellakath, El Bogueto, Dani Flow, Yeri Mua, and El Malilla have emerged and taken the sounds to new popularity heights in the TikTok age. “I feel like digital platforms created and pigeonholed this as ‘reggaeton mexa’ for the simple purpose of commercializing it. And I get it; this a business,” El Mali says, acknowledging the difference between reggaeton made by this new wave of Mexican artists and reggaeton from Puerto Rico and elsewhere. “As a Mexican, reggaeton is not our culture. We adopted it into our culture, and now we’re the representatives that will keep this growing,” he says. “There are 132 million Mexicans. We could live off of our own genre, but my dream is to be known in more places.” Though not strong enough to unseat corridos tumbados as the most listened-to genre, reggaeton mexa is on the come-up. According to Spotify, by 2024, the consumption of Mexican reggaeton grew more than 1,100 percent in the previous five years in Mexico. Gen Z and Alpha fans are the highest listeners of the genre, with 53 percent being under 24, and women accounting for 57 percent of all streams. In the U.S., reggaeton mexa came out as one of the top emerging Latine sub-genres on the same platform last year. As of September 2024, reggaeton mexa had grown by 240 percent globally compared to the previous year. With stats like these, it’s easy to assume that the Mexican reggaetoneros had conquered the market. But despite many foreign artists heading to Mexico to make it big, the country’s trends don’t mirror what’s hot in the rest of Latin America. Streams don’t necessarily translate to concert ticket sales or a turnout at a festival set, a bitter lesson El Malilla would learn at Lollapalooza Chile.

On March 22, 2025, El Malilla was set to make his Lollapalooza Chile debut, his first-ever international music festival. He was given a 2 p.m. slot, two hours after doors opened at one of the smaller stages. Compared to his crowds in Mexico, which are usually sold out with fervent fans, El Malilla’s set in Santiago paled in comparison. Videos of a few dozen people watching him went viral on social media, with many haters ridiculing him for it, and others saying that reggaeton mexicano was only a local movement with no global potential. Critics have called it “memetón,” reducing it to a TikTok meme meant to shock and entertain with its crass sexual language devoid of musicality. Two weeks after Lolla Chile, Hernández is mellow while discussing the performance. “I’m going to be real, and it’s the first time I’m talking about this,” he says.

When El Malilla first received offers to play international festivals, including Lollapalooza Chile and Riverland Fest in Madrid, he was hesitant. He was cognizant of his popularity in Mexico, but he had never tested it abroad. “If I don’t do it now, when am I going to do it?” he remembers asking himself. “In one year? Two years? Three years? I said, ‘No, I have to do it now to take those first steps.’ Not only for my own career, but for an entire new genre in Mexico to keep growing.” Hernández had a decision to make: extend the Mexico tour to more states or go international. “There has to be a guy who raises his hand and says, ‘You know what, I’m going to venture out,’” he shares. “Chingue su madre, I’ll be that guy.” A day before Lolla Chile, El Mali played Casa Parlante, a Chilean Boiler Room-like live session with artists in el movimiento, with about 105 people present singing along to his tracks. He was happy with the turnout, which made him confident going into Lollapalooza. Backstage at the festival, he asked his team about the crowd, which was about 40 people. He figured more people would come as the music began to play. “And they did. More and more people started coming. And when the other band started playing, that’s when people started to leave. But others stayed,” he explains. That band was Resonancia Etérea, a Chilean ensemble that played their Lolla debut at one of the main stages 15 minutes after El Malilla’s set began. While not massive as a band, it’s led by superstar Kidd Voodoo, who recently served as a judge at the Viña del Mar festival. “The last time we played, there were five people watching us,” Kidd Voodoo reportedly said. This time around, they had a full crowd by their second song. “At no point did I think to stop singing,” El Malilla shares. “If I have 100 people, it’s time those 100 people know who I am, look me up, follow me. I had to own the moment so that those 100 people wouldn’t leave.” At the end of his set, he acknowledged that though they were a small crowd, he was thankful they stayed. “I realized that [my] perreos that are anthems [in Mexico], like ‘B de Bellako,’ ‘Tiki,’ ‘Azótame,’ for them, it was like a new sound. Because I’d see their faces, and it was like, they’d dance, but they were like, ‘Qué pedo, what’s this?’” He notes that his hits that have a more globalized reggaeton sound, like “Dime” and “Mami Tú,” were the songs the Chilean crowd would sing to. Hernández thought back to when a club promoter in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, told him he loved his show, but asked him what a “ñerito” was. It made him realize that he'd have to change the slang in his songs so that more people understand him. “I said, ‘Ok. If we, as Mexicans, as pillars of Mexican reggaeton, want to lead or we want other people to know us, we have to change our sound so that it’s more relatable, so that they say, ‘Qué chingón este perreo,’ and not [label it as] Mexican perreo,” he adds.

“As a Mexican, reggaeton is not our culture. We adopted it into our culture, and now we’re the representatives that will keep this growing."

As we finish catching up with him in the hotel room, Hernández jumps up from the couch after talking about Lollapalooza Chile and assures, “But you’ll see today! You’ll see today!” Once at Tecate Pa’l Norte, Yeri Mua stops by his dressing room, greeting him by singing, “Ay, qué mojada me dejaste en tu cama,” her viral verse on their collaboration, “Avión Privado.” She’d join him onstage later for the song’s first joint performance. As he did press before his show, Coachella dropped its set times. “Look for yourself,” Christian García, one of El Mali’s publicists, says as he hands him a phone. “Who’s gonna tell me that I’m opening?” Hernández jokes, assuming he’d play an early afternoon set like at Lolla Chile and Tecate Pa’l Norte. It takes him a few beats, but then he finds it. He was closing the Sonora stage at 9:50 p.m. “Me dediqué a perderte,” he randomly sings, an Alejandro Fernández song he says his mom loves, followed by an excited shriek. “We come from a world where your dream isn’t to be ‘El Malilla,’” Hernández says, referring to Valle de Chalco, where he and most of his team, formed by his closest friends, are from. “Your dream isn’t to be a singer or an actor. We come from a world where the reality is working six days a week for minimum wage. And you see this, and it’s a dream.”

“There has to be a guy who raises his hand and says, ‘You know what, I’m going to venture out,’ Chingue su madre, I’ll be that guy.”

Before going out onstage in Monterrey, El Malilla occupies himself talking to his team, taking pictures and video, distracting his mind. He admits he still gets nervous before a performance, with butterflies in his stomach. But at Tecate Pa’l Norte, El Mali has his Resonancia Etérea moment — he plays one of the main stages to a crowd of more than 20,000 people, singing along to every word and cheering for him to take off his clothes. His next performance would finally be Coachella. And while stage size-wise it’s a few steps down from Tecate Pa’l Norte, this is the show for him. “It’s all or nothing,” El Mali says. “That’s why we’ve been working for 10 years on the project. It’s clear to me – I love singing in the barrios, it’s my favorite place, but [Coachella] is not a barrio show, you know? It’s like, from there, the world is next.” As he concludes Tecate Pa’l Norte successfully, Hernández heads into Coachella with a positive mindset. It will mark his first performance in the U.S. But despite what happened in Chile, he’s not burdened by reluctance. “I’m going with a lot of hunger to succeed,” he says. “My dream is for people to know El Malilla beyond Mexico, beyond the barrio. My dream is to fill stadiums and arenas outside of my country. So I’m going [to Coachella] very hungry.” And with an appetite, he steps forward, ready to turn hunger into history.

That would change on Nov. 20, 2024, the day Coachella unveiled its 2025 lineup. At around 2:20 p.m. PT, El Mali was at the gym when he received a WhatsApp message from his team. “Congratulations, Fernando, you’re there,” Hernández remembers reading two minutes before the formal announcement. It was official — he’d be playing Coachella. Once home, he finally went through his phone, only to realize it had blown up with messages. The first person to write him was Mexican popstar Paty Cantú. “‘Do you know what this means?’” she told him. Boricua stars like Álvaro Díaz and “B de Bellako Remix” collaborators Jowell y Randy also messaged him. That’s when it finally hit him. “There was a change there, a radical change in my life. I went from being a barrio artist, the guy everyone bet on in the barrio, to being an international product,” he says. “People said, ‘Wey, no, El Malilla is global, not just from my neighborhood, from my barrio, my city, my Mexico. El Malilla is also international.’” He’d become the first Mexican reggaeton artist to play Coachella, joining Bad Bunny, Karol G, and J Balvin as a representative of el movimiento. He'd also be amplifying the voices of Mexico’s underground, from the barrio to one of the world’s most important festivals.

By: Alexis Hodoyán-GastélumPhoto & Video: Joss Andreu Editor-in-Chief: Thatiana Diaz Director of Talent Relations: Joel Moya Editorial Consultation: Cyn SalazarCreative Director: Alan LópezSocial Media Manager: Alma Sacasa Special thanks to Virgin Music and French Toast Agency

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