Tropical Panama

Emerging from the music community in San Nicolas de las Garza, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, Tropical Panamá formed in 1979 with Francisco Javier Gonzalez serving as lead singer. As early Mexican trailblazers in cumbia and vallenato, the band drew frequent contentious parallels to Renacimiento 74 and La Sonora Dinamita yet swiftly carved out a distinct profile across Mexico and the United States through recordings that began with the 1981 album El Carita. The 1983 release La Fiera generated strong regional radio exposure and helped expand the group’s live schedule. During the early to mid-1990s Tropical Panamá issued fresh material on Disa while the label also made their complete initial catalog available again. Entering the new century, the band joined those same predecessors on large-scale tours and kept producing new work amid a resurgence of cumbia and vallenato sparked by a younger generation of pop artists. Their twenty-second album, a tribute to both Renacimiento 74 and La Sonora Dinamita titled Renacimiento 74, appeared in fall 2016.