Santa María Rivera: Community, One Beat at a Time

LOT: What’s your real name and where are you from?

Santa María: Santa María Rivera. I’m named after my grandfather, who’s from Guerrero. Both sides of my family are from Guerrero. My dad’s side is from a town near La Unión, the main municipality of this region. They were cattle ranchers. And my mom’s side, they’re from Feliciano. Feliciano is where you pay your toll when you drive from Morelia into the coast. Her family were fishermen. I was born in Zihuatanejo, in a little clinic right next to the basketball court downtown. And like many millions of Mexicans before us, and millions of Mexicans after us, we immigrated to the United States in the late ‘80s due to the economic hardships here in Mexico. We settled in central Washington, in Yakima, from there I went on to play college soccer and then professional soccer.

LOT: Who is Santa Maria, the DJ?

Santa María: I grew up in a musical household. My dad was a musician. He taught himself how to play the guitar. He was a lead singer in a little wedding band here, in Michoacán and Guerrero. Whenever we came back home—to Mexico—he would always bring down tons and tons of musical equipment, speakers, drums, guitars. And even though soccer was my outlet, whenever I came home, I played. I taught myself how to play the drums. Music is part of our culture. It’s who we are. Music has always been a central part of my persona. I grew up in the music.

I happened to stumble upon electronic music after my professional playing soccer days. I played for the Seattle Sounders until 2008. After that season ended, I backpacked through Thailand for a couple of months, and I stumbled upon electronic music on a tiny little island—Koh Phangan—in the Gulf of Thailand. It was eye-opening and groundbreaking for me. I was in my mid-20s, still developing, and I was like, “Whoa, there’s something else outside of having the rigid lifestyle of being a professional athlete.” I just fell in love with the community, the tropical environment, and the people who it brought together. After that two-month trip, I started to search for that community back in Seattle. That put me in the direction of learning how to DJ.

LOT: How do you describe Noches Lucidas?

Santa María: Noches Lucidas began in Sayulita. The first “official” party was in 2018. However, in 2017, I decided to go to Sayulita by myself and I was there for ten days. During that stay, I became friends with Olivia, the owner of a little bar on the beach named Lucid Bar. I went there almost every single day—to grab a drink, chill, mingle, get to know the locals—and eventually, by the end of the week, I was like, “Olivia, I think it would be super cool if we could throw a little electronic music event here. Would it be possible?” At first, she was like, “Electronic music is not really a thing here in Sayulita.” And I was like, “Just one event. Let me throw just one event. I’ll come down with my DJ friends from Seattle.” Finally, I broke her down. She agreed to it. A full year later, Semana Santa 2018, in Sayulita, we hosted our first event, at Lucid Bar. At the time, we didn’t know what to call the event. I can’t even remember how many names we thought of. I was like, “How do we brand it? How do we brand it? How do we brand it?” And I just kept coming back to Lucid Bar. Noches Lucidas. And that’s where the name came from, from that little bar. It gave us our first opportunity to play outside of Seattle.

LOT: What does the name mean to you?

Santa María: It means community. We started to do events in Sayulita, but then my wife and I decided to come to Zihuatanejo in the winter of 2018. On that trip, we came to Troncones and we stayed at Casa Ki. Sharon fell in love with Troncones. She was like, “Oh my God, why are we going to Sayulita? Why don’t we come here?” When we decided to get married, we decided to do it in Troncones. We had our ceremony at Villa Milagro in February of 2020. We basically took over Troncones ten days before the world shut down. We brought 140 people here, to our wedding, from all over the world, mostly from America. Everybody was just like, “Whoa, what is this place?” They’d never heard of Troncones.

We started building community here during our wedding. We got to know most of the owners of the beachfront houses, negotiating with them for our friends, so they had beautiful places to stay. Also, in preparing for our wedding, I became buddy-buddy with Roberto Rosas who, at the time, still had Roberto’s Bistro on the beach [where El Churingito de Fran is now; the site of the infamous Burro Borracho]. We had our reception there, at Roberto’s, on the beach. The day after our wedding, Sharon and I talked about building a home here rather than in Sayulita. I asked Roberto if he could help us find a piece of property on the beach. We thought it’d take months or years to find one. Roberto found this spot within a couple of weeks.

Noches Lucidas was growing in Seattle as we built our home here. Our first event in Troncones was a celebration of life, in late April of 2021. We had just gotten vaccinated in Seattle, and so had my entire group of friends. Our house was about halfway through being completed, and we all decided to come down here, to Troncones. We came with a new sense of meaning, of joy, of freedom, and we had our first little get together—a Noches Lucidas—celebrating that we could once again reunite and keep creating community. It was only about 12 of us, but we were happy to get together again and be around each other without being frowned upon for being around each other. This is still the pandemic, you know, year two.

LOT: What attracted you to electronic music?

Santa María: I’ll keep coming back to community. Hopefully, I can tie it back together. First, I have to go back to Koh Phangan, the island in the Gulf of Thailand. You have to take a ferry to get there and they throw a monthly party called the Full Moon Party. Don’t worry. I’m not trying to replicate it here. The ferry to the island was full of young people from all over the world, people on a journey, trying to get to this mystical party in the middle of nowhere, on this tropical island. Everybody was open-minded. Everybody was willing and able to get to know each other. There was this incredible sense of community. That’s what attracted me. That’s what I gravitated to.

I started doing Noches Lucidas events in Troncones, at the old Amor Tropical, with Rodrigo. We were coming every three months to check up on our property after we got vaccinated and we would host events every three months. Five years ago, electronic music here in Troncones wasn’t a thing. There wasn’t a community of electronic music. Over the last five years though, slowly but surely, the people from Saladita and Troncones, the ones who had a feel for electronic music, started to show up to all of our events and we started to build community with the people who gravitated towards electronic music. That same group of people are the restaurant owners, the bar owners, the coffee shop owners here, in Troncones and Saladita, and it’s been beautiful getting to know all these people through our events.

‍

LOT: For someone who may not know, how do you describe your beat?

Santa María: We tend to gravitate towards a deep House feeling, an Afro-House rhythm, classic House vibes. That is truly our essence, mostly because of the vibe that’s here in Troncones. It’s a kind of vibe that Noches Lucidas organically gravitated to here—deep House, minimalistic, groovy—a beautiful tropical vibe.

‍

LOT: Would you describe it as a reggaeton beat?

Santa María: We don’t gravitate towards reggaeton. There’s already enough reggaeton music in this part of the world. We don’t want to be another reggaeton-based party or event. We are carving our own niche and we’re trying to make Noches Lucidas as unique as we possibly can. You come to a Noches Lucidas event for that, for that special, unique vibe and that special unique sound and feel.

‍

LOT: How did you get into promoting it and building your audience?

Santa María: Once again, electronic music is community-based. When I hosted my first event in Tanta Vida in Ixtapa in December of 2021, a group of electronic music DJs from Morelia happened to be walking on the beach. They were like, “Whoa, is that electronic music I hear in Ixtapa?” They came, they sat down and halfway through the event one of them came up to me and was like, “Dude, you’ve been playing some incredible music. Can we exchange information? I’m also a DJ, from Morelia. I’m not sure how we can collaborate, but can we exchange information?” I was like, “Yeah, of course.”

So, literally as I was performing, we exchanged our WhatApp and, because of that brief conversation, a lot of the artists who I invite to come play here and in central Mexico are from Morelia. All because of that one interaction I had in December of 2021 in Ixtapa. And because of that, I’ve been able to host Noches Lucidas events in Morelia, Mexico City and San Miguel de Allende. I’m hoping to do a Noches Lucidas event in Pátzcuaro for Dia de Muertos this October. I’ve worked here in Troncones with Roy, who owns Corazón del Mar, and now he’s invited me to do an event in Pátzcuaro at one of his haciendas. It’s the vibe. That’s what keeps the community for Noches Lucidas growing organically. Yes, we use social media platforms to promote our events but, at the end of the day, it’s that human connection that really matters the most.

LOT: When you're performing, what’s happening for you? What's the interaction with the audience?

Santa María: My answer comes fresh out of my conversation with Pachamama, here at Quetzal [referring to local Earth Mother and temazcal leader Fanny Rivera Plascencia]. In 2023, we hosted our first Dìa de Muertos event here in Troncones at Doña Nica, right on the beachfront. Doña Nica used to have an old little palapita right on the beach, and we decided to throw a Noches Lucidas event there. I wanted to give the event an extra layer. Something that went beyond the music, something that made it more than just a party. There are too many parties around here already. I met Zali at Quetzal, and then I met her parents, who host traditional healing events. I thought it would be really cool if they came and did a 15-minute intermission, a ceremony similar to what they do at the temazcal each week, right in the middle of Noches Lucidas. I was imagining everybody taking a break, getting a breather, connecting to each other through the ceremony. I was like, “Oh, I hope this works. I hope people don't think it's a little too out there.”

It turns out their ceremony was an extra layer of incredible—the feeling, the energy it brought out. What I'm getting at is, at the Noches Lucidas event that we hosted at Costa Brava last week, we did the ceremony again, and I happened to play right after the ceremony. Pachamama watched me for about 15 minutes. The next day we went over to have breakfast with Zali. Pachamama saw me, and she hugged me and she’s like, “I get it, Santa Maria. I get it now. I absolutely get it. The energy that you transmit, that light that comes out of you when you’re playing, I witnessed it. I understand now why you do this.” It was magical hearing that coming from her, from someone who’s a magical lady herself. And so, to answer your question, the role of a DJ takes years to develop. The goal is to transmit energy, a vibe—pure, clean human energy—with connection.

LOT: You mentioned your soccer life. How did you end up playing professional soccer? How long did you play?

Santa María: In this part of the world, soccer is king. There really is no other sport. There is no baseball. There is no basketball. Ok, some, but it’s not like soccer. This region is soccer mad as far as I'm concerned. My entire family played it. We were all soccer fans. When we immigrated to the United States in the late ‘80s, landing in Yakima, soccer was truly my only way of connecting. I couldn’t speak English. I couldn’t communicate that way. The only way I could communicate with other kids was through sport. And the kids in Yakima would call me “Pelé”. That felt so special. And it helped me get along in school. After high school, I went to Wenatchee Valley Community College, played there for two years, then landed at Seattle University, a beautiful private Catholic university in downtown Seattle, on a scholarship. After college, I was drafted by the Seattle Sounders. And I played there for three seasons. And after the third year, I simply felt life was taking me in a different direction. And it did. It was time to move on.

‍

LOT: Where do you see the Noches Lucidus going?

Santa María: I’m not one to dream small. That’s not a part of who I am. We started super small, very basic, but we already have a a bi-monthly residency in Seattle. We have quarterly events in Mexico City and we’re doing little pop-up events in central Mexico. You could say we have our winter event series here, in Troncones. The plan is for the brand to keep growing, to take it outside the United States and Mexico. We want to do events in Europe. We want to do events in South America. Wherever there is a niche or a need for this type of energy and life. The long-term plan for Troncones is our doing just two events a year here.

‍

LOT: Do you have a long-term goal with Noches Lucidas, in terms of expansion?

Santa María: My wife and I, and the rest of the artists who compose this collective, we’re still relatively young. We’ve always wanted to draw other younger people to Troncones. A lot of that has to do with Mexico having an up-and-coming economy. There’s a lot more money here in Mexico now, especially in central Mexico. We want to draw those young people, who have the means, to come and discover Troncones. We want them to drive or take a flight here, from Morelia, Querétaro, Leon, San Miguel de Allende and Mexico City, instead of flying to Tulum or Oaxaca, some of the other meccas of electronic music. We want them to take the drive here and leave their money here. We want them to fill Troncones in the low season and spend on the local economy, to discover how beautiful the place is and enjoy the incredible energy we have. We want the people who love electronic music to know that Troncones is our Mexican home base. That it’s safe, that it’s beautiful and that there’s a place for everyone—that the young Mexican people from central Mexico are welcome here. Those are our long-term goals. Our short-term goals are playing in Europe, and playing in South America, in the next 18 months.

LOT: One last question. What keeps you coming back to Troncones?

Santa María: The beautiful community we are creating. Last night, Sharon and I went to go visit JP and Mari at Mi Jardín and we were the last ones to leave. They are always grateful that we come visit them and give them business. You can feel that for sure when at the end of the night, they don’t want you to leave. “Have a drink with us”, they say. All of a sudden, it’s an hour later. The staff is gone, the lights are off, and it’s just us, having a family moment. That’s why we’re here—to keep creating, to keep building—community.

LINKS

Noches Lucidas: https://www.instagram.com/nocheslucidas/

Santa Maria on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SantaMariaDJ

Casa Hermoso Cariño (Santa Maria’s home): https://www.instagram.com/hermosocarino_troncones

Meet Fanny: https://www.laondatroncones.com/meet/fanny-rivera-plascencia-for-modern-healing