MEXICAN POP.

BY NOW IT IS CLOSE TO 4 A.M. IN THE OUTFIELD of a small baseball park in the town of Guamuchil, located near the Pacific Ocean in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. On stage, Los Tigres del Norte are dressed in suits of turquoise satin and white fringe and are bouncing through one of their popular nortenos.

In the outfield--normally home to the Garbanceros, Garbanzo-Bean Growers--hundreds of young people, primarily teenage girls, crush together at stage front, mouthing lyrics to a song recorded when most of them were in elementary school. Farther back, older couples sashay to the polka beat. Nearby, chortling along with Jorge Hernandez. Los Tigres lead singer, groups of reeling young men wearing white cowboy hats, silk shirts and cowboy boots, are attempting to hold each other upright.

Fernando Cervantes, a young man standing unsteadily by the stage, his eyes at half-mast, says, "It's a miracle no one's pulled a gun."

The crowd of about 3,000 people is minuscule by Tigres' standards. The group routinely plays crowds of 100,000 in Los Angeles, Monterrey and Guatemala City. Lesser bands might even consider it a step down. Yet the group plays Guamuchil every year. Following a Tigres tour is to follow the spread of the Mexican diaspora in North America: North Carolina, Tennessee, Minnesota, Colorado, Oklahoma and, this year, Montreal, Canada, where a crowd of 1,500 turned out.

This is the essence of the band, arguably one of North America's most enduring pop acts ever. Remembering their roots and coming back to play in towns like this have made Los Tigres--four brothers, a cousin and a friend who have played together now for 31 years--the kings of Mexican pop. Informal market surveys. Long before the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) forced Mexican companies to pay attention to their customers and obsess about constant innovation, Los Tigres del Norte made it their business to be available to their fans.

In Mexico, concerts begin at midnight and end when the crowd is exhausted. Jorge Hernandez stops every show to take requests that the audience scrawls on scrap paper and throws on stage--a nightly market survey. The band also breaks to take photos with fans who line up backstage--a source of income, since it charges for the photos, and another way of maintaining contact with its consumers. For this reason, the band's crowd is a regenerating crop of 18- to 25-year-olds, often children of its first fans, though half the band members are well into their 40s.

Based on requests for "El Triunfo" off its new album, "Herencia de Familia," the band recently decided to produce a video based on the song. Tactics like these have led to the sales of 30 million records. From Los Tigres' home base of San Jose, California, they have also made 14 movies and won a Grammy. Many of its tunes are now classics in Mexican popular music.

The band employs 34 people. Its logo is as well known as Coca-Cola's in Mexico and Mexican communities in the United States. The group tours 44 weeks a year, records albums when not on the road and takes a break for only 4 weeks every year--though the band could have slowed down long ago. "At first we never saw it as a business:" lead singer Jorge Hernandez says. "I thought about working, doing my art."

Cultural bards. Los Tigres emerged from a little-noticed migration starting in the 1960s. As restless children in the United States were rebeling through drugs and music, restless working-class Mexicans began coming north.

Their exodus was another rebellion of sorts, Mexico's young were leaving corrupt Mexico, the Mexico that never gave a poor man a chance, eager to re-create themselves in the fields and restaurants of Gringolandia.

The irony was that in the United States these immigrants wanted more than ever to be Mexican. They missed their pueblo, a girlfriend, Mom. Mostly, they asked from the United States what Mexico never gave--a chance to earn real money for hard work, progresar, or advance.

As these immigrant numbers grew into one of the most important cultural flows in the second half of this century, Los Tigres became their chroniclers, spokesmen for a community largely voiceless in both Mexico and the United States. The band's best songs are stories distilling the essentials of Mexican working-class life--brutal machismo, piercing irony and the most tender melodrama.

The group arrived in 1968, four kids at the border in Tijuana, traveling with a music review contracted to play the Mexican Independence Day parade in San Jose.

"Little tigers." Because the oldest in the band was only 14, they had to convince a middle-aged Mexican couple to pretend to be their parents. The band had no name. But the immigration officer kept calling them "little tigers." Because they were headed north and playing norteno music, they became "Los Tigres del Norte."

Los Tigres never returned to Mexico to live. Their San Jose show was broadcast over the radio and heard by Art Walker, an Englishman who owned Fama Records, the first panish-language label in California. Walker signed the band, gave the members music lessons and suggested that they use electric instruments. "We never thought you could play norteno music with a full drum set and electric bass," bass player Hernan Hernandez says. "That was for rock groups."

Wiring up was the band's first of many important innovations to norteno music, an accordion-based polka music indigenous to dusty northern Mexico cantinas. Over the years, Los Tigres would infuse the music with boleros, waltzes, cumbias, better recording quality and sound effects such as machine guns and sirens to give it an international pop style.

At that time, though, the band might have remained just another cantina band were it not for a song that changed the group and norteno music forever. In 1972, Los Tigres put out "Contrabando y Traicion" ("Contraband and Betrayal"). The song tells the story of a man and woman--he an illegal, she a Chicana from Texas--smuggling marijuana from Tijuana to Los Angeles. After exchanging the dope, the man says he's taking his share of the money and visiting his girlfriend in San Francisco. However, his partner is in love with him. Unwilling to share him, she shoots him and disappears with the cash.

The song is a series of images--news item fused with a twisted love story--that ends in sweet tragedy. "It was like a film in the mind's eye," Jorge Hernandez says. "And it was the truth of what was happening in those years. It spoke of the total chaos that is drug trafficking. Perhaps, also, people had never heard these things said so clearly in song."

Drug ballads. "Contrabando" was the first hit song about drug smuggling and put Los Tigres on the map. It spawned two sequel songs and a movie. Its two characters, Emilio Varela and Camelia La Tejana, are part of every Mexican's cultural vocabulary. The band followed it with "La Banda del Carro Rojo" ("The Red Car Gang") and dozens of other narcocorridos, or drug ballads, over the years. Moreover, the band awoke to the idea that news and song could work well together.

The group stayed in tune with the concerns of the community and the hits kept coming. In 1976, the band recorded "Vivan Los Mojados" ("Long Live the Wetbacks"), an anthem to the importance of immigrant labor to the United States. The Mexican immigrant community sat up with a jolt. "That's when we realized that there was a market for this," Jorge Hernandez says. "We began to see that we needed to communicate with them."

Immigrants bought records. They then took them home with them to parts of Mexico where the band was unknown--the Johnny Appleseeds of Tigres music, as it were. After a first contact at a dance in Bakersfield or Stockton, they took norteno music south into the states of Michoacan and Guanajuato.

The band would return to the immigration theme as headlines warranted, particularly as the U.S. Congress debated the 1986 immigrant-amnesty bill. Immigration provided Los Tigres with its most bittersweet tunes: "Pedro y Pablo," "El Otro Mexico" ("The Other Mexico"), "Los Hijos de Hernandez" ("The Sons of Hernandez")--all dealing with the yearning to return home, love lost through separation and the economic importance of immigrant labor.

One song, "La Jaula de Oro" ("The Gold Cage"), recorded in 1984, is about an immigrant who's discovered he doesn't feel at home in the country he tried so hard to enter. Even worse, his children now speak English and reject their heritage. He aches to return home but can't make a living in Mexico. It is a classic Tigres tune, showing the band was keeping up with the concerns of its public.

"Three Times a Wetback." As civil war sent thousands of Central American immigrants to the U.S., the band recorded "Tres Veces Mojado" ("Three Times a Wetback")--a story of a Salvadoran refugee who crosses three borders to get to America. The song made them heroes to Central Americans. Los Tigres is still the only norteno band to regularly play Guatemala City as well as Washington D.C. and Boston, U.S. cities where Central Americans outnumber Mexicans.

Responding to California's Proposition 187, which would have denied public health and education services to illegal immigrants and their children if it hadn't been ruled unconstitutional in 1994, the band put several more immigrant ballads on its 1997 album, "Jefe de jefes" ("Boss of Bosses"). "El Mojado Acaudalado" ("The Wealthy Wetback") is sung about a successful immigrant who's going home with head held high. "Mis Dos Patrias" ("My Two Countries") has a Mexican naturalizing, insisting that he is not a traitor to his flag, that he's only protecting his pension.

This year's "Herencia de Familia" has more than its share of love songs, as if the band is willing to forget the Proposition 187 years, which weighed heavily on the band members and their public. One heavily requested song is "My Promise/Mi Promesa," sung in English and Spanish--a sign perhaps that the band's audience is changing now that many immigrants have naturalized.

"We try to analyze places we play Sometimes people will yell up to us, 'Sing us a song about us,'" Jorge Hernandez says. "It's a form of perceiving the needs of those in the crowd."