We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful El Chino. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with El below.

Alright, El thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about serving the underserved.

Imagine working 6 days a week at a dangerous job that leaves you little time for your family just to keep a roof over your heads. Imagine putting in that work just to be boxed in by your race and seen as “less” before the other person even hears your name. That’s the life some of my friends and family have. It’s the lives of extraordinary people doing triple what the average person can do yet never being acknowledged the way they deserve or represented the way they should be. That’s what I hope to change in my music.

I aim to be the voice that gives them the recognition they deserve.
I aim to shed light on the stories the mainstream doesn’t always show/has no way in showing. These are the stories connected to my Salvadorean-Malaysian roots, my Cali influences, and my TN upbringing. It’s the stories of someone who never felt like he fit in deciding to stand out over trying so hard to be like “everyone.” It’s the stories of people like my grandma who risked everything to let me and my brothers live a better life just for the news to label it a crime. It’s the stories of a barber I knew cutting hair out of a car dealership to get by.

I aim to shed light also not only on our hardships but on the good too that’s often overshadowed. This could be the stories of rolling in my lowrider blasting music chilling. It’s stories of the family parties we do and what the average day for someone like me is like. It doesn’t always have to be depressing to show my message, it just has to stay true to me.

When I make music, those stories along with my own are the influences and inspiration that they’re created from. It represents not only myself but the stories of my people and gives them a voice that none of us had before, and the world gets stories they would have never heard.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

If you don’t like reading you can listen to my song My Definition for who I am. If you do want to read then it starts with my grandparents. They went from El Salvador to the US in 1979 after El Salvador’s civil war started. They went to Los Angeles, California where my dad (who was 8 months old when they left) would grow up until 1992 when they would leave for Knoxville, Tennessee (which is where I was born) after the Rodney King Riots broke out.
I grew up with basically just my dad’s side of the family which meant since I’m latino asian (salvadorean-malaysian), I grew up knowing my latino roots well and nothing more of my asian side besides it being why I’m always squinting. My aunt Claudia was a DJ when I was little but I didn’t care at the time because my mind was on being Yao Ming in the NBA. This changed the summer of 8th grade for me though because as I stayed up listening to music pretending I was the artist, I started questioning what it would be like if I actually WAS the artist.
I went to my aunt Claudia about being a DJ like her and she put a DJ app on my phone for me to start playing with it. 1 month later that evolved into me getting a midi keyboard and Magix Samplitude (a DAW) to make beats. 1 year later that turned into me trying to write and rap my own songs at the age of 13. I gave up shooting hoops for locking myself in a room to torture my entire house with my songs at max volume.
I didn’t actually create a song until I was 14 and those early songs made the average soundcloud rapper seem like 2pac, but you gotta be trash before you’re any good. Thanks to my dad I grew up on oldschool west coast rap like Dr. Dre, NWA, and DJ Quik and that very much shaped my sound. Remember why my family went to the US and where they were before my birth? Those were and still are big influences on what I rap about. Around this time in my freshman year of highschool I started to explore my latino roots and embrace them more which led to me getting into the Reggaetón and Cumbia my family would play at the family parties which is why my songs have spanish influence. Finally, other Latino artists in hip hop like Crooked Stilo, Lil Rob, and MC Magic would inspire me to rap in english and spanish along with showing that in the beats too.
I continued making music throughout highschool and started a music club in 11th grade in order to meet other musicians in the school and perform during the school lunches to start making my name public. January of 2022 I entered a music talent show at my school and wrote My Definition specifically for performances and started going by the artist name of “El Chino,” the nickname I had growing up due to my Asian eyes. I skipped lunch for the next 2 weeks leading up to that show meeting with the theater teacher Mrs. Andraejko and my chorus teacher Mr. Brown to learn how to perform onstage and be understandable on the microphone. I performed for the 1st time February 11th at that school show and met my music manager Uncle Drip after it. For the rest of high school I performed with the music club (which is how I met J and BankS) and at my church group whenever they went to other states to start getting my name around.
In August of 2023 I did my 1st public show at Hey Bear Cafe thanks to Gordon who runs Dragon Food Truck telling me about it and I’m now in Nashville at Belmont University. Thanks to Antonio from the Southern Bruins Bands, I’ve done multiple shows in the university cafeteria and am hustling for any show I can get and hopefully shows outside of the college soon. College has slowed my music making to a crawl due to the work and since my freetime often goes to preparing for the shows but I am still making music and I look to drop at least one more song before 2024 ends and start doing features and collabs more to help when I barely have the time to build solo songs from scratch.
To sum it up I am a music artist/producer who is most comfortable in the artist role rapping bars and/or mixing engineer role bringing new life out of mixes. I also know how to make beats and even some promotion and video editing since I do it for myself but those are either weaker skills I have or take me forever since I’m not as good at it. I love to collab and am looking to do more collabs but due to college I can’t say I can get them out quick unless all you want is for me to do lyrics and not have to worry about the production process as much. I do only original songs with tracks as of now and can do 30 minute sets with preparation time, any set 15 minutes and below I can do on the spot since 90% of all my shows have been 15 minutes at the most. I can also do acoustic sets thanks to Alvaro V playing with me.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding part of being a music artist is seeing my music impact others. As someone who is addicted to music, I have a song to listen to for about every situation and event that pops up and I use songs to both get me in the mood for something and to calm down from life. To see the impact some songs have on me be felt by others with my songs is an unreal feeling. It’s how I know I’m making something special, when other people can relate to the songs and feel them the way I feel the songs I listen to.
One of the examples I have of this happening was when it inspired my Aunt Claudia to join a women’s focused workleader group. She said after seeing how I take control of a crowd onstage, it inspired her to take the step to join that organization. To see my music inspire her to do that was probably one of the best compliments I’ve gotten in my music career. That’s what I hope to give in my music. I hope it inspires people to do things like that and help people when they feel certain things, along with chilling and helping keep a party hype.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I had to show resilience when I did my first music club show in high school at the end of my 11th grade year. The plan for the show was to have me and my friend J perform a song together and each have a solo song too. The problems came leading up to the show though because the school basically said in order for us to do the show, we had to submit our lyrics to the school and have grades of C and above to perform. I was in the clear on grades, but J wasn’t eliminating him from the show. On top of this we were dropped to only performing 2 of the 5 lunches and nobody would be there to run the mixer for us. This meant I would be the literal only person at the show performing and mixing along with only having one song for the show left on the list.
At this point I talked with my people and determined whether it would be smart to walk onstage completely solo to a show nobody knew existed since this was the first one ever or call it quits. After talking to Mr. McWhorter who helped me in music at the time and thinking of how many times I had seen my family members quit though (which is none), I came to my decision.
I had my cousin Ethan and people I knew from each lunch help me run the mixer board and I performed solo for the school as the first music club show. It was a very ghetto show which I even had to restart halfway through due to the beat cutting out but I still made it work and even performed another original song I had to give 2 songs per show. The show may have been a rough one but it succeeded in getting my name out in my school as an artist and gave me a starting place for building fans. Shoutout to any of my fans from Bearden High School that saw the first music club show May 12th in 2022 (and my homies J and BankS from it).

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/el_chino_latino503/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@el_chino_latino503

Image Credits

Took by Henry Esquivel @teenyhenry on instagram