Bringing the ‘Casual Cookout Carne Asada Vibes’ to the Rave, Bolo Is Leading a New Wave of Latin Dance Music

It’s Saturday afternoon at HARD Summer 2026, and hot as hell. But the heatwave isn’t stopping the roughly 25,000 people at the festival’s biggest stage from partaking in the fiesta.

Onstage, DJ/producer Bolo is behind the decks. Behind him, a few people work the grill set up as a prop, while one man sits astride a lowrider bicycle and another lifts weights in time with the beat. There’s an appearance by Mexican American rapper OhGeesy and women dancing in bikinis printed with the Mexican flag.  

Speaking to Billboard after the set, Bolo says the show was about “bringing backyard Chicano vibes — like, casual cookout carne asada vibes, where we’re trying to showcase all the different cultures. We had Colombians on stage, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans.”

In Southern California, a natural stronghold of Latin dance music lovers — a 2026 report by the Public Policy Institute of California says 41% of Californians are Latino and 51.5% of Californians younger than 24 are Latino — it’s likely the crowd was just as diverse. Bolo was also among a HARD Summer lineup that included Latin artists like Kali Uchis, Bianca Oblivion, Tokischa and Nick León. Now, as a rising dance world star, a first-generation Mexican American and a rare Latin DJ/producer in the U.S. commercial dance music space, Bolo is focused on representing these cultures, while creating opportunities for the other Latin DJs also coming up.

Audiences are swarming to it. Last week, Bolo sold out three nights at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Palladium, selling 10,800 tickets for the November shows in less than a day. His daytime event, Bolo’s Block Party, happens in Sacramento, San Francisco, San Diego and Phoenix in September and October, amid a current 32-date U.S. tour encompassing festivals and headline club shows now through December. With his productions fusing house and tech house with traditional Latin genres, he says bigger collaborations, like a possible song with Becky G, “feel within reach.”

Bolo’s expanding business also includes three 2026 merch drops, with many of these pieces available at the debut “Bolo’s Bodega” pop-up shop that happened the day before his HARD set. Here, 2,000 people came through. Meanwhile, his label, Vibraza Records, launched last year to release Bolo’s music, along with music by other Latino producers.  

“There’s a big Latino dance wave right now,” Bolo says from his HARD Summer green room, a repurposed box suite at SoFi stadium. “The vision is to create opportunities and environments for new Latino talent, because there’s a lot of dope Latino artists out there… My goal for the Bolo project is to create something bigger than just Bolo.”

His growing visibility is significant in a space where, as his agent at UTA Ben Hogan (who represents Bolo along UTA’s Chase Caskey) says, “There’s not a lot of artists having commercial success who are legitimately coming from this culture.” While producers like Hugel, Diplo and Marshmello have made Latin records, none of them are Latin themselves. So, Hogan continues, “obviously Bolo is going to become a champion of the scene, because he’s very authentically part of the culture.”  

With a degree in marketing from Sonoma State University, Bolo (born Edgar Avalos) is also savvy in brand-building, having used this skillset to create the email lists and social followings helping fuel his breakthrough.  

“I was like, ‘Yo, calling all Latinos’” he recalls of the message he blasted on his socials before his first big festival set at SoCal’s Beyond Wonderland 2024. “It was like, ‘I need you guys to show up.’” His appeal worked, as roughly 8,500 people packed a space that normally held 1,000. “All the Latino ravers started showing out,” he says, “and I fell into the pocket where people saw me as the Latino house music guy.”

Bolo was born to a 16-year-old single mom from a “big, big Mexican family” in Jalisco. Shortly after his birth, she moved them to Napa Valley, Calif., which has a largely Latin population and is where Bolo grew up.  

As a kid he clocked the local DJ, DJ Shaggy, who played his family’s weddings, quinceañeras and graduations, where young Bolo was usually hovering around the decks. When he was 14, Shaggy asked if he wanted to learn the trade. Bolo spent a year apprenticing — moving boxes, wrapping cables and practicing on Shaggy’s turntables. Eventually, Shaggy offered Bolo the chance to play for a crowd, “the moment I’d been practicing for,” he recalls.  

His set was great, until the turntable malfunctioned, the music stopped and a man on the dance floor “was yelling, ‘Yo, someone get that kid offstage!’ Bolo says. “I was traumatized. I was like, ‘You know what? I’m not meant for this.’”

And so music was just something he enjoyed from the crowd, after his older cousins started taking him to festivals like Coachella and HARD Summer. “They introduced me to reggaetón and rave music,” he says. One of his favorite artists was Mexican American DJ/producer Deorro, who — alongside artists like the Mexican trio 3BallMTY that pioneered the tribal guarachero genre — was one of the few Latin DJs in the commercial space. But it was a set by Diplo and Dillon Francis at HARD Summer 2018 that, he says, “blew my mind.” With this edition of the fest happening at a racetrack in the Inland Empire, the duo played in racing suits with a NASCAR on stage.

Watching this show, Bolo realized DJing wasn’t just weddings and birthdays, but big productions where “the people onstage are making tens of thousands of people dance.” He wanted in.  

At the time there was, he says, “a little house music wave” happening on campus at Sonoma State, “but my background was in reggaetón, hip-hop, cumbia, salsa. There were many house DJs at school, but no one was playing Latin stuff.”

He just played sets that included both, co-creating a DJ collective that played local bars. When the pandemic hit, he taught himself to produce on Ableton in his dorm room. Realizing there’d only be real opportunities in a bigger city, after graduation he headed to San Diego. Here he played house music in the city’s dance venues and open format sets in its hip-hop clubs. But given that “the hip-hop clubs would see me as a dance DJ, and the house music scene would see me as hip-hop,” he knew he needed to go all in one or the other. He merged the reggaetón remixes he’d been making with house, and suddenly, he’d found a signature sound.

It was around this moment that he met Sal Moreno, who’s put on parties in L.A. for 20 years and launched the traveling event Reggaetón Rave in 2021. Moreno DM’d Bolo about a remix Bolo had made and posted about, asking to use it in a Reggaetón Rave promo video.

Recalls Bolo: “I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s great. Here’s a bunch of remixes. Pick whatever you want. In exchange, can I DJ one of these parties?’”

He was onstage at Reggaetón Rave the next month, finding “the crowd was perfect for me, because it was a mix of Latinos and dance music fans, so I was able to introduce the sound I’d been trying to curate.” A natural marketer, he was also collecting emails for his mailing list as he played shows across SoCal and beyond.

“I was essentially like, ‘Can I use your platform to build an audience?’” Bolo says. “Sal was like, ‘Dude, I don’t care, as long as you help me get people through the door and play a good set.’”

His big break came in 2024 when, as previously mentioned, he was booked to play an art car at Beyond Wonderland and put out the call to “all my Latino ravers.” While the crowd was huge, his day job wasn’t thrilled that hadn’t been in the office on the Friday of his set. They told him he needed to choose between the job and DJing. Back home, his girlfriend stressed the importance of a salary and good benefits.  

“So you know what I do?” he says. “I call my mom. She’s my biggest supporter and was like, ‘Mijo, whatever you need, you come move in with me and not pay rent if you need to. Just chase your dream.”

He left the day job. It wasn’t easy – he seriously considered driving Uber for extra cash as he continued playing Reggaetón Raves – but Moreno advised that they could turn him into a headlining act and offered to manage him. They blasted Bolo’s by-thi- time sprawling contact list with the news that he was doing standalone shows, which started selling out. Now, his mom is by his side when he plays near Napa. “She will literally start crying on stage,” he says. “That’s my queen for real. I do this all for her. Truly.”  

In the spring of 2025, Bolo signed with UTA and Hogan, who was watching intently as a crowd of roughly 40,000 showed up for Bolo’s 4 p.m. set at Beyond Wonderland 2025. “When you see moments like that in the festival space,” Hogan says, “you know they’re going to translate to headline moments.”

With the explosion of Latin music at large over the last several years hitting the highest echelons of American entertainment – Bad Bunny’s 2026 Super Bowl Halftime show performance and Karol G becoming the first Latin woman to headline Coachella this past April – there’s a sense that the national dance scene is primed for a Latin electronic music explosion.  

“The West Coast and Southern California are the meccas and places where the population is massive and the sound has its roots,” says Hogan. “But Bolo has built a national touring business. There are a lot of tertiary markets where he does incredibly well that you wouldn’t necessarily think are synonymous with Latin music. It is, at this point, a national genre.”

And not only for Bolo, with Hogan’s growing roster of Latino artists – Chicano rapper Dom Dior, Dominican producer Romy, Flaco, 3BallMTY, Juos – all rising in tandem.

“I’ve gotten feedback from Deorro that when he was coming up, there weren’t really any Latino homies he could lean on or work with to help him make noise,” says Bolo. “Whereas now, we have a whole community of emerging talent.”

Hogan is now also working with Moreno on booking Reggaetón Rave and another traveling Latin dance party, Gasolina, which has events in 19 U.S. cities through late October. “Those are also in an explosive period, selling out in markets like New Orleans and Pensacola,” says Hogan. “Seeing the explosion of these parties, you know something major is coming. It’s right at the cusp for a lot of these Latin DJs.”  

Back in his green room, Bolo admits he feels some pressure “now that people expect me to put on for the community,” but he adds that he also couldn’t be more grateful to be bringing the carne asada cookout to the rave.

“The reason I’ve been able to connect with people is because I’m no different than half the crowd out there. I’m just another Latino kid who grew up in California. I feel like they see themselves in me.”