Maiz Vargas Sandoval Flies the Flag for Latin Pride

It never felt like a conscious decision, but at some point, Maiz Vargas Sandoval realized that his band Sonido Mal Maiz didn’t play in Burlington much anymore.

“I think something like 80 percent of our gigs are out of town these days,” Sandoval said in a call from his home in Burlington. “To be honest, even before the city started losing venues, the city was a little too small for us. You can only play a market so many times before you oversaturate.”

The thought was striking for the musician, 40, who moved to Vermont from Costa Rica in 2013 and, two years later, formed the band Mal Maiz, a folk-leaning outfit that largely interpreted traditional Latin music. As that band grew over the years and was eventually rechristened as Sonido Mal Maiz (Spanish for “the Sounds of Mal Maiz”), it naturally started gravitating toward other markets, playing festivals in western Massachusetts, upstate New York and New Hampshire.

While Sandoval was pleased his band found a dependable touring circuit, he couldn’t help but watch the Burlington music scene in alarm as venues such as ArtsRiot, Nectar’s and Despacito all closed in 2025.

“Not the music, but the scene, the scene is decaying in this town,” Sandoval said. “We don’t play here a lot anymore, but we are in solidarity with the local scene — we see it, we feel it, we know what’s really happening. It’s the bad part of a cycle, and I want to help turn that around.”

To that end, Sandoval has an intensely busy couple of months ahead as Sonido Mal Maiz make a return to Burlington in a big way. First, he and his band headline both nights of the annual RIVEN Studio Block Party at the South End Art Hop next Friday and Saturday, September 5 and 6, followed by a coheadlining appearance at the Latin American Connection Twilight Block Party in City Hall Park later in the month — both of which Sandoval curated. He’ll cap it all off by releasing his band’s long-awaited second LP, Mama Abeula, in October.

Sandoval’s Art Hop lineup includes Burlington street band Brass Balagan, local surf-rockers Barbacoa, Brooklyn psychedelic cumbia band Milagro Verde, local instrumental Latin-psych band the Discussions and Burlington’s Latin-groove outfit High Summer, making the parking lot behind Speeder & Earl’s coffee shop one of the Hop’s hottest spots. It’s the third year in a row Sandoval has curated the big show. He estimated it drew 2,000 people last year, a number he hopes to top this year.

“With all the persecution of Latino people going on in America right now, I feel like my role … was to celebrate those things with absolutely no fear.
Maiz Vargas Sandoval

Programming the RIVEN Studio Block Party prepared Sandoval to go to the City of Burlington and urge it to revisit the long-dormant Latin Heritage Festival, an event he said hasn’t been staged in town since 1995. Working with the Vermont Professionals of Color Network, Love Burlington and Burlington City Arts, he created the Latin American Connection, a block party in City Hall Park on Saturday, September 20. The all-local lineup features Latin jazz trumpeter Ray Vega, Afro Brazilian percussion ensemble Sambatucada, Brazilian Cuban band Los Songoros, Caribbean music DJ Jah Red and, of course, Sandoval’s bands, Sonido Mal Maiz and his more traditional outfit, Alma Picante.

“Honestly, it wasn’t the best time to come to the city to do this,” he said, citing Burlington’s financial limitations, which he was able to bridge with private sponsors. But he added that the current political climate inspired him to action.

“It was past time, man,” he said. “With all the persecution of Latino people going on in America right now, I feel like my role as a representative of Latin arts and culture in Burlington was to celebrate those things with absolutely no fear.”

Those feelings were certainly at the front of Sandoval’s mind as he and his Sonido Mal Maiz bandmates — pianist Mike Hartigan, drummer Colin Henkel and guitarist Graham Lambert — crafted the band’s second album.

“With all the craziness going on, I actually decided that instead of taking a political stance with the new songs, I wanted to honor my roots,” Sandoval said. “My grandmother was Native, and a lot of the things she taught me growing up show up in the lyrics: natural remedies, healers from small towns — what I call ‘domestic witchcraft.’ We tend to romanticize or demonize witchcraft, but we all engage in domestic witchcraft, the little superstitions that we maintain.”

The mantra that “music is medicine” guided Sandoval and his bandmates as they spent years writing and recording their sophomore effort. After spending the better part of 2020 “writing and writing and writing,” as Sandoval put it, the band started laying down tracks at Future Fields studio in Burlington, eventually finishing the record at Big Lake Recording. Along the way, Sandoval realized how much his band had changed since its early days of interpreting Latin folk sounds.

“We weren’t a cover band anymore,” he said. “Almost everything we play is original music now; we don’t play traditional stuff. We’re a proper psychedelic Latin rock band these days.”

That shift led to tweaking the band name from Mal Maiz to Sonido Mal Maiz. While Sandoval attributes some of the new direction to the diverse and multigenre Burlington scene that influences him, his recent devotion to ’70s Latin rock, such as Santana and Malo, had him ready to amp up the psychedelic side of his outfit.

“There was so much great Latin rock music coming out of New York City in the ’70s,” he said. “I started listening to a lot of vinyl lately, particularly that stuff. It just made so much sense to start writing that way.”

Sandoval formed the salsa band Alma Picante to continue playing and interpreting more traditional Latin sounds. But he’s obviously excited for the rebrand of his primary band, which celebrates a decade of gigging together at its Art Hop performance. That night, the band will also release the first single from Mama Abuela, the title track, on streaming services. Sandoval says he’ll keep releasing singles until the full album debuts sometime in October.

“We’re going to perform a lot of the new record at Art Hop,” Sandoval said. “We might not get to play in town as much as we used to, but when we do, we’re going to make it count.”

RIVEN Studio Block Party, Friday, September 5, 4 p.m., and Saturday, September 6, 3 p.m., at the South End Art Hop in Burlington. Free. seaba.com

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The original print version of this article was headlined “Bringing It All Back Home | Costa Rican musician Maiz Vargas Sandoval on his Burlington band’s new album, Art Hop and relaunching Latin Heritage Month in the Queen City”