'It felt like freedom': How the Inland Empire is leading the revival of Latino hardcore punk

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When the gates opened at St.John’s Episcopal Church in San Bernardino on Good Friday, the music coming from inside wasn’t that of angel-faced choristers or pipe organs; it was the collective scream of electric guitars.As the sky darkened over the white stucco church framed in palm trees and the dry peaks of the San Bernardino Mountains, fringed teenagers made their way inside, shaking their limbs and chattering in excitement.

Fluorescent lights shone overhead in a room that, by day, hosted Bible studies and food pantries — that night, it would be the site of Spinkick Dance Hall, a regular underground music series where noses are bound to bleed and limbs to flail along to ear-splitting riffs.It’s just one of many shows taking place from Pomona to Palm Desert, heralding a Latino-led youth revival where the freewheeling movement of mosh pits meets the raw power of punk rock: Inland Empire hardcore.As the fast-paced and anti-establishment genre known as punk went mainstream in the ’80s, a harder and more unhinged variant emerged in the States; bands like Bad Brains, Minor Threat and Black Flag pushed the limits of vocalization and instrumentation into dissonant new sounds that would make up the subgenre known as hardcore punk.“As a teenager pre-social media, the music scene was the release for teen angst,” said music photojournalist Zach Cordner.“It was a convergence of nationwide bands that would come to play at [the now shuttered Riverside venue] Showcase Theater, and through word of mouth people got inspired to make cassettes and zines.”Cordner and his friend Ken Crawford grew up in Riverside in the ’80s and ’90s, photographing the initial wave of hardcore punk taking shape in the Inland Empire.

They turned these photographs into a sprawling exhibition held at the Riverside Art Museum earlier this year, “60 Miles East.”“The scene looks a lot different t...