John Pareles

Aspirations overflowed when Lila Downs performed at Town Hall on Monday night. Ms. Downs, who was born in the Mexican state of Oaxaca and grew up there as well as in California and Minnesota, has made her career a mission to explore Mexican and pan-American identity, staying aware of tradition while plunging into modern hybrids.

Her concert strove to be multi-everything: multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual, multimedia. It was independent; Ms. Downs produced the concert herself, in association with the Celebrate Mexico Now festival and National Geographic Traveler. It was high-minded, with songs about hard-working immigrants, justice, love and the ultimate mole sauce. And it included a mariachi band.

Most of the songs came from Ms. Downs’s exuberant new album, “Shake Away” (Manhattan/EMI), which brings a poetic and musical flair to her righteous ambitions and incorporates guests from Spain and the Americas. Onstage and on her own, Ms. Downs made border-hopping sound easy.

“Justicia” started with an Andean-flavored melody — complete with the tiny charango guitar — before mutating through rapping, funk, Mexican polka and a brass-band march. That was only part of the catalog.

Joined by two dozen eager young musicians in black-and-silver suits from the Mariachi Academy in East Harlem, she summoned the emotive quaver of old Mexican songs. Her own band, including Mexican and South American instruments and a horn section with her husband, Paul Cohen, on saxophone, traversed New Orleans second-line beats, country-and-western twang, Mexican cumbia and even a burst of Gypsy-flavored klezmer.

Ms. Downs has multiple voices, from an airborne near-falsetto down to a forthright alto and a sultry, emotive contralto. She could ride the quick 6-against-4 rhythm, plucked on harp, of a son jarocho from the Mexican state of Veracruz or linger tenderly over her Spanish and English version of Lucinda Williams’s ballad “I Envy the Wind.” And she was a striking presence onstage, from the conviction in her voice to costume changes and dance moves rooted in Mexican and African traditions. For all the good intentions in the songs — Ms. Downs introduced one as being “about social classes and love breaking barriers” — her performance was impassioned, never pedantic.

While the music thrived in its multiple layers, the concert had one visual stimulus too many: a large video screen flashing images through nearly every song. What started out as a welcome touch of rock-concert flamboyance grew distracting and oppressive. Ms. Downs and her songs ended up competing for the attention they could easily hold on their own.