The Cuban Cowboys are on tour promoting their latest rocking Cubano CD Diablo Mambo. And with devilish glee, singer and songwriter Jorge Navarro channels misguided love gurus from the streets of Havana, window gazers in Brooklyn, and sings of lessons learned from living life in between two cultures and languages. With spitfire Spanglish blazing, Navarro sends the perfect American icon colliding with a whole family’s worth of émigré tension, exile, tenderness and lust. “I turn on the accent, I come out of it; switching back and forth. ‘Is it real; is it parody?’ It takes people a minute to decide.”

Navarro grew up in Florida, in a family where nostalgia and bitter exile permeated everything. He recalls being too white-looking to be accepted as Latino, but too Cuban to feel completely Americano. Cuba loomed large in the family imagination, an almost mythical place inhabited by larger-than-life characters. “In many ways, the music is my way of making peace and meaning with my upbringing, as a son of Cuban exiles who, by the age of nine, had a thing for cowboy boots and KISS.” and “As a first generation Cuban-American, I want to rock it. There’s something in rock and punk that’s just as hypnotic as the rhythms in Cuban music.

“I started writing songs in Spanish and English, to present a positive image of bilingualism, for teachers preparing to work with Latino kids.” Navarro recalls. “I melded the two for a while, and that’s when I hit on The Cuban Cowboy, an American icon, singing in Spanglish, with rock and Cuban elements. And it just took off from there. I moved to New York City, and started playing open-mics wherever I could. ‘I built it and they came’ so to speak, as a band came together.”

For Diablo Mambo, Navarro drew on his rock experience while being taken much deeper into Cuban music territory with producer Greg Landau. Landau — who first went to Cuba while his father filmed a documentary about Castro – calls tracks like “Cojones” “Perez Prado meets the Ramones.” Landau suggested new sounds like calypso ( “Oh Celia”) and doo-wop balladry (“La Ventana”) to add to The Cuban Cowboy’s mix, and Navarro has relished the collaboration.

Yet there’s something still very Cuban about The Cuban Cowboys’ music, something Navarro found when he finally got a chance to visit the island earlier this year. “What Greg did to our sound makes so much more sense now,” Navarro smiles. “It was a thrill to take my music to Cuba, to play it live with Cuban musicians on the street, or to pop it into the CD player at my relatives’ house. Everyone grooved to it, saying things like “Pero eso es musica Cubana!” I took that as a very good sign.”