When Los tigresdelnorte set out to film a concert at Folsom Prison, they took on JohnnyCash's spiritual legacy -- and the challenge of their career
. As teenagers, Los Tigres had even secured their first U.S. visas to join a caravan of Mexican performers on a concert tour to California’s Soledad prison.
The biggest hurdle: a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation policy against filming or recording concerts. “I was told that there were a hundred requests from different bands to record a concert album at Folsom Prison for the 50th anniversary,” recalls Horowitz, “and all were rejected, as was ours.”
“One day, Zach told me, ‘George, if I knew I was going to have so much trouble with this, I wouldn’t be here,’ ” says Jorge with a hoarse laugh. “And I said, ‘It’s too late, you’re already in it!’ ” Horowitz’s breakthrough came when he reached out to Ralph Diaz, then the prison system’s undersecretary for operations. “I must have talked to 10, 20,of people at the Department of Corrections about this project, and Ralph was the first Latino,” says Horowitz.
Diaz agreed to help shepherd the documentary to the finish line -- and to make the film available to inmates on a closed-circuit TV network -- but imposed one condition: no. Even though the band’s trove of polka-based ballads about the drug-trafficking life rarely end on a glamorous note, Diaz knew he would never live down a concert that used Folsom as a backdrop for cartel tales. He figured it was a deal-breaker: “I thought a band like that is going to tell this bureaucrat, ‘Absolutely not.
“The messages in your songs are what give us the strength to live every day,” Manuel Mena, who is doing 36 years to life for murder, tells the band in one English-subtitled scene. When Los Tigres find out he’s an accordionist -- who once played in a norteño group -- they invite him onstage for “Un Día a la Vez” , to the cheers of a sea of men in prison blues.
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