Talking to Chicano Batman has never been about small talk, and Invisible People didn’t arrive quietly or politely. It showed up in the middle of a pandemic, amid uprisings, reckonings, and a country staring at itself through a phone screen, wondering how it got here and why it still refuses to see certain people clearly. If it sounds like a moment designed for an angry record, that’s because it was. And yet, Invisible People isn’t fueled by rage so much as clarity.
Bardo Martinez didn’t flinch when the conversation turned to protests. He’s no stranger to them. Growing up, activism wasn’t an abstract idea—it was lived, inherited, repeated. What feels different now, he said, is scale and exposure. “You can’t really hide anymore,” he explained. “You open your phone and you’re connected to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.” There’s no insulation left. Every injustice arrives in real time, unfiltered, unavoidable.
That immediacy is part of why the Black Lives Matter movement felt different this time. Martinez described it as a boiling pot whose lid had been held down since the civil rights era. “The truth is the truth,” he said plainly. “People are oppressed, and people are going to rise up against their oppression.” The timing—during a global pandemic—only sharpened the contradiction. When authority tightens, resistance pushes back harder. History, he suggested, doesn’t really give us another option.
For a band with “Chicano” in the name, the expectations are often lazy and immediate. Martinez pushed back on them without defensiveness. “Just because we’re called Chicano Batman doesn’t mean we’re a band composed of Chicanos or Latinos,” he said. The name itself was always meant as a provocation, a social experiment. A mirror. People see what they want to see, label what makes them comfortable, and stop asking questions. That’s exactly the habit he wants to disrupt.
Why do we call people Latino? White? Something else entirely? Martinez traced those terms back to colonial history, pointing out how old and constructed they are. “At the end of the day, everybody’s human,” he said. The labels persist not because they’re accurate, but because they’re useful—to power, to hierarchy, to systems that benefit from erasing complexity. Heritage, he argued, isn’t a straight line anyway. It’s layered, fractured, contradictory.
That tension runs straight through the album’s title track, especially the line about race being implanted in the brain. Martinez talked about heritage the way most people avoid it: by going backward far enough that the categories collapse. Scotland before Scotland. Latin America before Latin America. Long before borders hardened into identities. “Our genetics tell the story of the world,” he said, and it’s a messier, more beautiful story than the one we’re usually sold.
“Manuel’s Story” brings that history into focus. The song is rooted in Martinez’s own family—an uncle forced to flee Colombia because of cartel violence, a legacy shaped by colonial trade routes, slavery, and displacement. He spoke about Cartagena as both a tourist city and a former slave port, about the Caribbean as a collision point of Indigenous, African, and European histories. None of it abstract. None of it theoretical. Just lived reality passed down, reshaped, and set to music.
Immigration, he pointed out, is the wrong word anyway. Everyone migrated at some point. Germans, Italians, Eastern Europeans—all endured violence and exclusion before eventually being folded into the category of “white.” That process is still happening, still selective, still transactional. “You don’t want to offend the power structure,” Martinez said, acknowledging the compromises working-class families make just to survive. Even language choices—like singing in English instead of Spanish—aren’t neutral. They’re strategic, dialectical, necessary.
With all of that weight pressing down, Invisible People could’ve been a furious record. Martinez admitted he tried to make it sharper, edgier, angrier. But it didn’t stick. “I’m not really an angry person,” he said. His writing leans inward, reflective, observant. That tone isn’t avoidance—it’s intention. Joy, he argued, is not the opposite of resistance. It’s evidence of survival.
He connected that idea directly to Black music, to rhythms that carry memory and movement at the same time. “Music is DNA,” he said. A blueprint. A way of life encoded in sound. Without Black music, American music doesn’t exist. Maybe no music does. That lineage isn’t something he studies from a distance—Martinez holds a master’s in Latin American studies, wrote his thesis on Colombian music, and talks like someone who understands rhythm as both history and prophecy.
That’s why Invisible People dances even when it indicts. Why it smiles while it names systems as broken. Martinez sees that duality as essential. Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On came up for a reason—it can make you move and make you think in the same breath. Protest doesn’t always shout. Sometimes it grooves, invites, opens a door instead of slamming it.
In the end, Martinez kept coming back to the same idea: perception. The world we live in is constructed, agreed upon, rehearsed. And that means it can be reimagined. “Open your mind,” he said, echoing a line so familiar it risks sounding empty—until you hear it said with this much conviction.
Invisible People doesn’t pretend to solve anything. It doesn’t offer slogans or easy absolution. What it does offer is movement—physical, emotional, spiritual. And in a moment defined by lines drawn too hard and too fast, that motion alone feels radical.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
