Marco Antonio Solís

Ario de Rosales, Michoacán, 1970. A ten-year-old boy sings standing on a wooden crate, with a guitar almost bigger than his torso. There were no spotlights or record deals on the horizon. Only the stubbornness of a kid who learned to tune by ear while running errands for his family in a dusty town.

With his cousin Joel, he founded Los Bukis in the mid-1970s. The name means “children” in the Yaqui dialect, and record companies treated the group like cheap catalog material during its first recordings. But Marco Antonio did more than sing with a falsetto that bordered on tears. He wrote every arrangement, fought for publishing royalties, and locked himself in the sound booth to argue over equalization with veteran engineers who were twice his age.

Nobody handed him the mixing board.

By the late 1980s, the group was selling millions of copies by mixing synthesizers with cumbia beats. Mexican cinema, always focused on immediate box office returns, wanted to capitalize on the band's popular following and signed the entire group. Director Sergio Véjar put him in charge of Cómo fui a enamorarme de ti in 1990. The film earned huge sums and outperformed several big-budget American releases in theaters in Mexico City.

The Breakup of a Band and a Solo Comeback

Internal friction eventually blew the group apart in 1996. When a lineup has spent two decades on the road without a break, the tensions come not from the audience but from the splitting of royalties and accumulated exhaustion. Marco Antonio gave up the brand he had created himself to avoid court battles and put his own legal name on the album covers.

His solo debut, En pleno vuelo, hit the market that same year. Several executives at the Fonovisa label predicted a major commercial flop without the band's logo to back it. They were completely wrong. It sold half a million copies in less than a week in record stores across the United States.

And the gamble paid off.

Five years later, an unexpected crossover with art-house cinema happened. Alfonso Cuarón was filming Y Tu Mamá También in 2001 and was looking for a track that captured the boredom and melancholy of two teenagers driving across Mexico. The director chose his song “Si no te hubieras ido” to drive the film's dramatic climax. That sequence brought his voice to European film festivals and introduced him to a cinephile audience that had never bought a tropical music cassette.

Studio Production and the Business of Owning Your Catalog

In 2017, directors Lee Unkrich and Adrián Molina brought him on during the final editing of Coco at Pixar Studios. The character of singer Ernesto de la Cruz required a voice that imitated the golden age of studio ranchera music, but with a comic streak of vanity. Solís agreed to voice the character in Spanish and recorded the vocal tracks for the soundtrack with orchestral arrangements by Michael Giacchino.

Because the composer knew the inner workings of show business better than many classically trained actors, he did not want to copy Jorge Negrete's gestures. Instead, he gave the character that theatrical, distant courtesy he had witnessed for decades backstage in dressing rooms and ballrooms.

In December 2022, cinematographer and filmmaker Gabriel Beristain premiered the documentary series El Buki: Las letras de mi historia on streaming services. Solís served as narrator and opened his private vaults. He provided over three hundred hours of unreleased recordings on magnetic tape stored in sealed boxes in Michoacán. The third episode broke down, track by track, the recording session of a twenty-four-channel analog console recorded in Los Angeles in the fall of 1982.