Notes on a culture displaced - revisited

I missed this thread the first time around so will throw my two cents in now. As a person who generally spends his nights going from one music venue to another and who also spends his afternoons and evenings on the beach I am familiar with pretty much every musician in El Centro. I particularly like the local, traditional music and go out of my way to seek it out when I can. Rob and I tend to disagree a bit when I comes to defining who is local but not about the situation of the street minstrels. They do have an active union and the only foreigner who I know that strolls the beach belongs to it and pays his dues. I never have asked him for a song, just out of principle.
I am not sure of the current situation on the beach but, for the most part, I do not think that the restaurants with music are much in competition with the strollers. They tend to stick pretty close to the beach. What I do find to be a problem that has only been touched on, both on the beach and at the restaurants, is that the musicians often play non-traditional music because that is what people ask for. This is more of a problem at the restaurants but happens at the beach as well. I used to argue vociferously with one particular local duo who are masters at several schools of classical latin music about why they did not play more of it. They said they were playing what their audience wanted to hear, James Taylor, etc. and after observing them for years now, I have given up, they are right. I think that the answer lies more with the attitude of the people coming to Zihua. They need to embrace the local customs and culture more and come outside of their musical comfort zone. Not sure how to make this come about but that is the problem as I see it. Not other musicians.