“For me, rock was all about white people. I didn’t even know that there were Latinos in the rock scene,” says regional Mexican artist Régulo Caro. “When I heard Deftones it was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a guy named Chino Moreno in the band, and it sounded so mixed, so Mexican, so familiar.’”
As wild as the 2025 Dia De Los Deftones lineup is, perhaps no performer sticks out more than Caro — even Moreno describes him as “a curveball.” However, for Caro himself, his appearance feels like destiny.
Born in L.A. but raised from an early age in Mexico, the singer-songwriter has been a major fixture of regional Mexican music since 2010, blazing a trail for artists in the genre to break out of traditional boundaries. “For the first three years of my career, it was a challenge for people that were just too accustomed to that style and that sound,” says Caro, who scandalized the scene by daring to wear a leather jacket with his cowboy hat.
But his talents soon quieted the doubters, and in 2012 he earned a Latin Grammy nomination for his second album, Amor en Tiempos de Guerra, which he says is deeply indebted to Deftones. After borrowing Korn’s Life Is Peachy from a neighbor as a kid growing up in Mexico and seeing the name Chino Moreno credited on the cover of Ice Cube’s “Wicked,” Caro bought Deftones’ Around the Fur, intrigued by the band’s Latino heritage.
“When I first heard Deftones, I felt like the melody, the vocal style, it was all so different than what was around me,” he says. “When I write the music, all those melodies I do are very heavily influenced by Chino’s vocal style.”
Caro eventually got to see Deftones live in 2004 in Mexico City, after years of collecting their records and any magazine they were in that he could get his hands on. “Bro, I was hypnotized,” he laughs, remembering the show.
Now, looking ahead to Dia De Los Deftones, Caro is stoked, to say the least. “This is the event of a lifetime for me, personally,” he says. “It’s going to be difficult to top this show. Just being on the lineup and seeing my name on that poster, it’s surreal.”