Guests were still arriving when Jancy Rios stepped outside to call for more chairs at her 50th birthday party in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The growing crowd had filled the room, drawn by the chance to celebrate with family, friends and the familiar rhythms of Puerto Rico.
Inside, the Puerto Rican band Zona Libre—Vilmarie Méndez, and Reinaldo González as vocals, güira player Joseph Muñiz, and his 11-year-old son, percussionist Josiel Muñiz—had turned the celebration into something closer to home.
For Rios, the salsa and merengue rhythms remind her of everyday memories from Puerto Rico. She remembered songs playing at local stores, music drifting from chinchorros, and relatives gathering in family garages to clean, do laundry or work on their cars.
“Listening to them brings out emotions from where you were born,” Rios reflected. “It makes you remember many beautiful moments from childhood and youth.”
At Mendez’s invitation, guests left their seats and moved toward the center of the room to dance and feel the music. Soon, they were dancing together, responding to the rhythms that carried through the celebration.
“When they arrived, people got excited, and the atmosphere changed when they started playing,” Rios said.
Partygoers gleefully danced and leapt in a lively way that reminded Rios of experiences she had on the island, which helped to make her milestone birthday a meaningful one, she said.
‘My Puerto Rico’
For nearly a decade, Zona Libre has remained motivated to bring its music to private celebrations, restaurants and community events across the Mississippi Gulf Coast. In some of the coastal communities where Zona Libre performs, Hispanic and Latino residents make up 10,050 (9.5%) of Jackson County’s population, and 13,976 (13.3%) of Harrison County’s, the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2025 QuickFacts estimates. The band plays rhythms from across Latin America including salsa, merengue, bachata, cumbia and others so that audiences from different countries can hear something connected to their cultures.
“We wanted every person, through music, to be transported to their nationality and say, ‘Look, at least we can hear something from our own culture here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast,’” Méndez explained.
For Kismeth Meléndez, entertainment and marketing director for the 2021 Mobile Latin Fest, Zona Libre created exactly that connection by bringing back the Caribbean and tropical style commonly heard in Puerto Rico.
“When I am in the audience and hear their music, it immediately reminds me of my Puerto Rico,” Meléndez said.
For her, that cultural connection reflects the larger need for Latin music and cultural representation in the region.
“There are few groups in our region dedicated to bringing this kind of music to the public and representing the richness of our Latin American culture,” Meléndez said. “For those of us who live far from our countries of origin, hearing our music can become a bridge back to our roots.”
To maintain that bridge to home, the band members balance full-time jobs at Ingalls Shipbuilding, a Pascagoula-based shipyard, with school, late-night equipment setup and long drives to performances.
“It is very sacrificial,” Méndez admitted. “Setting up the sound can take two-and-a-half to three hours.”
After a full day at work, Méndez said, they sometimes feel too exhausted to perform.
“It’s not easy; it’s exhausting,” Méndez acknowledged. “Sometimes, on a Friday, we have to go perform after getting off work, and I tell my husband, ‘Can I skip it?’ Sometimes he tells me, ‘Can I skip it?’”
But Méndez said their sense of responsibility to audiences and the connection audiences feel through the music keeps the band performing.
“What matters to us is that people feel comfortable with what we do, that they feel at home, that they can say, ‘At least I went somewhere, I felt good, I had a good time, and I felt that connection’” Méndez said.
The band has heard that response before.
“Sometimes people tell us, ‘Wow, I felt so good. I had such a good time. Thank you, because we felt like family,’” Méndez said.
Filling a Niche
The need Zona Libre now meets for others was once their own. After job opportunities became scarce in Puerto Rico, Gonzalez lost his job and was recruited to work at Ingalls. Méndez later left her government job in Puerto Rico to join her husband in 2009.
“The transition was difficult and, above all, nostalgic because I had been involved in music my whole life,” Méndez confessed.
Although DJs played Latin music in the region and Mobile, Alabama, group La Nueva Imagen performed locally, Méndez said the Mississippi Gulf Coast lacked the live-music culture she knew in Puerto Rico.
“You arrive somewhere where there is nothing,” Méndez lamented. “No atmosphere, practically no music.”
Music has always been central to Méndez’s life. She remembers her grandfather turning on the radio at 5 a.m. each morning, filling the house with music before the family was fully awake.
“I think that made me love music,” Méndez reflected. “My mother says that since I was little, I was always dancing and singing, even in the bathroom.”
Méndez had been involved in music since her school years, singing in school and university choirs before directing a church choir of nearly 28 members. Gonzalez later joined that choir, where the couple first met. His singing career began unexpectedly at a celebration in their hometown of San Sebastián, Puerto Rico.
“I started by accident,” González said. “There was a party … and they were looking for a singer.”
Méndez had been invited to audition as a singer but could not attend the initial audition because she was pregnant with their first child. Organizers then asked González whether he could sing. He auditioned, got the job and began performing with the orchestra. Music remained central to the couple’s relationship as they later performed in groups and orchestras in Puerto Rico.
“We missed that part of our lives, which was music,” Méndez said.
‘Music Is Our Passion’
Zona Libre, which translates into “free zone,” began with two small speakers and its first performance at a Mobile, Alabama, restaurant. Méndez said early supporters, including karaoke host Carmen Romanello, helped the band find its first opportunities.
“At the beginning, there are always people who lend you a hand and support you,” Méndez said. “Then, little by little, people keep looking for you and calling you.”
Even as words spread and performances opportunities grew, González said the musicians remain motivated less by fame than by the enjoyment of performing for others.
“We did not do this to become big artists,” he said. “We do it because we enjoy it, and we enjoy bringing joy to people.”
Over the years, Zona Libre’s lineup has evolved. Javier Román, the band’s longtime güira player, returned to Puerto Rico after nearly eight years with the group, while conga player Luis “Toito” Colóndres later stepped away.
“I have nothing bad to say about any of them,” Méndez said. “We were a family, and we continue to be family.”
The band later recruited Joseph Muñiz, a güira player from Peñuelas, Puerto Rico, who had performed with Los Mambo Brothers. His 11-year-old son, Josiel, then joined the group as its percussionist.
“(Josiel) has that gift for music,” Méndez added. “He inherited it from his father, his grandfather and his family, because they are all musicians.”
That shared love of music carries Zona Libre through the demands of the week. While the adult members return to their shifts at Ingalls and Josiel returns to school, the group reunites onstage to step away from their daily routines and reconnect with the passion that brought them together.
“Music is our passion,” Méndez said. “We are one kind of person offstage, but when we are onstage, we become another.”
Recently, the band performed at the Festival Hispano de Pascagoula on Sept. 19 and at the Pensacola Salsa Festival in Pensacola, Florida, on Sept. 26. These events took place on these dates to coincide with Hispanic Heritage Month, an observance that lasts from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15.
Zona Libre prefers to advertise via word-of-mouth and does not have social-media pages. For more information on the Festival Hispano de Pascagoula, visit mainstreetpascagoula.com.
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