Luis Tigre boarded the uptown D train with two colleagues one recent morning to go to work. But unlike the other commuters on board, the three had already reached their job.

As the doors closed, Mr. Tigre - in a cowboy hat and crocodile-skin boots with a bejeweled accordion strapped to his torso - scanned the car for police officers. Seeing none, he shot a glance to cue his friends, who positioned their hands on their guitars and leapt into a popular Mexican ballad that describes a Salvadoran immigrant’s struggle to reach the United States. “I knew I would need more than courage;

I knew that I might not make it,” Mr. Tigre sang in Spanish.

The workday had begun.

Mr. Tigre’s group, Fuerza Nortena del Tigre - the Northern Force of the Tiger - is part of a growing community of Mexican musicians in New York’s subways. They mostly play norteno music, which fuses traditional Mexican styles like the ranchera with the polka and waltz rhythms carried to Mexico by German and Czech immigrants in the 19th century. The genre, wildly popular with Mexicans, originated in the Texas-Mexico borderlands.

Recognizable by their cowboy hats and their emotive, boisterous corridos - songs of love, loss and the immigrant experience -these bands are a bold manifestation of Mexican culture in a city where much of that population spends long days toiling in obscurity, behind the doors of restaurant kitchens and the high fences of construction sites.

“On the surface, Mexicans are a very discreet presence,” said Gaspar Orozco, a poet and Mexican consul in New York who was a director of “Subterraneans,” a documentary, about the subway musicians. “But in the underground, they explode with all this vital energy, with all this bravado, with all this pride of being Mexican musicians.”

Mr. Orozco recalled his first norteno experience in the subway. “It was like a punk music attack,” he said. “Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Then they pass the hat and go to the next car.”

But the Metropolitan Transportation Authority prohibits playing musical instruments on subway trains. Fines are often $75 each. Detention often involves an overnight stay in jail or community service. For illegal immigrants, these civil violations usually don’t prompt a check of immigration status.

But even though $75 is a good day’s earnings on the subway, the musicians seem to tolerate the penalties .

“Our babies have to eat ,” said Mr. Tigre, 41, who is divorced and has three American-born children. “If I had a steady job, I wouldn’t play in the train.”

The groups’ growth has paralleled the rising number of Mexicans in New York. By the estimates of several players, at least 15 such groups are playing in the subways, though the groups are continually forming, changing members and dissolving.

Mr. Tigre grew up in Piaxtla, a rural village in Mexico. He dropped out of school when he was 10 to work on a cattle ranch, then came to New York in 1986. In 1990, his eldest brother taught him to play the accordion, a mainstay of norteno music.

Mr. Tigre plays on trains several days a week, except when he can get construction work, which pays more, he said. But, he added, “Music is my life.”

Like the other bands, Fuerza Nortena typically starts playing about 9 a.m. and breaks for lunch at 2 p.m., when rowdy schoolchildren begin to fill the trains for their trip home.

“They’re outrageous and make a scene,” said Javier Francisco Durantes, 53, who plays the 12-string bajo sexto guitar . Adults can be hostile, too, but just as often, the music seems to charm people, particularly other immigrants from Mexico.

“They used to listen to these songs, and miss them,” Mr. Durantes said. At 145th Street, a man carrying a shopping bag stepped onto the train. The doors closed and the music filled the car.

“It’s like a party in here,” he said , to no one in particular.


By KIRK SEMPLE