"Double Grooves & Dirty Menudo," a collection of images, sculpture and video referencing California's sonidero (DJ sampling) culture, is a witty and colorful take on the possibilities of contemporary appropriation, with recurring motifs of vinyl records, low-rider graphics, and mirrors that evoke the border culture in which '80s American pop mixed with samba and mambo beats.

Los Angeles-based Eamon Ore-Giron and San Francisco-based Julio César Morales put together the show under the moniker of their ongoing collaborative, Los Jaichackers — a spanglish pun that encapsulates their sampling and mixing of sound, visual, and cultural phenomena in the name of art.

Their "dirty menudo" mixtures are in part an homage to Pérez Prado, the legendary orchestra leader who created his mambo beats by sequencing different Afro-Cuban and jazz sounds. The king of mambo acts as a sort of unifying spirit throughout the exhibition at thirtyninehotel. Everything is infused with Prado's rhythm, from the drawing of the master pinned to the wall (which acts as an impromptu icon), to the psychedelic painted photographic collage of kids dancing to house music.

Even the small, tightly executed blue-and-white gouaches by Ore-Giron, which don't necessarily fit the visual aesthetic of the rest of the works, are about the kind of cultural synthesis that Prado achieved in his early musical sampling. The images reference the confluence of native and invader cultures of the Southwest, where the artist grew up. Kitschy cholo bandanas are transformed into whimsical animated hybrid characters that could reference Peruvian chonguinada dancers, whirling dervishes or even burka-wearing Muslin women.

Several other pieces use vintage records as material: a column of 45s painted in a rainbow spectrum; gate-folded bootleg record covers transformed into abstract psychedelic patterns; and a series of Warhol-inspired photographs that repeat the same image of melted stacks of records over and over again. Like the bootleg covers, the photographs are installed in a way that creates a kind of Rorschach symmetrical mirroring effect. The psychedelic visuals could definitely be turned up a notch, but the pieces nonetheless create an infectious double groove in which cultures collide. Somehow the different beats mix and synchronize.

Los Jaichackers claim that the strength of their work resides in the way that discreet pieces of art are subsumed into the club installation/environment when they DJ. I agree. That is to say, if you happened to be at thirtyninehotel during this month's First Friday festivities, "dirty menudo" was that much more tasty.

That night, Ore-Giron sampled rare psychedelic cumbias in a sweaty atmosphere of kitschy purple, red and yellow colors that reflected off mirrors. To the same beat, Morales sampled video images of "A Fuego Lento" (1980), the last movie to feature Pérez Prado. The movie itself is about international drug trade and its influence in Mexico City. Morales' sampled clips tended to emphasize the constructed nature of Latin machismo within an homogenized landscape of modern concrete high rises.

The great thing about that evening was that Los Jaichackers' messages were felt more than intellectualized. The music, along with exuberant pink and yellow decal stylizations that decorated the turn tables, the exhibit entrance and the bar, contrasted with the way that Fuego Lento's hero was caught in the loop of Morales's visual mixer. These subtle deconstructions of pop culture washed over the distracted crowd as they danced.

The experiments of Los Jaichackers are part of a much larger impulse of artist/DJs (Christian Marclay and DJ Spooky are probably the most widely recognized) who seize every opportunity to co-opt and repoliticize the material of global consumption.

Ore-Giron, who mixes under the moniker DJ Lengua, has exhibited at Deitch Projects among other major galleries. Morales has shown in the Singapore Biennale and the most recent (and highly regarded) Istanbul Biennial. Also, they helped form Club Unicornio three years ago (which is more of a concept than a place, as it moves between San Francisco and Los Angeles). Club Unicornio takes its name from one of Tijuana's bars, which in the course of its 20-year history, was both a regular hangout of Al Capone and a transvestite strip club. With projects like Club Unicornio and performances in gallery/bar spaces like our own thirtyninehotel, Los Jaichackers is intent on crossing all kinds of borders — national, ethnic, audio, visual, and high and low culture.

To this end, they have expanded their appearances beyond house parties to museums, galleries and various biennial events around the world. Their next big art-world appearance will be for an upcoming show at the Los Angeles County Museum. Because they are interested in challenging notions of what art can be, who should have access to it and how we should experience it, they have gravitated toward the audio/art/social laboratories, such as the one played out during February's First Friday. I'd be happy to see more of these kinds of gatherings, in which the combination of ingredients initially seem scrappy (a bit like menudo) but then heat up, blending flavors into something quite substantive, rich, and even potentially transformative.

Jaimey Hamilton is an assistant professor of contemporary art and critical theory in the Art and Art History Department at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.