In Pinotepa Nacional, Oaxaca (a town in Mexico’s Costa Chica), a group of elderly gentlemen known as Los Banqueros congregate at a park bench in the town square to share music, poetry, gossip, and cultural critique. Here, their performances of chilenas and versos evoke a social world understood as fading in the present. Although chilena is often framed as a mestizo genre, Los Banqueros conceptualize mestizaje in ways that differ from the Black-exclusionary logic of nationalist discourse. While debates over the correct way to play the chilena’s rhythmic accompaniment have been shaped by competing and often racially coded claims to authenticity, Los Banqueros take a more fluid approach that highlights the diversity of chilena performance. This flexibility resonates with what René Zavaleta describes as a motley society, in which diverse histories and temporalities coexist without being fully reconciled (Tapia Maella, 2022). At times, members of Los Banqueros strategically engage multicultural frameworks when doing so is beneficial, yet they do not focus on cultural rescue or heritage display. Instead, they perform chilena as a social practice oriented toward pleasure, critique, and nostalgic remembrance. Drawing on memory studies, the concept of motley society, and ethnographic engagement, this paper examines how social music-making and storytelling among Los Banqueros produce a counter-narrative to the etnogenesis model that frames Blackness as newly emerging through political recognition (Varela-Huerta, 2023). Rather, the gatherings of Los Banqueros reveal how Black presence is embedded within everyday local understandings of history, place, and social belonging.