He spoke of moons on the run, of black angels carrying snow water, of winds that brandished hot swords against hearts made of olive oil. It was 1935, and the Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca was giving a lecture on Romancero gitano, his book of poems about Gypsy life in southern Spain. Although his poems celebrated the anguished cries of Gypsy song, García Lorca insisted they were “anti-flamenco” because they contained “not one short jacket, suit of lights, wide-brimmed hat, or Andalusian tambourine.” He was after not the “visible Andalusia” of castanet flamenco tourist kitsch but the “hidden Andalusia” that castanets and heel-stomping table dances cover up — the pain and anger of a people stepped on by a state that has turned making money off their soul into a national pastime. A year later, he would be assassinated by the forces of Franco during the first days of the Spanish civil war.

García Lorca’s poems remain principal documents not only of “hidden Andalusia,” but of hidden Spain — the Spain of Moors and Arabs, the Spain of African immigrants and Basque separatists, the Spain that longs to renew itself in the Latin American cultures it once colonized. Hidden Spain is the Spain beneath the folklore, undocumented Spain, Spain without papers or passports. “I am a border in the sea, a ghost in the city,” sang one son of anti-Franco Spanish exiles, Manu Chao, in his 1998 song “Clandestino.” “The authorities say my life is prohibited.”

The prohibited lives of these ghosts in the city haunt Rey de la Rumba (Narada), the new album from Barcelona Gypsy singer and guitarist Pubill “Peret” Calaf, who grew up selling fabrics in Gypsy street markets with his itinerant merchant father. In the late ’60s, after years of relying on the cry of his throat and the palmera clapping of his callused brown hands, he grew Elvis sideburns, retooled his native Mataró Gypsy song on an electric guitar, and fused it with enough rock, jazz, and mambo to help birth a new language of Gypsy expression, the rumba catalana. Rey de la Rumba, which serves up new versions of some of his most successful gitano/pop-rock hybrids, is Peret’s first album in years. The Spain it reveals is the mestizo country that Spain has always been and the mestizo country that it has always denied through the promotion of a European identity that eclipses the “clandestino” others it’s built on.

These others are everywhere on Rey de la Rumba. Peret invites some of Spain’s most vital and controversial young musicians — many of them fellow Barcelona Gypsies — to reinvent his songs and stage a battle between pop flamenco visibility and the aggressive underground invisibility of the Spanish margins. There is Afro-Cuban rumba and mambo, Tex-Mex norteño and cumbia, Jamaican dub, militant breakbeat. There’s Dusminguet, who perform in Arabic and Spanish. There’s Manuel Malou, whose most recent album, Mixa Cooltura (BMG), resonated with immigrant voices from Cameroon and Senegal. There’s Tonino Carotone, a madrileño who has traded in his Spanish urbanity for the provinces of the Spanish countryside and his Spanish birthright (Antonio de la Cuesta) for an Italian alter ego.

And perhaps most important (and most surprising for a Gypsy record that went gold on the day of its release in Spain), there is Fermin Muguruza, the former leader of punk radicals Negu Gorriak, who has emerged as the Basque country’s most prolific audio activist. Los vascos, or euskadi, are Spain’s oldest indigenous population — before the Gypsies, before the Moors, before the Jews; and for years they have been an Euskera-speaking thorn in the side of Spanish nationalism. Not only does Fermin sing in Euskera when he joins Peret on a jungle-jacked version of “Voy, Voy” (roughly, “I’m coming, I’m coming”) but so does Peret, and the two trade verses in Romaní, the native language of the gitanos. And so a song that many critics had dismissed as sellout gitano pop is now reborn in two of Spain’s most disenfranchised unofficial languages over a spiral of ballistic breakbeats on transcontinental loan from Kingston sound systems and UK ghettos.

Two artists from Mexico — the colony Spain seems to have the hardest time shaking in its quest for post-colonial innocence — also work their way into the hidden Spain that Peret curates: the Monterrey cumbia-hop conjunto El Gran Silencio and Professor Angel Dust, who left the colony for the crown and now lives in Spain, where he has worked with, among so many others, Sevillian rapper Mala Rodríguez. Rodríguez’s own debut, Lujo ibérico (“Iberian Luxury”) (Superego), which plops hip-hop down in the center of southern Spain, is a record García Lorca would have loved — he relished the similarities between New York blacks and Spanish Gypsies as early as the 1920s.

If you listen closely to Rodríguez’s “La cocinera,” you can hear her rhyme flow dissolve into the throaty trill of Gypsy song. Her words elongate, flutter, and scrape, and they get close to what García Lorca once described as “the scream of dead generations, a poignant elegy for lost centuries.” It is the same sound that perforates Rey de la Rumba’s chart-topping polish, the sound of the past forcing its way into the present, the sound of the hidden pushing its way back into visibility.