This was on display in a Broadway dress shop downtown.
LOS ANGELES: R.I.P. Chalino Sanchez
Perhaps the most influential musical figure to emerge out of Los Angeles in a generation was 
Chalino Sanchez, who was found shot to death 20 years ago today outside Culiacan, the capital city of his native state of Sinaloa, Mexico.
An unlettered immigrant who spoke no English, he virtually singlehandedly created the narcocorrido genre of music, with songs he composed himself that act today as an oral history of the lawless ranchos — villages — of Sinaloa, Durango, Chihuahua and other northwest Mexican states, where impunity and drug trafficking were rife.
On May 15, 1992, he’d given a show in Culiacan and gone out afterwards with friends. A group of men dressed as policemen stopped the caravan of cars and took Chalino. His body showed up with two bullet holes two his head in a field the next day.
Sanchez was already an underground star in LA. His death confirmed his street cred and he became a phenomenon. He is today a legend and well known to kids who weren’t even born when he was alive.
Chalino also did the impossible by making tubas, accordions and clarinets hip and cool instruments, so that young Latino kids would blast tuba- and accordion-based polkas from their trucks as they drove down the streets of towns in southeast LA County.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of LA-born kids followed him, becoming narcocorrido singers and sounding and looking just like the master.
I’ve always felt, though, that they imitated the wrong part of Chalino — his dress, his raw style of singing. Instead, the point of Chalino’s life, I’ve always thought, was to follow your own vision, your own way of doing things. People would tell him to shut up, that he couldn’t sing. “I don’t sing; I bark,” he said, fully aware of his own musical shortcomings. But he kept on, trusting his own experience and ability. he wrote corridos from the people he met in LA; recorded them in small studios, then sold the cassettes of these songs at Mexican bakeries, butcher shops and at swap meets.
DIY — that’s how great things are accomplished.
The narcocorrido scene he fathered in LA was one of the great DIY musical movements to come out of LA. First was punk, in Hollywood. Then gangster rap out of Compton. Then narcocorridos out of Huntington Park, Paramount, and other southeast LA County cities.
You can read more about him in my first book, True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx.
There’s a concert in his honor on Friday at the Gibson Amphitheater, which should be great, and a tour coming out of that later this year.
A great punkrock spirit. RIP Chalino Sanchez.
Filed under Culture, Los Angeles, Mexico
LOS ANGELES: “This is a business trip”
I was at a church service for junior college athletes, several of whom are from out of town. It’s held in El Segundo and aimed at bringing kids together who really felt out of place in LA.
I met these three fellows — Jamsky Baptiste, Jahrie Level and Luckner Brady — all wide receivers at El Camino College and all from Miami, here studying, playing ball and getting grades in shape to be able to get a scholarship to a four-year school. Level already has one to U of Texas, El Paso and leaves later this summer.
Los Angeles, apparently, and California generally, attract lots of out-of-state junior college football talent, particularly from states that don’t have JCs or don’t have JCs with football programs, Florida being one.
The weekly church meeting allows them to get a full meal and feel a little at home in a place they don’t know and where they have no car. Respectful, cheerful, friendly, and maybe a little daunted by LA, each was nevertheless certain that an NFL career awaited him.
“This is a business trip,” said Brady, of his El Camino sojourn. “I got kids to feed.”
I wish them all great luck.
Filed under Los Angeles
MEXICO: Carlos Fuentes dies
Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has died. He was 83.
One of the country’s foremost literary voices from Mexico in the 20th Century, Fuentes spent years living abroad and explaining the country to those who were not Mexican. He was mentioned often as a candidate for a Nobel Prize, but never won it.
He also feuded famously with Mexico’s other 20th Century literary giant, Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz, who gave a speech criticizing the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Paz had criticized the Sandinistas for their undemocratic methods after they came to power. The speech caused effigies of Paz to be burned in Mexico.
Fuentes supported the Sandinistas and was critical of Paz. A magazine Paz directed published an article attacking Fuentes, which the novelist took as an attack from Paz.
The two men, who’d once been friends, never spoke after the dispute.
“Lamento profundamente el fallecimiento de nuestro querido y admirado Carlos Fuentes, escritor y mexicano universal. Descanse en paz,” tweeted President Felipe Calderon today upon learning the news.
LOS ANGELES: Broadway Shoeshine Man
Saw this guy during the May Day parade on Broadway.
He stood like this, unmoving, as I snapped some shots and stayed that way when I left.
Filed under Los Angeles
TELL YOUR TRUE TALE: “Last Day of School”
This week on Tell Your True Tale, my storytelling website, Florida writer Anthony Quinones 
contributes a story of what happened when the vice principal of his junior high tried to discipline him. Great story.
Check out “Last Day of School.”
Please share it on social media if you like it.
And write one of your own.
Filed under Tell Your True Tale
MEXICO: Nuevo Laredo paper stops publishing narco news
Two days after being attacked by a drug gang, the newspaper El Manana of Nuevo Laredo said it will suspend publishing news of narco conflicts in the area.
On Friday, armed men shot up the newspaper’s offices and threw an explosive device as well. It marked the seventh armed attack on media offices in the state of Tamaulipas in six years.
The city, opposite Laredo, Texas, has been the scene of repeated flare-ups of intense violence between drug cartels. It was the first Mexican city to erupt in the drug violence in 2005, as the Sinaloa Cartel and the Gulf Cartel, with its then-allies, the Zetas, battled for hegemony.
The current battle for the Nuevo Laredo plaza — the term for drug territory leading into the U.S. — is between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas. Also on Friday, 14 decapitated bodies were found stuffed into a minivan in the city.
In a story for the Houston Chronicle, ace reporters Dudley Althaus and Dane Schiller, wrote that a banner over an overpass, addressed to the Gulf Cartel, read: “This is how I am going to finish off all the fools you send to heat up the plaza. We’ll see you around, you bunch of parasites.”
VIRGIN: of 6th Street
I’ve been spending a lot of time on Sixth Street lately, near MacArthur Park.
These were taken Thursday about 7 p.m.
Filed under Virgin
LOS ANGELES: A sauna that’s my favorite place in Hollywood
Check out a column in today’s LA Times about the sauna in Hollywood, in the club now owned by LA Fitness, where I love to spend time in and which is well worth visiting for all it can tell you about Los Angeles, I think.
I always liked the idea of the region as a place where people come and live with their own, more or less oblivious to others from elsewhere who live nearby. This, too, is on display in the sauna.
It’s a raw place; you may hear things that offend a PC sensibility, but L.A.’s geography of multiculturalism can be messy, which makes it so interesting.
Don’t pay attention to the commenter who says the only language you hear in there is Spanish. That’s nonsense.
Filed under Los Angeles, Migrants
TELL YOUR TRUE TALE: The New Kid
On Tell Your True Tale — my storytelling page –David Orr contributes a new story about his first day in Catholic school.
Check out “The New Kid.” Very hip story.
Share it if you like it, and send in one of your own…..:)
Filed under Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale
MEXICO: Three more journalists murdered in Veracruz
The killing of two photographers and a reporter in Veracruz brings the total to four journalists dead in that violence-riven state since the weekend.
Another, Regina Martinez, correspondent for the news magazine, Proceso, was found beaten and strangled to death in her home in Xalapa, the state capital, on Saturday.
Here’s a column from reporter Marcela Turati, from Proceso, on the topic of Mexican journalists who’ve become war correspondents in their own country.
Map source: Wikipedia
Filed under Mexico
MEXICO: Fox calls drug war “useless”
Not that it’s necessarily new, but Vicente Fox is again in the news for his blunt characterization of the drug war as “useless” and calling for the legalization of drugs.
He’s said this before, but it’s always interesting to hear a former president of Mexico get into this. Another former Mexican president, Ernesto Zedillo, is on record, along with Cesar Gaviria and Fernando Cardoso (of ex-presidents of Colombia and Brazil, respectively) as saying he thinks legalization should be part of a new approach to drugs.
Of course, it’s not clear how legalizing drugs in Mexico would have any effect on cartel profits, and thus violence, if the U.S. doesn’t do the same, as the market for all that dope is here.
Filed under Mexico
LOS ANGELES: Who was that masked man?
Yesterday, the May Day march was the smallest it’s been since it began in Los Angeles in 2006. (Here’s the LA Times story.)
Absent are the vast numbers of immigrants and their families — the region’s working class essentially — who populated the first marches and gave them an organic energy.
Nowadays, a much higher percentage of marchers is made up of youths with masks and bandanas covering their faces, and often with anarchist slogans, such as “Abolish Wage Slavery,” and calling for an end to the Federal Reserve.
Filed under Los Angeles
MIGRANTS: “We’re like cockroaches. We’re surviving.”
Roberto Chavez
Over the weekend, I spent time at Westmoreland and Francis avenues, a few blocks west of MacArthur Park, where on Saturday and Sunday a kind of street-vendor mall spontaneously pops up.
On a couple blocks, vendors crowd together, looking for all the world like some street in Mexico City, and selling toothbrushes, electric hair curlers, bleach, boots, DVDs, tools, laptops, cellphones, clothes of all kinds. Each vendor has a little space – first come, first served, I take it.
I met Roberto Chavez, from Honduras, who owned a hardware store at 6th and Union for 10 years until Home Depot and 99-cents stores moved in and crushed him.
“Since then, I’ve been on the streets” selling wallets and ladies purses lately at the Roadium Open Air Market swap meet.
Chavez said his father was a journalist and died when Chavez was 5. His mother cooked at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, he said. Chavez said he came here more than 30 years ago.
Street vending is part of the economy that L.A. cannot do without, he said, because it helps keep its cheap labor force here.
“People just try to survive here,” he said, looking at the vendors that surrounded us. “Nobody’s making money.” Most folks have full-time jobs and come here to sell on weekends to make ends meet. Otherwise, he said, they’d have to return home. It’s too expensive to be poor here, with cars, rent ($700 for a miserable single apartment that he has to share to afford, he said).
“You can measure the economy here,” he said. “We’re like cockroaches. We’re surviving.”
Filed under Migrants
GANGS: Drew Street acting up?
Drew Street, the once-scary two blocks into which the city of LA has poured enormous resources to reverse a serious gang and drug problem, shows a few signs of reverting to old ways.
A shooting on the street, followed by two others in a rival gang neighborhood, yesterday. A month ago, a Drew Streeter chased a black family down the street with a shotgun; the family left the area immediately. In December, a murder of a Drew Street gang member.
Of course, that would have been a couple days mayhem a few years back. That all of this is noteworthy is a sign of how far the street in Glassell Park, abutting the Forest Lawn cemetery, has come. Over the last three years, there were major sweeps, prosecutions, the razing of a notorious house, with a community garden in its place. Now, no drug bazaar, no kids in hoodies lurking by cars, very little graffiti.
(Most of the folks on the street are from the town of Tlalchapa, Guerrero, a part of the notoriously violent Tierra Caliente region. Here’s my story in the LA Times about the street’s fascinating history.)
Still, talking with some folks on the street, they seem to see a more brazen attitude among the little gangbangers who remain. Could be a good story, but first I want to talk to the cops about it all, which I wasn’t able to do today. Hoping to do so on Monday.
Filed under Gangs
