This was on display in a Broadway dress shop downtown.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Sixth Street lately, near MacArthur Park.

These were taken Thursday about 7 p.m.

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.

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…..:)