March 2009 Archives
FMLN
By Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
March 31, 2009
25 years ago you couldn't utter that acronym in Los Angeles without looking over your shoulder. L.A. was a Marxist hotbed, created in large part by the Reagan administration's support for right-leaning Central America governments. Those governments were waging a bloody war against leftists rebels, many fighting under the umbrella Farabundo Marti Liberacion Nacional. Government death squads pushed millions of refugees from cities and the countryside north to the United States. Hundreds of thousands arrived in L.A.
Permalink Discuss (1 Comments)Obama
By Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
March 26, 2009
Last week, this guy was selling patriotic tchotchkes outside the middle school where Barack Obama led his Los Angeles town hall meeting. His name is Fermin Rosas and he moved to Los Angeles from Mexico about a decade ago. Business was slow. He'd only sold a dollar's worth of vinyl American flags, USA strips, and Statue of Liberty tiaras. He was down with the gente, the people, and to prove it, he had a sign with the word migra, or Border Patrol, crossed out in red.
Permalink DiscussSnow
By Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
March 13, 2009
Last week, I joined the herd of thousands of Southern Californians looking for fresh powder on Mammoth Mountain. I found it.
I've been riding Gold Rush, Canyon Express and other ski lifts at Mammoth for about 12 years. This year, more than any other, I also found that the supermarket clerks, resort maintenance workers and even the guy who made me a Nutella-filled crepe in town looked like my cousins, aunts and uncles.
Permalink DiscussChavela
By Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
March 6, 2009
Both the Guzman and Lopez sides of my family like their ranchera singers manly like Jose Alfredo Jimenez or feminine like Lucha Villa. Think of them as the Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn of Mexican traditional music.
In ranchera music there are few artists who explore the space in between. That's what made me stop on one of the new Mexican cultural channels I'd recently signed up for. Some recognizable talking heads expounded on 90-some year old ranchera singer Chavela Vargas in a documentary. Chavela bragged about hanging with Jose Alfredo Jimenez and between both depleting all the agave produced in that mid 1950s tequila crop. Yeah.
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