For the last year, just six miles east of downtown L.A., a team of aspiring Mexican rodeo hopefuls has trained in a City of Industry arena for a shot at the annual championship in Guadalajara. Their quest was more than a dream — it was a reality series called Los......
Carlos Samaniego didn’t really know he was queer until college. But he remembers yearning to be a mariachi crooner as early as grade school. Luckily for him, LAUSD supports a mariachi band program as part of the music department at El Sereno Middle School. “I started on the guitarrón,” recalls......
One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2014 issue. Check out our entire People 2014 issue. At 6:25 a.m., during the March 17 earthquake in the Sepulveda Pass, Ana Guerrero was spinning at a low-key gym in Lincoln Heights. As chief of staff to Los Angeles Mayor Eric......
See also: *5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week Born in Mexico City, Ilona Katzew came to L.A. 13 years ago to assume a role at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as an associate curator of Latin American art. At the time, Latin American art was......
The outdoor balcony on the north end of UCLA's Haines Hall was a fitting place for the informal pizza party last week concluding a series of Pacific Standard Time exhibitions loosely gathered under the "L.A. Xicano" heading. The campus building houses the Chicano Studies Research Center as well as the......
In many ways, art historian, scholar and political activist Shifra Goldman was the madrina -- the godmother -- of Chicano art. A memorial service in her honor held October 15 at the Professional Musicians Local 47 was marked by an outpouring of love and sympathetic eulogies from artists and intellectuals,......
Like the late Chicano literary pioneer Raúl Salinas, the street-bred vernacular poet and political firebrand who adopted me as a teenager and helped steer me away from the streets and toward books, Luís J. Rodríguez has made a life-time of mentoring inner-city youth. Using his own escape from a violent......
For over 20 years, Lalo Alcaraz has gotten hate mail in response to his barbed Chicano satire, sarcasm and socio-political commentary. Reared in San Diego and a former San Diego State University Aztec, the award-winning editorial cartoonist is not, however, the caustic embittered iconoclast who lives to create controversy. He......
With his new web series Los Americans, writer-director Dennis Leoni has been resurrected. The creator of the short-lived Resurrection Blvd. series for Showtime has gone from a show about a working-class Latino family with championship boxing aspirations to a show about an upper-middle class Latino household led by a newly......
Gilbert "Magú" Luján used to laugh when described as a Chicano art icon, but he is more than deserving of the title. His irreverent, playful work across a broad spectrum of media that included cardboard, metal, ceramic tile and organic material, among others, fused a distinct visual vocabulary with his......
