Arts
Gustavo Arellano is back! This time our friend has a front page feature on Pepe Aguilar. That's right FRONT PAGE! We get into how the story happened, the background of doing a long feature and more. Story: In a city that loves rags-to-riches stories, few can match the saga of Pepe Aguilar and his family. But only some Angelenos know about it. His father, Antonio, slept on benches in Placita Olvera when he arrived in Los Angeles from Mexico in the 1940s with no papers but plenty of ambition. He triumphantly returned in the 1960s as a ranchera legend, with an espectáculofeaturing his family that brought Mexico back to homesick immigrant L.A. audiences, if only for three hours. These extravaganzas, which interspersed music with rodeo events, evoked the rural traditions of Jalisco and Zacatecas, from where hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans in the Southland trace their roots; what might’ve seemed like a circus act to non-Latinos was really an authentic, if romanticized, portrayal of culture of these Mexican states. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-14/pepe-aguilar-mexican-rodeo Video: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-10/pepe-aguilar-jaripeo-sin-fronteras Follow: Gustavo IG