With his supersized Afro, just-woke-up-after-a-late-night voice, and I-can’t-believe-I’m-a-star humility, Tego Calderón might be the most lovable thug of all time. Certainly he’s the most loved rapper in reggaetón. His 2002 debut album El Abayarde finally dragged the genre out of the underground, where young Boricuas had been toasting in Spanish…
However you want to measure success, 2003 belongs to Juan Esteban Aristizabal. Juanes’s album Un Día Normal moved more copies than any other disc in Spanish this year, spending the entire year on Billboard’s Top Ten Latin album chart (after parking there for eight months in 2002) and spawning five…
It has been an anxious year for the Latin music industry, as it has for the music industry in general. The good news: In a time of crisis the crassest pop acts fade away; the acts that survive are fired up by a personal vision. While some of the best…
In the heady, right-on Seventies, an article in the magazine ¡P’Alante! (Forward!), published by radical Nuyorican political outfit the Young Lords, once called U.S. prisons “concentration camps” for young black and boricua men. Deep. At that time the stars of the new Nuyorican musical movement known as salsa used to…
Who knew that the floor seats at the James L. Knight Center could be removed? All these years I thought we had no choice but to evade the ushers and squeeze into the aisles to dance salsa with La India or toss flowers at Alejandro Sanz. Then again, from the…
At around 5:00 p.m. last Thursday, November 20, approximately 50 riot police dressed in black were marching north along NE First Avenue. Like an army of androids, clear plastic shields and shiny helmets advanced toward me, a menacing wall spread across the pavement. I was the only civilian in sight…
It’s been 44 years since Generoso Jímenez last performed in Miami. He remembers the date perfectly, April 17, 1959, but he can’t quite recall the name of the place where he played trombone with the Banda Gigante de Benny Moré. “It was a plaza,” he says, squinting. A thin bluish…
The North American Free Trade Agreement among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico is nearly a decade old, long enough for its record to be examined by those who see it as a harbinger of what the much larger Free Trade Area of the Americas might bring. Predictably there is wide…
Market Access This issue puts the “free” in free trade by tearing down the barriers between nations and letting goods flow unfettered across borders. The current draft mandates that member countries eliminate tariffs on all imports from other member countries within ten years after the FTAA goes into effect. Taxing…
The story of the Free Trade Area of the Americas began — and may well end — in Miami. At the Summit of the Americas held here in December 1994, the heads of every nation in the hemisphere (except Fidel Castro, who was not invited) agreed to tear down trade…
Andean Region On the great-grandfather clock of time, 500 years is about a second. And in that second, European mestizos have managed to plunder this region of nearly all its mineral wealth, subjugate the Indian populations, and force on them Western laws and the Catholic Church. But if the recent…
Miami is known for its combustible mix of people from all points on the sociopolitical spectrum. At Home Depot the wealthy former somocista bumps into the Sandinista commander who appropriated his Managua mansion. The retired Medellín cocaine kingpin lives in the same Key Biscayne condo as the attorney general who…
Anyone who has listened to Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evora has heard the word sodade. In Creolu, the mixture of Portuguese and West African languages spoken on the tiny chain of islands 300 miles off the coast of Senegal, sodade means nostalgia, yearning, longing for love lost. Portuguese sailors felt…
Mini Malfi looks disgruntled, sitting on the edge of a low Japanese-style coffee table in the living room of a ranch house in Miami Springs. The squat beakless penguin, about half as tall as the original bowling pin-sized Malfi, stares straight ahead. With white Xs for eyes and a red,…
When the Spam Allstars abandoned Little Havana’s Thursday-night Fuácata party last summer, after two years of packing Hoy Como Ayer, party promoter and veteran session hand Steve Roitstein did his best to fill the void with Palo!, which has the same DJ/Latin jam band format and the same violent Spanish…
Handclaps cross the ocean over a cell phone call from Madrid to Miami. Manic fingers pick an acoustic guitar. Palms slap a conga like machine gun fire. Luis Alberto Barberia scats, imitating the drum with an explosion of lips and tongue, then sings: “I know that it’s hard to attain…
Start with her body. The scar she has always taken such care to conceal is visible now, snaking along her spine where the surgeon sliced open Gloria Estefan’s skin after she broke several vertebrae in a tour-bus crash in Pennsylvania in 1990. Thirteen years later she is lying nearly naked…
In the dark Ricky Martin contemplates his reflection. He stands in front of a giant mirror, his back to the audience. The crossover sensation may or may not hear George Lopez, host of the fourth annual Latin Grammy Awards, introduce him with a crack about his “bon bon.” Doesn’t matter…
David Oquendo has good reason to believe in the American dream. The Cuban immigrant moved from the island to New Jersey in 1991 looking for artistic freedom. And he found it in a little club in Union City. Back in 1996 Tony Sequeira, the owner of a joint called La…
High above the freeways in Los Angeles, hovering over the causeways to Miami Beach, and deep within the bowels of the New York City subway system hang sultry portraits of hot, ripped, copper-colored babes making love to musical instruments. A man gropes a guitar. A woman, conga wedged between her…
Back in the days of Cole Porter, pop songs had lyrics. You know, words put together in such a way as to say something you might be interested in hearing. And because there were lyrics, good singers had a way of delivering a song that went along with the words:…
For the first time on a shoot, documentary filmmaker Frances Negron-Muntaner is afraid. Hundreds of bodies surge against her lean, five-foot two-inch frame at the front gate of what used to be, until earlier that day, Camp Garcia, a U.S. Navy bombing range southeast of Puerto Rico on the little…
