After Caridad Brenes died, her granddaughter Margarita Cepeda felt her grandmother’s spirit dancing inside her. Mami Cari had raised Margarita from the time she was a baby and, most important, had taught her as a little girl how to dance bomba. Holding her wide skirt high and swishing it in…
In the melodramatic world of the Latin-American soap opera known as the telenovela, a threatening villain and a scheming, evil woman always stand in the way of true love. Cold-hearted family members, corrupt officials, mysterious diseases, and endless cases of mistaken identity all conspire to keep the innocent heroine away…
This weekend the biggest African-American business in the United States also is the best show in town. Detroit entrepreneur David Humphries, better known in the beauty world as Hump the Grinder, presents in Miami for the second year in a row what he calls “a showcase of hair entertainment.” At…
There was no more mosh pit. At the Watcha Tour Showcase for the Latin Alternative Music Conference (LAMC) held in New York City August 12 through 14, the entire first floor of Manhattan’s Irving Plaza churned in a tidal wave of human bodies that crashed above the heads of still…
A café in Mexico City where artists, writers, and political radicals gathered in the early 1900s, Café Tacuba also is the name of a band as committed to preserving Mexican history and culture as it is to turning the common places of its homeland upside down. “It’s a game that…
Once in a great while a concert that you wish everyone could see comes to town. The Florida debut of Totó la Momposina on August 5 was such a concert. Thirty-five years ago the Afro-Colombian singer began a mission to “conquer hearts with music,” introducing the sounds of her native…
On the main stage of the Colombian Independence Day Festival last month at Tamiami Park, Juan Carlos Zapata mouthed the words to the Andean country’s national anthem. Then he followed with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” With his hand over his heart, the trim, fresh-faced 33-year-old looked like an earnest schoolboy –…
“I am not seeking to be a star on Earth but rather a star in the universe,” once said the living legend of Colombian cumbia, Totó la Momposina. For more than three decades, Totó’s voice has floated heavenward. A Latin Grammy nomination this year for her album Pacanto just might…
Security grew tense backstage at the tenth annual Colombian Independence Day Festival at Tamiami Park late last month. A record crowd squeezed into the fairgrounds in front of the main stage, spilling over into the fenced-off VIP section. Ordinary folks eager to get close to their idols added to the…
Eleven years ago Pepe Alva could not get to Miami fast enough. When the singer was seventeen years old, his father moved the family from northern Peru to southern Ohio. After a month in Cincinnati, Alva was itching for the highway. “I went to the map with a highlighter,” he…
Confusion reigns as the first winners accept their prizes late last May at the Cubadiscos Awards 2000, in Havana’s National Theater. The happy honorees mount the stage, acceptance speeches springing to their lips, but the smiling hosts clutch their microphones tightly. This is not the Grammys. There will be no…
Gregory Nava’s Hollywood epic My Family/Mi Familia (1995) turns the travails of a Chicano family in Los Angeles into a saccharine-sweet elegy. Maria Escobedo’s fluffy romantic comedy Rum and Coke (1999) sends a hunky firefighter to rescue the Cuban identity of a confused New York damsel. Ela Troyano’s Latin Boys…
When Pepe Horta opened a second Café Nostalgia just more than a year ago on Miami Beach, the swanky new digs stood out, even amid the flash and glitter of the SoBe scene. But the sumptuous glamour could not prevent a pang in the hearts of many of the regulars…
It’s summertime and the livin’ is compas. Miami’s second annual Haitian Compas Festival coincides with the glut of new compas albums released each July. The sales barometer rises just before August, when the Haitian diaspora in Miami and New York heads home for the annual town festivals bearing gifts for…
Round about two in the morning on weekends from the 1930s through the 1950s, the smartly dressed residents of what was then known in Miami as Colored Town would gather at the doors of the hotels on NW Second Avenue. There they would wait for jazz greats like Count Basie,…
O Fortune, like the moon, you are changeable, ever waxing and waning. — Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana Faceless strawmen and shimmering goddesses flex their knees and fix their hair in the foyer between the front lobby and the auditorium of Havana’s Amadeo Roldan Theater. The dancers and musicians of the…
Looking like a battered Spencer Tracy, 49-year-old Julian Jorge Reyes stands beside his 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme in the parking lot across from Little Havana’s Domino Park. At 3:00 a.m. the bright lights on the marquee of the newly renovated Tower Arts Center theater turn the gray at his temples…
On a crowded bus in Buenos Aires, a gaggle of teenage girls huddled in the back, giggling and gossiping as teenage girls everywhere do. Their exuberant youth was too much for a cynic in his early twenties, who stood clutching a pole in the aisle. He couldn’t resist baiting the…
World peace is a tall order. Most of us around here would settle for peace in Miami-Dade County. Global-hybrid band Alabina comes to Miami Beach with the musical message that ethnic differences anywhere in the world can be settled through multicultural song and dance. Unfortunately named lead singer Ishtar has…
Great tango dancers are said to have “adoquín” or “cobblestone” beneath their feet. The dramatic poses and deliberate drag of the dance tell the story of the streets of late-nineteenth-century Buenos Aires, when Italians crossed the Atlantic in droves to work in the booming Argentine industry. The Bad Life in…
The U.S. Census has it all wrong. The question is not whether you are “white (non-Hispanic),” “black (non-Hispanic),” or “Hispanic.” The question is not even whether you are Latino, non-Latino, or none of the above. According to the Bacardi Salsa Congress 2000, the real question is: How do you dance…
