Leonel Maciel (born March 21, 1939), an Afro-Mexican artist, member of the Salon de la Plastica Mexicana, from the coast of the state of Guerrero. Although from a rural area and farming family, he studied art at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabaco "La Esmeralda" and has traveled extensively in Europe and Asia, which has influenced his work. His art has changed styles from generally contains multiple elements and saturated colors.
Maciel was born in the small village of La Soledad de Maciel, located in the municipality of Petatlan, Guerrero on Mexico’s Pacific coast. He was born to a farm working family, in a palapa near the ocean. His family is of mixed African, Asian and indigenous roots, not uncommon for that region, the Costa Grande of Guerrero. He is a tall thin man, from family of tall people, stating that his great-grandparents were two meters tall or taller. One of these was Margarita Romero, called Negra Margarita who was African-indigenous ethnicity.
Maciel spent his early childhood on beaches and among mangroves. He began to draw and paint early, with his father encouraging him even though the region does not have a strong artistic tradition. His father also taught him to appreciate literature and he became fond of Hispanic-American literature and authors such as Alejo Carpentier, Pablo Neruda and Miguel Angel Asturias, which affected his artistry.
Maciel attended primary school for four years and at age ten went to Mexico City where he attended more classes up to high school but he did not study art although he had been drawing since he was a young child. Instead he worked odd jobs and sold some works that he drew or painted. These came to the attention of the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda". He received a scholarship, studying there from 1958 to 1962.
Maciel believed that it is necessary for artists to see as much of the world as possible and be exposed to the work of other artists. His first journeys outside of Mexico included New York and Iceland, where he experienced an aurora borealis. He also spent three years in Europe, but did not use the time to visit museums and other artists. In 1995, he made an eight month journey through Asia in countries such as India, Bali, Thailand, China and Malaysia as well as the various Pacific islands. Elements of what he saw during this trip were then included into his work.
In 2007 Maciel worked on a project to document the cuisine of his native region which inspired a number of paintings.
Maciel lived in Tepoztlan from the 1980s into the 1990s when he began living in his native Guerrero state.
Maciel has had over forty individual and collective exhibitions of his work in countries such as Brazil, France, the United States and Portugal as well as Mexico.His first individual exhibition was as the Galería Excélsior in 1964. His important collective exhibitions include “Art-Expo” in New York, Erótica ’82 at the Galería José Clemente Orozco and Contemporary Mexican Painters at the Picasso Museum in Antibes, France.He participated in the Myth and Magic of Latin America Biennal in Rio de Janeiro in 1979. Recognitions for Maciel's work include membership in the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, retrospectives at the Museo del Carmen in Mexico City (2001) and the Museo de la Ciudad de México (2003) .In 2007 his home municipality had a ceremony to honor him.
Julia López (b. 1936) is a self-taught Mexican painter whose works depict her childhood home in the Costa Chica region of Guerrero state. She was born in a small farming village but left early for Acapulco and Mexico City to find a better life. In the capital, she was hired as a model for artists at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda" and as such became part of the circle of notable artists of that time. Their influenced encouraged her to draw and paint, with Carlos Orozco Romero discouraging her from formal instruction as to not destroy her style. She began exhibiting in 1958 and exhibited individually and collectively in Mexico, the United States and Europe. Her work was recognized with awards and membership in the Salon de la Plastica Mexicana.
López was born in 1936 in a small village near the town of Ometepecon the Costa Chica of Guerrero. She was one of eight daughters born to Africanand Amuzgo heritage parents.The parents were farmers, raising cotton, chili peppers, tobacco, sesame seed, bananas and other crops.
She has stated that she was blessed to have the childhood that she did, which would not have been possible in a big city. However, she wanted more in life and began her journey by going to Ometepec to work in a hotel called Casa Verde when she was only thirteen years old. In 1951, she moved again, this time to Acapulco, where she worked in a hotel kitchen. During this time she did not attend school but rather taught herself to read and do basic math.
Her final move was to Mexico City, finding initial employment modeling bridal and other formal dresses. This job allowed her to meet a number of people, especially from Coyoacan including a muralist that introduced her to Frida Kahlo in 1952. She gave her a card to present herself to Antonio M. Ruiz, then director of La Esmeralda. Her professionalism in her work allowed her to model for most of the well-known artists of the mid-20th century such as Jose Chavez Morado, Vlady and even Diego Rivera at La Esmeralda and at the Academy of San Carlos.
While doing this, she listened carefully to teachers’ comments to students and integrated herself with this artistic community. She initially remained very poor, along with her artist friends, which included Alberto Gironella, Hector Javier, Lauro Lopez, Vlady and Jose Luis Cuevas sharing accommodations, food and work. She began sketching on old bread wrappers images of saints, horses, seahorses and other familiar elements. She showed her work to Carlos Orozco Romero, who encouraged her novel style. She suggested an exchange whereby she would pose and he would teach her to paint. However, Orozco Romero convinced her that the classes would take away her spontaneity.
López developed her art career while continuing to pose in order to earn money for materials. She began exhibiting in 1958 and since then her work has been shown in various parts of Mexico, the United States and in Europe.Her work can be found in the collections of over forty museums and galleries, but most of her work is in private collections in Mexico and abroad.
Her work was first recognized with a first place prize at a competition held at the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana. Later she received the New Vales Prize from the Fine Art Gallery of California. She is a member of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana.
Three books have been written about her life and work Los colores mágicos de Julia López (1995), Fiori e Canti, Nella Pittura di Julia López (1996, in Italian) and Dueña de la luz (1998).
Johnny Laboriel (born Juan José Laboriel López, July 9, 1942 – September 18, 2013) was a Mexican rock and roll singer. His career started in 1958, when at 16 years old he joined the rock and roll group "Los Rebeldes del Rock".
Laboriel died on September 18, 2013 from prostate cancer.
Laboriel was the son of actor and composer Juan Jose Laboriel and actress Francisca Lopez de Laboriel. His parents were Honduran immigrants to Mexico from the Garifuna coast. He was the brother of bassist Abraham Laboriel and singer Ela Laboriel.
In 2004, Laboriel was invited by Alex Lora to participate in the 36th anniversary of his band El Tri. The concert was presented at the Auditorio Nacional and was made into a CD and a DVD entitled 35 Años y lo que falta todavía
In 2006, Johnny Laboriel was invited by Luis Álvarez "El Haragán" to participate in the 16th anniversary of his band, El Haragán y Compañía. The concert was presented on November 3, 2006, also at Mexico City's Teatro Metropolitan.
Johnny Laboriel died on 18 September 2013, in Mexico City, from prostate cancer. He was survived by his wife Viviane Thirion, and sons Juan Francisco and Emmanuel.
MEXICO CITY — Ariel Camacho, the lead singer of the popular norteño group Los Plebes del Rancho, died in a car accident early Wednesday on a highway near the Mexican state of Sinaloa. He was 22.
His death was confirmed by Justino Aguila, a spokesman for his label, DEL Records. The police said that two of the three other people in the car were also killed.
Mr. Camacho was returning from a performance at a music festival, Carnaval de Mocorito. He had been on tour with his group, whose name roughly translates as “the ranch’s plebeians,” promoting their album “El Karma.” It was not immediately known what caused the accident or who was driving.
Mr. Camacho, who played guitar and wrote songs as well as singing, was idolized by youngsters in rural Mexicoand had begun amassing a fan base on the other side of the border.
He was known for his original narcocorridos — accordion-driven ballads telling of the violent lives of drug traffickers. But his fans, and the musicians he worked with, argued that his message was broader. He himself referred to his songs as “campirana”: music for farmers.
He had posted a video on his Facebook page a day before his death, inviting his fans and “all the beautiful ladies out there” to attend his next concert.
Narcocorridos, which some say glorify Mexican drug traffickers, date to at least the 1930s. They have evolved into different subgenres, which often describe the lives of the poor and those who seek power through violence. Mr. Camacho’s songs ranged from the usual tales of drug traffickers, brawls and money to romantic ballads.
Mr. Camacho, who was from Sinaloa, was regarded as the heir to popular figures in norteño music like Valentín Elizalde, also known as El Gallo de Oro (“the golden rooster”). He was killed in the city of Reynosa in 2006 after performing a song whose lyrics were believed to have antagonized a drug gang.
Mr. Camacho was praised for maintaining a classical element in his regional music by paying attention to the songwriters who had come before him. He was also a frequent collaborator with other corrido singers, including Gerardo Ortiz, Regulo Caro and Luis Coronel.
Raul Rodriguez, who designed more than 500 floral floats for the Tournament of Roses Parade and conceived dazzling confections for other private and public celebrations around the world, died on Wednesday at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 71.
His spouse, Robert Cash, said that Mr. Rodriguez had been ill for some time and that he died of cardiac arrest.
Mr. Rodriguez dreamed up floats for Disneyland’s 50th anniversary in 2005; was the art director for the “We the People 200” celebration of the Constitution’s bicentennial in Philadelphia in 1987; served as a consultant to the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles; and designed installations for casinos (including the Flamingo Hotel’s pink neon facade in Las Vegas and the 22-story clown that graces the Circus Circus Hotel in Reno, Nev.), stores, restaurants and entertainment companies. He also illustrated children’s books.
His most conspicuous creations, though, were those he made for the Rose Parade. He designed his first when he was 15, a snow scene for the city of Whittier in California, and his final one in 2014, when — typically — he fielded multiple floats in the annual New Year’s Day procession in Pasadena.
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Mr. Rodriguez, seated at the front of a float with Sebastian in the Rose Parade in 2013.CreditDole Packaged Foods
Mr. Rodriguez was classically trained in drawing and painting, but when it came to pageantry he might just as well have been inspired by Oscar Wilde’s credo that nothing succeeds like excess.
In 2013, the chromatic “Dreaming of Paradise” float he designed for Dole Packaged Foods, and which he rode on with his signature pet macaw, featured a 26-foot-tall volcano spewing smoke and flame and 1,000 gallons of recycled water cascading into a fruit-laden tropical rain forest adorned with about 25,000 hot-pink roses, 10,000 dendrobium orchids and 8,000 florescent orange roses.
The Dole float won the sweepstakes award that year, contributing to Mr. Rodriguez’s record as the winningest designer in the parade’s history.
The city of Cerritos in California once asked him to replicate its library on a float, to encourage reading. Instead, he whimsically built a 50-foot-tall bookworm. For Natural Balance Pet Foods, he conceived a 113-foot-long float on which dogs could slide down a chute into 4,000 gallons of water.
Raul Ruben Rodriguez was born on Jan. 2, 1944, in Los Angeles, the son of Ruben Rodriguez, a sheet-metal worker, and the former Natalie Cortez, a department store supervisor. In addition to Mr. Cash, he is survived by two sisters, Irene Rodriguez-Morgan and Teresa Arzola.
His parents encouraged his artistic talent, he told The Los Angeles Times in 1992: “My mother wouldn’t erase the drawings I did on the dining room wall.”
He won a scholarship to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and graduated from Cerritos College and California State University, Long Beach.
Mr. Rodriguez viewed his floats as “moving stage sets,” unique art forms that allowed him to recreate exotic locales from around the world. While his fanciful creations were meticulously planned for months, they were built with natural components and typically for one-time events, which meant they usually lasted only a matter of days.
In an interview with The Glendale News-Press, he described the Rose Parade as “the five-and-a-half-mile smile.” Each Jan. 1, he said, “If we can start the year on a positive, we did our job.”
Lorena Rojas, a Mexican actress known for her roles in popular Spanish-language soap operas like “Alcanzar Una Estrella” (“To Reach a Star”) and “El Cuerpo del Deseo” (“The Body of Desire”), died on Monday at her home in Miami. She was 44.
Her publicist, Conchita Oliva, said that the cause was metastic cancer. Ms. Rojas learned she had breast cancer in 2008 and became an advocate for cancer education in Latino communities.
A familiar presence in Mexico and internationally on Spanish-language channels like Telemundo and Univision, Ms. Rojas often played protagonists notable for their grace while facing down histrionic co-stars and weathering unlikely plot twists.
She broke through in a supporting role in the 1990 series “Alcanzar Una Estrella,” a drama about an introverted girl’s efforts to win the love of a famous entertainer. The series spawned a sequel in 1991, which featured the pop star Ricky Martin, and a film in 1992. Ms. Rojas appeared in both.
In “El Cuerpo del Deseo,” which made its debut in 2005, she played the widow of a wealthy old man who dies and is reincarnated in a new body. More recently she played a villain in the telenovela “Rosario” in 2012 and 2013 and a mother trying to prove that her daughter was killed by her psychiatrist in the thriller series “Demente Criminal” in 2014.
Seydi Lorena Rojas Gonzalez was born in Mexico City on Feb. 10, 1971. In addition to her television work, she acted in Mexican films and recorded pop albums.
Her marriage to Patrick Schnaas ended in divorce. She is survived by her mother; her sister, the actress Mayra Rojas; her fiancé, Jorge Monje; and her daughter, Luciana Rojas.
In 2014 Ms. Rojas released an album of children’s songs that was inspired by her daughter.
Oscar Diaz, a former welterweight boxing champion whose career ended when he sustained a debilitating brain injury in a fight nearly seven years ago, died on Thursday in San Antonio. He was 32.
The Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed his death but said it had not yet determined a specific cause.
Diaz was in a coma for two months and spent seven months in a hospital after collapsing before the 11th round of a nationally televised United States Boxing Association welterweight championship fight against Delvin Rodriguez in 2008. Diaz was 25 at the time.
After performing emergency brain surgery, doctors were unsure how Diaz would recover. His brother, Fernando, recently told The San Antonio Express-News that Diaz had been living in a San Antonio nursing home and could not walk on his own.
Diaz was born on Sept. 29, 1982, in San Antonio. He compiled a professional boxing record of 26-3, with 12 knockouts.
Mario Vázquez Raña, a Mexican newspaper publisher who briefly owned United Press International and was a powerful member of the International Olympic Committee, died on Sunday in Mexico City. He was 82.
Carlos Padilla Becerra, the leader of the Mexican Olympic Committee, confirmed Mr. Vázquez Raña’s death but did not specify the cause.
Mr. Vázquez Raña, the owner of more than 60 newspapers in Mexico, took over the struggling U.P.I. news agency with a partner, Joe Russo, in 1986, paying $40 million. At the time, Mr. Vázquez Raña’s fortune was estimated to be $1 billion. He sold the company after two rocky years. It is now owned by an affiliate of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church.
Mr. Vázquez Raña led the Association of National Olympic Committees from 1979 to 2012. In that role, he was one of the most powerful people on the International Olympic Committee for years. He also served on the committee’s executive board.
He was a close ally of Juan Antonio Samaranch, the president of the International Olympic Committee from 1980 to 2001.
Mr. Vázquez Raña resigned from all of his Olympic positions in 2012 in the face of a possible revolt by delegates to the Association of National Olympic Committees.
He was the president of the Pan American Sports Organization at the time of his death.
“He had outstanding merit within the Olympic movement, and we will always remember him as a great Olympic leader,” Thomas Bach, the current I.O.C. president, said in a statement.
The Olympic flag at the I.O.C. headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, was to be flown at half-staff in his honor, Mr. Bach said.
The “revolution” was a bungled plot, with Keystone Kops overtones, in which rebels seized an isolated courthouse in northern New Mexico on June 5, 1967, and it lasted only 90 minutes. But it would be immortalized in ballads (as in “Corrido de Rio Arriba”), elevate a former itinerant evangelist into a quixotic national prophet and propel a radical Chicano property rights movement into America’s consciousness.
The onetime evangelist, Reies Tijerina, who died on Jan. 19 at 88, never had the tangible success of Cesar Chavez and his nonviolent campaign to improve the lot of migrant workers. He never achieved his goal of reclaiming — for Mexicans, Indians and descendants of the original Spanish settlers — the millions of acres that changed hands when northern Mexico became the American Southwest in the mid-19th century. And his legacy was later marred by apocalyptic and anti-Semitic undercurrents.
Nonetheless, in the view of Lorena Oropeza, a history professor at the University of California, Davis, and author of a coming book about Mr. Tijerina, “Probably no person did more to shift our understanding of the history of the American West from a celebratory tale of ‘manifest destiny’ to the now-prevailing notion of a ‘legacy of conquest’ than did Tijerina.”
“One way to think of Tijerina,” she added, “is that he led an anticolonial movement within the continental United States. With only a few years of elementary education, and then time spent in Bible college, he developed a devastating critique of the American empire at the height of the Cold War.
“To young people involved in the Chicano movement, moreover, he gave them not only a militant alternative to Cesar Chavez, but also an understanding of the long history of Spanish-speaking people in the American Southwest,” Professor Oropeza said.
Mr. Tijerina, who died in a hospital in El Paso, had diabetes and heart problems, said Estela Reyes-Lopez, a family spokeswoman, who confirmed the death.
Reies Lopez Tijerina (pronounced tee-heh-REE-na), the son of cotton-picking sharecroppers, was born on Sept. 21, 1926, in Falls City, Tex. After he served as a Pentecostal pastor, he and more than a dozen families who constituted his followers bought 160 acres in Arizona in 1956 and founded Valley of Peace, a utopian commune. Often skirmishing with neighbors, the group did not live up to its name.
Mr. Tijerina, inspired by what he said was a heavenly vision, later uprooted his followers and led them to New Mexico, where by the early 1960s they had formed the Alianza Federal de los Pueblos Libres, or alliance of free city-states. Members of what he called his republic staged symbolic land seizures and citizen’s arrests and held mock trials of forest rangers. (Much of the land they claimed was in national forests.) There were arrests, prosecutions and prison terms.
The raid on the Rio Arriba County Courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, the county seat, was their most dramatic action. Mr. Tijerina and about 20 armed followers sought to liberate 11 Alianza members who they believed were being held there. The 11 had been charged with threatening to seize the 600,000-acre Tierra Amarilla land grant and to make a citizen’s arrest of the district attorney. But neither the prisoners nor the prosecutors were at the courthouse.
In the raid, a state police officer and a jailer were wounded. (The jailer was later beaten to death just before he was to testify that he had been shot by Mr. Tijerina; that crime was never solved.)
Pursued by tanks and helicopters in a National Guard manhunt, the rebels fled for the hills with two hostages. The getaway car got stuck in mud, and the kidnapped men were eventually recovered and most of the suspects captured.
Mr. Tijerina successfully defended himself at one trial but was tried a second time and convicted of charges stemming from the raid. He served six months in a state penitentiary. He also spent more than two years in federal prisons on charges arising from other protests. Nicknamed King Tiger, Mr. Tijerina was likened to other Chicano activists like Corky Gonzales of Colorado and José Angel Gutiérrez of Texas. But his views were more idiosyncratic.
He prophesied an apocalyptic future linked to American policy in the Middle East.
He also “turned many previous supporters away as he moved toward a singularly novel, but unmistakable, anti-Semitism,” Rudy V. Busto, a professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in an interview.
Mr. Tijerina argued that Spanish speakers in the United States were the rightful descendants of the House of Israel.
“When there is war we are all Americans,” Mr. Tijerina once said. “When it’s voting time, then we are Mexican-Americans. But when it comes to jobs and land,” he said, using an epithet for Hispanics, “we are nothing.”
By 2006, after returning from self-imposed exile in Mexico, he was living in a two-room cinder-block house in a run-down barrio in El Paso, seeking legal residency for his Mexican-born third wife, Esperanza, who survives him along with eight of his children.
“My philosophy is that of the cricket against the lion,” he often said. “The cricket is the king of the insects, and the lion is the king of the beasts. The cricket had no chance against the lion, so he jumped into the lion’s ear and tickled him to death. That’s what we’re going to do to the United States — we’re going to tickle him to death.”
