Word: bamba
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hispanics in Hollywood, despite barriers, have also met with recent success. Latino actors Andy Garcia and Rosie Perez have become sought-after talents; the movie La Bamba grossed more than $50 million and sent the signal that Latino movies can be moneymakers. "In American society, transmitting culture is done in the marketplace," says Gary Puckrein, editor in chief of American Visions, a magazine that covers culture in the U.S. "You see it in food, fashion, music...
...CULTURES can be a barren place. But for LOS LOBOS, a scrappy garage band born 18 years ago in the Chicano barrio of East Los Angeles, the gap between American music and its Mexican roots has been inspirational. The band reached a commercial apex with 1987's La Bamba, an international hit that was elevated beyond pop predictability by its intricate acoustic coda. That flourish of integrity was no fluke. Los Lobos' new album, Kiko, blends rock, jazz and Mexican folk styles with authority and panache; David Hidalgo's lambent vocals transport songs about hardship and redemption to a numinous...
...release of La Bamba, the disarming biography of Latino rocker Ritchie Valens, that launched them into the full glare of the big time. They performed superb renditions of Valens' classics for the film and had a No. 1 single with the title cut, as well as a sound-track album that spent two weeks at No. 1. "That kind of eclipsed everything else we had done up to that point," says Perez. But as Hidalgo recalls, "we didn't know if we were going to be an alternative novelty thing or just a flavor of the month...