The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Chalino Sánchez revives thanks to the 'Ídolo' podcast, a story that has captivated his fans and also those who did not know him

2022-12-19T01:52:45.587Z


We consider it one of the best podcasts of this year. That is why we spoke with the creators of this bilingual story that portrays the life and death of this Mexican known as the 'king of the corrido' in a mystery key. Haven't heard it yet? It's on time.


MEXICO CITY, LOS ANGELES.– He is a character of great complexity and at the same time: inspiring, human.

It was not easy to tell his story – full of music, corridos but also violent episodes – taking into account that he was shot in 1992 when he was barely 31 years old and that the few confirmed details about his death are full of contradictions. .

But the journalists Erick Galindo and Alejandro Mendoza –authors and co-hosts of

Ídolo–

together with the production team of Futuro Studios and Sonoro found a way to tell this story and engage whoever decides to

play

it .

They did it in a podcast that will be one year old in January.

Since then, his impact has been enormous.

Written by Galindo y Mendoza as if it were a

thriller

, chapter by chapter investigates in mystery the possible theories surrounding the life and death of this character known as 'The King of the Corrido', who was born and died in the north from Mexico –in Culiacán, Sinaloa– but he is well known and continues to be very popular on the other side of the border, especially in Los Angeles, where he lived for several years and achieved his dream of becoming a popular singer.

Illustration of the podcast 'Ídolo: The Ballad of Chalino Sánchez' Futuro / Sonoro

The result is an emotional story, set to music by an original corrido created especially for audio in eight chapters in English and Spanish, which has once again focused attention on the legacy of Rosalino,

Chalino,

Sánchez Félix: a Mexican in the United States who became legend.

A podcast narrated by a pocho and a chilango

Galindo, whose family is from Culiacán, was born in the United States and clearly remembers how for him and his relatives the death of Chalino was an event that they received with shock.

Even like an electric shock.

His older brother had just come home visibly shaken, after learning that his favorite corrido singer had been shot to death, according to the writer in the first episode of the podcast.

Without saying anything, he wanted to put a cassette with the artist's hits in the family's rickety tape recorder, but trying to remove another stuck cassette with a screwdriver, he was electrocuted and passed out.

He barely woke up, he said between sobs:

"They killed Chalino

. "

Erick Galindo is a talented writer not only of the Chalino Sánchez podcast, but of other successful audio productions such as 'Wild' and 'Out of the Shadows: Children of 86'.

People recognize him in the streets due to his ability to communicate and to get closer to the audience.Eulimar Núñez / Noticias Telemundo

“The figure of Chalino is an archetype for many Mexicans because of what he represents, a bit like the stereotype of the brave, brave man, thrown forward, who has a clear objective and is going to achieve it, who does not leave anyone behind and who He had a dream and he fulfilled it," explained Alejandro Mendoza in an interview with Noticias Telemundo.

['Who killed Jenni Rivera?': a documentary explores the death of 'La diva de la banda' when her plane plummeted 10 years ago]

And it's true.

Chalino exemplifies in many ways the experiences of migrant men and women in the United States.

He was born in a ranch in Culiacán, in the bosom of a traditional, poor and numerous Mexican family.

His father died when he was only 6 years old and he had to learn to make a living with his seven brothers.

Mexican journalist Alejandro Mendoza, director of the bilingual podcast 'Ídolo: La balada de Chalino Sánchez' about the life of the narcocorrido musician, narrates the eight episodes in Spanish.

His gaze, from that side of the border, offers a unique perspective.Gabriela Martínez / Telemundo News

The anecdote that Erick Galindo describes in the first episode perfectly exemplifies the deeply personal touch that its two presenters give to the narratives, each drawing on their own experience, which ends up producing unique versions of the same story, each with a completely original language and approach.

Galindo recalled, in a conversation with Telemundo News, how they came up with this idea: “We started thinking that it would be an exact translation from English to Spanish and vice versa.

We were going to swap episodes.

Alex, my co-host who did the Spanish version, was going to do one in English and Spanish, and then I would do another one in English and Spanish… we wanted to switch it up.

But when we started writing, we realized it wasn't the same story."

On this matter, Mendoza added: "We understood that the story takes place both in Mexico and the United States, that each one has a different perspective and that it becomes richer if it is told from both perspectives."

It was an approach that was not without its challenges

.

After all, you had to coordinate meetings and agree to work with people who were in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Mexico City, where the Sonoro y Futuro teams dedicated to the project were located.

Rosalino Sánchez Félix in a file photo. Via Milenio

“Although now we can have conversations from different parts of the world, at that time remote work was a bit new because we had just come out of this process of realignment of the pandemic,” Mendoza recalled.

However, it was a journalistic way of working mixed with touches of mystery and entertainment that made sense when it came to telling the story of Chalino, a man who, after all, had lived on both sides of the border.

Galindo explains it: “If you listen to the two episodes, in English and in Spanish, you are going to hear a story.

Chalino's story is the same, but you will see that the perspective is different: one is the perspective of a little boy living in the United States and the other is that of a chilango", and he represents all that other perspective from the Mexican states of Jalisco, Michoacán and Sinaloa, epicenters of the war against drugs and much of the violence that shakes the country.

[The mystery about the whereabouts of 'La Barbie', the Mexican drug trafficker imprisoned in the US who disappeared from federal records]

“People have always argued that it doesn't matter who tells a story, but

this is an example of how much it matters.

We are talking about the same team, we are all working on this together: but as soon as you change the lens of the presenter, the story becomes very different.

If you ever need evidence that this is absolutely false, there it is,” explained Galindo, who not only wrote this but many other successful podcasts like

Wild

, and currently also creates and develops television series in Hollywood. 

At the top of the

rankings

“I think that no one imagined that it would be as big as it has been,” recalls Galindo from Los Angeles.

“It ended up being the number 1 podcast in Mexico, it ended up in the top 0.001% of world podcasts, I remember seeing the charts and it was in the top 100 in all countries.

It's still in the top 100 podcasts today, a year later, and people recognize me from the podcast: it's not a video.

But people see me and they're like: 'OMG, you're Erick Galindo!'” 

Ídolo: La Balada de Chalino Sánchez

topped the podcast charts after its launch earlier this year and has been described as “a tribute to the many things Chalino pioneered,” according to Podcast The Newsletter, or as "a series that immediately hooks you into the mystery surrounding the singer's death," according to renowned local Los Angeles outlet LA Taco. 

This week a new nomination for the list was announced: for the 2022 iHeartRadio Music Awards in the category of the best podcast of the year in Spanish, where it competes with the projects of Ciudad Mágica, Crónicas Obscuras, Escuela Secreta and Leyendas Legendarias.

But beyond the reviews and acknowledgments, the response from the public has been overwhelming, since the story in English and also in Spanish makes it possible to connect with very different audiences, not only of nationality, but also of age.

“It's the first podcast my parents listened to,” Galindo points out.

It has also crossed musical tastes: it does not matter if those who listen are lovers of regional Mexican music who see Chalino 

as one of the greatest standards of the genre or if they had never heard of him or played 

a podcast, it is about a universal story that anyone can connect with.

Even Chalino's wife, Marisela Vallejos Félix, confessed to Galindo that the production was not expected to be so popular:

"I don't understand why everyone is telling me about this podcast, I thought it was going to be a small thing, but it is very big".

The success of the project partly reflects people's love for Chalino Sánchez, but his story transcends the borders of musical tastes and appeals to a much broader audience because it deals with a highly human character, with ups and downs, great successes and huge setbacks, brave and cheesy at the same time.

In addition to being someone typical of the border: with one foot in Mexico and the other in the United States, an experience with which thousands of Mexicans on both sides identify. 

Chalino Sánchez's widow speaks: "I want a series attached to reality"

May 19, 202103:01

An outlaw turned singer

But the Sinaloan is also a controversial figure and the podcast shows it.

He participates in more than one shooting, for example, at a party in Culiacán that he attended armed when "he was barely a short teenager," as Mendoza narrates it in Spanish.

Fact that forces him to emigrate to California.

Or when he shoots into the audience in the middle of a concert at the Plaza Los Arcos bar in Coachella, California, after a man named Edward Gallegos attacks him with a revolver.

Thus, the podcast narrators skillfully weave together the most relevant events in Chalino's life with theories about his death: whether he was assassinated in revenge for the shooting at a party in Culiacán when he was a teenager, or that the cartels They wanted him dead because of the lyrics to his songs, or because of a love triangle with a furious drug lord, or because of possible links with the drug trafficker, among other hypotheses.

Each episode is dedicated to one of these theories and together they masterfully narrate the life of Sánchez in a movie.

View of a plaque on a cenotaph erected in memory of singer Chalino Sánchez, on May 15, 2022 in Culiacán, Sinaloa.Juan Carlos Cruz / EFE

Anecdotes and references to the songs of Sánchez and other greats of regional Mexican music –including a very brief interview outside a parking lot worthy of a movie script with don Pedro Rivera, one of the pillars of the industry and father of Lupillo and Jenni Rivera – round off the narrative and plunge the listener into the underworld of the music industry and drug culture.

“The regional Mexican genre is historically associated with drug trafficking and crime,” Mendoza points out.

It is a complex relationship that stems from a relatively simple principle: artists talk about what they know, so in a country overwhelmed by crime it is not surprising that songs about bosses, kilos and machine guns abound, explains the Mexican journalist.

"The regional Mexican genre tells stories that happen in the country and if the country is submerged in violence there will be a chronicler who talks about it," he says.

And in the midst of all that complexity, as happens in the daily life of thousands of Mexicans, love and comedy emerge in the characters the podcast talks about.

It is something that is reflected, for example, in a scene from the second episode about how Chalino and his future wife and mother of his two children, Marisela Vallejos Félix, met.

For Mendoza, that was his favorite anecdote of the entire project.

[López Obrador makes an unusual request to Bad Bunny: to sing for free in the Zócalo for the Mexicans who could not see it]

Newspaper clipping announcing Chalino Sanchez's January 26, 1992 Coachella Valley performance.newspapers.com

It goes something like this: the singer is driving through the streets of East Los Angeles and sees a woman he likes standing on the sidewalk getting wet in the rain.

Then, he offers to take her in her car, in a gesture between gallant and arrogant.

For Mendoza, the scene says a lot about the two characters.

“He was exercising this image of power, like 'hey, I have a car, I'm handsome, get in.'

And I love it because her response speaks of the character of the Mexican woman who is thrown forward too and without letting go, she said "Ok, I'll get on but you let me drive," and she drove, but she did it so fast that he himself Chalino was scared.

And well, he liked that, that brave attitude of 'you can but I also bring what with'.

Between shootings, love anecdotes and theories about an unsolved crime, the narrators take the listener by the hand through Chalino's story, until his last days of life.

"Among the injured was Marcelino Sanchez from Los Angeles [His real name was Rosalino]. Sanchez also uses the stage name of Chalino," reads the AP note that recorded what happened in 1992.

By 1992 Chalino's career is finally taking off.

The man who assured himself that he did not sing, but rather barked, has managed to gain an audience that follows him from bar to bar to hear him howl his corridos, that buys his cassettes and requests his songs on the radio.

It is at that moment that the artist is involved in the Coachella shooting while he was on the stage.

And he catapulted to fame.

He is hospitalized in serious condition after being hit by two bullets.

But a few months later, when he is barely recovering from his injuries, he makes a risky decision that puts him on a deadly path: return to Culiacán to sing to the audience in his homeland the corridos that had made him famous.

Finally, he arrives in Sinaloa to present what would be his last concert on May 16, 1992. The concert is sold out, the audience sings all the songs and Chalino is probably giving the performance of his life.

In the midst of the merriment, he is approached by a man to hand him a note with a handwritten message, known in the singer's fan circles as the

Death Note

.

What was written on that paper has never been revealed, but his face breaks when he receives it.

Then, she throws it to the ground and continues playing, as if nothing had happened.

Hours later, still at dawn, they find him dead in a canal.

He has his wrists and ankles bound and has been shot twice in the back of the head.

“When Chalino died in Mexico in 1992 at age 31, it just seemed like the foregone conclusion of his Wild West life.

Rumors about how it happened started immediately: that he had faked his death to escape a possible attack, that the Mexican or US government killed him, that he was a secret hit man for the cartels and got what he deserved by final "

Erick Galindo, Idolo - The ballad of Chalino Sánchez

Newspaper clipping on the murder of Chalino Sánchez.newspapers.com

The murder of the "King of the Corrido" more than 30 years ago became the first tragedy of the Mexican regional that prefigured other attacks that would suffer legends of the genre such as Valentín Elizalde, Sergio Gómez (from Grupo K-Paz de la Sierra) or Selena Quintanilla , among others that had a sudden and violent end. 

Since then, ranchera songs sung with a shrill and out-of-tune voice but with deep passion have gone from being the extravagant taste of some to becoming the most important musical genre in Mexico and with it the figure of Chalino has become a true pop icon. .

His image is the same stamped on a cap as on a shirt at the Paramount

swap meet

(market), and others in East Los Angeles;

and his unmistakable voice continues to flood the streets of Mexican cities.

Chalino Sánchez merchandise abounds at Paramount's swap meet in East Los Angeles, California.

Eulimar Núñez / Telemundo News

The Ídolo: The Ballad of Chalino Sánchez

podcast

does nothing but revive the character and his story and present it to a new generation and an audience that has received it as one of the best stories of the year.

Source: telemundo

All news articles on 2022-12-19

You may like

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.