As Dora the Explorer turned 10 years-old last week, Hank Stuever, staff writer for The Washington Post described his experience with one of the first ever bi-lingual Hispanic doll to become an animated television series and in turn created a multi-billion dollar business.
Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Cuban-American poet, critic, curator, professor and collector is unique. It is not often that one man can be all of the above and achieve worldwide notoriety in all.
It’s not hard to discover that Florida is another state of this great country that has a name with a Spanish origin. It comes from the Spanish name for Easter, the “feast of flowers” or in Spanish Pascua Florida.
Back in January of 1964, when Bob Dylan first recorded his classic hit “Times They Are a Changin” it was a revolutionary song. One that talked about how the country in a relatively calm 1950s was changing and becoming more revolutionary as it opposed the war in Vietnam.
Mention the words Talavera tile, or ceramics, and immediately the conversation turns to Puebla in Mexico, home of the oldest tin-glazed ceramic in the Western Hemisphere that is still being manufactured with the same techniques as in the 16th Century.
How it came to pass that Talavera tile became synonymous with Puebla, Mexico and not with the same type of ceramic works created by Spanish craftsmen in the town of Talavera de la Reina, Spain, is part of the fascinating history of how the art and culture of three continents became the beautiful ceramic art that we know today.
The Sistine Chapel has not been seen in its full splendor in centuries.
Yes, a few years ago the paintings of Michelangelo, Perugino and Botticelli were renovated and the Sistine Chapel regained much of the color that centuries had dulled. When that was done it regained some of its majesty.
For nearly two centuries, beginning in 1561 and continuing until 1748, two fleets a year were sent from Spain to the New World. The ships brought supplies to the colonists and were then filled with silver, gold, and agricultural products for the return voyage back to Spain.
Even before hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled Fidel Castro’s communist regime, there were Cubans in the United Sates.
Some of them even became part of American pop culture, such as Desiderio Alberto Arnaz ye de Acha the Third. Few knew him by that name. But if you mention, Desi Arnaz, his American name, or Ricky Ricardo, or say he was the husband and partner of Lucille Ball of the television series I Love Lucy, then everybody knows who he was.
The death of two prominent writers from two continents came within days of each other.
José Saramago, the Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 died a week ago Friday. He was known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction. Saramago was 87.
Renowned Mexican journalist, critic and political activist Carlos Monsivais died the following day at 72. Monsivais chronicled Mexico’s historic upheavals, social trends, and literature for over 50 years. He was also known as a tireless and ubiquitous activist for leftist causes.
For those who only value the legacy of his music, the debate of where Carlos Gardel was born should be left to academics, historians, and researchers.
For those who celebrate his life and his music it is irrelevant if the man whose marvelous voice made the tango a worldwide sensation, was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in the town of Tacuarembó, also in Uruguay, or in Toulouse, France, as his official biography says.
