The Smithian

East Los succeeds as a portal into a nascent, mostly “backyard” music scene that champions and explores youth, catharses, and notions of family. Showing another side of the Latino community also contributes to the all-around heart at the center of East Los.

...Michael Pena as Cesar Chavez...America Ferrara plays his wife, Rosario Dawson fellow labor-leader Dolores Huerta, John Malkovich an industrial grape farm boss, Chavez’s would-be nemesis.

...a portrait of midcentury, Mexican American California and the cultural divide that defined the state then but that was only hinted at in its literature.

Houston has a lot of museums, but the city sorely lacks anything tangible that salutes its rich musical legacy...In honor of the Houston Press Music Awards' 25th anniversary, the Houston Press is now creating our own Houston Music Hall of Fame.

Blake’s...2012 novel, “Country of the Bad Wolfes”...introduced the epic history of the fictional Wolfe family, a Mexican-American clan with a penchant for troublemaking and crime...“The Rules of Wolfe”...jumps ahead a century or so to 2004, when 19-year-old Eddie Gato Wolfe, working as a security guard at one of the pleasure ranches of a drug cartel, seduces (and is seduced by) a kidnapped Mexican beauty, kills her captor and flees for the border...despite the violent nature of his protagonists, they are nearly always thinkers...Mr. Blake said...“All my characters are intelligent,” he said. “I’ve never been interested in alcoholics, druggies or crazy people, because they are not exercising free will.”