The Inland Empire is a hotbed for Latino culture. De Los wants to tell its stories.

Los Angeles Times

31-01-2025

In the more than four years since launching this newsletter — and in the year and a half since helping launch De Los, the L.A. Times' vertical focusing on Southern California's Latino community — something that has continued to strike me is just how much the Inland Empire is a hotbed for culture.
Not only is the region home to the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture in Riverside — the country's first art institution dedicated entirely to Chicano art — but it has also produced a lot of musicians that are leading the next wave of música Mexicana. Cumbia pop queen Estevie (Beaumont); sadboi crooners Ivan Cornejo (Riverside) and DannyLux (Coachella Valley) and mega band Fuerza Regida (San Bernardino) all claim I.E. roots.
And who could forget Jenny69, the self-proclaimed 'chingona que salió de Riverside,' who still remains one of my favorite internet celebrities?
The I.E.'s cultural output shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone. After all, this neighboring community occupies a land area and has a population that's larger than many U.S. states.
The I.E. is also very Latino. According to the Pew Research Center, Riverside and San Bernardino counties are the sixth- and eighth-largest Latino counties in the country, respectively. To put this into perspective, there are more Latinos living in the Inland Empire than there are in Orange and San Diego counties combined.
And yet the region's stories often go untold in the media. Though outlets like the San Bernardino Sun, The Press-Enterprise in Riverside and The Desert Sun in the Coachella Valley have long served the community, their staffing has been diminished as local journalism across the country continues to decline. Outlets like The Riverside Record, founded by journalist Alicia Ramirez, are working to fill that void and the local journalists that remain are doing heroic work with insufficient resources. But the region deserves more.
And now you can count De Los as part of the effort to shed more light on the I.E.'s Latino stories. Thanks to a partnership between De Los and the Cultivating Inland Empire Latino Opportunity (CIELO) Fund at the Inland Empire Community Foundation, we'll be expanding our coverage into the region. Our goal is to report pieces that explore the region and its people with nuance, respect and an understanding that the I.E. is a complicated place with countless issues and stories.
We aren't going to fully fill the void, but we will do our part to help paint a more complete picture, and we'll do it with journalists with deep connections to the region. There will be no parachute journalism here. It'll be stories about the I.E. from and for people from the I.E.
Spearheading this effort will be my colleague Paloma Esquivel, who joined the De Los team a few weeks ago as an assistant editor. A native of the I.E., Esquivel has spent 17 years at The Times, covering various beats including immigration, education, housing and — for four years — the Inland Empire.
I can't stress how excited the De Los team is to do this work. Not only is it necessary, but it also brings us closer to our lofty, aspirational goal of covering as many Latino stories as we possibly can. And if you're reading this and are from the I.E., we'd love to hear from you. Have a story idea you think we should pursue? Send us an email at [e-mail], or [e-mail].
A quick housekeeping note: the newsletter will now publish on Fridays. Yes, I'm very aware that the Latinx Files has already been reaching your inbox on Fridays — and in some cases, Saturday, which ugh! — but now it's official. As I wrote in the first newsletter of 2025, one of my biggest goals for this year is to be more consistent and to continue building this space into a varied, robust digest of stories that highlight Latinidad and modern Latino life in the United States. Pushing back the publication of the newsletter by a day gives me an opportunity to devote more time to it. Thank you as always for your continued support!
If you're looking for something to do this coming Monday and find yourself in L.A., I recommend catching 'Sleep Dealer' at the Academy Museum's Tedd Mann Theater, as part of its 'Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema' film series.
Despite being released in 2008, the low-budget, ambitious dystopian science fiction film by director and MacArthur Fellowship recipient Alex Rivera (disclosure: Alex and I are friends) feels as timely as ever. 'Sleep Dealer,' which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, tells the story of Memo Cruz, who was forced to flee his home in Oaxaca and moved to the Tijuana/San Diego border, which has been completely militarized and shut down. Despite restricting the flow of people, the powers that be have figured out a way to extract labor from the laborer without having them set foot on American soil. The plot feels a little too prescient, doesn't it?
''Sleep Dealer' is a wondrous thing to behold, with its saturated cinematography, its unnervingly realistic vision of the future, its singular focus on U.S.-Mexico border politics and its supremely taut storytelling,' wrote my former colleague Carolina Miranda in 2014.
You can find tickets for the screening here, and if you do go, come say hi!
Column: Forget 'Emilia Pérez.' Its parody, 'Johanne Sacreblu,' is the real work of art
Without getting too much into how the sausage gets made, I'd been trying to no avail to get De Los contributing columnist JP Brammer to write a take on 'Emilia Pérez,' the polarizing narco-musical from France about Mexico that doesn't feature any actual Mexicans in its main roles. That all changed this past week with the release of 'Johanne Sacreblu,' a parody short film made by filmmaker Camila Aurora that lambasts the source material in a way that only Mexican humor can, by being over the top and bordering on the absurd.
JP's column doesn't disappoint. I might be biased, but in my opinion it is one of the funniest and most thoughtful takes of 'Emilia Pérez' out there right now.
In a Long Beach parking lot, charros put on 'El Show de los Caballos'
You should click on the story by contributor Laura Anaya-Morga above not just because it chronicles how rancho culture is being preserved and thriving in Long Beach, but also because of the beautiful photography by contributing photographer Jilly Connelly.
Decades later, 'El Norte' returns to its Sundance roots
Among the marquee screenings at this year's Sundance Film Festival was 'El Norte,' the 1983 Oscar-nominated saga that follows two Indigenous siblings from Guatemala who are forced to flee to the United States because of a civil war. De Los contributor Manuel Betancourt spoke to Nava about bringing the film back to its roots — he developed the film at the first Sundance Lab in 1981.
'[Everything] that the film is about is once again here with us,' Nava said. 'All of the issues that you see in the film haven't gone away. The story of Rosa and Enrique is still the story of all these refugees that are still coming here, seeking a better life in the United States.'
Column: Are we asking the right questions about Hilaria Baldwin?
Earlier this month, a video that showed Hilaria Baldwin cooking went viral because of the fitness influencer's insistence on speaking Spanish despite her not being Latina, Spanish or even a native speaker. The proliferation of the clip was enough for contributing columnist Alex Zaragoza to explore what this says about how Latinos 'value language, race and ethnicity.'