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Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ramon Barragan, founder of Barragan's chain of Mexican restaurants, dies
When Tony Barragan worked at his family's Echo Park Mexican restaurant in the 1970s, he regularly heard longtime customers tell newcomers about the story of his father. How Ramon Barragan came to Los Angeles as a 16-year-old immigrant. How he went from dishwasher to head chef at a restaurant run by someone from his small hometown of Tecuala, Nayarit. How Barragan opened up a spot bearing his last name in 1961 at a former coffee shop that seated only 24. How he saved enough money to buy six storefronts next door and expanded Barragan's so it grew into a sprawling palace that could seat 300 in its two bars, banquet room and patio. 'Customers would offer like a guided tour in a museum, because it wasn't just a restaurant to them, it was a human phenomenon,' said Tony. 'They would talk about how they loved the food, and then point at us. 'Look, this is the son! That's Ramon!'' Barragan's was part of a group of Mexican restaurants on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park and Silver Lake run by immigrants from Nayarit that introduced traditional Mexican dishes like cocido and sopes to Angelenos in sit-down environments beyond the Eastside. Ramon and his children eventually opened Barragan's in Burbank and Glendale, but it was the original one that became part of L.A.'s culinary landscape, that a 1983 Times review praised for offering 'very, very good … Mexican dishes not commonly seen in restaurants rather than being confined to the usual taco-enchilada combinations.' In its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, the Echo Park Barragan's attracted long lines, celebrity regulars like Jackson Browne and even a visit from England's Prince Philip, who arrived one night with security to eat 'lots of guacamole and shmooze [sic] with the waiter about green cards,' according to a 1984 LA Weekly story. Once the hype died down and crowds moved on to other styles of Mexican food, Barragan's still attracted longtimers with its stiff margaritas and reliably delicious meals, all based on Ramon's recipes that called for freshly made sauces and limited the "ingredients out of cans to tomatoes and maybe olives," according to his daughter, Carmen. The Barragan's patriarch died April 13 of natural causes at his home in Duarte, surrounded by family. He was 94. He was born in 1930 to a father who was an itinerant salesman and a mother who ran a small store. Barragan inherited their entrepreneurial streak, hawking cheese in surrounding villages for a quesero when he was 12. But life in Tecuala was hard, and Ramon had aspirations of moving to the United States to work for Natalia Barraza, a friend of his parents who operated a successful Mexican restaurant in downtown L.A. called the Nayarit. 'He had that vision that this lady from Nayarit had come [to the U.S.] and built something,' said Tony. 'He wanted to tap into that.' Ramon helped Barraza open a second Nayarit in Echo Park in 1951 and eventually became the head chef. He also convinced a niece to start her own Mexican restaurant on Sunset, La Villa Taxco, which eventually became its own successful chain and beloved L.A. institution. Soon after, he opened Barragan's just a few blocks down from the Nayarit with seed money from Barraza and borrowing against his home, which was a mile away. Slender but tough, he slowly transitioned the menu from a mix of American and Mexican American classics in favor of guisados (stews) and soups that appealed to Echo Park's growing Mexican and Chicano community. Working double shifts at a restaurant that was open six days a week in the early years from 7 in the morning to 10 at night, Tony and his siblings remember a father devoted to his restaurant and customers. 'When you watched him cook, he would watch the flame to make sure it was perfect,' he said. 'There was a service mentality to my father. He was here to serve mankind, and it was to serve delicious hot food.' 'He wanted his waitresses to have their lipstick on and their shoes shined,' said Carmen. 'He wanted perfection from his employees and his children.' But she and her siblings also remember a tender side to their father, someone who enrolled them in Catholic schools for a better education, tried to treat them to donuts every morning or sneaked off on shopping trips "so we could own two pairs of shoes instead of one," according to Carmen. Ramon also encouraged his workers to advance at Barragan's or mentored them about how to branch out on their own. The Barragan story was told by USC history professor Natalia Molina in her 2022 book 'A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community.' The granddaughter of Natalia Barraza, Molina and her family frequented the original Barragan's as a child. As an adult, Barragan's was a favorite place for drinks before or after a game at Dodger Stadium, just a few blocks east. The MacArthur fellow had fond memories of the man she called Tío Ramon sitting at a stool between the kitchen and counter to 'vigilar [keep watch],' just like her grandmother taught him. 'We take it for granted the cultural work that my grandma and Ramon did to have Mexican food have a seat at the table' in Los Angeles, Molina told The Times, referring to their spots in her book as "urban anchors" where immigrants were able to create and foster a community in their new country. She and others were heartbroken when the original Barragan's closed in 2013, the last of the original Mexican restaurants on Sunset run by Nayarit alumni. 'If it was just about the food, you'd say, 'OK, I can just go to another Barragan's,'" Molina said. "But it represented, 'We're here, we're seen.' For that to go away it, felt like a real loss.' The last Barragan's remaining is in Burbank and run by Ramon's son, Armando. In his later years, Ramon liked to stop by to chat with workers, many who had worked with his family for decades, and enjoy his birthdays with the meals that earned the Barragans their American dream. 'We have customers who ate at the original location 40 years ago and they taste the same food, and they're just so happy,' Armando said. 'And all credit goes to my dad insisting we never change any of his recipes.' Ramon Barragan is survived by his second wife, Josie; his children Frank, Tony, Armando, Carmen, Grace Douglass and Rita Hiller; 17 grandchildren; and multiple great-grandchildren. Services were private. Sign up for Essential California for the L.A. Times biggest news, features and recommendations in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
The Guardian
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Dead white men are what I'm legitimately interested in': podcaster Karina Longworth on the forgotten work of Hollywood titans
'When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.' So runs the most famous line from John Ford's elegiac 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The 44-year-old historian Karina Longworth has other ideas. The former LA Weekly film critic launched her podcast, You Must Remember This, in 2014, setting out to tell 'the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century', as she puts it in the show's introduction. Its title is lifted from the jazz standard As Time Goes By ('You must remember this / A kiss is still a kiss …') as featured in Casablanca. Hearing that wistful, timeworn lyric, it is easy to overlook the imperative hiding in plain sight. With each fastidiously researched and gloriously entertaining episode, Longworth seems to be telling us: you must remember this. To not do so, or to allow fact to curdle into legend, would be unconscionable. 'I don't want to be a schoolmarm scolding people for forgetting,' she says from a sunny upstairs room in the Los Angeles home she shares with her husband, Rian Johnson, director of the Knives Out whodunnits and Star Wars: The Last Jedi. 'But I think we can only understand where we are at and where we're going if we look to where we've been.' One reason she steers clear of modern topics on the podcast is the possible conflict of interest with her husband's career. Jamie Lee Curtis's appearance in the original Knives Out, for instance, precluded Longworth from ever making an episode about that actor's parents, Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, even though they would be ideal subjects. As if further evidence were needed of her passion for the past, a framed poster of Marcel Pagnol's 1936 melodrama César dominates the wall behind her today. Later, she will dismiss several questions about modern Hollywood with the same bored riposte: 'I don't care about new movies.' That was one of the reasons she hung up her pen at the LA Weekly in 2012. Shortly before quitting, she mocked James Bond's backstory in Skyfall as his 'formative sads' and wrote the film off as 'Downton Abbey with cybercrime and shower sex'. She dismissed Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris as 'a Bill and Ted sequel for cultural studies majors', and said Joss Whedon was 'crippled by his short-term need to please the crowd' in the first Avengers movie. Film criticism's loss is cinema history's gain. Over 11 years of You Must Remember This, Longworth has covered in granular, invigorating detail everything from the anti-communist blacklist to the influence of Charles Manson and the Hollywood phenomenon of the dead blonde. She is a factchecker par excellence – a full 19 episodes were devoted to clearing up the scurrilous, spiteful untruths in Kenneth Anger's gossip bible Hollywood Babylon. She is also the ally any neglected genius would want on their side, as proved by her season on the late Polly Platt, a largely unsung figure in the careers of Peter Bogdanovich and Wes Anderson. The latest series, The Old Man Is Still Alive, addresses the declining years of 14 cinematic titans, among them Vincente Minnelli, whose visually groundbreaking The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse sparked the idea for the season after Longworth saw it in Paris on a rainy Saturday evening in 2023. 'It's from the early 1960s but it feels proto-psychedelic. Seeing it reminded me why I started the podcast: to talk about things that have been forgotten.' With that in mind, she gives us the Hitchcock not of Vertigo and Psycho but of the astringent Frenzy and the meandering Family Plot; the John Ford of Cheyenne Autumn, a well-meaning if not wholly effective critique of the western's values; and the Billy Wilder drawn back to the mournful territory of Sunset Boulevard in Fedora. It's fascinating to hear Longworth charting the corkscrew turns these film-makers took as they twisted themselves out of shape trying to keep up with the times. But there's no escaping the fact that she has taken on a supremely unfashionable topic: dead white men. A deliberate provocation? 'No, it's what I'm legitimately interested in,' she scoffs. 'My podcast is really hard to make. I can only do it if I care about the subject. Sure, in the world right now there is anger at specific older white men. Part of it is an impulse to say: 'We should just burn it all down and start again.' But history makes us who we are today.' As a student, she was taught the importance of DW Griffith, the director of The Birth of a Nation. 'There was only a cursory conversation around whether the film was racist,' she recalls. 'It was primarily all about the technique. I don't think that's the way to do it either, but nor do I think we should burn all copies of The Birth of a Nation. That sets a dangerous precedent.' The phrase 'institutional memory' crops up in the new series, and it is this, along with the nuance of considered investigation over kneejerk reaction, that Longworth is fighting to defend. That said, people today are time-poor and inundated with viewing options. With the BFI Southbank hosting a month-long series of the movies covered in the podcast, some of which Longworth will be introducing in person, how does she think potential audiences will respond to the invitation to sample, say, The Only Game in Town, starring Warren Beatty and Elizabeth Taylor? By her own admission, it is 'the least successful of the George Stevens films I've seen, [though] aesthetically it has its moments'. Hardly a ringing endorsement. 'I don't care,' she shrugs. 'I'm not trying to change the paradigm. I'm just reacting to movies the way I react to them.' Sign up to Film Weekly Take a front seat at the cinema with our weekly email filled with all the latest news and all the movie action that matters after newsletter promotion By and large, the age of 60 is the point at which these figures, many of whom began their careers in the silent era, 'got weird' as they struggled to adapt to cultural changes. When I suggest that ageism is no longer as prevalent now that Martin Scorsese is revered at 82, while Ridley Scott is whooshing along like a runaway train at 87, she disagrees vehemently. 'Look at Megalopolis and the way Coppola was treated as if he was a doddering old man foolishly spending his family's legacy. Even with Scorsese, there's this sense of: 'Aw, the old man is trying to do something else before he dies!' And that's the positive spin. The negative one is: 'Why won't he just make shorter movies?'' Along with erudition and tireless research, listeners of You Must Remember This get Longworth's shimmering writing (on William Wyler's How to Steal a Million: 'Dressed in a slip, a car coat and rain boots, Audrey Hepburn invents grunge') and plenty of shade (to anyone defending Otto Preminger's last film, The Human Factor, she says: 'You do you, babe'). It's all delivered in her alluring conspiratorial tones, which suggest a film noir schemer. Or, as one online fan put it, 'a sexy ghost'. When I ask how this exaggerated vocal style evolved from the chattier early episodes, she looks unimpressed. 'I'm not trying to do anything differently,' she says. One indisputable change in the new season is that, to adapt TS Eliot and Charles Dickens, she do the directors in different voices. Whereas she once hired actors, even enlisting her husband to play John Huston, she now takes on every role herself, including an amusing Hitchcock with a severe case of irritable vowel syndrome. Does this have anything to do with her own background as a would-be child actor in LA? 'I'm not acting,' she says firmly. 'I'm doing what I would do if I were telling these stories at a cocktail party.' It was her mother who steered her into auditions as a child. 'She wanted to be an artist and a model. When she had me, she stopped pursuing work outside of the house. That was not the right decision for her, and she killed herself when I was 11. She was in a situation common to many people of her generation: they had been told to want something and then, when they got it, it wasn't fulfilling and they didn't know what to do about that.' Longworth's acting career was short-lived. 'I had trouble controlling my body and my face. A lot of that came from nervousness at being looked at. I still don't like it. The podcast is the only way I can be free to do any kind of performance because nobody's watching.' Channelling Greta Garbo and providing our conversation with a natural end, she says: 'I want to be alone.' You Must Remember This Presents … The Old Man is Still Alive is at BFI Southbank, London SE1, until 30 April
Telegraph
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Joni Mitchell wore blackface 50 years ago – now she's facing backlash for it
Joni Mitchell is facing a social media backlash over her use of blackface in the 1970s. The Canadian-American artist, one of the world's most celebrated songwriters, has come under renewed scrutiny for her former black 'alter-ego', named Art Nouveau. The 81-year-old musician, best known for her association with California's beatnik counterculture, used to dress up in blackface, complete with an Afro, a pimp suit and a wide moustache, in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. Mitchell's 'alter-ego' featured prominently on the cover of her 1977 album Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. However, following a viral rendition of her song California by Amanda Seyfried, the Mamma Mia actress, on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the artist's controversial history has come under the spotlight from younger generations. One social media user wrote on X: 'Can I be the brave annoying Gen Z [person] and say yeah, I don't care for her because she did black face.' A fellow social media user said: 'Just found out Joni Mitchell did blackface in the 80s during the era of my favourite album no one talk to me.' Another critic claimed she had a 'problematic history,' while others said she was now 'being cancelled on TikTok'. It came after Seyfried, 39, appeared on the US television programme on March 5, during which she performed a rendition of California to pay tribute to the US state that 'deserves a lot of love right now' after devastating wildfires earlier this year. A clip of the performance gained traction, notching up 38.3 million views and 5.1 million likes on the FallonTonight TikTok account. It has led, in turn, to a new generation discovering Mitchell's back catalogue. However, in subsequent viral videos, users have also expressed dismay over their discovery of her Art Nouveau character. The artist previously said she created the persona after being inspired by a black man she saw walking down Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1976 and decided to dress up as him for a Halloween fancy dress party. 'I saw this black guy with a beautiful spirit walking with a bop,' Mitchell told writer Angela LaGreca. 'As he went by me he turned around and said: 'Ummm mmm, looking good sister, lookin' good.' Well, I just felt so good after he said that. It was as if this spirit went into me. 'So I started walking like him. I bought a black wig, I bought sideburns, a moustache. I bought some pancake make-up. I was like, 'I'm goin' as him'.' The artist revisited the character intermittently over the following six years. The last appearance of the 'alter-ego' was in an unreleased 1982 short film called The Black Cat in the Black Mouse Socks. Mitchell's decision to embody the persona was controversial at the time, with Ken Padgett, an American historian, telling the BBC in 2016: 'Even in 1976, this caricature was outrageous and offensive.' The singer has addressed the controversy on numerous occasions but has also claimed to not feel white. She once told LA Weekly: 'I don't have the soul of a white woman. I write like a black poet. I frequently write from a black perspective.' In a previous interview with New York magazine, the singer claimed she could identify with the experiences of black males. She said: 'When I see black men sitting, I have a tendency to go – like I nod like I'm a brother. I really feel an affinity because I have experienced being a black guy on several occasions.'
