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Tag: musician

  • ‘I thought I was going to die there’: Voices of migrants deported to a Salvadoran prison

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    CARACAS, Venezuela — In March, President Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to declare Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang a foreign terrorist group.

    Shortly after, the U.S. sent more than 250 Venezuelans who it said were a part of the gang to El Salvador, where they were jailed for months in one of the country’s most notorious prisons, the Terrorism Confinement Center, also known as CECOT.

    Many of the men insist that they have no ties to the gang and were denied due process.

    After enduring months in detention, the men were sent home in July as part of a prisoner exchange deal that included Venezuela’s release of several detained Americans.

    Venezuela’s attorney general said interviews with the men revealed “systemic torture” in the Salvadoran prison, including daily beatings, rancid food and sexual abuse. The men have been adjusting to life back in Venezuela, which most fled because of their home country’s political and economic instability.

    The Times photographed four of the Venezuelans — Arturo Suárez, Angelo Escalona, Frizgeralth Cornejo and Ángelo Bolívar — as they got reacquainted with their families and life outside prison.

    A man with a dark beard, wearing glasses, headphones and a dark ballcap, sings

    Arturo Suárez records a song at a studio in Caracas’ Catia neighborhood. He composed the song in prison in El Salvador.

    Arturo Suárez, 34

    Suárez, a musician, was detained in North Carolina while gathered with friends to record a music video. Ten people were arrested that day. Inside the Salvadoran prison, he said, music was forbidden and guards beat him repeatedly for singing. But he refused to stay silent. From his cell, he wrote a song that spread from cell to cell, becoming an anthem of hope for the Venezuelans imprisoned with him.

    “From Cell 31, God spoke to me,” the lyrics go in part. “He said, son, be patient, your blessing is coming soon…. Let nothing kill your faith, let nothing make you doubt because it won’t be long before you return home.”

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    A brown-colored handmade heart displayed on an open palm

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    A dark-bearded main with a tattoo of a bird on his neck

    1. Suárez holds a heart he fashioned in prison out of tortillas and toothpaste, with letters made from threads of the white shorts he wore. 2. This tattoo of a bird enabled his family to identify Suárez in videos released by the Salvadoran government.

    A man with dark hair, seated under a hand-drawn sign and a cluster of red and purple balloons, looks at his phone

    Suárez checks his phone beneath a poster welcoming him home in Caracas.

    I thought I wasn’t going to make it out of there. I thought I was going to die there.

    Posters depicting individual people line a fence near a street vendor selling watermelons

    Posters depicting Suárez and other Venezuelan migrants deported to El Salvador are seen in Caracas’ El Valle neighborhood.

    Angelo Escalona, 18

    Escalona had turned 18 just three months before Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained him in the same raid that swept up his friend Suárez, the musician. His dream was to become a DJ, and Escalona had saved up to buy equipment that he showed Suárez just before they were arrested. He had no tattoos, no criminal record and was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, he said.

    When the deportation flight landed in El Salvador, he and the other Venezuelans tried to resist being taken off the plane. “We all fastened our seat belts because we’re Venezuelans — we weren’t supposed to be there” in El Salvador, he said. “But the Salvadoran police boarded the plane and started beating the people in the front.”

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    A young man with dark hair, in a dark T-shirt, stands for a portrait with arms crossed

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    A hand-drawn poster on a rack with items on different shelves

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    A woman with glasses, holding a large white hand-drawn poster with words and a photo of a young man

    1. Angelo Escalona said that the other Venezuelan prisoners called him “El Menor,” or the minor, because at 18 he was the youngest of the deportees.
     2. A poster family members held during protests demanding his release says, “Your family has not abandoned you.”
     3. Escalona’s aunt displays a poster with a letter his mother wrote to him upon his release. “Son, I love you,” it says in red.

    When we arrived [at the prison], they told us, ‘Welcome to the real hell — no one leaves here unless they’re dead.’

    A view of homes covering a hillside, with dark clouds overhead

    A view of Caracas’ Antímano neighborhood, where Frizgeralth Cornejo lived with his family before traveling north to the United States.

    Frizgeralth Cornejo, 26

    In mid-2024, Frizgeralth Cornejo made the long trek through the Darién Gap, the dangerous jungle separating Central and South America and made his way north with three friends. Hoping to obtain asylum in the United States, he had applied for an appointment with immigration officials through Customs and Border Protection’s CBP One app.

    But when Cornejo, 26, presented himself at the border, officials accused him of gang affiliation because of his tattoos. Everyone else in his group was allowed through, but not him.

    1

    Two men and a woman seated at a table inside a home

    2

    Two men walk near other people. Behind them are buildings

    1. Cornejo has lunch with his mother, Austria, and his brother, Carlos, in Caracas’ Antímano neighborhood. 2. Cornejo walks with his brother, Carlos, in the neighborhood of Sabana Grande in Caracas.

    A man in a dark ballcap, with tattoos, kisses the top of a brown-haired woman's head

    Cornejo kisses his mother, Austria.

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    A bearded man in a cap, with a rose tattoo on his neck

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    A man lifts his shirt to show a tattoo of an angel carrying an assault weapon and a rose

    1. Cornejo shows the neck tattoo that allowed his family to identify him in videos released by the Salvadoran government. 2. U.S. authorities claimed this tattoo linked him to the Tren de Aragua gang.

    I never imagined being imprisoned just for getting tattoos.

    A view of people near vehicles, one riding a bicycle, on a street near buildings

    A view of the neighborhood where the family of Ángelo Bolívar lives in Valencia.

    Ángelo Bolívar, 26

    Bolívar was living in Texas when he was arrested by ICE agents and sent to El Salvador’s CECOT prison. His many tattoos are part of a family legacy, one he shares with his mother, Silvia Cruz. His late father was a tattoo artist. His tattoos led to his imprisonment, he said, because authorities saw them as proof of membership in the Tren de Aragua gang. He is now back in the city of Valencia, about 80 miles east of Caracas.

    They said I was a gang member because of my tattoos — because I had a watch and a rosary. Even though the ICE agents had tattoos of roses and watches too.

    A blond woman covered in tattoos holds the face of a young man, with her other hand over his

    Bolívar and his mother, Silvia Cruz, in Valencia.

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    Kate Linthicum, Gabriela Oráa

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  • Vintage Vixen: Cher (26 GIFs)

    Vintage Vixen: Cher (26 GIFs)

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    I don’t need to tell you who Cher is. Unless you live under a rock, under another bigger rock, you know the single-named “Goddess of Pop,” Cher.

    The diva with a deep voice is both an Academy Award-winning actress and Grammy-winning recording artist. From television shows to quadruple-platinum records to major motion pictures, Cher is a true superstar with a career spanning six decades.

    Accomplishments aside, Cher is simply stunning. Long, raven locks, big, sparkling eyes, and an enviably perfect figure, Cher can’t help but command attention. Cher’s beauty is amplified by her bold fashion sense. She is unafraid to wear clothing that shows her body, obliterating the status quo with wearable art – intricate, daring, and subversive.

    It’s obvious I’m a fan. 

    I present this week’s Vintage Vixen – Cher.

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    Laura Lee

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  • Blues Legend John Mayall Is Dead at 90

    Blues Legend John Mayall Is Dead at 90

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    “Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller… all the blind guys.” That’s how the multi-instrumentalist John Mayall, one of the chief architects of the British blues revival of the 1960s, who died at 90 yesterday at his home in California, described the influences that shaped his musical tastes and inspired a career that stretched across six decades. That career, which started well before Mayall formed his famous Bluesbreakers in 1963, was not defined by blindness so much as by a single-minded, near-messianic vision that the music created by Black artists of the Mississippi Delta and Chicago’s South Side possessed beauty, honesty, and strength that transcended race, age, and geography. And so, thanks to Mayall—along with the like-minded musician Alexis Korner and a growing number of aficionados—American blues took root in London’s coffee bars, the domain of trad jazz. From there it migrated to subterranean clubs packed with sweaty youths, and on to record players and radios in bedsitter flats from Bournemouth to Belfast.

    Soon, a generation had its mojo working as the British R&B scene exploded: the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, Them, and much of what came after, including Cream and Fleetwood Mac, two epochal rock bands that Mayall had a hand in creating. The blues-focused vision that Mayall brought to popular music in the 1960s turns out to have been, in retrospect, 20/20.

    In the 21st century, conversations about the British blues boom have focused on these important foundational aspects—and raised thorny questions regarding cultural appropriation. But there is no doubt that Mayall’s adoration of the blues was genuine and uncynical, not to mention daring, vanguard, and subversive—an important dent in the armor of postwar, stiff-upper-lip, class-divided Britain. As Mayall and other proselytizers brought the work of Otis Rush, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Elmore James to ravenous young audiences on the other side of the Atlantic, those blues legends began to find themselves in demand as concert attractions, sought out as musical mentors, and anointed as cultural icons in Europe, America, and, in time, across the globe.

    John Mayall was born in 1933 and grew up in the town of Cheadle Hulme, outside of Manchester. His parents divorced when he was a boy. The best-known exploit of Mayall’s childhood was that he built a treehouse out of window frames and tarps in a sturdy oak behind his mother’s house, outfitting it with a bed and paraffin lamp. This, he said, “became my room, my world.” (In 1970, he wrote a song about it, “Home in a Tree.”) His father made a hobby out of jazz guitar and, the young Mayall, at age 12, had likewise begun to play the instrument, along with the piano. By the late 1940s, he had become besotted with jazz, Hoovering up 78 rpm records. And then he stumbled on the blues—the genre that would transfix him for the rest of his days.

    As a white suburban kid growing up in England after the war, listening to the blues brought Mayall face to face with the genre’s outsized personalities and the harsh conditions they often sang about. As Mayall told the Guardian in 2021, “So-called ‘race records’ told the story of the vile lynchings and racial injustices in the south that were a black man’s reality in the early 20th century. Not many other people I knew were all that interested in this music, but it was something I was really passionate about.”

    In 1956, Mayall had returned from national service in Korea to attend art college in Manchester, forming his first band, the Powerhouse Four. This was followed by the Blues Syndicate, which traveled to London in 1961, whereupon Mayall met Korner, who encouraged him to move south. Mayall threw himself into the London blues scene, forming his Bluesbreakers and becoming a mainstay at such clubs as the Marquee. If the blues-infused Rolling Stones were on a trajectory of international pop stardom, the Bluesbreakers were musician’s musicians, all about integrity—the spirit of the blues. They were the perfect band for record-collecting blues trainspotters, a group that would never be tainted by huge commercial success: the stuff of the purist, not the tourist.

    Mayall’s Bluesbreakers were a clearinghouse for generational talent. Eric Clapton quit the Yardbirds and joined the band; his playing was featured on its debut LP, released in 1966. When Clapton left, Peter Green, later to found Fleetwood Mac, joined. And when Green left, Mick Taylor, later of the Rolling Stones, joined. Mayall was to British blues guitarists what Leo Castelli was to New York painters; his group was the blue-chip gallery you wanted to show your work in. The bassist Jack Bruce met Clapton in the Bluesbreakers, then went on to found Cream. Other future rock stars who were Mayall alumni: Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, later of Fleetwood Mac, and the well-traveled drummer Aynsley Dunbar. In these Bluesbreakers incarnations, and in many more that would follow, Mayall moved between guitar and keyboards, with spotlight moments to demonstrate his prowess on harmonica. Even so, Mayall’s chief talent may have been his uncanny, unselfish capacity for spotting it in others.

    In the late ’60s, Mayall expatriated to California, moving into a house in Laurel Canyon that became affectionately known as The Brain Damage Club, based on the kind of personalities and diversions one could find there. The house burned to the ground in the 1979 Kirkwood Bowl-Laurel Canyon Fire, which consumed all of Mayall’s archives, along with the trove of vintage erotica his father had amassed. (“My father was a pornography collector,” Mayall would unabashedly say. “A totally irreplaceable collection.”) Throughout the ensuing decades, there were more concerts, tours, collaborations, and albums, as Mayall became invariably known as the Godfather of the British Blues. In 2005, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire. A 35-disc boxed set of Mayall’s work was released in 2021. Three years later he was inducted, at age 90, into the Rock & Roll Hall of fame. Mayall married twice; he had six children and several grandchildren.

    A cornerstone of the Mayall songbook was “Room to Move,” powered by his propulsive, almost orgiastic harmonica. But if one song defined him, it was perhaps “All Your Love,” a mambo-inflected Chicago blues classic by Otis Rush, which was the Bluesbreakers’ calling card and an early showcase for Clapton’s fretboard pyrotechnics. (Peter Green recast “All Your Love” as “Black Magic Woman,” which became a 1968 single for Fleetwood Mac and a subsequent signature for Carlos Santana.)

    In February of 2020, on the eve of the coronavirus pandemic, Mayall, shockingly spry at 86, sang “All Your Love” with gusto at the London Palladium as part of an all-star tribute concert organized by Mick Fleetwood to celebrate Green’s music. (Green died about five months later.) It would be difficult to conjecture how many times Mayall performed that number and others like it—typically three-chord, 12-bar blues songs.

    When a reporter once asked John Mayall about his unwavering fidelity to the blues, the music that took him from a tree house in a Manchester suburb to concert stages around the world, Mayall responded, “There’s nothing else I can play.”

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    Mark Rozzo

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  • K-Pop star AleXa on breaking through racial and gender barriers on stage | amNewYork

    K-Pop star AleXa on breaking through racial and gender barriers on stage | amNewYork

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