Thursday, March 5, 2015

Raul Rodriguez, Showered Rose Parade With Bouquets on Wheels

Raul Rodriguez, Who Showered Rose Parade With Bouquets on Wheels, Dies at 71

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Raul Rodriguez and Sebastian the macaw, at work in 2009. Fiesta Parade Floats
Raul Rodriguez, who designed more than 500 floral floats for the Tournament of Roses Parade and conceived dazzling confections for other private and public celebrations around the world, died on Wednesday at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 71.
His spouse, Robert Cash, said that Mr. Rodriguez had been ill for some time and that he died of cardiac arrest.
Mr. Rodriguez dreamed up floats for Disneyland’s 50th anniversary in 2005; was the art director for the “We the People 200” celebration of the Constitution’s bicentennial in Philadelphia in 1987; served as a consultant to the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles; and designed installations for casinos (including the Flamingo Hotel’s pink neon facade in Las Vegas and the 22-story clown that graces the Circus Circus Hotel in Reno, Nev.), stores, restaurants and entertainment companies. He also illustrated children’s books.
His most conspicuous creations, though, were those he made for the Rose Parade. He designed his first when he was 15, a snow scene for the city of Whittier in California, and his final one in 2014, when — typically — he fielded multiple floats in the annual New Year’s Day procession in Pasadena.
Mr. Rodriguez, seated at the front of a float with Sebastian in the Rose Parade in 2013.Dole Packaged Foods
Mr. Rodriguez was classically trained in drawing and painting, but when it came to pageantry he might just as well have been inspired by Oscar Wilde’s credo that nothing succeeds like excess.
In 2013, the chromatic “Dreaming of Paradise” float he designed for Dole Packaged Foods, and which he rode on with his signature pet macaw, featured a 26-foot-tall volcano spewing smoke and flame and 1,000 gallons of recycled water cascading into a fruit-laden tropical rain forest adorned with about 25,000 hot-pink roses, 10,000 dendrobium orchids and 8,000 florescent orange roses.
The Dole float won the sweepstakes award that year, contributing to Mr. Rodriguez’s record as the winningest designer in the parade’s history.
The city of Cerritos in California once asked him to replicate its library on a float, to encourage reading. Instead, he whimsically built a 50-foot-tall bookworm. For Natural Balance Pet Foods, he conceived a 113-foot-long float on which dogs could slide down a chute into 4,000 gallons of water.
Raul Ruben Rodriguez was born on Jan. 2, 1944, in Los Angeles, the son of Ruben Rodriguez, a sheet-metal worker, and the former Natalie Cortez, a department store supervisor. In addition to Mr. Cash, he is survived by two sisters, Irene Rodriguez-Morgan and Teresa Arzola.
His parents encouraged his artistic talent, he told The Los Angeles Times in 1992: “My mother wouldn’t erase the drawings I did on the dining room wall.”
He won a scholarship to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and graduated from Cerritos College and California State University, Long Beach.
Mr. Rodriguez viewed his floats as “moving stage sets,” unique art forms that allowed him to recreate exotic locales from around the world. While his fanciful creations were meticulously planned for months, they were built with natural components and typically for one-time events, which meant they usually lasted only a matter of days.
In an interview with The Glendale News-Press, he described the Rose Parade as “the five-and-a-half-mile smile.” Each Jan. 1, he said, “If we can start the year on a positive, we did our job.”
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Monday, March 2, 2015

Oscar Diaz, Welterweight Boxing Champion

Oscar Diaz, Boxer Injured in ’08, Dies at 32

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Oscar Diaz, a former welterweight boxing champion whose career ended when he sustained a debilitating brain injury in a fight nearly seven years ago, died on Thursday in San Antonio. He was 32.
The Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed his death but said it had not yet determined a specific cause.
Diaz was in a coma for two months and spent seven months in a hospital after collapsing before the 11th round of a nationally televised United States Boxing Association welterweight championship fight against Delvin Rodriguez in 2008. Diaz was 25 at the time.
After performing emergency brain surgery, doctors were unsure how Diaz would recover. His brother, Fernando, recently told The San Antonio Express-News that Diaz had been living in a San Antonio nursing home and could not walk on his own.
Diaz was born on Sept. 29, 1982, in San Antonio. He compiled a professional boxing record of 26-3, with 12 knockouts.
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Sunday, February 8, 2015

Reies Tijerina, Chicano Property Rights Activist

Reies Tijerina, 88, Dies; Led Chicano Property Rights Movement

By 



Reies Tijerina in 1972. United Press International

In the year of sixty-seven
June fifth was the day,
There was a revolution
Over there by Tierra Amarilla.
The “revolution” was a bungled plot, with Keystone Kops overtones, in which rebels seized an isolated courthouse in northern New Mexico on June 5, 1967, and it lasted only 90 minutes. But it would be immortalized in ballads (as in “Corrido de Rio Arriba”), elevate a former itinerant evangelist into a quixotic national prophet and propel a radical Chicano property rights movement into America’s consciousness.
The onetime evangelist, Reies Tijerina, who died on Jan. 19 at 88, never had the tangible success of Cesar Chavez and his nonviolent campaign to improve the lot of migrant workers. He never achieved his goal of reclaiming — for Mexicans, Indians and descendants of the original Spanish settlers — the millions of acres that changed hands when northern Mexico became the American Southwest in the mid-19th century. And his legacy was later marred by apocalyptic and anti-Semitic undercurrents.
Nonetheless, in the view of Lorena Oropeza, a history professor at the University of California, Davis, and author of a coming book about Mr. Tijerina, “Probably no person did more to shift our understanding of the history of the American West from a celebratory tale of ‘manifest destiny’ to the now-prevailing notion of a ‘legacy of conquest’ than did Tijerina.”
“One way to think of Tijerina,” she added, “is that he led an anticolonial movement within the continental United States. With only a few years of elementary education, and then time spent in Bible college, he developed a devastating critique of the American empire at the height of the Cold War.
“To young people involved in the Chicano movement, moreover, he gave them not only a militant alternative to Cesar Chavez, but also an understanding of the long history of Spanish-speaking people in the American Southwest,” Professor Oropeza said.
Mr. Tijerina, who died in a hospital in El Paso, had diabetes and heart problems, said Estela Reyes-Lopez, a family spokeswoman, who confirmed the death.
Reies Lopez Tijerina (pronounced tee-heh-REE-na), the son of cotton-picking sharecroppers, was born on Sept. 21, 1926, in Falls City, Tex. After he served as a Pentecostal pastor, he and more than a dozen families who constituted his followers bought 160 acres in Arizona in 1956 and founded Valley of Peace, a utopian commune. Often skirmishing with neighbors, the group did not live up to its name.
Mr. Tijerina, inspired by what he said was a heavenly vision, later uprooted his followers and led them to New Mexico, where by the early 1960s they had formed the Alianza Federal de los Pueblos Libres, or alliance of free city-states. Members of what he called his republic staged symbolic land seizures and citizen’s arrests and held mock trials of forest rangers. (Much of the land they claimed was in national forests.) There were arrests, prosecutions and prison terms.
The raid on the Rio Arriba County Courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, the county seat, was their most dramatic action. Mr. Tijerina and about 20 armed followers sought to liberate 11 Alianza members who they believed were being held there. The 11 had been charged with threatening to seize the 600,000-acre Tierra Amarilla land grant and to make a citizen’s arrest of the district attorney. But neither the prisoners nor the prosecutors were at the courthouse.
In the raid, a state police officer and a jailer were wounded. (The jailer was later beaten to death just before he was to testify that he had been shot by Mr. Tijerina; that crime was never solved.)
Pursued by tanks and helicopters in a National Guard manhunt, the rebels fled for the hills with two hostages. The getaway car got stuck in mud, and the kidnapped men were eventually recovered and most of the suspects captured.
Mr. Tijerina successfully defended himself at one trial but was tried a second time and convicted of charges stemming from the raid. He served six months in a state penitentiary. He also spent more than two years in federal prisons on charges arising from other protests. Nicknamed King Tiger, Mr. Tijerina was likened to other Chicano activists like Corky Gonzales of Colorado and José Angel Gutiérrez of Texas. But his views were more idiosyncratic.
He prophesied an apocalyptic future linked to American policy in the Middle East.
He also “turned many previous supporters away as he moved toward a singularly novel, but unmistakable, anti-Semitism,” Rudy V. Busto, a professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in an interview.
Mr. Tijerina argued that Spanish speakers in the United States were the rightful descendants of the House of Israel.
“When there is war we are all Americans,” Mr. Tijerina once said. “When it’s voting time, then we are Mexican-Americans. But when it comes to jobs and land,” he said, using an epithet for Hispanics, “we are nothing.”
By 2006, after returning from self-imposed exile in Mexico, he was living in a two-room cinder-block house in a run-down barrio in El Paso, seeking legal residency for his Mexican-born third wife, Esperanza, who survives him along with eight of his children.
“My philosophy is that of the cricket against the lion,” he often said. “The cricket is the king of the insects, and the lion is the king of the beasts. The cricket had no chance against the lion, so he jumped into the lion’s ear and tickled him to death. That’s what we’re going to do to the United States — we’re going to tickle him to death.”
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Monday, October 27, 2014

Elizabeth Pena, Actress on the Big and Small Screens

Elizabeth Peña, Actress on the Big and Small Screens, Dies at 55

By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK
    Elizabeth Peña and Chris Cooper in John Sayles’s “Lone Star” (1996), for which she won an Independent Spirit Award. Alan Papp/Castle Rock Entertainment
    Elizabeth Peña, an actress who appeared in major studio pictures like “Rush Hour,” independent films like John Sayles’s generational drama “Lone Star,” and a host of television shows, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. She was 55.
    Her manager, Gina Rugolo, confirmed her death, saying it followed a brief illness.
    Ms. Peña played everything from love interest to comedic sidekick in movies and on television for 35 years. She was a demolition specialist alongside Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in “Rush Hour” (1998). As Pilar Cruz, a history teacher who rekindles a romance with a small-town Texas sheriff in “Lone Star” (1996), she won an Independent Spirit Award for best supporting actress. “The sultry Ms. Peña gives an especially vivid performance as the character who is most unsettled by the shadows of the past,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times in 1996.
    Her first major film role was as Tim Robbins’s lover in Adrian Lyne’s psychological thriller “Jacob’s Ladder” (1990). She reportedly won the part over stars like Julia Roberts, Andie MacDowell and Madonna.
    A television regular, Ms. Peña appeared on shows like “L.A. Law,” “American Dad” and “Boston Public.” In the mid-1980s, she starred as a maid who marries her employer to stay in the United States in the short-lived sitcom “I Married Dora,” and starting in 2000 she played a hairdresser in “Resurrection Blvd.,” the Showtime drama about an upwardly mobile Latino family.
    More recently she played the mother of Sofia Vergara’s character on the hit ABC sitcom “Modern Family,” even though she was only 13 years older than Ms. Vergara.
    Elizabeth Peña was born in Elizabeth, N.J., on Sept. 23, 1959. Her father, Mario, was a Cuban actor, director and playwright, and Ms. Peña spent much of her childhood in Cuba before returning to the United States. She graduated from what is now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan.
    She performed in a production of “Romeo and Juliet,” translated into Spanish by the poet Pablo Neruda, at the Gramercy Theater in 1979 and made her film debut in the Spanish-language film “El Super” that year.
    Ms. Peña went on to play the mistreated wife of Ritchie Valens’s half brother in the biopic “La Bamba” (1987); Jamie Lee Curtis’s confidante in the action film “Blue Steel” (1989); and Richard Dreyfuss’s and Bette Midler’s maid in the comedy “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” (1986).
    She also did voice-over work in the animated film “The Incredibles” (2004) and cartoons like “Justice League.”
    She married Hans Rolla in 1994. He survives her, as does their son, Kaelan; their daughter, Fiona Rolla; her mother, Estella Margarita Peña; and a sister, Tania Peña.
    Ms. Peña said that she researched Mexican-American culture to prepare for her part in “Lone Star.”
    “I recorded people’s voices to get the proper inflection,” she told The Ottawa Citizen in 1996. “I crossed the border a whole bunch to collect a lot of history. I would sit for hours looking at the women, how they dressed.”


    “In the United States, all Spanish-speaking people are lumped into one category,” she continued. “But we’re all so different.”
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    Thursday, August 7, 2014

    Augie Rodriguez, Mambo Dance Master

    Augie Rodriguez, 86, Half of a Mambo Team, Dies

    By 



      Augie and Margo Rodriguez in the 1950s. The couple, fixtures at the Palladium Ballroom in Manhattan, mamboed their way from dance competitions to nightclubs around the world.Courtesy Michael Terrace


      Augie Rodriguez, half of Augie and Margo, the husband-and-wife team who at midcentury helped turn mambo from a sultry social dance into a dazzling public entertainment, died on July 18 in Deerfield Beach, Fla. He was 86.
      The cause was cancer, Margo Rodriguez said.
      In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, Augie and Margo were among mambo’s most famous exponents, appearing on television, on concert stages and in nightclubs worldwide, often accompanied by renowned bandleaders like Xavier Cugat.
      In New York, the couple were fixtures at the Palladium Ballroom, on Broadway between West 53rd and 54th Streets. The space was for decades a mecca of Latin music; there, they often danced to live music by Tito Puente and his orchestra.
      In Las Vegas, Augie and Margo opened for many major entertainers, including Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.; they also performed at the White House for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon and in London for Queen Elizabeth II.
      On television, they were seen often on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “The Steve Allen Show” and “The Arthur Murray Party.”
      Mambo dancing originated in Cuba in first half of the 20th century. As conceived, it was a ballroom affair involving sensual swaying and elegant footwork.
      Augie and Margo kept the sultriness and the elegance and added a stunning dose of athleticism, integrating slides, turns and dizzying spins worthy of a figure skater.
      They also infused mambo with techniques from other dance traditions, including ballet, jazz and modern. In so doing, they helped usher in the transition from mambo dancing to salsa dancing, which, as the style’s saucy name implies, is an amalgam of diverse genres.
      Augustin Rodriguez was born in Brooklyn on May 13, 1928; his father had come to the United States from Spain, his mother from the Dominican Republic.
      After service in the merchant marine as a young man, Mr. Rodriguez returned to New York, where he began frequenting the Palladium. For many months, he said, he learned by watching other dancers; only then did he begin to dance himself.
      At the Palladium, he was first partnered with Margo Bartolomei, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican and Corsican parentage; like him, she was self-taught at first. They became partners off the dance floor as well, marrying in 1950.
      In their early years together, the couple competed in many ballroom dance contests, doing a more traditional mambo. They often won the top prize, which might be as much as $100 or as little as $15.
      Before long, they began studying ballet and modern dance. Little by little, almost without their being aware of it, that training crept into their ballroom routines.
      “At the time, we didn’t realize we were changing the whole atmosphere,” Mrs. Rodriguez said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “Whatever we learned that day in class, we would put into the mambo.”
      In later years, the Rodriguezes taught dance and booked nightclub acts for cruise ships.
      A resident of Deerfield Beach, Mr. Rodriguez is also survived by a son, Richard, and two grandchildren.
      If, in their transformation of mambo, Augie and Margo ruffled purists’ feathers, it did not bother them in the slightest.
      “Some of the dancers said: ‘What are you doing? You’re ruining the mambo!,’ ” Mrs. Rodriguez said on Thursday. “And we said, ‘That’s the way we feel it.’ ”
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