TONY CASTRO, the former award-winning Los Angeles columnist and author of "Chicano Power" (E.P. Dutton, 1974), is a writer-at-large and national political writer with LAMonthly.org. "Chicano Power" will be published in a 50th anniversary edition in 2024. He can be reached at tony@tonycastro.com. Website: https//tonycastro.com
By TONY CASTRO It’s hard to believe that Pete Rose, baseball’s all-time hits leader, the man who turned more singles into doubles than most of us turn coffee into energy, has passed away at the...
In a district as politically scarred as the 14th of Los Angeles, voter apathy is practically a local pastime. But this election could be different. After all, how many times can you elect a...
Perhaps it will take the death of the last baby boomer—gasping, clinging to an overstuffed armchair and a cherished first edition of Profiles in Courage—to finally bury the myth of Camelot, a...
I came to town to promote my books about a legendary baseball player, including one titled 'The Best There Ever Was.' I saw a ball game while here. And I wound up leaving feeling like I had...
J.D had that rare gift of capturing heartbreak and hope all in one breath. He could take a moment, a feeling, and turn it into something timeless. It wasn’t just music; it was emotion set to...
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s not every day that you find yourself with a front-row seat to the strangest conversation since Socrates asked his disciples to pass the hemlock. But here we are,...
I have always believed that nothing brings a neighborhood together quite like a good old-fashioned scandal. And in our cozy, diverse, and mostly serene Southern California community, we now find...
If the stars align and Kamala Harris ascends to the highest office in the land, it won't just be another presidency. No, my friends, brace yourselves for the dawn of a new era—a magical epoch that...
The Richard Alatorre I knew, the Richard Alatorre who said he had to change the world — and to a great degree, he did just that… that Richard Alatorre dramatically altered the...
WHEN I ELOPED with my girlfriend from college, my best friend had a good laugh at my expense. "People don't elope to Waxahachie, Texas," he said. "Las Vegas, man. People elope to Las Vegas." it...
Roberta Dos Santos Busby, a Brazilian-born exotic dancer, gets too choked up with emotion and can’t finish the thought: That people now stare at her because of the extensive scar tissue from burns...
Does Donald Trump like his yes-men a little on the unusual side? Or why is his GOP running mate JD Vance wearing mascara? Is it just those baby blues that make it look like he's got Hillbilly Elegy...
I HAVE BEEN A DEI writer all my life, I suppose, without ever knowing about it even when the invisible branding behind my back by some editors and insecure, fucked up colleagues was there for...
Nearly sixty years after JFK's assassination, recent incidents involving the denial of protection to presidential candidates Robert Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump, combined with revelations of budget...
Pete Rose, the man with more hits than anyone in the history of Major League Baseball, this titan of baseball is conspicuously absent from the Hall of Fame. The reason? He gambled on baseball....
Vice President Harris stands on the threshold of history to become not only the first woman but also the first Black woman elected President of the United States but facing a country experiencing...
By TONY CASTRO A few days ago, a famished orange stray cat jumped into our front patio, perhaps trying to escape this summer's record-high heat not only in Los Angeles, but throughout the country. A...
The Surprising Agenda of the New President The Better Angels Initiative including a new reality TV show, “Angel Apprentice,” the Ask-Not Challenge includes a call for public service, encouraging...
Elon Musk decided that California is no longer big enough for his ambitions and with a flick of his diamond-encrusted spurs, has announced that SpaceX, Tesla, and X (formerly Twitter) will all be...
It's a scene straight out of a Clooney heist movie, but instead of robbing a casino, he's plotting an escape from the land of the free and the home of the increasingly conservative ahead of a second...
"I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad... The dollar buys a nickel's worth... shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and...
Unidentified would-be-assassin slain by Secret Service, rally spectator killed and two others critically wounded at Pennsylvania political event just two days ahead of the start of the Republican...
From the debut of “Magnum PI” in 1980, Hollywood has had an unrequited love affair with the Ferrari, objectifying, worshipping it and turning it into a glorified sex symbol as if it were...
He's Been in Israel, Land of Faith & Miracles Now, given events since last October 7, the Israel-Hamas War in Gaza and the ongoing heavily pro-Palestinian protests at college campuses across the...
ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos was surreptitiously recorded on a New York street saying President Biden effectively wasn't fit to serve another term to a stranger who asked him, “Do you think...
President Biden's troubling condition reminds me of my grandmother's own cognitive decline in which she didn't make sense at times, called my dad and me by different names and, worse, had stopped...
Traditional Dem Bloc Could Swing Election The most recent CNBC Survey found that in a head-to-head matchup, former President Donald Trump had a 5-point lead with Latino voters against President...
Cher, Diana Ross, Prince, Marvin Gaye, Barbara Streisand, Goldie Hawn, Liza Minnelli. Pick a name from that era, and they too likely shopped at Fred Slatten Shoes, a boutique he kept lit 24 hours a...
East End Studios Lands $130 Million in Loans to Make It Happen Set in the heart of the Los Angeles Eastside, East End Studios - Mission Campus is just part of a $1 billion, three-segment project the...
In 1978, Los Angeles was still basking in the afterglow of its golden age. The city was a sun-drenched playground where dreams came to life—or, as I discovered on one particular day, where dreams...
Can It Be Nearly a Dozen Years Since Antonio Villaraigosa Was Mayor? The man who often gushed when recalling that London’s Guardian newspaper had called him the ‘Latino Tony Blair’ was like a...
Is the Sleeping Giant Latino Vote Finally Ready to Get Off Its Butt? The 2026 gubernatorial campaign is quickly shaping up with candidates like Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, State Senate leader...
We Don’t Use Ballrooms for Reunions. We Rent the Dallas Cowboys' AT&T Stadium My parents came from families big enough to play baseball against one another — and still have players on...
The Way It Might Have Been in the 2012 Presidential Election When GOP challenger Mitt Romney was about to derail Barack Obama’s reelection with running mate Marco Rubio, the president dumped Joe...
Remembering the Chicano Civil Rights Leader ‘I will forgive them, but I will also keep fighting them with non-violence, with justice and with human dignity — and you must do the same,’ said...
Could Swift be looking at making history beyond the Grammys? The political consultant who helped elect Bill Clinton president says that Taylor Swift has an unheard of 93% ‘very good’...
The famous but now shuttered Lucy's El Adobe Café in Hollywood holds a special place in California pop culture but now symbolizes the demise of the Chicano Movement's once promising political...
The Boy Who Loved Lint At a preschool in town, the teachers still talk about a boy named Trey who had special powers. It wasn’t magic, though that’s what his classmates had called it. The...
MY GRANDFATHER'S LAST CHRISTMAS gifts to me came early, sometime in mid-summer of the year when I was four. They were simple gifts. A stuffed lion and a bear, but they were expensive gifts for him...
'I am Latina and my parents are Lebanese," Rayes said in an interview. "I grew up in Venezuela until I was nine, and then my family moved to Santa Monica. At the time, L.A. was not as diverse as it...
AROUND 6 A.M. MONDAY, THE SOUND of drums will shatter the quiet in the plaza at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles as Aztec dancers appear out of the darkness, braving...
Movie stand-in Jameelah Elena Michl fell so madly in love with her film's beautiful director that she began stalking her — even brandishing a Glock — and when the director didn't return her...
By TONY CASTRO ON THE MORNING OF JANUARY 20, 2009, I am about 75 yards away from where Barack Obama would soon place his hand on the Bible used by Abraham Lincoln at his 1861 inauguration and...
From the debut of “Magnum PI” in 1980, Hollywood began an unrequited love affair with the Ferrari, objectifying, worshipping it and turning it into a glorified sex symbol much as it did Marilyn...
The national tragedy of November 22, 1963, affected all of us in different ways. For me, it intensified my childhood dream of wanting to write and later of wanting to report the news. By TONY CASTRO...
So I had come to the Rio Grande, symbolic of the border of my existence and the two sides of who I was. And right now I wanted to be neither. I AWOKE TO FIND MYSELF WITH a young woman I’d met the...
WHY DID PRISCILLA PRESLEY leave Elvis? Did the 14-year-old girl he fell in love with when he was 24 realize as she grew into a woman that they had little in common except for their daughter Lisa...
A video of the arrest shows Wendy Carrillo looking so inebriated that she appears starting to fall in the middle of a sobriety test, saved from collapsing only by two LAPD officers at her side who...
Imagine. Weekly, if not daily, plane loads of migrants sent by GOP governors to L. A. and other major Democratic-run cities, to disrupt and overrun the infrastructures and economies of those...
How Los Angeles deals with Kevin de León and therefore with itself will show it to be either the Tinseltown viewed by its detractors — selfish and exclusive — or the city seen by its...
