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      Marcos Witt, the Pop Star Bringing Latino Evangelicals to the Pews

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      The sanctuary of Northside church in Charlotte, N.C., is built for joyous adoration. Enormous speakers hang from its domed ceiling, along with an elaborate system of colored lights. Its semicircular stage has wide, carpeted steps that lead down on all sides to rows and rows of wine red pews, which hold about 2,700 people. The evening I visited last February, they filled to capacity with Latino families who had come to see the evangelical superstar Marcos Witt.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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      ‘Gods of Mexico’ Review: A Portrait of Indigenous Residents

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      This abstract-leaning nonfiction film consists of a series of vignettes and tableaus of communities in Mexico.Onscreen, “Gods of Mexico” is subtitled “a portrait of a nation through its land and peoples,” although its human subjects rarely speak and aren’t identified by name until the end. The director, Helmut Dosantos, making his first feature, eschews context. This abstract-leaning nonfiction film, made from 2013 to 2022, consists of a series of vignettes and tableaus featuring Indigenous residents of Mexico. Chapters are labeled by geographic region and, more obliquely, with the names of Aztec gods.Some of the movie shows life in motion. The camera observes salt harvesters sloshing water in rhythmic synchronization. A shot descends into a crater until all that’s visible is the crater’s floor, which resembles a giant eye.Other stretches of “Gods of Mexico,” which shifts between black-and-white and color, are built from shots that contain barely any motion. A fisherman who has his catch strung from a bamboo trunk carries the beam behind his neck, as the wind ripples across his clothes. A cow-drawn cart and its driver remain surreally in place on a beach as waves lap the shore. Women balance baskets on their heads while standing frozen against a spare, desert-like backdrop.Viewed as still photographs, these images have a raw power, and sound contributes to that effect. But the temporal element of cinema makes the compositions feel mannered and overly posed. (“Just one more second,” you picture the camera operator signaling to the women with baskets.) When, late in the film, miners playing a dice game converse, it only calls attention to how artfully — and perhaps artificially — withholding the preceding scenes have been. This nominal portrait of people isn’t interested in what they have to say.Gods of MexicoNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘What We Leave Behind’ Review: A Father’s Final Project

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      At 89, Julián Moreno began building a home in Mexico for his children who had immigrated to the U.S. His granddaughter made the poignant documentary “What We Leave Behind.”When Iliana Sosa’s grandfather Julián Moreno turned 89, he stopped making trips from Mexico to El Paso, Texas, where Sosa’s mother lives. In her documentary “What We Leave Behind,” his granddaughter follows Moreno to his home in the Mexican state of Durango and watches as he undertakes one last project: building a house next to his own that his children who migrated to the U.S. might return to.With an approach that is more elegiac than sociological, the director signals the passage of nearly seven years with the progress of the new building and the evidence of Moreno’s decline. He shovels a bit. He fries an egg that begins sunny side up but ends scrambled. He carries a plank, annoyed that he can’t carry two. A quad cane appears.Eschewing the politics of policy, “What We Leave Behind” honors the poetics of a life: Moreno’s memories of his long-dead wife; his affection for the land; his fealty to his son Jorge, who is legally blind and lives with him; but also his belief in hard work. His face holds traces of the handsome young man pictured on the ID card he used as a bracero — an agricultural worker issued a temporary work permit to come to the United States after World War II.Compositionally calm but never static, the documentary trusts in motes of beauty: a dog lapping water out of a mop bucket; Jorge’s green bristled broom poised above a courtyard floor as he listens; a once-sturdy man lying in bed, his family surrounding him. “What We Leave Behind” insists upon power in stillness, and the poignancy in staying — and leaving.What We Leave BehindNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 11 minutes. In theaters and on Netflix. More

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      Carla Morrison Wasn’t Afraid to Go Pop. It Helped Conquer Her Anxiety.

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      With her first album in five years, the Mexican songwriter embraces a new sound, and sings bluntly about her struggles.The Mexican songwriter Carla Morrison had a thriving career in 2017. With her pure soprano, her unabashedly vulnerable songs and constant touring, she had steadily built an audience among Spanish-speaking listeners across the Americas and Europe. Her songs had won Latin Grammy Awards and her first two full-length albums, “Déjenme Llorar” (2012) and “Amor Supremo” (2015), were nominated for Grammys. Morrison was on the road, performing at theaters and festivals following the release of “Amor Supremo Desnudo,” an album of radically altered acoustic remakes of the songs from “Amor Supremo.” Concertgoers were singing along with every word. And she was miserable.“I was on tour and I was hating it,” she said. “And I wanted to make music and I was hating it. And I just had no songs to offer.”That’s why it has taken five years for Morrison to release a new album out Friday, “El Renacimiento,” which can be translated as “The Renaissance” or “The Rebirth.” In her new songs, Morrison, 35, reveals both her paralyzing anxiety and her newfound strength. The album’s opening song, “Hacia Dentro” (“To See Within”), begins with Morrison singing “One day I woke up numb/Without the desire to keep going.” And it concludes with the hymnlike, uplifting “Encontrarme” (“Finding Myself”), which vows, “Even if it hurts when I touch/I will heal with time.”Morrison was relaxed and smiling in a video call from her home in a suburb of Los Angeles, where she settled in 2021 after marrying her longtime boyfriend and co-producer, Alejandro Jiménez. The piano she writes songs on was just over her shoulder. But in 2017, she recalled, “I just was kind of like, ‘What am I?’ All those questions that we as human beings ask ourselves: ‘What am I here for? What was I born for? What’s my purpose?’ I was just so uninterested, and at some point a little bit suicidal as well,” she said.“I remember thinking that I just didn’t know my value whatsoever,” she continued. “I just felt like everybody just wanted a piece of me, but nobody really wanted to know me.”Morrison’s songs have never held back on emotion. Her first EP — the skeletal, self-produced “Aprendiendo a Aprender” (“Learning to Learn”) in 2009 — opened with “Lagrimas” (“Tears”), presaging a catalog of songs filled with loneliness, yearning, devotion and heartache.“In every one of my albums, I’ve always tried to be very honest and to give a space to people that feel like nobody understands them,” she said. “I have a feeling that if I hadn’t been a singer-songwriter, I’d probably have been a psychologist or a therapist.”Morrison was born in Tecate, Mexico, a border town in Baja California, and she grew up hearing both traditional Mexican rancheras and American and British pop and rock. She lived in Phoenix for part of her teens. “I do feel very Mexican in my core, but at the same time, I feel very gringa,” she said. “But all of my songs, if you sing them like rancheras, they would totally make sense. Rancheras always tell you a story. The lyrics are very, very honest. There’s no shame if you feel something or expose it.”In 2017, “I just had no songs to offer,” Morrison said. But after taking a break and studying jazz singing, she found her voice again.Carlos Jaramillo for The New York TimesMorrison’s early recordings presented her as a pop-folk singer-songwriter, relying on guitar and keyboards. Her first full-length album, the largely acoustic “Déjenme Llorar” (“Let Me Cry”), in 2012, went platinum in Mexico and won a Latin Grammy as best alternative music album. Just three years later, Morrison transfigured her sound with “Amor Supremo,” deploying hefty rock beats and reverberant keyboards for songs about obsessive love. It reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Latin Pop Albums chart. As Morrison promoted it, she agreed to perform acoustic versions of the songs for radio stations and webcasts; eventually, she decided to rework all of the songs, adding two new ones, for “Amor Supremo Desnudo.”But when her 2017 tour was over, Morrison upended everything. She dropped her Mexican management company and stopped touring for the first time since her debut. With Jiménez, she moved from Mexico to Paris in 2019. They passed auditions to enroll at a music conservatory in a Paris suburb, where Morrison studied jazz singing; it was her first formal music education after a decade as an award-winning songwriter. She immersed herself in Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and, surrounded by fellow musicians, she also eased back into writing songs.“Carla was starting to feel much better,” Jiménez said in a separate interview. “I remember the day she wrote something and she showed the song to me and I was like, Wow! It had been such a long time since she had not only written something but was excited about music again. She had the same old Carla energy.”As the pandemic began in 2020, Morrison got an unexpected message: Ricky Martin was looking for songs. Morrison and Jiménez sent some possibilities; from the demos, Martin chose to collaborate on one and invited Morrison to share lead vocals and Jiménez to produce. The result is “Recuerdo,” which appeared on Martin’s 2020 quarantine EP, “Pausa,” and has been streamed 16 million times on YouTube alone.In Paris, working on songs during quarantine isolation, Morrison was ready to change her sound again. “For the longest time, I felt very pressured to keep my guitar close,” she said. “I felt very pressured to be this singer-songwriter, because I know people love that side of me. But I also was like, ‘No! I listen to Adele, to Sam Smith, to Billie Eilish, to Ariana Grande, to Dua Lipa.’ And I was like, ‘I really want to channel that. I just want to go pop. And I don’t want to be afraid.’”Where “Amor Supremo” used the gravity and spaciousness of rock, “El Renacimiento” has the surreal depths and computer-aided transparency of 21st-century pop, with close-up vocals, programmed beats and enveloping ambiences: the kind of music that could be concocted while working in isolation in Paris. “We had a whole different perspective,” Jiménez said. “We were not competing with anyone else — we were just trying to do our thing.”In September 2020, Morrison released the first single from “El Renacimiento”: “Ansiedad” (“Anxiety”). Over pulsing, hide-and-seek chords, she sings about panic attacks: “I want to speak and I can’t/I want to breathe and I can’t.”But the chord progression ascends and the beat is crisp and confident “I thought if I were to listen to the song, I would like for the beat to make me forget I’m having an anxiety attack,” Morrison said. “I would like for the beat to make me think, ‘OK, I’m getting out of this.’”Morrison weathered another bout of depression in 2021 after losing her father to Covid-19. She got treatment with ketamine infusions at a clinic in Los Angeles. “I had a ton of epiphanies,” she said. “The next day I woke up and I thought, ‘What’s missing? Something’s missing.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m not scared, I’m not sad.’ I just felt at peace.”Fans have told Morrison they are grateful to hear songs about her struggles. “There aren’t many songs about mental health in Spanish,” Morrison said. “In the Latin community, we don’t allow ourselves to be vulnerable, because then you’re weak. Or if you think about mental health, you’re crazy — just drink a beer, calm down, relax. We don’t face these problems because we weren’t taught.”Morrison has made her way back to performing. Last year, she played a full-length livestream concert. And as a lead-up to the album release this spring, she has been performing at arenas in Mexico, opening for what she names as her “favorite band”: Coldplay.Onstage, on tour, with fans shouting along, Morrison felt joy again. “In the industry, I get this space where I am so honest, and so vulnerable, and very intense at times,” she said. “I feel like people get that from my music. I do feel like I’ve really tried to be that space of freedom. And as long as I’m honest, I’ll be happy.” More

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      ‘¿Y Cómo Es Él?’ Review: A Fraught Buddy Comedy

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      A jealous man tries to exact revenge on his wife’s lover, but ends up taking a road trip with him instead.“¿Y Cómo Es Él?”, a Mexican love-triangle comedy by the Argentine director Ariel Winograd, translates to “And What’s He Like?”“He,” we find out immediately, is Jero (Omar Chaparro), a taxi driver and businessman, who is the lover of Marcia (Zuria Vega), who is married to Tomás (Mauricio Ochmann).The film opens with Tomás, our edgy protagonist, scrutinizing pictures of a dashing hunk while on a flight to Puerto Vallarta.Tómas, unemployed, jealous and insecure, tells Marcia he’s traveling for a job interview. He’s actually on his way to kick Jero’s butt — or tase him, or blow him to pieces with a machine gun. These violent fantasies play out in comic bursts, but when faced with the opportunity to exact revenge, Tómas gets cold feet. Then, he accidentally stabs himself, passes out, and wakes up in his nemesis’s back seat.It turns out that Jero is a pretty nice guy — he even offers Tomás a ride back to Mexico City.Cue the fraught male bonding, which (predictably for this kind of straight guy buddy comedy) includes a trip to a brothel and run-ins with thuggish debt collectors.The film, a remake of a 2007 Korean film bluntly translated as “Driving With My Wife’s Lover,” will seem retrograde to contemporary viewers. In addition to homophobic quips, the premise relies on the idea that an adulterous wife is the greatest offense to a man’s dignity. As such, it caters to an older, more traditional Latino audience who might still be tickled by such a conceit — and for whom the cast, which includes Chaparro (a prolific comedian and singer), along with several other popular Mexican personalities, will be a draw.Though Winograd questions the film’s gender biases in the conclusion, he does so unconvincingly. At a quick 95 minutes, at least the whole thing zips by, however brainlessly.¿Y Cómo Es Él?Rated PG-13. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘La Mami’ Review: Tough Love

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      This documentary about the den mother of dancers at a Mexico City cabaret is vérité at its best.At the Cabaret Barba Azul, women get paid to dance and drink with the male patrons, a custom that dates back to the 1930s. In the beautifully-rendered documentary “La Mami,” the director and cinematographer Laura Herrero Garvín (“The Swirl”) immerses us in the behind-the-scenes world of these dancers through the lens of their den mother: Doña Olga. Like them, Doña Olga also used to spend her nights dancing for pesos, but after 45 years working various jobs at the cabaret to support her five children, she has settled into her post in the club’s dressing room-bathroom combo. There she regulates the distribution of toilet paper with an iron fist, and doles out a charming mix of motherly nurturing and fierce rebukes. Like this bit of poetry: “Men are only good for two things: for nothing, and for money.”Garvín’s adept camerawork allows the story to unfold so seamlessly in its vérité style, that the film emanates the magic of a scripted drama without revealing any noticeable interference. And it creates a palpable depth of intimacy too: from Doña Olga waving incense and whispering prayers throughout the club before the doors open, to the nervous new girl Priscilla putting on makeup in the mirror.The triumph of “La Mami” is that in depicting how Doña Olga and the Barba Azul dancers navigate a job where male pleasure dominates, the film does not look down on them, but instead revels in their humanity. And in so doing, this remarkable portrayal of female friendship offers a poignant, elemental take on the lives of working-class women in urban Mexico today.La MamiNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Vicente Fernández, the King of Machos and Heartbreak

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      The singer’s brand of machismo may have frayed, but for many, he was the ideal of what it means to be hard-working, hard-loving Mexican man.The singer Vicente Fernández was “El Ídolo” and “El Rey” — the idol of Mexico and the king of ranchera music. These lofty titles reinforced his profound cultural influence, which spanned decades and countries far beyond Mexico.Fernández, who died on Sunday at 81, long represented the ideal of the Mexican man, proud of his roots and himself. His music often centered on love and loss, though also with a high degree of confidence and attitude. His iconic rendition of the song “Volver Volver” propelled him to fame, but it’s in another major hit, “Por Tu Maldito Amor,” that his agony and longing are on full display.In 2016, Fernández, known as Chente, recorded “Un Azteca en el Azteca,” a live album featuring some of his biggest hits, at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, the largest venue in the country, which holds over 87,000. It was billed as his farewell concert, and it also turned out to be the last before he experienced a series of health problems.During his performance of “Por Tu Maldito Amor” (“Because of Your Damn Love”), the sea of fans sing the chorus back to him.Por tu maldito amorNo puedo terminar con tantas penasQuisiera reventarme hasta las venasPor tu maldito amorIt’s become a musical standard at any special occasion hosted by someone of Mexican descent — everyone knows the lyrics. The night doesn’t begin to end until someone starts pouring tequila, plays this song, and belts out a grito in their best Chente voice — operatic and soaring with a tinge of melancholy.Despite the subject matter of his music, it was always tempered by his manly persona — he dressed in full charro regalia, took swigs from fans’ bottles and performed atop his horses. Fernández’s brand was this: a brawny, mustachioed man gallantly fighting for the woman he loves.And his persona was not unlike the idols that preceded him, Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete, Mexico’s earliest ranchera stars who rose to fame in the 1930s with their interpretations of love songs. And like them, he parlayed his music career into acting roles. Fernández starred in more than 30 films with titles like “El Macho” and “Todo Un Hombre,” in which he plays hard-living rancheros who romance beautiful women.To be sure, after so many decades of influence, Fernández and his work will remain beloved. His music will endure in the Mexican songbook. But his brand of machismo has frayed — at least for a younger generation less interested in a narrow view of what it means to be a man.In 2019, Fernández gave an interview to “De Primera Mano,” a Mexican entertainment news show, where he described receiving a cancer diagnosis in 2012 after doctors found a tumor on his liver. He said they suggested he get a liver transplant, which he rejected, saying: “I’m not going to sleep next to my woman with the organ of another man, not knowing if he was a homosexual or a drug addict.”There was an outcry on social media over the homophobic remarks, and even his son, Vicente Fernández Jr., tried to walk back his father’s interview, asserting that his father’s music was for everyone.Regardless of Fernández’s views on sexuality — though they seem to be pretty apparent — Vicente Jr. might be right. After decades in the spotlight, Chente’s music no longer belongs just to him — it belongs to the people. His musical influence extends far beyond Mexico, permeating much of Latin America and the United States. Fernández’s popularity hasn’t waned, as demonstrated by the memorials and outpouring of condolences on Sunday, ranging from the likes of President Biden to that other “king,” the country singer George Strait.Fernández wasn’t one to shy away from politics. In Mexico, he was a known supporter of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which long held power in the country. And his influence extended into U.S. politics. He performed at the 2000 Republican National Convention, where George W. Bush secured the nomination. But more recently he supported Democratic candidates in the U.S., even writing a corrido for Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential run.Though he is emblematic of a type of dated machismo, many people will still choose to listen to his music and belt out his songs at karaoke or at a cousin’s wedding. Perhaps another one of his memorable songs, “El Rey,” explains this dichotomy.You might say you never loved meBut you will be very sadAnd that’s why you will have to stayWith money and without moneyI always do what I wantAnd my word is the lawI don’t have a throne nor a queenNor anyone who understands meBut I’m still the kingYou probably don’t remember the first time you heard one of his songs because they were always a part of the soundscape, imprinted in your mind. His music is imbued in the fabric of American Latino culture, much like in the rest of Latin America. More

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      Vicente Fernández Knew His Way Around Your Broken Heart

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      First breakups. Final goodbyes. For generations, Mr. Fernández, who died on Sunday, provided a soundtrack for moments of anguish and heartache, and a pathway to healing.After four years of dating, this is what it came to for Art Castillo: sitting alone in his blue truck in Waco, Texas, listening to his girlfriend on speaker. Long distance wasn’t working, she told him. She had found another man. The relationship was over.“I hanged up and put Vicente Fernández on,” said Mr. Castillo, 30. He played “La Cruz de Tu Olvido,” in which Mr. Fernández bellows, “As I looked at the evil in your eyes, I understood that you have never loved me.” He played it louder, again and again, until he was done crying.“With his songs,” Mr. Castillo said, “you just feel it inside you.”For generations, Mr. Fernández’s often sorrowful songs have served as a balm for the heartbroken. Over a career that spanned six decades, Mr. Fernández, the Mexican ranchera superstar who died on Sunday at 81, recorded hundreds of songs and dozens of albums, singing of unrequited love, scornful partners and tarnished romance.In that time, Mr. Fernández, known to millions as Chente, became a beacon for the brokenhearted, a man to listen to when love has gone awry and all you want — besides, perhaps, some tequila — are plucky guitars, harmonized horns and someone to give voice to your most intimate feelings.“For a lot of people with Mexican descent, his voice is home,” said Rachel Yvonne Cruz, a professor of Mexican American studies and a music specialist at the University of Texas at San Antonio.That explains why so many people, mostly Latinos, turn to him when they are down, she said.“When Vicente Fernández sang, he expressed all of those emotions that we keep held inside: that silent cry, that silent scream that’s happening when you’re heartbroken, when you just cannot anymore,” Dr. Cruz said. “And when you listened to him, you were able to have that release that you needed.”Who broke Mr. Fernández’s heart? That remains a playful mystery among his fans. He married María del Refugio Abarca Villaseñor when he was in his early 20s, and the two stayed together until his death.But however and whenever his heartbreak occurred, his fans say, his anguish came through in his lyrics.Tu boca, tu ojos y tu peloLos llevo en mi mente, noche y día“Your mouth, your eyes and your hair, I carry them in my mind, night and day,” Mr. Fernández sings in “Las Llaves de Mi Alma.”Por tu maldito amorNo puedo terminar con tantas penas“Because of your damn love, I can’t bring an end to so much shame,” he roars in “Por Tu Maldito Amor.”En un marco, pondré tu retratoY en mi mano, otra copa de vino“In a frame, I will put your portrait, and in my hand, another glass of wine,” he croons in “Tu Camino y el Mío.”That was the song that helped Fernanda Aguilera.“I had been with someone since, I guess, high school, and then you think, ‘Well, this is going to be my person,’” said Ms. Aguilera, 27, of San Antonio. But when college came and they went their separate ways, she realized that the relationship “was just an illusion in my head.”She played “Tu Camino y el Mío” (“Your Road and Mine”), and recalled thinking: “This is exactly how I feel, but I could just never find the words. And it’s like he put the words together for me.”On a cool March night in Oxnard, Calif., a brokenhearted Jaime Tapia grabbed some beers, invited a friend to his house and put on a Vicente Fernández playlist. Mr. Tapia was 19. He and his girlfriend of four years had decided to cut off their relationship earlier that night.Mirroring the way Mr. Fernández had dealt with heartache in the movies (mostly with alcohol, a somber stare into the middle distance and buddies who reassure him he will be OK), Mr. Tapia and his friend kept the beers coming as they sat on the hoods of their cars.“Just dozing off, looking at the stars,” he said. He was lonely and drunk for the first time in his life.“A lot of the songs that Chente talks about are about breakups, being in a cantina, stuff like that,” Mr. Tapia said. “So even though you feel sad at the time, you felt good that you were bonding with a buddy and that you weren’t by yourself.”Ranchera music “can be thought of as a sung exposition of one’s most honest emotions,” said Mónica Fogelquist, a professor of practice in mariachi and ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin.“In Mexican culture, men are supposed to be strong, valiant, proud and void of any sentiment,” she said. “They don’t cry, and they don’t express vulnerability, including heartache. However, through music, all the unexpressed or prohibited emotions are free to come out.”People have used Chente’s romantic tunes to try to win back an estranged partner through serenatas, a musical message of love delivered by a mariachi band in front of a lover’s window — a tradition that Mr. Fernández popularized in films.“It’s pretty popular; we’ve been hired a couple times to help win that person back,” said Giovanni Garcia, who manages the band Mariachi Estrellas de Chicago. He added, “There’s been a couple of times where they’ll tell us, ‘Oh, I’m in the doghouse right now and hoping this will help me.’”Sometimes it works, he said. Often, it doesn’t — even if the band plays one of Mr. Fernández’s songs.Someone tried it on Laura Figueroa once. It did not end well.A mariachi band knocked on her door in Chicago. Her little brother let them inside, and the musicians marched through the kitchen and into her bedroom. She was 22 at the time.“I’m sitting there looking down at the floor like, ‘Oh my God, there’s literally a mariachi in my house,’” said Ms. Figueroa, now 39. She does not believe the band played Chente, and in any event she did not take her former lover back.Jesus Gutierrez, 37, of Chicago said his father used to sing “Hermoso Cariño” (“Beautiful Darling”) by Mr. Fernández to his mother, Juana, when they were dating in Guanajuato, Mexico. She used to be embarrassed when telling the story, Mr. Gutierrez said, because his father, Nicolas, was “not a good singer.”But perhaps it worked, he said, because they married, had children and listened to ranchera music together for decades. She saved nearly all of her Chente vinyl records and screamed every word of his heartbreaking songs at his concerts, her son recalled.In 2019, Juana Gutierrez died, and Chente’s songs came to represent a new type of heartbreak for Mr. Gutierrez. He said he couldn’t play some of his mother’s favorites anymore because “it’s too much.”But on Sunday, when he heard Mr. Fernández had died, he knew right away how he would spend his evening: the same way he and so many others had gotten through their first breakups and final goodbyes.He scrolled through his playlist until he found “Hermoso Cariño.”Precioso regaloDel cielo ha llegadoY que me ha colmado de dicha y amor“Precious gift, from heaven it has come,” Mr. Fernández sang. “And that has filled me with happiness and love.” More