Trying to explain what música ranchera is to non-Mexicans reminds me of the apocryphal quote attributed to–take your pick–Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington, when someone asked what jazz is. Ranchera ...

Dwight Manley: The Brea King? Illustration by Paul Nagel. Photo by Federico Medina. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, once a young apprentice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and who later ran “Rainbow ...

The caravan of Klansmen crept to a stop around midnight in front of the home of David and Lizzie Milder on Nov. 17, 1932. Their quaint bungalow in the Carroll Park neighborhood of Long Beach had just ...

15-year-old high school sophomore and how he has missed her growing up and becoming a mother.” Before denying her parole, the OCDA continued, the board “took into consideration the facts of the case, ...

Rodney Alcala is a man stuck in a time warp, his flowing silver hair, granny glasses, beige blazer and jeans reminiscent of a creative-writing professor circa 1980, the year he began life behind bars.

Go ahead, call us a bunch of culture-less, lily-white suburbanites with a partiality to flip-flops and right-wing politics. Those kind of labels never cease to amuse us. Because one thing that ...

After eating dinner and watching television at his girlfriend’s Santa Ana apartment on Spurgeon Street, 17-year-old Charles Honea went to sleep outside on the second-floor balcony, his makeshift ...

“Santa's real. . . . It's the stories that are fake.” —Uncle Bill, grandma's house, Christmas 1957 Ric Erwin, “Singin' Santa,” the most vibrant performing professional Santa Claus I've ever met, is ...

The gleaming black Cadillac Escalade trembles at the intersection of Beach Boulevard and Cerritos Avenue in Stanton. Four young Mexican men inside, all buzz cuts and oversized white T-shirts and ...

Little People's Park is a tiny slab of grass near downtown Anaheim, just down the street from police headquarters and two blocks from City Hall. The afternoon of Sunday, July 29 was similar to most ...

No other genre can claim a connection to evil like heavy metal. Whether it's a brutal Satanic death metal band from Florida, a church-burning Norwegian black metal band, or a Mexican gang of ...

This past week, I hosted ESPN's burrito correspondent, Anna Maria Barry Jester of the company's FiveThirtyEight data-mining site. We ate at Athenian Burgers #3 in Buena Park, which is a competitor in ...