E-Mail This Article to a Friend Desert hero The legendary Eduardo ‘Lalo’ Guerrero BY JOSH KUN

The last time I saw Eduardo "Lalo" Guerrero, he was eating chorizo and eggs in a leather-boothed Mexican restaurant on the southern edge of downtown Palm Springs. The legendary Chicano musician was 86, frail, and just beginning the slow decline that ended in his death last month. Juan Gabriel’s "Te lo pido por favor" was playing on the jukebox, and just outside the restaurant’s doors, Lalo’s star on the Palm Springs Walk of Fame was being baked by morning desert heat.

Lalo had moved out to the desert in the ’70s, around the same time my grandparents did. They belonged to different worlds. Mine were Jewish retirees who lived in a bucolic country-club bunker, ate cobb salads and sand dabs, drank Tab, and traveled by golf cart and Mercedes-Benz. They knew that the rest of the desert was different (my grandfather complained that the Mexican men he got dialysis next to never spoke English), but that didn’t keep them from pretending that their Palm Springs was the real Palm Springs.

Lalo didn’t move to the desert to retire. He came to keep working. As early as the ’50s, he would drive down from his home in East LA to headline one-nighters at Indio ballrooms like the American Legion Hall. He’d play his pachuco blend of Chicano dance music that mixed swing and R&B with corridos, rock and roll, and jump blues. "The 10 freeway wasn’t even here yet. There was nothing but desert, miles of desert. It was all raza out here."

Back in LA, Lalo had established himself as the patriarch of Chicano music, a living bridge between traditional Mexican music and Mexican-American hybrids like "Chicas Patas Boogie," the zoot-suited finger-snapping "Los Chucos Suaves," and the pop parodies "Tacos for Two" and "Ballad for Pancho Lopez." (This last turned Davy Crockett into a lazy overweight Chihuahan who after fighting with Pancho Villa and working in the California fields opens a taco stand and becomes "the king of Olvera Street.") He did most of his recording in the ’60s — more than 200 sides for the Colonial label — while running Lalo’s, a flagship East LA nightclub. (Check out the Arhoolie compilation Pachuco Boogie.) He was a musical icon throughout the Chicano Southwest, but his impact extended below the border as well, from his classic kids’ albums in Mexico City (he created Las Ardillitas, a Mexican answer to the Chipmunks) to "Canción Mexicana," a Lalo original made famous by Mexican legends Lucha Reyes and Lola Beltran.

After selling Lalo’s, he moved out to a section of Palm Springs that would later become Cathedral City and started playing at Las Casuelas Nuevas, a tony Mexican restaurant in swank Rancho Mirage. He played there for 24 years. "The audience from the beginning was elite, very elite. All the big names came through: Frank Sinatra, Milton Berle, Jane Russell. Sinatra even kissed me on the cheek." There was the time Berle had Sinatra in stitches when he requested "The Mexican Hat Dance" and then dropped his pants. Or the time Sinatra asked for "Quizas, Quizas, Quizas" and Berle shouted "Kiss ass, kiss ass, kiss ass."

In Palm Springs, Guerrero occupied two worlds. When he played for Latino audiences, he was a beloved community activist and musical spokesman for Mexican migrant life, the people’s singer responsible for "Barrio Viejo," "Corrido de Delano," and "El Corrido de César Chávez." When he played Palm Springs Hollywood parties and held court at Las Casuelas Nuevas, he was a Mexican entertainer with no past — equally beloved, but for different reasons. "All the Latinos who live in Indio and Coachella knew about me already. They knew all my records. But the Anglos didn’t know anything about my career."

My grandparents had no idea who Lalo was. One of his closest musical collaborators, Don Tosti, another Chicano regular on the Springs’ music circuit who recently passed away, lived just minutes from them, not far from the diner crowded with portable oxygen tanks where my grandfather loved to eat German pancakes soaked in lemon juice. They had never heard of him either. When you’re old and well off, "Third World California" (as Mike Davis recently dubbed the Coachella Valley) is another planet, even if it’s the one you’re living on.

When recently a new City Hall was built in Cathedral City, they named the street for Lalo. As payback, he wrote a tune that he sang to me between bites of his breakfast: "I wanna sing a ditty, about Cathedral City, the most wonderful city that I know."

After we finished, he stopped to look at his star on the Walk of Fame and a group of tourists stopped to look with us. "That’s me!" he told them. They smiled, then asked about the star of Bob Hope, who had died earlier that morning. "I think it’s right up that way," Lalo said, without an ounce of defeat in his voice. Then he quietly headed home.