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 ...

Talk to some people (we guess), and they'll tell you that '90s nostalgia is the only kind of nostalgia that matters. But let's be honest: Within the '90s-rock spectrum, as far as quality is concerned, ...

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 ...

If you want to see how rising sea levels will change Orange County over the course of this century, you have to go to Balboa Island. For much of the 19th century, what we now call Balboa Island was ...

At the end of the first chapter of her memoir Glitter Saints, creator of international clothing company Magnolia Pearl, Robin Brown, is whisked up to the top of a Ferris Wheel by her carnival-circuit ...

One of the best parts about buying a physical album (if you still do that sort of thing) is the album cover art. And if you're a metalhead or crusty punker, the more brutal and bloody it is, the ...

DEAR MEXICAN: I've heard the Tijuana donkey show featuring a female whore is not real other than the fact they do bring out a donkey and do some simulation for people who are drunk.

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 ...

The story of the 1990 New Music Seminar brawl has been whispered about for decades but never fully told—until now. This excerpt comes from Ben Westhoff's upcoming book Original Gangstas: The Untold ...

At the end of October, The Orange County Register did what any Southern California media outlet looking for an easy Halloween story does: send a reporter to Black Star Canyon. The remote site, reached ...

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 ...