Vicente Fernandez, thehe crooner to sombreros and romances that rocked festive evenings and generations of broken hearts from Mexico to Argentina passed away this Sunday, December 12 at the age of 81 in a hospital in Guadalajara, the second city of the country, has posted his family on Instagram.
The absolute master of “rancheras”, songs about the torments of love with several guitars and inevitable trumpets, had been hospitalized since a fall in early August in his ranch near Guadalajara, capital of the state of Jalisco, cradle of tequila and stronghold of the most dangerous active drug cartel.
The sentimental and macho interpreter assumed to Por tu maldito amor (For your cursed love) and very bittersweet Que te vaya bonito (I wish you the best) has sold 70 million records in a fifty-year career spanning three Grammys and nine Latin Grammys.
Icon of a Mexico all in shadows and lights, refined and violent, “Chente” had known the tragedy of his life during a tour in 1998 when his son Vicente Fernandez Jr was kidnapped for 121 days against a ransom demand of 10 million dollars by a criminal gang who cut off two fingers. One of his other sons would have been the friend of a capo of the Sinaloa cartel, according to the Argentinian journalist Olga Wornat who has just published a biography not authorized by the family, El ultimo rey (the last king).
With his boots, sideburns, thick eyebrows and mustache, the “Sinatra of ranchera music” – as the American newspaper The Houston Chronicle dubbed him in 1991 – hated a fierce hatred for one of his rivals who died in 2016, Juan Gabriel, “because he was gay and Chente was a man from another era”, adds Olga Wornat.
Very symbolically, Fernandez bows out on the day when tens of thousands of pilgrims converge on the Sanctuary of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City, the source of inspiration for the Mariachi orchestras. And the day a Guadalajara football club, Atlas, will try to win their first title in decades on Sunday night.
Among other multiple initial reactions, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador greeted a “symbol of ranchera music of our time, known and recognized in Mexico and abroad”.