In May of 1992, Rosalino “Chalino” Sanchez was killed in his home state of Sinaloa, Mexico.
His recording career spanned just four years and ended with his untimely death at 31 years old. Yet in that time, the self-made singer-songwriter had sparked a revival of Mexican corridos — gritty folk tales told in songs that transcended borders and generations. Many of today’s most popular Mexican artists, from Natanael Cano to Fuerza Regida, cite Sanchez as an inspiration.
Despite the scale of his impact, the first written account of Sanchez’s life came almost a decade later, in 2001, when award-winning author and journalist Sam Quiñonespublished a book featuring the story of the often-fabled musician who, so he wrote, “changed everything.”
“To me, the great lesson of Chalino Sanchez was not dressing up in cowboy hats with guns and blazers; it was independence [and] non-conformity,” said Quiñones, author of “True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx.”
Quiñones joined the latest episode of “The De Los Podcast,” alongside hosts and Times editors Fidel Martinez and Suzy Exposito, to discuss his chronicle of Chalino Sanchez and his lasting legacy on Latin music and Mexican American identity.
“Before Chalino, Mexican kids in South L.A. were growing up ashamed of their parents’ music,” Quiñones said. “It was ‘old-timey,’ it was ‘corny’… and then comes Chalino.”
Quiñones recalled interviews with friends, family and collaborators of Sanchez, who helped him piece together a timeline of the artist’s life. Born into poverty in Sinaloa, Sanchez would establish a music career in the U.S., where he started out by selling his cassette tapes in South L.A. neighborhoods like Inglewood.
“A lot of Chalino’s life, accomplishments and music [were] not chronicled until he died,” Martinez said. “He is someone who is a mythical figure. He is as much a folklore [tale] himself as much as he is a folkloric artist. … A lot of that is because his legend is preserved through word of mouth.”
In tracking down a life retold through oral history, Quiñones said writing a biography about Chalino Sanchez involved “accepting that there would be myth.”
“There was nothing written about him,” explained Quiñones. “I tracked down the people who knew him to make that 20-page story [in my book]. I interviewed his recording engineer Angel Parra, who — like how Elvis was discovered by Sam Phillips in a recording studio — found Chalino.”
Parra was a valuable resource for Quiñones to break the story of how Sanchez went from small-time drug-dealer and assistant coyote to recording artist — whose singing style, as it turned out, was hard to imitate.
“Sanchez didn’t think he was a singer,” Quiñones said. “Part of the amazing story of Chalino is that everyone thought he sang badly, except for his hardcore fans. They loved him because he sang just like they did.”
Quiñones is now writing a full-length biography on Sanchez. On “The De Los Podcast,” he shared some of the offbeat stories that shaped the book— including how Sanchez unknowingly sparked a tuba-stealing craze in L.A., which Quiñones chronicled in his 2025 book, “The Perfect Tuba.”
You can watch the full episode below.
The post ‘The De Los Podcast’: Chalino Sanchez is the King of Corridos. Sam Quiñones was the first to tell his story. appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
