Dan Guerrero On Linda Ronstadt's New Memoir Feel Like Home: A Song For The Sonoran Borderlands

Maggie LePique sits down with Dan Guerrero, an award-winning producer/director of diverse programming for network and cable television and of live arts and culture concert events at prestigious venues including the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the LA Opera and multiple events at the Kennedy Center in DC. The eclectic artist also tours with his autobiographical solo play ¡Gaytino! Made in America that was recently filmed and is screening at U.S. Film Festivals. Guerrero is also an influential activist for both the Latinx and LGBTQ communities and is a popular figure on the speaking circuit. But he is most proud of his work as an educator teaching the course ¡Gaytino! Performance and the Power of One at UCLA. That led to his appointment as a UC Regents lecturer jointly in the UCLA Cesar E. Chavez Chicano/a Studies and LGBTQ Departments. Dan and I discuss Linda Ronstadt's new Memoir Feels Like Home: A Song For The Sonoran Borderlands as well as the companion CD from Putumayo Records: Feels Like Home: Songs from the Sonoran Borderlands—Linda Ronstadt’s Musical Odyssey.  In Feels Like Home, Grammy award-winning singer Linda Ronstadt effortlessly evokes the magical panorama of the Sonoran borderlands, a landscape etched by sunlight and carved by wind, offering a personal tour of the place where she came of age, built around meals and memories. Following her best-selling musical memoir, Simple Dreams, this book seamlessly braids together Ronstadt’s recollections of people and their passions in a region little understood in the rest of the United States.The granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, Ronstadt celebrates the marvelous flavors and indomitable people on both sides of the border in this road trip through the high desert. Written in collaboration with Lawrence Downes and illustrated throughout with stunning photographs by Bill Steen, Feels Like Home features 20 recipes for traditional Sonoran dishes and a bevy of revelations for Ronstadt’s admirers, including never-before-seen family photos. If this book were a radio signal, you might first pick it up on an Arizona highway, well south of Phoenix, coming into the glow of Ronstadt’s hometown of Tucson. It would be playing the old canciones, from a time when the border was a place not of peril but of possibility.Putumayo has released Feels Like Home: Songs from the Sonoran Borderlands—Linda Ronstadt’s Musical Odyssey, a musical accompaniment to the acclaimed singer’s new book, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands, published by Heyday Books. The musical collection was co-curated by Ronstadt and Putumayo founder Dan Storper and includes influential songs from her childhood and career, as well as several of her own interpretations of classic Mexican songs. Participating artists include legends and musical explorers Lalo Guerrero, Ry Cooder, Jackson Browne, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Neil Young, Taj Mahal and David Hidalgo. Source: https://lindaronstadt.com/book/feels-like-home/Source: https://www.putumayo.com/feels-like-homeSource: https://www.heydaybooks.com/catalog/feels-like-home/?utm_source=carousel&utm_id=flikSource: http://www.danguerrero.comThis episode is from an archive from the KPFK program Profiles adapted for podcast.Host Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo. She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked for Pacifica station KPFK Radio in Los Angeles since 1994.Send us Fan MailSupport the show@profileswithmaggielepique@maggielepique