Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. Live from the WNYC studios in SoHo, I'm Alison Stewart. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful you're here. On today's show, we'll speak with the show runner of the new Netflix series, Cameron. We'll kick off this month's full bio conversation about the life of trailblazing journalist Barbara Walters, and we'll talk about the memeification of Vice President Kamala Harris. That is the plan, so let's get this started with a look at the life and legacy of Mexican superstar, Juan Gabriel. [MUSIC- Juan Gabriel]

That was Juan Gabriel. He was a music industry titan. The Mexican singer sold more than 100 million albums during his 45 year career, cementing him as one of Mexico's biggest artists. For journalist Maria Garcia, Juan Gabriel, or Juanga for short, was more than just an artist. He was from her hometown, Juarez. To her, Juanga was someone who helped reconcile two important facets of her identity, her Mexican heritage, and her life as a queer woman. He is the subject of her latest podcast, My Divo.

In each episode, Maria examines one aspect of Juanga's life and reflects it back unto her own. Like looking at the star's difficult upbringing to understand her own family struggles, or examining his queerness to come to terms with her own coming out journey. What culminates is a tender, honest portrayal of life of a legend who helped Maria realize that her Mexican heritage and her queerness can coexist. Plus, the podcast features some great, incredible music, so for music fans, it's for you, too. It's called My Divo, and the full show is available to stream on Apple TV+. With me now is the host and the creator of her show, Maria Garcia. Maria, welcome.

Maria Garcia: Hi. Thank you so much for having me, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Before we dive in, a note to our listeners that this conversation contains mentions of abuse. Please take care while listening, and if you need help, the number for the national crisis line is 988. Maria, you created the podcast anything for Selena, which honored the artist Selena and the world created around her. It was named Apple Podcast, one of the Apple podcasts of the year of 2021. This podcast is about another artist, Juan Gabriel. What did you want to explore about? Juan Gabriel?

Maria Garcia: Wow, that's a great question. I really wanted to explore, as you said in the intro, how to be very sort of proudly Mexican while also being authentically myself, and that includes being a queer woman. I was thinking about this because a couple of years ago, I moved back to the place I was raised, US Mexico border. I was raised in El Paso, Texas, and also in Ciudad Juarez, right across border where I was born, and I hadn't lived at home in many years. I was different than when I left.

I came back as an openly queer woman, something that I wasn't fully when I left. I was thinking a lot about my son and my son having a close bond with my mother, and my son being close to our roots and sort of passing on all of the culture and beauty of being Mexican, that was on my mind a lot because I was back home. Like I said, it was different, and I had to come out to my mother. I was thinking about, how do I hold on to these things? How am I still the connective tissue between generations, between my mom and my son? I was thinking about lineage, about roots. While also thinking about being an openly queer woman with my Mexican family.

Now, there are plenty of openly queer Mexican folks living beautiful, full lives, but none of them are in my family. I am the first in my family, and so I was thinking about how to pave that road for myself authentically, and it felt like Juan Gabriel's life and legacy held some really important lessons.

Alison Stewart: Juan was known as El Divo de Juárez, which is the city where you both grew up. He sang about Juarez in his songs quite a bit. You mentioned that he had a refreshing take on the hometown, on your hometown. Why is that?

Maria Garcia: Growing up on the border, I learned at a very, very young age that the place I was from was incredibly misrepresented and misunderstood. I remember, like I have these distinct memories of watching the news as a kid and being like, "Wow, they make this place sound like it's all narco traffickers and violence, and there's so much beauty and culture and warmth here and art, and that gets drowned in these false narratives and stereotypes and fear mongering that happens around the border." But here was Juan Gabriel, who grew up in the streets of Juarez in a bohemian artistic scene, and he boasted about the richness of Ciudad Juarez, about the warmth of border people, about this being the border where God should live. Sometimes he exaggerated a little bit. He had this sort of intense hometown pride, but it served as an antidote for the larger false narratives around the border. That really, really stuck with me, and frankly, it gave me permission to be a proud fronteriza person who is proud to be from here.

Alison Stewart: He grew up relatively poor, and he had to hustle really hard and sing and perform in nightclubs at Juarez to make ends meet. Who was one of the first people to actually recognize his talent?

Maria Garcia: Oh, my goodness. Juan Gabriel moved up north to the Mexican town, the border town of Ciudad Juarez, like a lot of people from southern Mexico do, looking for opportunity and work. His mother did when he was a toddler, and she had to work as a maid, for lack of a better word, in wealthy homes, and she couldn't take him with her. He was carrying shopping bags for people, selling candy in the streets since he was three years old. After a while, his mother realized she could no longer care for him, and she put him essentially, in a shelter, and that's where he was until he was 13 years old.

He talked about growing up with the sense of abandonment. His mother visited him, his biography says maybe a total of, like three times over those years, and so he grew up with a lot of pain and hunger for love and acceptance. At 13, he ran away and escaped the shelter, and he basically started sleeping wherever he could, and one of those places was in the Juarez Strip, which was a strip of nightclubs. This was in when Ciudad Juarez was like the Las Vegas of the Southwest.

Juarez has this rich history of being like bohemian party city, where Hollywood starlets would go to get a quick divorce or even a quick wedding. Clubs were open all night, and here was like 13 year old, Juan Gabriel, trying to get into these clubs. He was underage, so they would hardly let him, but he would sneak in when he could, and he would sing, and people recognized. Juaren says, recognized really early on, like, "Wow, this is a talent." He was known locally since he was, like 13.

I know people from my parents era who remember, like, "Oh, I remember when Juanga was a waiter here. I remember seeing him as a teenager." But then, of course, later on, he moved to Mexico City, and we uncovered some evidence that shows he was profiled and criminalized for being queer there, charged with some false crimes, ended up in prison, and the prison director eventually noticed him. He had a famous singer who then helped Juan Gabriel get out of prison and land his first record deal.

Alison Stewart: We're talking to Maria Garcia, the host and creator of My Divo, a podcast examining the life and legacy of Mexican singer and superstar Juan Gabriel. It's now on Apple TV+. You describe Juanga as being charming and warm and a tender persona, even in the public eye, you use the word exuberant a lot to describe his fashion and his artistry and personality. Where do we see the exuberance?

Maria Garcia: Oh, my gosh. In everything. I mean, he was the antithesis of what the male Mexican pop star was at that time. Here he was with his high pitched voice, his sparkly outfits, his dance moves that were provocative and racy, not just for that era, but even now. We see it in everything, in his presence and the way he spoke to people. I have a lot of people who told me throughout my reporting, like, "Junga never explicitly said he was gay," and one, you'll hear in the podcast that we uncovered that he, in fact, did say that, and there's evidence. But two, I believe that what you see on stage with Juan Gabriel is freedom. He is free to be himself. To me, he is the embodiment of queer exuberance.

We see him wearing a little makeup, these beautiful, elaborate outfits with embroidery and glitter, like I said, his high pitched voice, which was incredibly rare for the time. You have to remember, he was not only a pop star, but what made him so different is that he also performed traditional Mexican music and innovated traditional folkloric Mexican music with Mariachi. At that time, the only male artists who were doing it, were these mustachioed machos, like Vicente Fernandez, who were singing about conquest and revenge and being a king, and here was Juan Gabriel talking about the eternal optimism of the sun rising every day.

He was just truly the antithesis of the macho male pop star at the time, and he did it on his own terms, and he was still beloved.

Alison Stewart: As he started to become more popular, rumors began circulating about his sexuality, and a big part of the podcast is understanding his queerness and his queer identity. When was the first time that you heard rumors that Juan Gabrielle was gay?

Maria Garcia: Oh, my gosh, when I was a kid. I mean, it was just in the air. For many, many Mexicans, he was the first example of a queer person in our lives. He was the very first person who somebody called gay in front of us, and so he was the biggest representation of queerness. Even though, like I said, he wasn't publicly out, newscasters would allude to it. Latin American comedy skits would make fun of him for it. There was this duality with him in a way, because he could, and he was often the butt of homophobic jokes, but there was also a reverence and a love for him as an artist. Because his compositions truly are the soundtrack of Mexican life.

Like if you want to explain Mexican culture to somebody, play them a Juan Gabriel song, they are the essence of Mexican identity. He was beloved by a people, while also ridiculed, and it gave you a sense of what reaction to you as a queer person was going to be. I think in the US we have these ideas of coming out as being really tragic or really beautiful and cathartic, when often, it's in the middle, It's this inelegant, nuanced dance, and reaction is often mixed. I think that's what Juan Gabriel had. He had an audience that loved him, adored him, while at the same time, allowed him to serve as a proxy to unleash their homophobia.

Alison Stewart: Even though he never came out. You speak to many of his queer fans who decoded Juan Gabriel's lyrics, finding queer coded connotations in his music. Let's listen to this clip from My Divo.

[CLIP FROMaria Garcia: My Divo]

You should know that in this file, there are pages and pages of notes on Juan Gabriel's evaluations with the social worker while he was detained. While at the prison, he told officials a story that I think shows what young Juanga, without any family support, was going through when he escaped the shelter. He said he roamed the streets of Juarez looking for work. He did what he could to survive, washed other people's clothes, cleaned a church, waited tables. Then he met a priest.

The priest invited teenage Juanga to live with him as his servant. The file actually uses that word, sirviente. Juan Gabriel agreed. Then the file reads, the priest raped him. Juan Gavriel was 14 years old.

Alison Stewart: Obviously, we picked the wrong clip, got to play there. That was a very shocking revelation about his childhood. What was your immediate reaction when you found that piece of evidence?

Maria Garcia: I was surprised how enraged I felt. I did not expect to find that. We were at the Mexican National Archives in Mexico City, and the thing is, I've spoken to dozens of people, some of them in his inner circle, and so I had heard this rumor before. Somebody had told me, "Oh, you know, Juanga, to people who were incredibly close to him, would tell them that he had been sexually assaulted by a priest when he was a teen," and I didn't plan on reporting that because, like I said, it was just people who would mention it.

Then I went to the Mexican National Archives, and I found this prison file that was thought to be lost for many years and that the content hasn't been published. I was reading it, and I discovered basically, when Juan Gabriel was 15/16 years old in Mexico City, he was detained by a police officer, essentially just for looking gay. Charged with pedophilia, which was a very common tactic at that time, to persecute, like a loophole to persecute queer people. Of course, that was a baseless accusation, and the charge was later dropped, but here he was, 15/16, scared, terrified, being interrogated by police with a social worker present. There's just this fascination with his queerness, and so he just--

They ask him about his sexual history. They ask him who he has slept with. They ask him when he knew he was gay. He talked about when he was five years old, knowing that he liked to play with dolls and knowing even then, that he wasn't like the other boys, and that if he could change, he would. Then when they ask him about his sexual history, he tells them this harrowing story about being the victim of sexual abuse by this priest.

I felt so much rage, to my surprise, and I was trying to sort of figure out, like, why do I feel this way? Why is this landing on me so intensely? I realized it's because I was thinking of an incredibly similar story that happened to my mother in Ciudad Juarez, also at an age very similar to Juan Gabriel when this assault happened. My mother was, and she was also sexually assaulted in Ciudad Juarez. In both cases, the assault happened because Juan Gabriel's mom and my mother's mother, my grandmother, rejected both of them and forced them to live with people who did not have their best interest in mind. Forced them to be vulnerable and exposed in a world of people who were trying to hurt them and didn't protect them and, in fact, put them in harm's way.

I realized that Juan Gabriel's story was triggering me to reckon with the secret about my mother's sexual assault that I had carried with me for many, many years, something she hadn't even told my brother. When I came back from the archives, talked to my mom, and I said, "I found this out about Juan Gabriel. It made me feel this way because it was so similar to your story," and we got to talking. My mom, I was so proud of her. She said, "It's time. It's time to release the secret, it's time to let it go. I'm sorry that I have made you carry this alone for so many years. I'm ready to talk about this." You hear it in the podcast.

Alison Stewart: We're talking to Maria Garcia, the host and creator of My Divo, a podcast examining the life and legacy of Mexican singer and superstar Juan Gabriel. I want to mention that My Divo is a bilingual podcast. You produce each episode in both English and Spanish. Are you catering to two different audiences with different cultural, linguistic backgrounds, or is it a good story, a good story?

Maria Garcia: Both. Juanga's story is fascinating. This is not a straight biography podcast. You can find his story, and there's been a bio series about it, but we did uncover, like I said, bombshells and new details about his life that really reframe him in a much more nuanced way. It's also a story about my own queer and cultural exploration. It's to me, the storytelling is worthy in both languages, but there are some nuances, right?

Like a Mexican audience is going to receive this differently, and it's going to land differently for them than even a US Latino audience or an audience that is not familiar with Juan Gabriel. We did take very careful editorial decisions on how to speak authentically to both audiences. We had a really great editor, a Mexican editor, Fernando Hernandez, who was really great in helping us create the Spanish version. I think there's something of value for both audiences.

Alison Stewart: In 2016, Juan Gabriel died at the age of 66 of a heart attack. How did you and your family react?

Maria Garcia: Oh, my gosh, I was devastated. I was absolutely devastated. One, I was devastated because he was so young, it was so unexpected. We really thought we took him for granted. We just thought Juanga was gonna be here for decades to come. Nobody thought that he was going to die of a heart attack. He was still spry and performing these long concerts, and he was still dancing in such a lively, beautiful way, on stage. He was still his very vibrant self.

He had performed in LA the night before, and so it was just so incredibly shocking. I was living in New York City at the time, and I remember watching the news on the television. My child was a toddler, and watching people in Ciudad Juarez and just yearning to be home. Yearning to be among Juarez and people from the border and mourning and celebrating him in community.

I was also devastated because I never got to see him in concert, which is so sad. It was one of my biggest regrets. I still miss him very much. I think my mom, for example, there are these conspiracy theories that are baseless and not true, that he's still alive. I think my mom still struggles with the fact that he's not here and will sometimes start believing the conspiracy theories. Theories like, "He was spotted, so and so said he called her." I think it's just still grappling with the loss.

Alison Stewart: The podcast is called My Divo. It's an examining the life and legacy of Mexican singer and superstar Juan Gabriel. It is now out on Apple TV+. I've been speaking with its host and creator, Maria Garcia. Maria, thank you for being with us.

Maria Garcia: Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much, Alison. I just want to say, the podcast is also available widely. It's available on any podcast app that you listen to podcasts. It's not just available on Apple Podcasts. You can binge the whole series right now on Apple Podcasts, but there are six episodes available anywhere you listen to podcasts, and they'll be releasing weekly.

Alison Stewart: Awesome. Let's go out on Juan Gabriel with Querida.

[MUSIC- Juan Gabriel: Querida]

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