Cue depressing laugh track. On Saturday the L.A. Times grossly misidentified a young "Ricky Martin" in a Calendar section photo caption for a piece about the new Menudo by Agustin Gurza. They called the guy on the far left Ricky. Hmmm. Menudo is a little before my time, so I didn't know who that was when I first saw the photo, but I knew it was wrong. Ricky Martin is only one of the most recognizable faces in the entire Western Hemisphere.
Then I received a finely detailed email from former Times contributor and playwright Gregg Barrios, sent to both Gurza and I, which broke down the error: The Times put the Martin name on Nuyorican Ray Reyes (pictured at right).
Barrios also supplied some wonderful detail on the other guys pictured (none of whom is actually Ricky) but it is somewhat unsuitable information for a family weblog. Gosh, this looks so terribly familiar I'll leave it up to the lede to a piece I did in December to lay out the embarrassing irony:
Agustin Gurza, a Los Angeles Times staff writer who covers Latino music and culture, was in the paper’s ground-floor cafeteria last July when he heard the young, mostly Mexican and Central American workers behind a lunch counter chatting away about an item in that day’s edition. Reventon Super Estrella, a multiband bill of several Mexican acts hosted by the Spanish-language radio station Super Estrella (107.1), had been written up as a Hot Ticket in the Calendar Weekend section. At first, Gurza saw it as a good sign that the editors had previewed a Latin music concert without his usual prodding. But his contentment was short-lived. The cafeteria kids were actually laughing about the paper misidentifying the item’s accompanying photo of singer Paulina Rubio as Thalia, another huge Latin pop star — and a Rubio rival. Not only that, Rubio wasn’t even appearing at the Super Estrella event. The workers told Gurza how the hosts of the Spanish-language TV program El Gordo y la Flaca were making fun of the paper for the error. Think of misidentifying Britney Spears as Christina Aguilera. “That’s like the worst mistake you can make, right?” Gurza recalls. “It was a miniscandal on Latino media... I think the problem was the wire photo — the wire service had misidentified the photo. But the point is, no one in the paper knew any different.”
P.S. That was Saturday morning. As of Monday night, still no correction. And yet, it's Menudo, you say, does it even matter who each of them are? They're dressed like intergalactic boy-pops!