Gaviota traidora de flor silvestre biography
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Flor Silvestre, beloved Mexican singer, actress and musical matriarch, dies at 90
In the annals of show-business rechristenings, few boast a better origin story than the Mexican singer-actress Flor Silvestre.
Born Guillermina Jiménez Chabolla in 1930, she moved at 13 with her family from their native Guanajuato to Mexico City because her mother wanted to live in the megalopolis. The ingenue quickly established herself as an up-and-comer in concert halls and radio, which drew the attention of producers and musicians.
In one appearance, she took on the persona of a soldadera, a female soldier from the Mexican Revolution lionized in the country’s history as amazons. A promoter took a look at the gangly teen and scoffed.
“You’re no soldadera,” he told Chabolla. “You’re nothing like a soldadera. You are a flower.”
He summarily branded her Flor Silvestre — Wild Flower — after a popular film and song of the time about a rural woman whose beauty won the love of the son of a lando
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Behind the story: A lifetime of listening to Pepe Aguilar and his family suddenly becomes personal
After the Beatles and maybe Tupac, there’s probably no music act whose songs I’ve listened to more than the collective output of the Aguilar family from Zacatecas: Father Antonio, wife Flor Silvestre; sons Antonio Jr. and Pepe; and Pepe’s children, Leonardo and Ángela.
Even if I didn’t always care for their stuff.
Their rancheras, norteñas, cumbias, corridos and bandas have been inescapable in my life, and are embedded in my DNA. My mother and father, a good decade before they even met, listened to Antonio and Flor at the Million Dollar Theater in downtown Los Angeles when Mami y Papi were young adults who had just arrived in the United States from the north-central Mexican state of Zacatecas and needed a respite from their hard lives.
One of my earliest memories is Mami and Papi taking my baby sister and me to an Aguilar show in the early 1980s at the Anaheim Convention
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Flor Silvestre
Flor Silvestre is a Mexican singer, actress, and equestrienne whose career on stage, screen, and television spans more than sju decades. She is best known to international audiences as part of the rodeo-performing dynasty led by her husband, fellow singer and actor Antonio Aguilar.
Acclaimed for her sensual beauty on screen and her lovely, natural vocals, Silvestre became a sought-after film star during the so-called Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the 1940s. She shared the marquee with top artists of the day, such as María Felix and Miguel Aceves Mejía, and she won fans with her performance of popular rancheras in her films. From the beginning, Silvestre launched a concurrent recording career, making a series of successful albums for three major labels: Columbia Records, RCA Victor, and especially Musart, the Mexican independent.
By 1964, the trade journal Cashbox had listed her among the Top 10 Mexican folkloric acts in the U.S., along with