{"id":118,"date":"2007-06-05T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-05T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/lalupe\/"},"modified":"2022-03-29T15:01:26","modified_gmt":"2022-03-29T22:01:26","slug":"lalupe","status":"publish","type":"films","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/documentaries\/lalupe\/","title":{"rendered":"La Lupe Queen of Latin Soul"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A rebel and innovator, pop singer Lupe Yoli, otherwise known as La Lupe or La Yiyiyi, was renowned for her emotional performance style. Her renditions of classics such as \u201cMy Way,\u201d \u201cFever\u201d and \u201cGoing Out of My Head\u201d were famous worldwide. But the legendary Cuban-born star was also a single mother of two, a survivor of domestic abuse and a Santera who later became an evangelist Christian speaker. <em>La Lupe Queen of Latin Soul<\/em>\u00a0tells La Lupe\u2019s story through character-driven interviews in first-person anecdotes, in an oral history much like those found in a folk ballad or a bolero.<\/p>\n<p>Born in Cuba in 1936, La Lupe first hit La Habana\u2019s music scene in the 1950s. Her older sister Norma Yoli describes her as \u201cjust another black girl from Santiago,\u201d one who loved to imitate the singers she heard on the radio. One of these was Olga Guillot, who at the time was Cuba\u2019s reigning bolero singer. As the Cuban Revolution dawned, La Lupe, like many artists at the time, left Cuba, claiming, \u201cThere was no room in Cuba for me and the revolution.\u201d She emerged in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s as the Queen of Latin Soul, performing alongside peers such as Mongo Santamaria, Tito Puente and Celia Cruz.<\/p>\n<p>Shot in New York City, Miami, La Habana and Puerto Rico,\u00a0<em>La Lupe<\/em> evokes two groundbreaking cultural periods through interviews and rare archival footage: pre-Revolutionary 1950s La Habana and the burgeoning Latin music scene in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. The film begins with La Lupe\u2019s funeral in 1992\u2014attended by fans, family and the whole of New York\u2019s Latino music aristocracy\u2014and follows her from poverty to celebrity and back again.<\/p>\n<p>A long-time gay icon who was often described as the first performance artist, La Lupe was ahead of her time. In trying to discover who Lupe was,\u00a0<em>La Lupe<\/em> also provides a collective portrait of mid-20th-century Latin musical history.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>The Filmmaker<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Ela Troyano<br \/>\n<\/strong>Ela Troyano is an award-winning Cuban-born filmmaker. Her half-hour ITVS short, <i>Carmelita Tropicana<\/i>, won the coveted Teddy Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival as well as the Audience and Critics Award at the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Her debut feature film, <i>Latin Boys Go To Hell<\/i>, remains a cult hit on the Web and was recently shown on Showtime. Both of these films were screened theatrically in the U.S. and at festivals in Europe, Australia and Japan.<\/p>\n<p>Troyano has also directed episodic action television on the drama series <i>Reyes y Rey<\/i> and the comedy <i>Angeles<\/i>, produced by Stu Segall for Telemundo\/Sony, and the documentary <i>Urban Youth in the 21st Century<\/i> for Canal Plus in Spain.<\/p>\n<p>Troyano has also worked as a theater director, most recently in the critically acclaimed Off-Broadway production <i>A to B<\/i> by Ricardo Bracho, and with video art installations, most recently with renowned composer John Zorn and the Tiffany Mills Company at the Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Arts Center and the Joyce Theater.<\/p>\n<p>Selected awards include a Rockefeller Fellowship, a screenwriting workshop at Sundance with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and funding from Creative Capital, Jerome Foundation, Ford Foundation, Latino Public Broadcasting and the New York State Council on the Arts.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Legendary Afro-Cuban pop singer Lupe Yoli, the Queen of Latin Soul, was famous for her emotional &#8212; and controversial &#8212; performances before her tragic death in 1992. She was also a long-time gay icon who was often described as ahead of her time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":10919,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"topic":[1216],"class_list":["post-118","films","type-films","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topic-arts-and-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>La Lupe Queen of Latin Soul | Lupe Victoria Yoli | Independent Lens | PBS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"La Lupe Queen of Latin Soul documents the life, work and legacy of Afro Cuban pop singer Lupe Victoria Yoli, who rose to fame in the 1960s and died virtually unknown in 1992.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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