Smithsonian embraces Fresno musician’s songs of Chicano movement
It’s ironic: Agustín Lira should have been born an American.
His mother, a U.S. citizen, was illegally deported in the 1930s. Lira was born in Mexico and came to California as an undocumented migrant farmworker before becoming an activist.
The Fresno man’s experiences fuel his work, using art to talk about inequality. Despite the struggles — picking crops from age 7, growing up in poverty, being homeless for a while — he is on the brink of releasing an album of his songs from the Chicano movement of the 1960s for that most quintessential of American institutions, the Smithsonian…
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