This is part of a special series, Cumbia Across Latin America, a visual report across six countries developed over several years, covering the people, places and cultures that keep this music genre alive.

Cumbia arrived in Monterrey, a mountain city in northern Mexico often called “Colombia Chiquita” (Little Colombia), in the 1960s, when DJs began collecting Colombian cumbia and tropical records to play at local clubs and street parties. They reshaped the music, creating cumbia rebajada, or slowed-down cumbia.⁠ This new style, along with Monterrey’s fascination with Colombia, sparked an urban subculture that remains vibrant today.⁠
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This coverage was made with the support of the National Geographic Society Explorer program.

Karla Gachet is a photojournalist based in Los Angeles. You can see more of Karla’s work on her website, KarlaGachet.com, or on Instagram at @kchete77.

Hollywood studios did not want Charlie Chaplin to make The Great Dictator. When he first started writing the script in 1938, the U.S. had not yet entered World War II. In fact, it still enjoyed friendly diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany, as well as many lucrative business ones.

So Chaplin financed The Great Dictator himself. He took advantage of his uncanny resemblance to Adolf Hitler by playing an obvious parody of the Nazi leader, named Adenoid Hynkel, in the film. But the parallels continued, as noted in the 2002 documentary, The Tramp and Dictator.

“Charlie Chaplin, the Little Tramp, and Adolf Hitler, the leader of Germany, had more in common than just a moustache,” says the narrator. “They were born in the same week of the same month of the same year. A few years before Chaplin became famous as the Tramp, Hitler was a tramp. Both were outsiders who left their homeland to conquer the world. They became the best loved and most hated men of their time.”

In The Great Dictator, Chaplin played another character as well: a likeable Jewish barber who finds himself mistaken for the odious Hynkel and who, at the end of the film, delivers an incredibly moving speech.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor,” he gently informs an assembly of Hynkel’s army and advisors. “I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible. Jew, gentile, Black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery.”

Never before this film had the biggest star of silent film spoken aloud on screen.

“Greed has poisoned men’s souls,” he continues, “has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in.”

Later, Charlie Chaplin said he hoped that talking from his heart might even help to end the war.

“Machinery that gives abundance, has left us in want,” he says in the speech. “Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.”

Some critics found the speech overly sentimental. Chaplin’s film also stirred the ire of right-wing politicians and power brokers in Washington including Sen. Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, who wrongly accused him of being a Communist sympathizer. The FBI would eventually compile a 1,900 page file on him.

The film was indeed subversive, and impressively so, said science fiction legend Ray Bradbury, who was interviewed in the documentary The Tramp and Dictator before his death in 2012.

“Comedy is the greatest way to attack anything like a totalitarian regime. They can’t stand it,” Bradbury said. “At the end of the speech, [Chaplin] dares to remind you that you don’t have to go on killing. You don’t have to be a totalitarian. You can make do with the worst people in the world. Somehow you must.”

Chaplin ended his speech with an appeal to the humanity of everyone facing war. “Let us fight for the world of reason,” he implored. “A world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!”

The Great Dictator was released years before the world was aware of the extent of Nazi crimes against humanity. Later, Chaplin said he never would have made a comedy about Hitler had he known. But 85 years after it debuted, his movie stands as a testament to how art can stand up to tyranny, and how hard it can fight.

Demonstrators in Berlin wave flags and hold a poster reading “Peace with Russia and China” as they rally in front of a screen displaying a scene from the movie The Great Dictator during the “Peace – Freedom – Referendum” demonstration in May 2025.

Ralf Hirschberger/AFP via Getty Images

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Ralf Hirschberger/AFP via Getty Images

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The parkway garden sits on a commercial stretch of Glendale’s Brand Boulevard. It’s a modest patch of native plants, hardly visible from the road.

But this baby plot is the pride and joy of the tight-knit group of green thumbers who tend to it. They gather there every last Sunday of the month for Club Gay Gardens, a garden club catering to queer Angelenos, to maintain the parkway strip, learn about native gardening and connect with other plant lovers.

At Club Gay Gardens’ September gathering, attendees ranged in age and botanical savvy, with some boasting degrees in horticulture and others just happy to lend a hand. After a brief round of introductions — pronouns optional, astrological signs mandatory — they were broken into groups of seed-sorters, pavers, planters and detailers (a euphemism for trash crew).

Club regular Juno Stilley sat inside with the seed-sorters, grinding white sage between her fingers. Stilley, who grew up in L.A., attended her first club meeting in 2023 and since then has established her own landscape design and maintenance business, Juno Garden.

Before Club Gay Gardens, Stilley said her landscaping operation was just “a little seed,” but attending club meetups equipped her with the educational resources and sheer confidence to turn it into a full-time gig.

Juno Stilley reaches for a dried bundle of stems while sorting seeds.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

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Stilley can identify most plant species in the parkway garden at a glance, but she still comes every week that she can, excited to glean fresh wisdom.

“I always learn something when I’m here,” Stilley said, “because there’s so many people who come with different sorts of plant knowledge, and there’s infinite different things about plants and ecology.”

When it comes to plant expertise, Club Gay Gardens co-founder Maggie Smart-McCabe is among the stiffest competition, though she’s far too humble to say so herself.

The 27-year-old urban ecologist and biodiversity educator, originally from New Jersey, has spent the last five years working in composting and native gardening. She’s also a skilled community organizer and often cited as the glue that holds Club Gay Gardens together.

“We’re really trying to find ways to help people reimagine their connection to space, too,” Club Gay Gardens co-founder Maggie Smart-McCabe said. “When you’re walking down a street, you should feel at home there.”

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

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In 2022, Smart-McCabe met her match in Linnea Torres, a 29-year-old graphic designer for Junior High, the mixed-use arts and event space near the parkway garden. The club co-founders connected on Instagram after Torres posted some photos of the garden — at that time, they were the only person taking care of it — and planned to meet up a few weeks later.

“Basically, it was a blind date between the two of us,” Smart-McCabe said. Luckily, the pair gelled easily, but they also realized that maintaining the native garden would be too tall an order for them alone.

“We were like, ‘Let’s try and just call out and see if we can get some volunteers to show up,’” Smart-McCabe said. “And people showed up.”

For months, it was just prep work: sheet mulching, teaching and more sheet mulching. The soil was so compacted that each time they dug a planting hole, it took an hour to drain. By the following spring, the first wildflowers had sprung up, and the native plants were digging deep root systems.

Progress has come in waves, with hot L.A. summers turning the plants “crispy,” Torres said, and passersby always leaving behind strange litter. Recently, they found an Abraham Lincoln magnet in the brush.

“People are gonna stomp on your plants,” Smart-McCabe said. “It’s pretty brutal, like, the parkway strip is a pretty hostile environment.”

But as the garden has grown, its eldest and most mature plants have started shielding its youngest, and walkers have been more careful about where they step. When patches do sustain damage, the gardeners are persistent in nursing them back to health.

“Every seed needs certain conditions to thrive, and I think so do people,” said Nina Raj of the Altadena Seed Library. “Especially for queer folks, I think that’s a potent metaphor.”

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

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That persistence feels like a queer instinct to Nina Raj, founder of the Altadena Seed Library. The community-run initiative provides free seeds to L.A. residents through a network of exchange boxes throughout the area, one of which is at Junior High.

“There’s something really potent about queer people rooting for the underdog,” Raj said. “And so something like a little parkway garden that takes a lot of extra care is really sweet, because you’re kind of rooting for it to thrive despite all the odds.”

Smart-McCabe agreed that queer people are drawn to spaces where they can take care of something together.

“Maybe that kind of helps people with any other sort of negative relationships they may have with home,” she said.

At the parkway in late September, Smart-McCabe plunged her shovel into the dirt a third time. The club co-founder was beginning the day’s plant demo, and on her first two swings, she’d hit grate below the ground. This time, as she sunk the metal into the earth, the sound was soft.

“Yes! We found soil! At the parkway!” Smart-McCabe shouted victoriously. The group cheered as though she’d won the Powerball jackpot.

Linnea Torres prepares to place a plant into a planter box.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Beside Smart-McCabe’s planting hole is a raised plant bed, which the gardeners designated as the “goth” bed with dark plants only. On the opposite end of the parkway is its fraternal twin, the “rainbow” bed — a free-for-all of colorful plants. In between, rows of mallow and other native plants were separated by pavers.

As Smart McCabe began sending club attendees to their stations, Cassandra Marketos announced that her trunk was packed with donations from Silver Lake’s Plant Material. The plants were too dead for the nursery to sell.

“We love rejects,” Smart-McCabe said with a grin.

Like many of her peers, Smart-McCabe grew up envisioning home gardeners as conforming to a very particular archetype: usually wealthy, often white and always women. With Club Gay Gardens, she and Torres sought to deconstruct that archetype.

They did so with the club’s name, a riff on the 1975 documentary “Grey Gardens,” which chronicles the lives of ex-socialites Edith “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale, who, despite retiring to a rundown Long Island estate, continue sporting luxurious furs and gowns as they go about their daily lives.

Gardeners at the September meetup were dressed in various looks, from frayed overalls and baseball caps to babydoll dresses and chokers.

Bex Muñoz waters a planting hole in a raised garden bed.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

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Niamh Sprout wore a smattering of chunky silver rings, which complemented the long black nails she had dug into the parkway soil as Smart-McCabe did her plant demo. It was nearly impossible for Sprout to scrape the dirt completely from under her nails, but after a lifetime of being “raised by plants,” as she put it, she was used to the mess.

“I don’t have the traditional hands of a gardener,” Sprout said at the seed-sorting table. “For me, it’s gotten to the point where, like, I’m so used to it, and it doesn’t feel so strange.”

“Everyone’s always been like, ‘Oh, so how do you take care of plants?’” Niamh Sprout said. “I’m like, ‘I just listen to them. They just tell me how they need to be taken care of.’”

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

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From the beginning, Smart-McCabe and Torres didn’t want Club Gay Gardens to exist in a vacuum. They wanted to politicize the act of gardening and place it within a broader social justice framework.

As part of that mission, the pair each year hosts an event called Pisces Plantasia, which features native plant resources, local artists and more. In its first year, profits from the event went to the Palestine Children Relief Fund. This past year, they went to the Altadena Seed Library and the No Canyon Hills legal defense fund.

The club co-founders also regularly speak during meetups about food accessibility and improving people’s access to urban green space, something club member Katya Forsyth believes is not valued enough by city planners.

“The basis of all human society, human life, is the soil and the plants that grow out of it,” Forsyth said. “It’s so abundant, and it wants to give us so much, and we’re like, ‘I’m gonna put some concrete over you.’”

The parkway garden on Brand Boulevard might be small, but to Forsyth, it’s a definite step in the right direction.

In the future, Smart McCabe hopes to help establish Club Gay Gardens satellite locations across L.A. and to create more professional development opportunities for local gardeners. In the fall, she’ll get some support on that front through a grant benefiting Club Gay Gardens, the Altadena Seed Library and ecological landscaping business Soil Wise.

The grant will allow four Club Gay Gardens members to take a six-week course on working safely with contaminated soils, which Smart-McCabe said is especially needed in the aftermath of the January wildfires in Altadena and Pacific Palisades.

Smart-McCabe has a favorite saying about native plants in Southern California: “First they sleep, then they creep, then they leap.”

It’s a reference to how these plants have adapted to a cycle of hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters by establishing deep tap roots that keep them hydrated even during long dry spells.

“So that means in their first year, they’re not growing as much as they are establishing their root system,” Smart-McCabe said. She likens this phenomenon to the slow but steady growth of Club Gay Gardens.

As the club co-founder discussed the details of the new grant with grantees, club regular Bex Muñoz began to tear up.

“We’re leaping,” they said.