alejandro fernandez

If you only read the papers and watched CNN, you'd think Mexico was a border-to-border hellhole full of swine flu-infested people and flying bullets from drug wars. We know better, and so do Latin celebs, who are starting to wear these adorable t-shirts that read "Muñecas Como Estas Vacacionan en Mexico."

Shakira dumps her loser beau Antonio de la Rua and lands a Colombian college professor.

Psych! Happy April Fool’s Day, mi gente. De La Rua has a powerful macumba on Shak; she isn’t going anywhere. Below are a bunch of faux Latino musician stories—which I wish weren’t.

Uno,

Jesus

This is a post about love. It’s a post about Latino love. And it’s a post about how music brought my wife and I together. It was February 2004, and I was an editor at a music magazine; I was working on a feature on DJ Enuff and was shadowing him for a day. We met up at Hot 97, where I waited in the lobby. There I met Yva. She had a baseball cap on (she doesn’t wear them often) and studying hip-hop. WTF? She was there to become Angie Martinez’s apprentice. But my only question was who studies hip-hop? You either live it or you don’t.

Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck: OK, so only half of this couple was Latino, but how could I pass up running this classic picture, in which Jennifer puckers up for the cameras while Ben looks like he’s thinking “Someone please extricate me from this sham of a relationship!" Mixed signals and awkward moments were the hallmark of Bennifer, J. Lo’s foray into blanquitoland. She loved the limelight, he was the definition of low-key. She made him be in her Jenny from the Block video, he hated every minute of it. His family hated her.