Sitting shoulder to shoulder with other visitors in the Juan Gabriel Museum’s packed viewing room, I feel every sway and shimmy of the woman next to me. The first half of this two-hour guided tour of the Mexican pop icon’s mansion turned museum, in Juárez, is spent in rapt darkness in this room, taking in a film of the widely beloved singer-songwriter performing his greatest hits. We watch Juanga, as he’s fondly called by his millions of fans across the Spanish-speaking world, as he croons, smiles, sashays, and flirts with the audience, his Bambi eyes ringed in dark eyeliner, his face sweaty. During his 1980s dance hit, “El Noa Noa,” an homage to the Juárez bar of his youth and its welcoming vibe of joy and acceptance, my neighbor sings along. She is not alone: The tiny grandmother with her caretaker daughter, the well-coiffed lady in her blazer, and the barrel-chested dude in his mirrored glasses know every word. “This is a place with a different atmosphere,” they murmur along in Spanish. “Where you will always dance happily all night long there. . . . Let’s go to the Noa Noa.” I want to get up and dance.
Generations of Latin Americans know and love the catchy, unabashedly romantic music of Juan Gabriel, who died in 2016 at age 66 but remains one of Mexico’s best-selling artists of all time. Known for his captivating stage presence, high-energy shows (some of which lasted as long as five hours), and flamboyant fashion sense—he often performed in sequined, bedazzled, or otherwise embellished jewel-toned suits—Gabriel had a unifying power that made him equally popular with both young, queer Latinos and their conservative grandparents. “He redefined modern Mexican music, from pop to traditional mariachi. He’s our Lennon-McCartney, our James Brown,” wrote The Dallas Morning News’ Jorge H. Chávez in a memorial tribute.
Recently, the popular podcast My Divo, released in July and produced by Apple and Futuro Media, has introduced Juanga to a wider audience, including me. The show’s creator and host is El Paso–based journalist and Juanga superfan Maria Garcia. Garcia was born in Juárez and grew up dancing in the same clubs where the future pop icon once sang as a struggling kid, looking for an audience as he bounced between unstable living situations. Garcia migrated with her mother to El Paso; later attended Columbia Journalism School, in New York; worked at the NPR affiliate in Boston, and then moved back to El Paso–Juárez, the close-knit sister cities she loves for many reasons, one of which is the golden light they’re bathed in at dawn and dusk. “My mother and her mother and her mother have all been cloaked in this same light,” she says in the podcast. “The one-of-a-kind hue of the Chihuahuan Desert that glistens over Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, Texas.”
Throughout eight engrossing episodes, Garcia deftly braids together the strands of her own life as a queer woman from the border with Juanga’s story—both the uplifting and the awful. Though he had relationships with women and rarely spoke about his sexuality, Gabriel is widely believed to have been gay or queer. He once answered an interviewer’s question on the subject with “Lo que se ve no se pregunta”(“Don’t question what you can see.”) Garcia’s podcast takes a deep dive into dark corners of the musician’s past—while it’s well known that he was abandoned by his mother, Garcia uncovers new evidence to suggest he suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a priest and was arrested on charges related to homosexuality—while always exuding a tenderness for Gabriel that made me love him, too.
That’s why, on the nine-hour drive from my home in Austin to El Paso, in the last stretch through the desert past Fort Stockton, I am singing full tilt to “Abrázame Muy Fuerte,” a love ballad Gabriel croons with all the longing of a flamenco artist plumbing his soul. It’s more exhilarating than the gas station energy drink I’m tempted to buy on my long cruise down Interstate 10. The hours slip away, and the music is the ideal warm-up for my visit the next day, accompanied by Garcia, to the Juan Gabriel Museum, which opened in August and is housed in the Juárez mansion that Juanga bought in the mid-eighties, shortly after he jumped to superstardom with the success of his world hit “No Tengo Dinero.” The official moniker of the mansion is Amor Eterno, after Gabriel’s ballad of the same name, but you could also call it the singer’s “Look, I’ve really made it” house.
Left: The exterior of Museo Juan Gabriel, in Juárez. Rich Wright
Top: Juan Gabriel’s concert attire on display at the museum. Courtesy of Museo Juan Gabriel
Garcia and I meet up on the El Paso side of the Paso del Norte International Bridge and are joined by Rich Wright, a longtime El Pasoan who’s been giving tours of Juárez since 2015. As we step into Mexico, Wright points out the vendors selling shoelaces, a necessity for people who’ve just had theirs confiscated in U.S. immigrant detention centers. Later, when we bump into a street artist known as Yorch who’s touching up a mural of Don Quixote in a tiny plaza, Yorch greets Wright, who cuts a striking gringo figure in his big straw hat, warmly: “Qué milagro!” (“What a miracle!”). That isn’t the only time people we pass on the street greet Wright in this way. Between Wright and Garcia, I’m in good hands. Their expert guidance makes it clear that, for open-minded travelers willing to look beyond the stereotypes about this often misunderstood border city, Juárez is a vibrant and beautiful place.
On our thirty-minute walk to the museum down Avenida Benito Juárez, the city’s main thoroughfare connecting to the bridge, we pass a parking lot where the Noa Noa club once stood. Wright witnessed the club burning down in 2004 due to a short circuit. “You could see the smoke pouring out of it. People were crying.” A multistory mural on a building overlooking the lot depicts a handsome young Juan Gabriel. In curvy letters beside his pensive face are the words “felicidades a toda la gente que está orgullosa de ser como es.” (“Congratulations to all the people who are proud to be how they are.”)
“I genuinely believe Juan Gabriel would not be Juan Gabriel if he hadn’t come of age in Juárez,” says Garcia, whose long, dark hair hangs over her leather jacket. “Juárez completely molded him. It was this bohemian live-and-let-live kind of place. That’s not to say that he didn’t experience homophobia, but the way he blossomed here, he would not have been able to blossom in some town in central Mexico. Like when he sings in ‘Noa Noa,’ he’s saying, ‘This is a place where everything is different. This is a queer place. This is a place where we’re safe . . .’ And so the thing is, Juárez is everything. The light and the darkness.”
Juan Gabriel is in the air in Juárez, and like everything in this intertwined community, he flows over to El Paso. After he died of a heart attack in 2016 at his home in Santa Monica, California, thousands of mourners lined the streets of downtown El Paso as a motorcade passed, carrying the singer’s ashes back to Juárez. One onlooker held a sign that read, “Juan Gabriel, you will always live in the heart of El Paso and Juárez.” In 2019 and 2022, when El Paso and Uvalde, respectively, were devastated by mass shootings, Gabriel’s ballad “Amor Eterno” became a song of communal mourning played at vigils. In April, the song was inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.
When we arrive at the museum, I look up at the shiniest, gleamiest building I’ve seen in Juárez—a stucco, 1940s-era, two-story Spanish Colonial Revival encircled by a ten-foot-tall lime-green iron fence. From it hang photos of Juan Gabriel coupled with famous quotes, many of which speak to the star’s fondness for Juárez and the border. Under one image, in which Gabriel stands with arms outstretched, are the words “Aquí todo es diferente, y esto es gracias a la gente.” (“Here everything is different, and this is thanks to the people.”)
After locking our phones into camera-proof sleeves (the better to stay in the moment and, perhaps, prevent visitors from posting the museum experience online for free), a guide ushers us into the little viewing room, outside the main house. An hour of absorbing Juanga’s stage charisma, backed by full orchestras and armies of ecstatic dancers, is worth more than the price of admission—which is about $13.50. Garcia whispers occasional tidbits in my ear: “This concert is at Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes,” or “This is the song about not finding love.” In the final clip, Gabriel waves and blows kisses to a packed concert hall, hesitating before he leaves the stage to be helped by his backstage crew into a golf cart as the workers wrap a cape over him. The show is over, but our tour is just starting.
A guide leads us through a gallery of artifacts enclosed in glass display cases that is dominated by the performer’s dazzling wardrobe. Like a Mexican Elton John, Juanga is famous for his suits: jacquard, bolero, mariachi, tasseled, beaded, sequined, rhinestoned. The guide explains how he would wait until the day of each concert to pick out his suit. “No one knew what he was going to wear,” he reports. “He was very mystical.” We gaze upon a suit jacket over a sky-blue satin shirt with a fluffy floral cravat, the shirt Gabriel wore for his final concert, two days before he died.
Throughout the tour, our guide asks fan-favorite trivia questions of our group—about the significance of a blue velvet throne or what Gabriel’s favorite fruits were—and when someone answers correctly, which is always, he responds warmly with “¡Correcto, caballero!” or other encouraging words. As he stands by a television running clips of Juan Gabriel on the late-night eighties TV program Mala Noche . . . ¡No!, the guide asks if we know the significance of what we are seeing. Garcia answers quickly. “Es la noche en que México no durmió,” she says, referencing the famous episode in which Juanga kept the show going all night long, until it finally had to stop for the morning news; that episode is immortalized as “The Night Mexico Didn’t Sleep.”
Finally, we enter the main house, a baroque fantasia of ornate gold crown molding, naked Greek and Roman statues, glistening mahogany tables, and chairs with red and purple velvet cushions, all lit by dozens of crystal chandeliers, some as big as golf carts. “He loved his antiquities,” the guide said solemnly. The few rooms not lined in gold molding are trimmed with white plaster intricately carved with flowers and Gabriel’s beloved fruits (“He was known to eat five mangoes at a sitting,” Garcia tells me.) The dining room, painted with frescoes of the hills of Michoacán, where Juan Gabriel was born, was the setting, according to the guide, “of many bohemian nights.”
The highlight of the house tour is a peek from behind a velvet barrier rope into Juanga’s rococo bedroom, a lavender-walled nest with gold brocade curtains and a puffy lavender bedspread. Taking it all in, the woman who’d sat next to me in the viewing room tears up. “I’m sorry,” she tells me in Spanish. “I can feel his essence.”
After our tour, Wright, Garcia and I stroll the pretty, brick-paved avenue dedicated to Juan Gabriel outside, where kids play and their parents admire a Juanga statue and photographs. Around the corner, a boy with a cart is selling chapulines, a.k.a. roasted grasshoppers, and candies—cherry-flavored gummies make a good snack for our walk back to the bridge.
On the way, Wright steers us toward Olímpico, a gay bar with glowing green lights and a portrait of Marilyn Monroe over the bar. Wright tells us how sometimes, long after he was famous, Juanga would sneak out of Amor Eterno in the middle of the night and hit the Juárez bars of his youth, including this one. I can see why. It’s not El Noa Noa, but there is a definite vibe of friendly fellowship, and the crowd is eclectic: gentlemanly rancher types sit near a man with fake eyelashes and hair pulled back in a scarf. Wright tells us he came here the night Juan Gabriel died. He asked a fellow drinker, “ ‘How long are you going to mourn Juan Gabriel?’ And the guy said, emphatically, ‘The rest of my life.’ ”
The soft-spoken bartender serves us añejo as we muse about our museum experience, agreeing that the videos of the live performances were our favorite part. During most of the songs, everyone looks so genuinely happy, from the members of Gabriel’s backup bands to all the well-heeled elites dancing in the audience at the Bellas Artes concert. And in the sadder songs, Gabriel sings with a depth that feels fueled by his life but also universal, as if all of that darkness from his earlier years sharpened both his compassion and his life force.
Garcia and I discuss the last scene of the concert footage, in which the star is led almost reluctantly offstage and into the golf cart. In that one moment, he seemed sad. “Did he ever find, in his personal life, that love he was seeking?” I ask. Gabriel had six children with three women, but “I don’t think he ever did find that lasting relationship,” Garcia replies. “But he was resilient and turned his own heartbreak into love for others.”
I think about the final episode of Garcia’s podcast, in which she speaks of “Buenos Días Señor Sol,” Gabriel’s jaunty song about the sun coming in through his window every day, about trying to be better, to live a life with love. Some, she says, might consider such cheerful optimism naive and simple, but for Juanga, this positive outlook was hard-won, a deliberate choice after so much hardship. Absorbing even a smidgen of that resilience and joy is well worth a visit to Juanga’s museum. Even better if you carry it with you back across the bridge.
