LAST MONTH MEXICAN California lost one of its most promising young voices, Adan "Chalino" Sanchez. The 19-year-old dream date with the pencil-thin mustache, black cowboy hat, and gold-rope necklace was the son of another dead icon, corrido singer Chalino Sanchez, who was murdered in 1992.

The album Adan recorded before his car crashed, Amor y lagrimas (Sony Discos), is, as Mexican regional music goes, nothing extraordinary – some understated love laments, some macho boasts, a few musings on mortality and war – but Sanchez wasn't about the music itself. Like his vocally challenged father (who liked to say he didn't sing, he barked), Sanchez was about sentimiento, the feeling he gave his listeners, the sense that he was one of them, his experience rooted in the same ground they walked on. That Adan could actually sing, that he never moved out of his family's home no matter how famous he got, and that he kept going to his same high school when he wasn't on tour, just fed the public adoration.

In "Campo," a short story by Central Valley writer Manuel Muñoz (included in his collection Zigzagger), Mexican music like Sanchez's – which local record shops boom out on "a small megaphone playing songs in tinny voices" – is what connects Mexican migrants to their past while they construct their present. "He recognizes the places those singers come from," Muñoz writes of his migrant protagonist, "their faces smiling at him from the posters taped crookedly to the windows."

Sanchez wasn't from one of "those places" in Mexico. He was a California kid, born and raised in Paramount, a Mexican immigrant town just outside of Los Angeles. But when he died, he died in one of those places, in Sinaloa, the very place his father was born. Adan was only 19, but he had released nine albums, and a month after his death, his crooked poster was all over Mexican L.A.: stuck to walls, tacked to bus stops, taped to the doors of record stores that played him on tinny megaphones.

L.A. Mexicans revered Sanchez because he had become a familiar and fresh-faced emblem of how they were changing the city. Take a street like Central Avenue, once the Main Street of the L.A. jazz scene, lined with black restaurants, black clothing stores, and black hotels like the legendary Dunbar. In the '30s, if you looked out of a window from a room in the Dunbar, you'd see black L.A. If you look out of a Dunbar window today, you don't see any of that. You see Mercado Garibaldi, a nearly block-long Mexican market crowned with a bright mural of a sombrero-topped mariachi blowing a trumpet. Inside, black women ask Mexican clerks if they sell cornbread mix, and they file past aisles of Bubulubu candy bars, Fabuloso cleaning bottles, and Virgen de Guadalupe candles to find it.

Central Avenue, like most of the once-Anglo, then-black communities across South Los Angeles, is now predominantly Mexican turf. South L.A. has even been dubbed "Nuevo L.A.," the new Los Angeles that, with the help of Mexican peso devaluations and NAFTA, has displaced all the L.A.s that came before it. But Mercado Garibaldi is a sign of something even greater that's been evolving since the 1970s: the gradual Mexicanization of California, the only mainland state in the union where, as of the 1990 census, whites are the minority.

After news of Sanchez's death washed over southern California, a crowd of 15,000 gathered for an overflowing memorial that quickly thrust an omnipresent yet invisible population into the limelight of the mass media. By the time the story had made its way out of the Southwest and into the Wall Street Journal, the saga of Sanchez's life and death had stopped being a story of migrant life and American cultural change and had become the inevitable, an opportunity for the rest of the nation to finally pay enough attention to Mexicans to market more products to them.

In a country where we increasingly measure cultural visibility by potential units sold, Sanchez's death has, perhaps predictably, not led to a heightened awareness of the struggles and injustices faced by Mexicans in California. Instead, it's introduced one more example of the advertising exec as multicultural ambulance chaser. Rejoicing that there are thousands of undiscovered Mexicans to sell stuff to does little to unlock the low-wage traps that free trade and deindustrialization continue to set.

The obvious parallel here is Texas-Mexican singer Selena, whose 1995 murder sparked a marketing blitz that exploded the Tejano music industry and helped save EMI Latin from financial downfall. While Selena's death gave her music the national market it never had when she was alive, she was in the midst of a crossover career, with English-language songs recorded and ready for release. Sanchez had no such aspirations, and it remains to be seen if postmortem marketing buzz will get someone who represented Mexicans in America, and not Mexican Americans, a Today Show homage or Best Buy signage in Minneapolis.

The difference is perhaps most felt by revisiting both singers' final major concerts. When Selena took over the Houston Astrodome in her purple pantsuit, she mixed cumbias with Donna Summer. When Sanchez sold out Hollywood's Kodak Theater just days before he died, he never colored outside of the Mexican regional formula, delivering song after song about love and loss over a border that nearly everyone in the audience had crossed. At one point he stopped to honor his late father, and sitting alone onstage with just a white Stetson hat, he let Mexican Los Angeles sing the words for him.