THE LAST TIME I saw Lalo Guerrero, he was eating chorizo and eggs in a Mexican restaurant on the edge of downtown Palm Springs. The legendary Chicano musician was 86, frail, and just beginning the slow decline that ended in his death in March. Juan Gabriel's "Te Lo Pido Por Favor" was playing on the jukebox, and just outside the restaurant's doors, his star on the Palm Springs Walk of Fame was being baked by morning desert heat.

Lalo had moved out to the desert in the '70s, around the same time my grandparents did. They belonged to different worlds. Mine were Jewish retirees who lived in a bucolic country club bunker, ate Cobb salads, drank Tab, and traveled by golf cart and Mercedes-Benz. They knew that the rest of the desert didn't look like they did, but that didn't keep them from pretending it did – pretending their Palm Springs really was Palm Springs.

Lalo didn't move to the desert to retire. He came to keep working. "I never was a golfer," he told me that morning. "I don't like to walk." As early as the '50s, Lalo would drive down from his home in East L.A. to headline one-nighters at Indio ballrooms. He'd play his patented pachuco blend of Chicano dance music that mixed swing and R&B with corridos, rock 'n' roll, and jump blues. "The 10 freeway wasn't even here yet," he said. "There was nothing but desert, miles of desert. It was all raza out here."

Back in L.A., Lalo had already established himself as the reigning patriarch of Chicano music, a living north-south bridge between traditional Mexican music and Mexican American hybrids like "Chicas Patas Boogie," the zoot-suited finger-snaps of "Los Chuco Suaves," and his pop parodies "Ballad of Pancho Lopez" (which turns Davy Crockett into a lazy, overweight Chihuahuan who, after fighting with Pancho Villa and working in the California fields, opens a taco stand and becomes "the king of Olvera Street"). He did most of his recording in the '60s – more than 200 sides for the Colonial label – while running Lalo's, an East L.A. nightclub. Lalo was a musical icon throughout the Chicano Southwest, but his impact extended far below the border as well, from his classic kids' records in Mexico City (he created Las Ardillitas, a Mexican answer to the Chipmunks) to "Canción Mexicana," a Lalo original made famous by legends Lucha Reyes and Lola Beltran.

After selling Lalo's, he moved out to a section of Palm Springs that would later become Cathedral City, and started playing at Las Casuelas Nuevas, a tony Mexican restaurant in swank Rancho Mirage. He played there for 24 years. "The audience from the beginning was elite, very elite," Lalo told me. "All the big names came through: Frank Sinatra, Milton Berle, Jane Russell. Sinatra even kissed me on the cheek." There was the time Sinatra was in stitches when Berle requested "The Mexican Hat Dance," then dropped his pants in front of the whole restaurant. Or the time Sinatra asked for "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás," and Berle shouted, "Kiss ass, kiss ass, kiss ass."

Since moving to Palm Springs, Guerrero had learned to occupy two worlds. When he played for Latino audiences in the desert, he was a beloved community activist and musical spokesperson for Mexican migrant life, the people's singer responsible for "Barrio Viejo" and "El Corrido de Cesar Chavez." When he played Palm Springs Hollywood parties and held court at Las Casuelas Nuevas, he was a Mexican entertainer with no past, though when a new city hall was recently built in Cathedral City, they named the street for Lalo.

My grandparents had no idea who Lalo was. One of Lalo's closest musical collaborators, Don Tosti – another Chicano regular on the Springs circuit who recently passed away – lived minutes from them, not far from the diner, crowded with oxygen tanks, where my grandfather loved to eat German pancakes soaked in lemon juice. They had never heard of him, either. When you're old and well-off, "Third World California" (as Mike Davis dubbed the Coachella Valley) is another planet, even if it's the one you're living on.

After we finished, Lalo stopped to look at his star on the Walk of Fame, and a group of tourists stopped to look with us. "That's me!" he told them. They smiled, and then asked if we knew the location of another star, that of Bob Hope, who had died that morning. "I think it's right up that way," Lalo said, without an ounce of defeat in his voice. Then he quietly headed home.

E-mail Josh Kun at jksfbg@aol.com.