[ilbegone]

But the old man is also deeply principled and good-hearted, with a black-and-white moral code that demands respect for elders, obedience to parental authority and allegiance to Mexican culture. He's tries valiantly to hold onto his identity and self-respect as he struggles futilely against the Americanization of his son, who shaves his head and wears tattoos, and his daughter, a single mother raising a boy, Brian, whom Don Cheto tenderly calls Briancito.

Don Cheto is a man fighting to shape the modern world to his will, and failing. Yet it's a world that he set in motion the moment he decided to cross the border illegally and raise his family in the United States. Try as he might, there's no going back. Or is there?

Juan Carlos Razo, nicknamed Juanca, was a restless boy in La Sauceda, a town of less than 10,000 surrounded by strawberry fields. He led his soccer team, recited poetry at school assemblies and assigned nicknames to all his peers, some of which have stuck to this day.

He is the oldest child of Carlos Razo, a small businessman and part-time songwriter, and Teresa Magana, a homemaker, who also have two daughters. The family was poor; their house was made of adobe with a corrugated metal roof that would blow off during storms, a fate his father saw as nature's way of rubbing salt in the wound of their lowly social status.

After losing money in a business selling homemade marmalades, Carlos Razo decided to come to the U.S. to get back on his feet, leaving the boy in the care of his grandparents. One of them, his Abuelita Adelaida, would later serve as a model for Don Cheto's character quirks, especially his habit of breaking into tears at the drop of a hat.

Razo was just 16 when he decided to join his parents in El Monte, a destination for immigrants from this part of Michoacan. He says he undertook the dangerous trip alone, nearly suffocating in the trunk of a car before finally making it across on a second attempt.

Once here, Razo crammed into a modest home with his parents and sisters -- and a dozen other relatives -- forced to sleep on the floor in the living room.

After graduating from South El Monte High School, he took a job at a factory in Long Beach, turning over his paycheck to supplement his father's minimum-wage factory job. The teen helped the family make ends meet -- until he announced he would try for a new career in radio.

Razo's father turned to a cousin from La Sauceda, Eddie Leon, a former DJ who is now vice president of programming for the Lieberman stations. Leon referred the kid to his compadre, Ezequiel "El Cheque" Gonzalez, host of a daily afternoon show called "La Hora de los Corridos" (The Corrido Hour) on Que Buena, who took him on as an intern -- a big break with no pay.

Taking the opportunity meant the family would have to get by without his income, and Razo remains grateful for his father's support. He worked a year for free before finally getting to co-host his own show, on the graveyard shift from midnight to dawn. The only listeners at that hour, he recalls, were drunks who would call to request a song and threaten to shoot up the station if the DJs didn't play it.

What would Mom say?

When he finally transferred to a daytime slot with more famous co-hosts and larger audiences, he clammed up, especially working with Rocio Sandoval, a popular afternoon DJ nicknamed "La Peligrosa" (The Dangerous One), for good reason. She insisted on trying to lure Razo, her engineer, into provocative sex talk, which had boosted the ratings of El Cucuy and others at the time.

But Razo couldn't get himself to talk dirty because he kept worrying what his mother would think. That streak of old-fashioned modesty would become one of the traits of Don Cheto.

"I'm no saint," says Razo. "I'm dirtier than [Sandoval] is and most anybody else, but I just can't transmit that on the radio. I might be a son of a gun, but Don Cheto isn't. That's just part of his character because that's the way folks were in those days. They didn't go around bragging about having a menage a trois."

Sandoval, now on Univision's La Nueva (101.9-FM), says Razo was charismatic and charming in private. She wanted listeners to enjoy him on the air too. "The kid has natural talent," she says. "He just needed an avenue to develop it."

Sandoval can take some credit for helping Razo create Don Cheto. She and Garza, her co-host at the time, would quiz Razo on the air about life in his little rancho, which had no radio station. They wondered how people found out what was going on without a local broadcaster or newspaper.

Razo then told them about the man who was like the town crier but with a microphone and big loudspeakers set up at the top of his house. With a tap and a puff on the mike to test the sound, the entertaining announcer would give news of funerals, farm meetings and the homes that had fresh pork meat for sale. Listeners instantly called in to say that's how announcements were made in their hometowns. And Don Cheto was born.

"To this day, I think nobody's listening," says Razo, "as if I were still on at midnight with all the drunks. I never really wanted to be No. 1. I just want to come to work like I do every day and have a lot of fun."

Nowadays, La Sauceda has many modern amenities, including Internet connections in many homes. But local news is still broadcast by loudspeaker.

And there's one more chapter of this immigrant's success story. In 2004, the younger Razo returned to La Sauceda and found his family's house abandoned, an eyesore at the edge of the town's main plaza. So he tore it down and rebuilt it, using the $30,000 he had made from sales of his first record, the prophetically titled "Vamonos Pa'l Rancho" (We're Going Back to the Ranch).

Razo, who's now a legal resident, returned with pictures of the new three-bedroom, two-story residence and told his father, "You can go back to Mexico now. Your house is ready."

The family did just that. Razo's parents and sisters moved back to the town two years ago.

Don Cheto has put La Sauceda on the map. People come from all around just to see where the lovable old character used to live. They ask his father, "Is this the house of Don Cheto?" And he proudly says yes.