By OSKAR GARCIA Associated Press Writer
LAS VEGAS—Las Vegas paid tribute Thursday to a Mexican children’s entertainer with few links to the American adult playground, except her many fans who live here.
Officials unveiled a star for singer Tatiana on the Las Vegas Walk of Stars, which will be placed Friday on the Las Vegas Strip nearly 25 years after she began as a teenage pop singer and 13 years after she gained fame singing songs for kids.
Tatiana, who turns 40 years old on Friday, is known to Latinos throughout the world as “La Reina de los Ninos,” translated to English as “Queen of the Children.”
In an interview before a ceremony honoring her at The Mirage hotel-casino, Tatiana said that she has only performed a few times in Las Vegas, and was surprised by the crowds and the feedback because her show is entirely in Spanish and she is more well-known south of the U.S. border.
“They said, ‘We have children and we don’t have anywhere to take them to have fun and to recover their roots and their language and their music,’” Tatiana told The Associated Press. “Maybe I’ll come back—I hope so—and I want to come back big.”
Tatiana said a run of three shows in 1997 along with a Mexican family circus in the mall of a Hispanic market in North Las Vegas attracted a total of 17,000 people.
“All the people knew me from Mexico and the TV shows in Mexico,” she said. “The little girls, they had the dresses like me and the T-shirts and everything that their grandmothers or family sent them from Mexico.”
Las Vegas Walk of Stars spokesman Pablo Castro Zavala said Tatiana was picked because the organization got a tremendous amount of e-mails and phone calls asking that she be honored. According to the Las Vegas Walk of Stars Web site, honorees usually have had a significant and enduring Las Vegas presence.
“People love her,” Zavala said. “She’s also a person with a good heart, a single mother who works very hard.”
According to the latest numbers from the U.S. census bureaus, about 25 percent of Nevadans are Hispanic.
Tatiana said she began focusing on children’s songs when her daughter was 1 year old.
Tatiana joins Hispanic musicians Alex Lora of El Tri, Vicente Fernandez, Veronica Castro and Los Tigres del Norte on the walk. Her 180-pound star will be placed on the Las Vegas Strip sidewalk on Friday outside the MGM Grand hotel-casino. Her star is the 35th on the walk.
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