Timoteo, "El Charro Negro"

Timothy Pollard (born in Dallas, Texas), more commonly known by his stage name Timoteo, "El Charro Negro", is a musician currently recognized as the first musically-published African-American mariachi of non-Mexican ancestry or nationality. His musical purview spans a number of Regional Mexican genres, including mariachi and Son jalisciense to ranchera, tejano, and bolero. Timoteo has performed with multiple notable Mexican regional musical artists, among them the likes of Vicente "El Rey" Fernández. He has also been a guest on numerous Spanish-language television shows, channels, and programming, including, but not limited to Sábado Gigante, Don Francisco Presenta, Univisión, Telemundo, EscandaloTV de Noche, American Latino TV, Latin Nation, Hoy Día, His most recent album release was in 2013.

Background Timothy Pollard was born to an African-American family in Dallas, Texas that, at the age of eight, relocated to a Mexican neighbourhood in Long Beach, California. Being the only Black family in his community at that time, Pollard's youth saw him exposed to many aspects of Mexican culture, notably 50s to 70s ranchera music, to which, despite his lack of knowledge in Spanish at the time, he found himself deeply pulled. Much later, at the age of 28, he began to learn Spanish through exposure to music and other media, but originally approached the idea of performing cautiously. "When I decided that I wanted to be a mariachi, I didn't think it was fair to exploit the culture and not understand the language," he says. "If I'm going to sing, I need to be able to communicate with my audience and engage with them. I need to understand what I'm saying because it was about honor and respect." – Timoteo in an interview on 17 March 2021 with Natalie Vaval for the Latino media company Mitú

Stylistic approach Pollard's musical style seeks to invoke the artistry of the "Golden Age" of Mariachi during the mid-to-late 20th century, to which he was well-exposed in his youth. Additionally, his music often infuses or incorporates elements unique to his Afro-descendent background – a practice common throughout Latin America, and often elemental to many genres thereof, such as Son montuno and Salsa – genres of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Colombian conception. In Pollard's work, this has manifested through, for instance, the incorporation of some African percussion not necessarily common in Mexican regional music, such as the congas.