MEXICAN SINGER CHAVELA VARGAS DIES

Only days before her death, Chavela Vargas said she "wouldn't die but transcend"

Popular Mexican singer Chavela Vargas, 93, has died of respiratory failure.

Vargas was born in Costa Rica but was closely linked to the Mexican cultural scene of the 20th Century.

She was a friend of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, with whom she said she had been in love.

Open about her homosexuality when it was frowned upon in Catholic Mexico, she performed Mexican ranchera songs dressed in men's clothes, smoking cigars and drinking on stage.

Her friend and biographer Maria Cortina said Chavela Vargas died of respiratory failure at a hospital in the city of Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City.

Ranchera queen

Vargas moved to Mexico as a teenager, after a loveless childhood in Costa Rica.

Speaking about her family she once said: "I never got to know my grandparents. My parents I got to know better than I would have liked. They never loved me and when they divorced, I stayed with my uncles, may they burn in hell!"

In Mexico, Vargas sang in bars, but did not gain fame until she was in her thirties.

By then, she had embraced the Mexican genre of rancheras and made it her own.

Rancheras, traditional songs about love and loss, had mainly been performed by men.

Vargas, with her deep and rugged voice, performed the songs dressed as a man, smoking cigars, and swigging from a bottle of tequila.

Her unique style caught the attention of Mexico's intelligentsia.

She became a close friend of painter Frida Kahlo, muralist Diego Rivera and writer Juan Rulfo.

'We're quits'

Speaking about her sexuality she said: "Homosexuality doesn't hurt, what hurts is when you're treated like you have the plague because of it".

While singing in the hotels of the Mexican resort town of Acapulco, she became popular with Hollywood stars holidaying there and performed at the wedding of Elizabeth Taylor to her third husband, film producer Mike Todd.

She recorded 80 albums and performed until late into her life, having her debut at the famous Carnegie Hall in New York when she was 83.

Only recently she said she did not fear death.

"I don't owe life anything and life doesn't owe me anything, we're quits," she said.