national anthem

Calabasas High senior Elie Samouhi, who considers himself a music producer, performer and writer of songs, got to do his own two-minute concert in front of fans on Friday night before the Los Alamitos-Calabasas football game.

He played the national anthem on his electric guitar. And it was good.

Like a coach trying to give his student confidence, Samouhi’s teacher kept telling him before he began, “You got this.”

You could see how much he enjoyed the spotlight during the rendition.

Samouhi said he’s been playing guitar since he was 5. He’s 18 and hopes to attend USC or NYU.

It was another positive experience during high school sports competition.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].

What started as a subtle act of protest has become national news.

Three days after singer and social media personality Nezza performed a Spanish version of the national anthem at Dodger Stadium — despite being asked by a team employee to sing it in English — the performer further addressed the situation Tuesday in an interview with CNN.

“With everything that’s been happening, I just felt like I needed to stand with my people and show them that I’m with them,” Nezza (whose full name is Vanessa Hernández) said on CNN’s “The Lead.” “I wanted to represent them that day.”

Nezza’s performance of the Spanish anthem — a version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” commissioned by the U.S. State Department in 1945 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt — became a viral story after she posted a video on TikTok of an unidentified Dodgers employee telling her beforehand that “we are going to do the song in English today, so I’m not sure if that wasn’t relayed.”

Nezza proceeded to sing the Spanish version anyway; doing so on the same day thousands gathered downtown to protest President Trump and recent ICE raids around Los Angeles in the last two weeks.

In email communications with the team leading up to her performance, Nezza said she asked if she could sing the anthem in both English and Spanish, but was told no because she would have only a 90-second window for her performance.

Still, she said she arrived at the stadium “fully thinking that I was welcome [to sing in Spanish], because nobody told me in that email thread, ‘No, you can’t.’”

“Had they told me you can’t have any Spanish in there,” she added, “I would have respectfully declined and not shown up on Saturday.”

Instead, Nezza performed the anthem in Spanish prior to the Dodgers-Giants game, before posting two videos on TikTok explaining the situation that quickly went viral.

On Sunday, a Dodgers official told The Times in a statement that she would be welcome back at the stadium.

In Tuesday’s CNN interview, Nezza said she was “very shocked” to learn she was welcome back at the ballpark, noting that “30 seconds after my performance, we actually received a call that said, ‘Don’t ever call us again. Don’t ever email us again. The rest of your clients are never welcome here again.’ So for me, that kind of feels like a ban.”

The Dodgers, however, reaffirmed to CNN that there were “no hard feelings” resulting from the situation. And a team spokesperson confirmed to The Times this week that, “She is certainly welcome back at the stadium. She is not banned from the stadium.”

On Saturday night, singer Nezza sang a Spanish version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” also known as “El Pendón Estrellado,” at Dodger Stadium, despite being told by an unnamed representative of the baseball organization that she sing it in English.

The 30-year-old pop singer, whose real name is Vanessa Hernández, uploaded the interaction on TikTok, where she proceeded to sing the Spanish version anyway. She captioned the video, “para mi gente [heart] I stand with you.”

In a tearful follow up TikTok video, she clarified that her decision to follow through with singing “El Pendón Estrellado” was in response to the ongoing immigration sweeps throughout Los Angeles

“I’ve sang the national anthem many times in my life but today out of all days, I could not,” Nezza said in the TikTok video.

The Dodgers did not issue a public comment on Nezza’s social media posts, but a team official said there were no consequences from the club regarding the performance and that Nezza would be welcome back at the stadium in the future.

“I just don’t understand how anyone can watch the videos that have been surfacing and still be on the wrong side of history,” Nezza told The Times.

Nezza’s performance has also sparked conversations about the origins of “El Pendón Estrellado,” resurfacing the legacy of a trailblazing Latina composer, Clotilde Arias.

“The lyrics and the story are the same,” said Nezza. “We’re still saying we’re proud to be American.”

In 1945, the U.S. State Department looked to commission a Spanish version of the national anthem, per the request of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who looked to strengthen political and business partnerships with Latin American countries amid World War II. His cultural efforts aligned with his 1933 Good Neighbor Policy, a Pan-Americanism objective that he implemented at the start of his first term to distance the U.S. from earlier decades of armed intervention.

Although “The Star-Spangled Banner” had already been translated to various languages by the time that President Roosevelt entered office, including two Spanish versions, no versions of the anthem were considered singable. In 1945, the Division of Cultural Cooperation within the Department of State, in collaboration with the Music Educators National Conference, invited submissions for the song in Spanish and Portuguese to promote American patriotism throughout Latin America.

Composer and musician Arias — who immigrated to New York in 1923 at the age of 22 from Iquitos, Peru — answered the call.

At the time, Arias had already established herself as a formidable copywriter for ad agencies, translating jingles and songs in Spanish for companies like Alka-Seltzer, Campbell Soup, Ford Motor Co., Coca-Cola (including the translation version of Andrews Sisters’ “Rum and Coca-Cola”) and others.

She submitted “El Pendón Estrellado,” which included singable lyrics that conveyed the original patriotic essence of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was accepted as the only official translation of the national anthem allowed to be sung, according to the National Museum of American History.

However, Arias would die in 1959 at age 58, leaving the song’s existence publicly unknown until 2006, when Roger Arias II, her grandson, dug out drafts of the sheet music and drafts hidden in the garage.

The unexpected find caught the attention of Marvette Pérez, the late curator of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History who at the time was programming Latino exhibits like “!Azúcar!: The Life and Music of Celia Cruz.”

To honor Arias’ legacy, Pérez organized an exhibit in 2012 titled “Not Lost in Translation: The Life of Clotilde Arias,” featuring real documents and photographs of the songwriter. The exhibit also commissioned the first-ever recording of “El Pendón Estrellado,” sung by the a cappella ensemble Coral Cantigas under the musical direction of Diana Sáez. The DC-chamber choir also performed during the exhibit’s opening day, which Arias’ son, Roger Arias, age 82 at the time, came to see.

“I was there when she was writing it,” Roger Arias told NPR at the time. “She’d sing it in her own way to see if it fits, and she would say, ‘How does that sound, sonny?’ And I would say anything she did sounded good to me. So, yes, she struggled through it, but she made it work.”

For Nezza, Arias’ “El Pendón Estrellado” is not only a symbol of American pride, but also a living piece of forgotten Latino history.

“Latino people are a huge part of building this nation,” said Nezza. “I think [the song] shows how we are such an important piece to the story of America.”