When it comes to cul­ture there is no short­age in San­ta Cruz.

It is the home of ar­guably the old­est, great­est and most well-known parang group to be cre­at­ed in this coun­try—the Lara Broth­ers.

While the Lara Broth­ers did not orig­i­nate in San­ta Cruz, the four boys and their par­ents moved to T&T from Venezuela and start­ed sign­ing with their fa­ther, Igna­cio. When he left the fam­i­ly, they as­sumed their moth­er's sur­name in­stead, and the Lara Broth­ers parang band was born.

Daphne Lara-Roberts, sit­ting in the liv­ing room of the home she lived in with her fa­ther, Tito, re­count­ed the lega­cy of Willie, Tito, An­to­nio and Vic­tor, the orig­i­nal Lara Broth­ers.

She said they start­ed go­ing from house to house per­form­ing in San­ta Cruz and even­tu­al­ly around the coun­try. Al­though Vic­tor made the oc­ca­sion­al ap­pear­ance with the group, his work sched­ule didn’t al­low him to be a full-time mem­ber.

"Grow­ing up, peo­ple would come from about ear­ly in the morn­ing time to come and meet my dad. His broth­er would come and they would start to parang from here and then they would go next door and they would keep go­ing from there," Lara-Roberts said.

The group be­gan to grow and moved from sev­en to ap­prox­i­mate­ly 20 mem­bers. It toured not just lo­cal­ly but in­ter­na­tion­al­ly as well.

Lara-Roberts ex­plained that her un­cle Wille was the writer and her fa­ther was the singer. But al­though Tito Lara wasn’t a writer, "he would sit down and now for now he would just take up his cu­a­tro and he would start to hum a song and then he would just put it to words, but he wouldn’t write, he would just re­mem­ber what he was singing."

Af­ter time, Tito be­came known as the fa­ther of parang.

"Every­body looked up to him. Every­body used to call him dad and un­cle or what­ev­er. He was such a per­son that you could go to. You want to find some­thing you could go to him and ask him," she said

Now all the broth­ers have passed away but the man­tle is be­ing car­ried on by Tito’s son Car­los Not one day goes by with­out Lara-Roberts feel­ing proud of her fam­i­ly name and lega­cy.