Mexican comedian Chabelo died at the age of 88

Every Sunday morning for nearly five decades, millions of Mexican families gathered around their televisions to watch Chabelo.

The squeaky-voiced, short-wearing child character was played by Mexican actor, entertainer and businessman Xavier López Rodriguez, who died on Saturday at the age of 88.

His children's game show En Familia con Chabelo (Family Time with Chabelo) aired live every Sunday for 45 years and even made the Guinness Book of Records for its unprecedented broadcast run.

This longevity inspired a massive internet fandom celebrating Chabelo's seeming immortality. Although the television programme finished in 2015, memes about the character - inserting him into Mexican historical events, placing him at the Last Supper or even suggesting he had lived through the Big Bang - continued for years.

But these irreverent jokes hid a genuine affection. Generations grew up with Chabelo's albums, films and Sunday television series. As Laura Martínez, a Mexican journalist based in New York, told the BBC, "There is not one Mexican person who doesn't know Chabelo."

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López was born on 17 February 1935 to Mexican parents in Chicago, Illinois. The family moved back shortly afterwards to the central Mexican city of León, where he and his two sisters were raised. He told the magazine Caras in 2020 that he had been in Mexico "all my life and I consider myself 100% Mexican".

At the age of 18, he was drafted into the US army during the Korean War because of his dual citizenship, but the conflict ended before he could participate and he spent his short service on a military base in California. He then returned to Mexico to study medicine and worked for years as a doctor at a private clinic.

While he was studying medicine, he also started working part-time as an assistant at the headquarters of the Mexican broadcaster Televisa. He started to fill in for actors who were late for shows, and on one occasion was asked to read a joke on air about a boy named Chabelo.

"I read it and the voice came out like a child, and that's where Chabelo was born," López told Caras. He decided to turn away from medicine and went instead to study drama. "I'll never forget my father's face [when I told him]," he told the magazine.

In the 1950s, his character became one of the faces of soft drink brand Pepsi. López appeared in their adverts throughout North and South America, before launching his own radio show in Mexico, La media hora de Chabelo (The Chabelo Half Hour).

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