It was an eighty degree afternoon, my grandmother had baked a sheet cake—one part sugar, two parts flour—and I was called into her kitchen to arrange strawberries, blueberries, and whipped cream on the cake’s surface into an edible replica of the flag. I assembled probably four stripes, twelve stars, then posed for a photo with my handiwork. Uncomfortably, out of goodwill.

I say uncomfortably because I was, at this point, twenty years old, and well aware of what this country was. This particular fourth of July was a year after police had murdered Breonna Taylor in her home and George Floyd in the street; I had by now observed something at every stage of life that corroborated that what the United States did best was harm. As a child, I had seen the cardboard posters in our neighbors’ yards demanding an end to the war that would last until I was an adult; had heard the news reports about Trayvon Martin; had been told by my mother that the man who bought me my first DVD player, to watch movies in the backseat of the car, had answered the door one night for a cop and been deported. I had seen my parents sell that same car to pay off our debt.

By this fourth of July, I had, also, been a teenage American girl—watched my high school football team take a knee during the national anthem; gone to school the morning after Trump was elected the first time, after hearing the soundbite loop endlessly on the news: grab her by the pussy, grab her by the pussy; hunched under my desk in silence during active shooter drills and then walked out in protest when fourteen teenagers, one teacher, and two coaches were killed in their classrooms in Florida.

By twenty, I had voted for president for the first time in this country; watched my then-boyfriend’s absentee ballot arrive in the mail after primaries were over; left dozens of voicemails demanding investigation into the police’s murder of Sean Monterrosa; felt panicked walking into my local mall and movie theater; seen the sticker on the post outside of my house telling immigrants to go back where they came from; had my mother shush me when I spoke Portuguese in public. I had memorized other names: Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Erik Salgado.

If a patriot is someone who sees all that and still celebrates this country, I admit that is not me.

And yet, somehow, I found myself in Washington D.C. on the most American of days—a fourth of July that, a fervent patriot might tell you, was not just any other. This was the 250th since the Declaration of Independence—an anniversary President Trump, who had been preparing a lineup of events and performers for months, called “the most important milestone in our country’s history.” It surely was not—but something drove me to want to see the capital on its birthday with my own eyes. Something drove me to want to witness the story a crowd of Americans wanted to tell about this country, if only to correct it for the record.

+++

Perhaps it was the White House countdown I found online, sometime in early spring, until “America’s 250th anniversary.” The clock ticked down ominously, as though to doomsday, apocalypse, or bomb. I checked it every once in a while at first, then more obsessively as the date sped closer. 19 days, 11 hours, 47 minutes, and 8 seconds on June 14. 2 days, 6 hours, 59 minutes, and 12 seconds on July 1st. 1 day, 15 hours, 4 minutes, and 17 seconds on the 2nd. 0 days, 10 hours, 47 minutes, and 30 seconds when I boarded my train to D.C.; 0 days, 5 hours, 56 minutes, and 29 seconds when I got off. 0 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes, and 0 seconds when, in a sleeping bag on an old friend’s bedroom floor, the clock struck midnight on the fourth of July. When, I hoped, the spell might break, and everyone would see the carriage for the pumpkin that it was.

The spell, unfortunately, did not break, but neither did the heat, which meant that the following morning the parade scheduled for 10:30am on Constitution Avenue was cancelled, and America’s fans were left to wander through the city until official programming resumed. A few gathered outside the black metal gates surrounding the White House—where there was not much to do, or see, given the fencing—in all sorts of commemorative attire. T-shirts celebrating “250 years of freedom,” t-shirts demanding we “say no to communism,” flag t-shirts, “Jesus is coming back. Are you ready?” t-shirts, “I am Charlie. We are Charlie. You can’t kill Charlie Kirk” t-shirts, Trump t-shirts. At around 11am, a middle-aged man called out to some of these t-shirts to gather around, because, he said, the BBC wanted a picture and he needed people to help hold up a massive American flag, which he proceeded to pull out from a gray plastic tub on wheels. A couple dozen people unfolded the rectangle, waved it like a parachute in gym class, chanted USA! USA! and then listened as the man who had called out to them sang a weak rendition of God Bless America that did not catch on because it appeared most people did not know the words.

All the while, two stoic Americans who had come at 9am to stand outside the White House in protest looked on. Donna and her husband Don (I couldn’t believe this either), stood in baseball caps and sunglasses on either side of a Trump cutout that at least one passerby temporarily mistook for the real man. Cardboard Trump held a sign that read: “I’m stealing from YOU!” while Donna’s illustrated sign, made possible by BLICK art supplies and chosen from a collection of some 75 homemade posters, read: “TRUMP Made $2Bill in 2025. Did You?” Don’s own message for the fourth of July was a peace sign filled in with the pattern of the American flag, captioned “No War.” At home were several posters that had previously been photographed and featured in the Washington Post (“Together, we can redeem the soul of our nation”), Wired (“I am stealing from you,” with a portrait of Elon Musk and “They Lie Like They Breathe. Abolish ICE!!!”), and The Wall Street Journal (“Keep his tiny hands off the federal reserve”), though none of these outlets identifies either Don or Donna by name.

Don and Donna, much to their grown kids’ surprise, have been standing outside a range of government buildings—the White House, the Capitol, the National Planning Commission, the Treasury, the Department of Labor—every morning for the last year and a half. The logistics are as follows: Donna wakes first, around 4am, to check CourtListener for cases involving the U.S. government, check Instagram for protests, which she adds to a joint calendar, and, finally, check the weather. Once Don is awake, they choose their signs together based on the relevant headlines of the day. If, for instance, ICE abductions were in the news, they might reach for “Ice the Noem” with a drawing of a Kristi-like gnome; if the war on Iran made headlines, “Peace President My Ass.” (“He thinks he’s the peace president but he keeps bombing countries,” Donna told me.)

There are, also, their inflatable dalmatian costumes, which they wear to accompany the sign “I poop a better president every day.” And depending on the weather, they gear up differently: insulated boots in the winter, hiking boots in summer. They walk to the White House, or wherever it is they plan to be that day, and for safety reasons they do not let each other out of sight.

Most of the time, they stand silently. Donna refers to the ritual as “protest,” a way to take advantage of their free time as retirees and proximity to government buildings to “protest for people who couldn’t.” Don prefers the term “ralliers.” Either way, after a few hours of protesting/rallying, they return home and—at the request of their sons—text to make sure they are alright.

By this Fourth of July, then, Donna and Don were experts—very different from the couple who attended their first ever protest, against the misuse of Social Security data, in February of 2025. (“I thought it was pretty cool,” Donna said of that first experience. “I was hoping we could make a difference.”) A year and a half later, the pair has been emboldened by all the people they’ve met at protests/rallies and by the many sympathetic tourists who stop to take pictures or selfies with them, sometimes even waiting in line to do so. Donna is so confident that she often, when confronted by a Trump supporter, tells the person to “have a nice day,” or says, when in the mood to goad, “you’re reading my sign. My sign is working,” or “thanks for your support!” (This is, she says, particularly frustrating for a MAGA tourist.) When, one time, a Trump supporter leaned in to kiss their cutout on the lips, she pulled it away. Another day, she asked members of the National Guard sent in from out of state on Trump’s orders whether they wanted to take a picture with her. When told by passersby outside the White House that “this is our house, not yours,” Donna responded: “No, this is the American people’s house.” When someone else, after reading Donna’s sign, approached to chant “USA! USA!,” she chanted “USA! USA!” right back.

These comments, more than the periodic “libtards” “r*tards” “idiots” and, in at least one case, “wack-a-doodles,” seemed to be what bothered Donna most. After all, she was American, and had fond memories of July 4, 1976—the United States’ 200th anniversary—when she had been a senior in high school in northern Illinois. In fact, she had been looking forward to the 250th for years, and was used to dressing up in red white and blue for flag day and Independence parades. After Trump became president again, she remembers thinking: “How are we going to celebrate [now]? Maybe the patriotic thing to do is protest.”

When I ask if there was anything special about this fourth of July, the 250th, the day we met, Donna says no. Lately, all her mornings outside the White House have felt the same.

+++

Or perhaps I had come to D.C. because the United States had solidified itself as an imperial power during my lifetime and I had read somewhere that, on average, empires survived about 250 years. What if the countdown clock was in fact a countdown to the collapse of American empire on the very day of its celebration? At noon, Donna told me, there would be a protest at 33 Constitution Avenue, where the Fourth of July floats were originally scheduled to parade. I started my walk over.

I arrived just as rally was coalescing into march and learned, thanks to a pamphlet in a Little Free Antifa Library, that the demonstration had been planned and previously announced as a part of Seven Days in D.C., a coalitional effort to bring “organizers, activists, journalists, veterans, voters, and troublemakers from across all 50 states” to the capital “to make noise and make history” on the occasion of the country’s 250th. In practice, this meant that police were already there surrounding the pathway before the march began. It also meant a wide range of demonstrators were called to the block: the Free DCers, the pro-Palestine folks, a Guerilla Girl (complete with a gorilla mask), the Americans wearing red white and blue, the veterans in uniform, and a woman rolling a massive image of a bald, swollen J.D. Vance on wheels. All were invited to join.

Together, they held up a 700-foot long replica of the Constitution, “We the People” written in calligraphy above thousands of individual signatures. We the people held their declaration proudly. The way their hands clutched at the fabric reminded me of the tourists outside the White House, how they had grasped the giant American flag.

Here, though, the anthem was not “God Bless America” but a marching band rendition of “John Brown’s Body” (Glory, glory, hallelujah). Instead of USA! USA!, chants rang out to “86 47!” (I felt, however briefly, embarrassed to have no idea what this meant. Was it a reference to some legislation? I asked a gentleman who had paused on the sidewalk: “Well, Trump is the 47th president. And 86 means, well, it means get rid of. If you know what I mean. Basically that’s what they’re saying. Get rid of Trump.”)

This was not, unfortunately, the revolution. I bought a Gatorade and a bottle of water from a Halal cart, checked my shoelaces, and started my trek to the Wild West—the Great American Fair.

+++

The line was far too long and the sun far too hot for me to wait, no matter how curious I was about Trump’s rodeo, 110-foot Ferris wheel, “Made in America Pavilion” and FIFA Fan Zone. (After the 4th, Trump requested an extra $10 million from Congress to cover said fair, on top of the $150 million taxpayer dollars previously allocated for the anniversary.) Instead, to cool off, I enter the nearest building with air conditioning, which happens to be the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

This choice, made in part out of desperation, turned out to be quite fitting. In fact, it’s possible the real reason I came to the capital on this fourth of July was because of a trip I took to D.C. a few months prior, to see a certain empty plot of land. I had traveled with a little blue notebook, into which I had stuffed leaves and scrawled notes:

The empty stretch of the National Mall I had gone to visit in April, labeled the “South Monument Site” by the Smithsonian, was one of two plots of land recommended for the construction of a museum. The second, southwest of this one, is a triangular field referred to as the “Tidal Basin Site.” In another world, or perhaps a future one, these two abandoned plots are the National Museum of the American Latino and the American Women’s History Museum. In this one, they are grass. They’re grass because we disagree about what is worth remembering.

By this I mean: when a prototypical gallery for a National Museum of the American Latino was unveiled in 2022, the backlash was so swift and virulent that Congress responded by refusing to allocate any funding for the museum’s creation. Its inaugural exhibit, ¡Presente! A Latino History of the United States, hosted by the National Museum of American History, lasted just weeks before pundits published an op-ed in The Hill calling it “a disgrace.” The installation was, they wrote, “unabashedly Marxist…its only redeeming quality is that it makes clear why the forthcoming National Museum of the American Latino must not be funded.”

Sure enough, not long after the article, legislation transferring the museum a plot of land on the National Mall—the South Monument Site, or the Tidal Basin Site—was abandoned. The hundreds of millions promised by Congress in 2020 were not, in fact, included in its budget. And the exhibit that was set to follow ¡Presente!, on Latino civil rights history and youth movements, was abruptly put on hold. Its two curators, who had planned to display, among other objects, the Young Lords’ first patient bill of rights, were given no explanation as to why. Instead, in subsequent staff meetings, museum director Jorge Zamanillo stressed that exhibits were meant to encourage museum fundraising and appeal to broad audiences. The forthcoming exhibit on Latino activism, he announced, would be replaced by one on salsa music.

By 2023, a Smithsonian employee alerted TIME magazine that after a meeting between museum administrators and members of Congress, labels in the ¡Presente! exhibit were being edited. By July 2025, months into Trump’s second term, the exhibit had been dismantled entirely—four months ahead of schedule—supposedly in preparation for the country’s 250th anniversary. By August, the Trump White House had broadened its audit, alerting the Smithsonian to an internal review of all its exhibitions and materials. It announced:

As we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our Nation’s founding, it is more important than ever that our national museums reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story…Within 120 days museums should begin implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions across placards, wall didactics, digital displays, and other public-facing materials.

A few weeks later, the White House published a list of specific artworks and text displays it found problematic. Among them were several from the ¡Presente! exhibit, which had, by then, already been taken down. The White House complained that the exhibit “feature[d] writing from illegal immigrants ‘fighting to belong.’” It complained about Judy Baca’s quote “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.” It complained that the National Museum of the American Latino’s website featured an image of Puerto Rican activists raising their fists in support of the Black Lives Matter Movement. It complained of a caption that characterized the United States’ founders as afraid of “non-White immigration,” a didactic that suggested that the United States was built on stolen land and rooted in “colonization,” and a quote by Angela Davis, who was once, the White House emphasized, one of the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted Fugitives.

The White House complained, also, that the National Museum of African American History and Culture developed a series on “Being Antiracist” that defined U.S. society as a “white-dominant culture” and featured writing by a “hardcore woke activist.” It complained that the National Museum of African Art featured an exhibit on an imagined underwater kingdom populated by people who jumped or were thrown into the ocean during the Middle Passage. It complained that the American History Museum displayed a brown Statue of Liberty carrying a basket of tomatoes; complained that the building flew a pride flag; complained that the ¡Presente! exhibit featured an illustration of migrants watching 4th of July fireworks “through an opening in the U.S.- Mexico border wall.” The only reasonable response to all this, for the architects of Project 2025, was that a Latino museum “should never come into being.”

So I wander through the Smithsonian on the Fourth of July. In my backpack, a copy of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past. Underlined in red pen: “Average citizens…access history through celebrations, site and museum visits, movies, national holidays, and primary school books…How do we decide—and how does the collectivity decide—which events to include and which to exclude?”

+++

Around 4 p.m., after walking past the White House again—Donna and Don now gone, replaced by a man with a “Trump For King” flag offering free photos—I hear the loudest thunder of my life. Louder, even, then the storm at summer camp that made me believe the world was ending. Louder than the storms that keep me up as an adult.

The thunder is not accompanied by lightning, nor rain. And its vicious rumble only grows more ear-shattering and ominous until the culprit, a massive bomber jet, tears through the sky above me. I search for other people on the block, for their faces, to try to gauge their reactions. I think of a sign I pass by often outside an army recruitment office in Harlem—suddenly it makes sense. Below a formation of ten navy fighter jets the text on the poster reads: “SOMETIMES WE RUSH IN AFTER THE STORM. SOMETIMES WE ARE THE STORM.”

The sound alone is violent, apocalyptic. And what accompanies it betrays the lie, the rotten essence of this whole spectacle: Americans are told—and believe—that this is about freedom, independence, a birthday—but the President celebrates with military flyovers of bombers and helicopters and the Navy’s Blue Angels. The planes loop upside down, or else they speed in formation, their trajectories preserved in contrails after they are gone. The nerve they have, to try and make their flight beautiful. To give me goosebumps.

Later, I realize that it is this display, most of all, that does it. That reveals this Independence Day, despite the White House’s narrative emphasis on “a rag-tag army defeating the mightiest empire in the world,” is in fact a mighty celebration of empire. Of a country constantly at war, a country so violent that people pay for rooftop views of warplanes. A country where, when I scan people’s reactions to the sounds of battle, I find many to be unbothered, because this celebration has happened before.

+++

By the end of the afternoon, I have seen two people collapse from the heat (it’s more than 100 degrees) and feel like I have, somehow, overhydrated myself to the point of nausea. So when the National Mall is evacuated around 7pm—for a real storm this time, true lightning and thunder the way nature intended—I have already given up on seeing the fireworks. Instead, I stay in with my friend Z, who works at an environmental nonprofit. He rereads a staff email sent earlier in the week about the air pollution Trump’s record 850,000 explosives would cause. “I will be out of town,” his coworker wrote. “But there is no chance that I would attend in person.”

At home, Z, his roommate L, and I gossip about boys and pack for his trip to Alaska, to campaign against offshore drilling. Z and L face the bedroom window, from which some neighborhood fireworks are visible. I face the wall. We realize that they have accidentally sublet a room—decorated with Green New Deal posters—to a member of the Federalist Society. This is, I say, the perfect premise for a sitcom. We laugh.

Just before midnight, Z and L leave for a nearby school from which the sky above the Potomac River is visible. L says he hopes we’re all still around for the 300th anniversary. Z takes a disposable mask—the pollution, even far away, will be worse than a wildfire—and I wait for midnight again, for the 4th of July to be over. There is no countdown. I fall asleep to the sound of fireworks.

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The next morning (363 days, 14 hours, 40 minutes, and 0 seconds before the United States’ 251st, give or take) I arrive, more than half an hour early, to the bus station. There is a poor air quality alert. And I learn, thanks to the internet, that the previous night, during the speech preceding his fireworks, Trump had proclaimed:

For two and a half centuries, our American republic has stood as the crowning achievement of human history. This country is the home of freedom. This is the land of liberty. And this is a flag that’s the banner of the most extraordinary, most exceptional, most incredible nation ever to exist on the face of the earth. And we’re doing better now than we’ve ever done before…The American dream is back, very strong, beautiful… Two years ago, we couldn’t fill a job [in the military], and now it’s overflowing… it’s really hard to get into our military because people respect and love our country again…You look at Venezuela; you look at Iran. We wiped it out, wiped out their military.

On the bus stop bench, I return to Trouillot.

Commemorations sanitize…messy history…They contribute to the continuous myth-making process that gives history its more definite shapes: they help to create, modify, or sanction the public meanings attached to historical events deemed worthy of mass celebration…A flag, a memorial, a museum exhibit, or an anniversary can become the center of a living theater with historical pretensions and worldwide audiences.

On the occasion of this country’s semiquincentennial, commemoration of independence was, in practice, commemoration of the empire that this former colony has become: a state with the most military bases in the world, a country that kills in broad daylight at home and abroad. And how could it not be? With military planes flying overhead, with the censorship of history in national museums, with 5,000 deployed members of the National Guard? Trump’s presidency, in all its excess, is the culmination of 250 years of celebrating a country founded on slavery, genocide, and stolen land, the end result of generations of Americans being taught—by the landscape, by their textbooks, by museums, by the celebrations around them—that the United States is exceptional, that it is blessed, that we must pledge allegiance to it.

And yet, I can’t help but remember all the things I was never meant to see. The cardboard posters in my neighbors’ yards. My high school football team, kneeling. Donna’s signs. The illustration, now removed from the American History museum, of migrants watching 4th of July fireworks through cracks in a border wall. Glory, glory, hallelujah. Aaron Bushnell, on fire in protest, “I will no longer be complicit in genocide.” My peers walking out of class, for Parkland, for Pulse; my neighbors marching, in the middle of a pandemic, for Black lives, to defund the police; tents going up on campus, this is a liberated zone. Glory, glory, hallelujah. “You know and I know,” James Baldwin now, in 1962, “that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early.” That we cannot be free until we are all free. You know and I know, today, that the country is celebrating 250 years of freedom while it imprisons and disappears and deports its people; while it kills. You know and I know that it is celebrating 250 years of freedom when we are not yet all free. +

Cover image: Faith Ringgold, The Flag is Bleeding #2, 1997; acrylic on canvas, painted and pieced border; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland.

You can listen to an audio version of this story here:

The other week, at the halfway point on my walk from Copacabana to the bar where Garota de Ipanema was written, I passed none other than Tom Jobim. He was mid-stride, guitar slung over his right shoulder, nicely dressed, hair gelled, not very tall. Approachable. I would have asked him to play, or sing, or take a photo, had he not been metal. I would have asked him how to write a song.

By this particular day—about a month into my time here—I had already passed Tom’s statue often. This time, determined as I was to understand the history of bossa nova, I finally paused to face him, search his eyes, and then scan the QR code at his feet. I was rewarded for my bumbling, public 21st century worship with a robotic recitation:

“The importance of Tom Jobim to Brazilian culture seems immeasurable. It is undoubtedly immense. One of the founding fathers of bossa nova, Antônio Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida Jobim shaped the musical imagination of the entire country and remains one of the most revered Brazilian musicians abroad. With an unmistakable playing style, he recorded with legendary artists of both Brazilian and international music, such as Elis Regina and Frank Sinatra. One of the most performed songs in history, ‘The Girl from Ipanema,’ was written by Tom Jobim with his great collaborator, Vinícius de Moraes. The song has been covered hundreds of times, by artists ranging from Amy Winehouse to Chitãozinho & Xororó.”1

The statue itself, the artificial voice continued, was 200 kilograms of pure bronze sculpted over four months by the São Paulo-based artist Cristina Motta. The memorial, though, was much larger. It included the black-and-white sidewalk; those walking along it; the rock formation where people huddle to watch the sun set and then clap when it finally rests; Rio’s sand, sky, and sea. I took this to mean that in that moment, it included me. After all, Jobim, the uncanny narrator summarized, “translated [Rio de Janeiro] into music… its streets, neighborhoods, bars, [natural beauty], and people…are all present in his songs.” Corcovado, Vou Te Contar, Garota de Ipanema, Àguas de Março, Samba do Avião. If you know how to listen, Tom’s natal city is the main character in most of his melodies.2

I found this all to be lovely, and as I listened I kept walking, focused, along the shore. Just after 6PM, I arrived at the song’s now-eponymous bar. Apart from my disposable camera, notebook, and library copy of Ho-ba-la-lá, a German journalist’s account of his attempt to track down João Gilberto in Rio more than a decade ago, I was alone. Like Marc Fischer, the book’s author, I fancied myself a sort of historian/detective, one that might discover something simply by retracing the steps of the musicians I admire.

But the sun had only just begun to set. I was too early for dinner, too early for gossip over drinks, and far too late to meet up with Vinícius and Tom, who had, some sixty years ago, composed their most famous song in this very restaurant.

Back then, it was called Bar Veloso—and, the story goes, the poet and composer were sitting on the veranda when a girl from Ipanema (soon to be the girl from Ipanema) walked by. Helô Pinheiro was not only tall and tan and young and lovely but also completely oblivious to their extramarital yearning. And she was—according to my mom, who interviewed her for the Washington Post in the early 2000s—gracious, humble, and even more beautiful in person.

But why was this Brazil’s most famous song, even all these years later?

My music professor—the one who inspired this series—often says that talent and luck alone are not enough. To be successful, to be remembered, you also need a third thing: the ability to speak to a moment. And in 1962, Garota de Ipanema, the song scribbled on a napkin two blocks from the beach, was emblematic of a certain romanticism, one that quickly became a symbol of what the (misguided) world imagined Brazil to be. To the listener of Garota de Ipanema, Rio’s greatest sorrow was an unattainable love. Its gospel was the beauty born from solitude and the solitude of beauty.

Garota de Ipanema, then, might have become so popular because it marked the beginning of the end of a short-lived Brazilian era—of “love, smiles, and flowers” (the title of João Gilberto’s third LP)—before the era of tanks, torture, and generals. In retrospect, the song is so associated with freedom that in one mythology, recounted by the pianist João Donato, Tom Jobim came up with the melody after hearing a thrush in a nearby garden sing its tune. “I think,” João Gilberto’s collaborator said, decades later, “that [Tom] set the birdsong to music.” Incredulous, Marc Fischer asked if he really meant to say that “one of the most beautiful and well-known songs in the world is really a bird’s song?” To which Donato, while preparing to smoke a joint, replied: “Why not?”

Within two years of Garota de Ipanema’s debut, tanks would occupy Rio’s streets. A coup would usher in a brutal twenty-one year dictatorship. The country, and its music, would suffer immensely, and both would be forced to learn how to resist. Bossa nova was “too beautiful, too smooth,” and because of that, according to the composer Marcos Valle, during the dictatorship the genre “disappeared.”

But in 1962, it was still possible to write love songs.

Aside from defining an era of lightness and peace—at least for the white, wealthy urban class—Garota de Ipanema is historic, too, for a few other reasons:

1. It was performed in New York’s Carnegie Hall3 and subsequently re-recorded, as Tom’s memorial statue hinted, by an all-star roster of jazz greats including Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt, Sarah Vaughn, Nat King Cole, Charlie Byrd, and Stan Getz.

2. It was covered by powerhouses like Frank Sinatra, Amy Winehouse, and The Supremes, and re-imagined by Brazil’s most popular contemporary artist, Anitta.

3. It is—according to this NPR story sent to me by my mom upon hearing I was writing this blog—the second-most recorded song in history, behind only The Beatles’ Yesterday.

4. It was sung by me, on my high school jazz band trip to Spain. (Okay, this is not historic. But it it’s still a fun fact.)

5. Its melody is so enduring that even Bad Bunny has made use of a sample, in Si Veo a Tu Mamá. (This is a shameless plug for my blog post about famous Latin American samples! Read it here).

But the most romantic reason, in my opinion, for the longevity of Garota de Ipanema is that when it debuted live at a restaurant in Copacabana, its performance marked the first and only time that the three patron saints of bossa nova (João Gilberto, the voice; Vinícius de Moraes, the words; and Tom Jobim, the melody) ever performed together. They sang Garota de Ipanema, and then never sang together again. That was it.

Luckily, someone had the foresight to record a snippet (translations below):

Video credit: Instituto Tom Jobim, 2020.

JOÃO GILBERTO: Tom, what if you wrote a song now, one that will tell us about what love is?

TOM JOBIM: Look, Joãozinho, I wouldn’t know how to without Vinícius writing the poetry.

VINÍCIUS DE MORAES: If this song is to exist, we’ll need João to sing.

JOÃO GILBERTO: Ah, but who am I? I exist with you. Better if we all three sing.

Decades later in Ipanema, I ordered garlic bread and Guaraná with a slice of orange to justify my obsessive photos of the memorabila that lined the bar’s walls. (I even checked the bathroom, to make sure there wasn’t a hidden gem in there.) I ate quickly, and then signaled for the check.

Can I ask you something, a question I’m sure everybody asks? I said, before standing up.

Of course, the waiter replied.

Do you know which table they were sitting at? When they wrote the song?

He smiled.

This one here, the same one you’re sitting at now.

I couldn’t believe it, and asked again to make sure. Maybe it was Tom who led me here.

After twenty-one years away, I’m back in the city where I was born, the city that gave me my name. I’ve swapped my daycare (Mamãe eu quero ir/ ‘Mommy I want to go!’) for university (PUC-Rio); I’m living in Copacabana instead of Leme; my parents are in another country; Rio is rapidly gentrifying and touristifying (one thing about Brazilians: we love to make up words); the ocean is probably less clean and per kilo food is more expensive, but otherwise, I imagine, things are as we left them. We even have Lula in office.

At PUC, I’m taking five classes, including a mandatory Portuguese for Foreigners course (Brazil can be unbearably Kafka-esque, and neither a passport nor fluency spared me this seminar)— but my favorite is a lecture on the history of Brazilian music. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I alternate between taking vigorous notes, practicing the thumb-fingers-wrist-palm tambourine rhythm of samba on my thigh, mouthing lyrics to myself, and tearing up. The obsessive notes are, first and foremost, to sear this most brilliant of courses into my memory, and second, to report the day’s stories back to my parents (and now, to you).

Today’s lesson—all credit to my brilliant professor, Paulo Cesar de Araújo— is on the song that, he says, changed destiny. Feel free to guess what it is. I’m not going to tell you right away.

Instead, let’s back up a bit. A lot. To 1958, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. If you’re listening to recorded music at the time, you’re listening to the radio. You’re hearing an ensemble of crooning radio kings and queens, Disney-like arrangements, operatic vocals, and oh-so-much melodrama. While you (the you of 2025) cook or organize or do whatever you’re doing while reading this, take a few minutes to listen to a bit of some of these:

This one is my favorite in this style:

If you’re not a fan, though, don’t fret. Some radio royalty were also recording classic sambas. In fact, because carnaval season was when most records were sold, anything that was too melancholy to pass for a parade tune (like all the melodrama above) was referred to as “música do meio do ano”— “middle-of-the-year music.” Carnaval music, I suppose, was just ‘music’:

And if those don’t do it for you, there was also the Northeastern forró/baião (my favorite genre):

But regardless of which of those styles you like most, on July 10, 1958, a then-unknown artist would record a single that sounded absolutely nothing like any of them. It would, quite literally, redefine Brazilian music and culture, from vocal technique to social gatherings. (I’m building so much suspense, aren’t I!?)

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To build some more, here’s a quick summary of some of the Brazilian artists who have testified to our mystery song being either a) the reason they became musicians or b) the reason they decided to play this kind of music:

1. Our song played on the radio for the first time when Gilberto Gil was around sixteen years old. He had been eating at home when it came on and he lept up when it ended, running to the local pharmacy to call in to the radio station and beg to know who had been singing. What was that song called? What was that music?

2. Chico Buarque, who had wanted to be an architect or maybe a writer (he did go on, eventually, to also be the latter) decided he wanted to be a musician when he heard the record, and played it so many times his father thought he was unwell.

3. Caetano Veloso heard it and promised to learn the guitar.

4. Gal Costa said that when she listened to the song, it “bateu em mim como destino”— it hit me/ pounded in me like destiny.

5. Milton Nascimento, who was working at a radio station at the time, called the disc an illumination.

These five singers, who would go on to be the greatest artists of their generation, of my mother’s generation, and of mine, were in awe. (A nearly fifteen-year running survey of the students enrolled in my class—hundreds of ~18-23 year olds since 2012—revealed that Caetano and Chico were the two artists most frequently listed as students’ favorite Brazilian musicians. At eighty-something, they remain our superstars.)

But alas, all that to say that the impact of this record was immense, and the tapestry of sound woven from its thread is outstanding in its beauty and abundance. My professor, before revealing the record, said earnestly that it was in each of our DNA.

The song, the side A of its singer’s first hit single, was this one:

(Here’s a translation of the lyrics.)

A tsunami of questions crashed over the city. What genre was this? Was it samba (the disc itself said so, but where was the tambourine?) Was it a baião? Why was he singing so colloquially, as if the voice itself were an instrument? What was this democratized sound, voice and guitar on the same plane, simple, revelatory? Tom Jobim, in his blurb, didn’t have all the answers. But he knew to praise his partner for transcending the limitations of a body: “When João Gilberto accompanies a guitar, it is him. When an orchestra accompanies João, the orchestra, too, becomes him.”

And he knew that there had never, ever, been anything like this. Young people loved it; stations refused to play it (how could he call himself a singer? How could this be music?). But a few radio plays were enough. The record exploded.

Its B-side, meanwhile, was even stranger than its twin (before you ask, no, “bim bom” doesn’t mean anything in Portuguese):

It’s fitting, though, that Gilberto’s introduction to the world was scatting reminiscent of a heartbeat. And that yet again, he reconfigured himself— body and voice— as an instrument. When I heard Bim Bom in class, I immediately thought of a song by Gal Costa that had been stuck in my head for days. In it, she mimics an instrument (no spoilers) until they, too, merge gloriously into one:

Ah! I’m getting ahead of myself! Gal Tropical is from 1979. Back to 1958!

Quickly, our world-shattering single was such a success that it demanded another one. And this time, Gilberto responded to his haters perfectly, marvelously—with a tune that was sweet but sharp. (Ha- ha; didn’t even mean for that to be a pun.)

He recorded Desafinado.

Here’s an English version, “Slightly Out of Tune.”

It’s here, in a phrase of Desafinado, that Gilberto names, for the first time, the genre he has invented. “Isso é bossa nova,” he sings. “Isso é muito natural.” (“This is bossa nova, this is very natural.”) <3

Some sixty years later, on another continent and in another century, I sang Desafinado with my high school jazz band. A jazz band that I joined because my dad, after falling in love with bossa nova, learning Portuguese, moving to Brazil, meeting my mom, and having me, asked me, sixteen years after my birth in Rio, to please audition for my school band so that I could sing his favorite songs.

What a record indeed.

Last March I was at my airport gate in San Diego when I noticed a man staring at an upside-down boarding pass. He smoothed it, then stood up, disoriented, paced around in brown work boots, and sat down again next to me, the letters still rotated the other way. He was anxious, or he was lost—but I couldn’t tell which, and didn’t know why. And then I saw him message someone on WhatsApp, in Portuguese. O senhor é brasileiro? I asked. Sir, are you Brazilian? It turned out he was from the same state where my mom was raised, and flying to the one where I grew up. While we waited to board, I told him what his ticket said, read the departure screens, and repeated the loudspeaker announcements. For a brief moment, I was a translator—and I couldn’t remember ever feeling more useful. 

That same spring, I began reading about translation. I pored over books, essays, and articles, traced the webs connecting translators to their various authors, and read Bruna Dantas Lobato’s debut novel, Blue Light Hours, which imagines, among other scenarios, a Brazilian daughter’s careful translation of an American airport for her mother. Her translation is tender, a form of love. The act can, I learned, be many other things. 

For Jhumpa Lahiri, in Translating Myself and Others, to translate is to “alter one’s linguistic coordinates, to grab on to what has slipped away, to cope with exile.” For Octavio Paz, a child learning to speak is a translator, as is the poet who searches for the right words; there are, therefore, as many translators as there are people. For Dantas Lobato, there may be even more than that. “Translation,” she says, is “an exercise in being in touch with the other people I’ve been.” By these measures, Dantas Lobato herself—former child, self-proclaimed foreigner, literary translator, and now novelist—is a translator at least four times over. It should come as no surprise that Blue Light Hours, a book about immigration, digital intimacy, and a long-distance mother-daughter relationship, is also a profoundly illuminating meditation on language. 

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Like most immigrant kids of the modern internet, the narrator of Bruna Dantas Lobato’s Blue Light Hours tries to live in two places at once. She Skypes her mom, back home in Northeastern Brazil, when she moves into her dorm room at a rural Vermont college; she calls when she turns in her first paper and when sees her first snow. She blows kisses to her laptop screen, then smears it trying to reach through. In bed, she mulls over her “life on the computer” as though it were distinct, but her offline world, with its campus parties and colonial homes, remains filtered through blue light just the same. 

When we meet her, our unnamed narrator is (again, like many immigrant kids) a translator, though she does not know this yet. She’s living abroad, alone, for the first time, and her saudade—a simultaneous desire and pain, warmth of memory and ache of distance—compels her to carefully document each novelty in a notebook so that her new life may be shared. She notes red barns, coffee with straws, blue eggs in birds’ nests, spruce trees, chipmunks (“why no word for them in Portuguese?”), honey barbecue sauce, wool sweaters, snow. Each marvel is diligently recorded, a world translated—until the devastating moment, anticlimactic and arbitrary, when she understands that to fully convey a life would take a lifetime, and she cannot live for two people at once. Of her abandoned project, she laments: “I stashed [the notebook] in one of my desk drawers and never opened it again…I’d never be able to finish telling my mother what I saw.” 

Before long, the daughter is writing diary entries in English, analyzing Henry James, speaking the language “as if [she] had always spoken it,” and searching her dorm room in vain for books, flyers, magazines—anything—in Portuguese. When no one is looking, while she treks home at night, she speaks to herself in Portuguese, too—an attempt to craft language as incantation, to return, at least in phrase, to Natal, a past self, and the mother who was warm and vibrant before she was a lonely, grainy image. In her room, the daughter hums Brazilian songs and longs for her mom’s soft words: minha filha, minha menina. She strives to condense her experiences into stories, if not written records, for her. 

But though the women continue to regularly call, and yearn for, each other, they slowly lose the sameness—reinforced by shared words conjuring shared atmospheres and feelings—that they had in common. “There isn’t much to tell,” the daughter responds, shaking her head, when her mom asks for news one night. Later, when the mother overhears her speaking in English to a friend, she asks, bewildered, whose voice it was. “You sounded different,” she says. “You see, that’s something. That’s news to me.” But for the daughter, what was once novelty is stamped into the wax of routine, then hardened. It seems life becomes more difficult to translate now than when wonder was abundant. And how frustrating that her mom cannot see her “outside…the screen,” that even everyday words (rain, water, sky) do not animate the same scenes anymore, that every phrase carries the suffocating context of the language in which it comes packaged. Hers are any translator’s perpetual frustrations: frustrations Dantas Lobato, and a growing body of peers who write about their art, know well.

The literary translator Daniel Hahn, for instance, asserts in a 200-page diaristic account of an 150-page novel translation that no word maps perfectly onto another, for even the image conjured by the English ‘tree’ is certainly not the same as the image associated with the Brazilian Portuguese ‘árvore.’ And, he reminds us, that is just the visual—the first of many building blocks of meaning. Translators must also consider how a word tastes on the tongue, the histories it’s connected to, its power. “It’s easier to [translate],” he writes, “once you’ve understood that in theory it cannot be done.” Edith Grossman, who translated Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, acknowledged in her own book that translation was viewed by critics as “impossible at best” and “a betrayal at worst.” For both, thankfully, the conclusion is nonetheless one of optimistic faith: there is nothing to do but translate. Our narrator, in spite of her teenage angst, decides the same. 

Her linguistic trials act as the pendulum of the novel. There’s an attempt to translate, then disappointment; an attempt to translate, then longing for home; failure to translate, then guilt; an attempt to translate, then a reminder of shared love, and finally, understanding. For most of the book, despite her best efforts, the daughter’s landscape, for the mother, remains a mystery, a movie, a region of the imagination. When it snows, she asks: “Does walking outside feel like being buried alive?” In her mind, the daughter’s dormitory is “a palace,” her peers are “milky,” and squirrels gather to greet her each morning, an immigrant Cinderella. Phrase by phrase, the mother constructs a fantasy. But like any good trick mirror or literary parallel, the daughter, too, begins to fictionalize her mother’s speech, layering it with new meanings and imposing on each sentence her own emerging linguistic context. In conversation, words are distorted and relationships are redefined. Mother and daughter speak, one night, about grief: 

She said, softly, Do you think I’ll get used to it? To my mother being dead? My only mother.

Though she didn’t speak those words at all, not exactly, another layer of removal between us. She said something else, in Portuguese, minha única mãe. I was the one hearing her in English, this language that was taking over everything, her words turning into a fiction in my head.

It’s here that Blue Light Hours, already an autofictional text, reaches its self-referential peak. Dantas Lobato is, in fact, also from Natal. She attended Bennington College in southern Vermont, where she studied Literature. Her head sports the same graying curls as her character. She also spoke in Portuguese to her mother, to whom the book is dedicated, over Skype from her dorm room. She writes in English. We can imagine her narrator’s career trajectory being similar to that of Dantas Lobato herself: established and acclaimed translator of contemporary Brazilian literature, known for her National Book Award winning translation of Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain and Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries. We can imagine her sitting down to write this book. But this one phrase—I was the one hearing her in English…her words turning into a fiction in my head—forces the reader to question the veracity of all they have just read and all that remains. Paradoxically, the seed of doubt it sows further binds the narrator and her author: the former, after all, purports to be writing a form of fiction; the latter is a novelist. And the seed finds itself in a vast field of distrust in English itself—the very language the reader is, presumably, reading the phrase in. When they learn that Blue Light Hours was self-translated by Dantas Lobato from English into Portuguese, that field blooms. The parallel version of the text, published near-simultaneously in Brazil as Horas Azuis, raises a litany of questions. 

How is the English, which recounts conversations in Portuguese, distorted? Are we to believe it is more ‘fictional’ than even the narrator suggests? Is the Portuguese more raw or more convoluted, the translation of a translation? How do these mirrored novels differ? How do they transform the narrator, and the writer herself? 

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For the most part, the slight variations between Blue Light Hours and Horas Azuis are expected. The Portuguese both loses specificity (“Goodwill” becomes a generic bazaar, “Fireball” becomes whiskey, gone are the labels of uptown or upstate New York) and gains it (“chocolate icing” becomes brigadeiro, delivery people are in fact deliverers of water and gas, “longing” becomes saudade). Measurements are adjusted (miles to kilometers, and Farenheit to Celsius); and additional context, when needed, is added (salt melts ice in winter!).

Every once in a while, for the close reader, a small swap results in a larger change in meaning. “I’m becoming my own person,” a phrase spoken by the daughter to her mother, becomes “Estou me tornando uma pessoa melhor”—I’m becoming a better person; frogs, for some unknown reason, become crickets; a gut-punch of a phrase about the mother’s “low standards” in coffee is missing from the translation. And when, in Blue Light Hours, people are introduced as white (“a group of white boys smok[ing] weed by the door;” “a white boy with hipster glasses;” “the white kids from the lit department”) their race is either omitted or they are introduced as “muito branco(s)”—very white—in Horas Azuis, a subtle nod to how the narrator herself might be racialized differently in the United States as a Latina immigrant than how she might be categorized in a skin-tone obsessed Brazil.

Other times, as Hahn alludes, words carry a weight in Portuguese that is absent from the English. The mother’s bed, in the translation, is a “cama de casal” (a bed for two, a couple’s bed), emphasizing her solitude. Horas Azuis, the title, literally translates to “Blue Hours,” and though it’s missing the concept of “light,” it also carries its own unique connotations of sorrow. In a 1998 ballad of the same name, the Brazilian singer Fagner croons: “Não vejo a cidade sem nós dois/Momentos depois/ Nem sei quem tu és/ A chuva cai…Volta meu amor/ Eu quero te ver…/ Não sei te esquecer” (“I don’t see the city without us two/ Moments later/ I don’t even know who you are/ The rain falls…Come back my love/ I want to see you…/ I don’t know how to forget you”). For those who recognize it, it is a beautiful parallel: an homage by Dantas Lobato to a fellow northeastern artist. It is also one of many truths found in translation rather than lost to it. 

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In 2000, just after she won a Pulitzer for Interpreter of Maladies and over a decade before she authored her first published translation, Jhumpa Lahiri wrote an essay grappling with her creation of “Indian landscape[s]” and Indian characters in English. The dialogues imagined in her head in Bengali, she noted, were translated, fictionalized, English imposed on mouths that did not speak it, words replaced. It was “disorienting…something of a betrayal.” That feeling is what marked her writing as a work of translation—even if the prose was only ever written in one language—of place, speech, emotion, culture, worlds. In Blue Light Hours, Dantas Lobato—by way of the narrator—mourns this same fabrication, though the novel would not exist without it. And in Horas Azuis, she mourns it in other words, in an even more nuanced spiral. 

Take, for instance, the passage cited earlier, but in the Portuguese version: 

Ela disse, baixinho, Você acha que vou me acostumar com isso um dia? Com minha mãe estar morta? Minha única mãe.

Apesar de ela não ter dito nenhuma dessas palavras, não exatamente, outra camada de distância entre nós. Ela disse alguma outra coisa, em um português só dela, my only mother. Eu que a ouvia em inglês às vezes, essa língua que tomava conta de tudo, e a traduzia de volta para o português, suas palavras virando uma ficção na minha mente.

Here is how I would translate—with the phrases not included in the original English novel in bold:

She said, softly, Do you think I’ll get used to it one day? To my mother being dead? My only mother. 

Though she didn’t speak any of those words, not exactly, another layer of distance between us. She said something else, in a Portuguese that is hers alone, minha única mãe. I was the one hearing her in English sometimes, this language that was taking over everything, and translating her back into Portuguese, her words becoming a fiction in my head. 

Horas Azuis, a self-translation of an English manuscript that is based on real and imagined conversations in Portuguese, exposes an additional cycle in the fictionalization of dialogue—and thus the limits of narrativizing it, regardless of language. First, our Portuguese-speaking narrator recognizes that even within the same dialect, there are different languages (her mother’s Portuguese, for instance, is different from her own; it is “hers alone”), making wholly faithful reproduction impossible. And second, she reveals that in conversation, she not only hears her mother’s Portuguese phrases in English, but re-processes them as her own Portuguese self-translations. It’s a game of telephone, but with herself, in her mind. 

The result of that game is that dialogue, emotion, and characters remain—even in the language they are pictured in—a fiction. It is left unclear, intentionally, where the translation of imagination ends and the translation of language begins. Instead, from the Portuguese novel, we learn that the English narrator is unreliable only in the sense that she is a writer, tasked with the impossible undertaking that is replicating experience. Her döppleganger is unreliable for the same reason. For Dantas Lobato, there is no authentic original anymore because the mother tongue itself is rewritten. 

Like most devices in Blue Light Hours, this rewriting cuts both ways. The daughter’s endless translations reshape her Portuguese, but the mother’s fantastic notions, at first denied, come true in English, too. Not long after dismissing her mom’s question about feeling “buried alive,” the daughter describes walking in snow as being “buried up to [her] shins” and as sinking into the “plain landscape [that] tried to bury [her].” She denies that she is the “child alone in a palace” that her mother deems her to be in autumn, but recounts her next summer as that of “a kid playing grown-up in an oversized house…unsupervised play.” Mother and daughter—and their speech—redefine each other. Reading both novels reveals just how much the author, her narrator, and their relationships to language have evolved.  

I return here to Lahiri, who after writing four books in English went on to not only study but write novels in Italian and then self-translate one of them into English, because she may be the best living point of comparison for Dantas Lobato’s craft. She is certainly the most well-known, celebrated contemporary self-translator: Dantas Lobato herself tweeted “call me Jhumpa Lahiri from now on” in a thread about her mirrored novels. And Lahiri articulates—in a book chapter written in English, but based on diary entries in Italian—precisely the tumult we witness in Dantas Lobato’s Brazilian-American narrator. Just swap out Italian for English, and English for Portuguese: 

When an author migrates into another language, the subsequent crossing into the former language might be regarded, by some, as a crossing back, an act of return, a coming home. This idea is false…[For me] the idea of ‘coming home’ was no longer an option. I had gone too deep into Italian, and so English no longer represented the reassuring, essential act of coming up for air. My center of gravity had shifted; or at least, it had begun to shift back and forth.

Halfway through Blue Light Hours, a card the daughter mailed home for Christmas arrives, two months too late, to Brazil. Her mother begins, proudly, to read it out loud on a call—“Querida mãe, Feliz Natal” (Dear mom, Merry Christmas)—but then cannot make out a single word that follows, even though the note is in Portuguese. She holds the letter up to the camera for the daughter to read, only she does not understand anything either. The language pools. Portuguese—even her own words, written in her own penmanship, fail to transport her home. You are not the person who wrote this, the new shapes seem to say. Still, she keeps trying to read. “I tried to make sense of what I’d written, but all I saw was a blur,” the daughter narrates. “Neat lines of blur.”

It’s an obvious metaphor, but an intentional one—for transformation, for the ways English has restructured her relationship to Portuguese, for the way translation, as Walter Benjamin says, is “charged with…watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.” For Dantas Lobato, and for her narrator, there is no English text without its Portuguese counterpart, no story without an origin, no daughter without mother, no immigrant without birthplace—but there is also no immigrant without a new home, no daughter without an identity of her own, no story without a middle, and an end, and no Portuguese, anymore, without English layered atop it, redefining, translating, forcing a fictionalizing cycle. There is no “life on the computer” and life off it, no English-speaking narrator separate from her mother, no reality separate from fantasy, no literature without translation, no—as the narrator claims—“two lives” within herself. There is just the one. It is messy, and it is beautiful. 

“I am…living in two languages at once,” Dantas Lobato tweeted last spring, while translating Blue Light Hours. “The way god (aka my characters) intended.” ¤

The first time I saw Marta play, I was eight years old. It was 2009, just after her move to the United States to start for the Los Angeles Sol, and at 23 she had already been named FIFA Player of the Year an unprecedented four times. She would go on to win the award again—in 2010, and 2018—but according to my mother, and according to Brazil, she was already the greatest of all time. 

It was my mom who brought me to see Marta, in an away game against the Boston Breakers in Cambridge, the same city where I played in a youth soccer league. (I had recently graduated from the Cambridge Waterfalls, for our light blue t-shirts, to the Cambridge Fireflies, a travel team with a real-deal jersey.) The game was my first time watching a professional match, and I still remember the novelty of the stadium, the warm-ups, the songs vibrating in my chest from the speakers, the other young girls in the stands. I remember squinting at the field, my mom indicating who to watch. Marta wasn’t the only Brazilian on the pitch, she explained. At the time, the Breakers boasted national-team right-back Fabiana, who threw a promotional skill ball into the stands before the game, right to my mom—and Brazil’s stars could often be found in Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS). Formiga and Cristiane, two of Brazil's all-time best, were playing in the U.S. in 2009. So was Daniela, who scored during the 2008 Olympics, the last time Brazil made a gold-medal match, which they lost, 1-0, to the United States (déjà-vu can be cruel). In the aughts, the historic lack of infrastructure for women’s clubs and competition in Brazil meant that for its players, the U.S. was a “paradise of women’s soccer” by comparison. This muscle drain continues, though to a lesser extent: of Brazil’s 2023 Women’s World Cup squad, two-thirds played abroad professionally, with eight in the WPS’ offshoot, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). One of those eight was Marta, playing in her last Cup.

Since then, I have found myself thinking about Marta’s legacy often. She has led Brazil to Copa America wins and Olympic medals; she’s led club teams on three continents to championships, she’s won the Golden Boot and Golden Ball, collected more Player of the Year Awards than any woman in history; scored more World Cup goals than any other athlete, regardless of gender (four more than Messi, and three more than Cristiano Ronaldo); she’s been nicknamed “the queen of soccer” and declared the royal counterpart to King Pelé. Today, it’s a mainstream take to call her the greatest of all time: CNN, ESPN, and FOX Sports, to name a few, have all made the claim. But more than individual awards and accolades, more than the wins and glory and certainly more than the losses, her legacy has been one of championing women’s soccer and challenging sexism: of recognizing that her team was made up of millions of girls, and then playing and advocating for all of them. To speak about Marta is to speak about a revolution in women’s soccer, on and off the pitch.

When Marta Vieira da Silva was born, in 1986, it had been just a year since the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship, and less than a decade since its strict ban on women’s soccer was lifted. By the time she decided she wanted to play—in the rural, northeastern state of Alagoas—there were no girls teams for her to join. Even at the highest level, women athletes were neglected: though Brazil fielded a team at the Women’s World Cup in 1991, they played in hand-me-down men’s uniforms, and received minimal media, public, and political support. “When I started to play, I didn’t have an idol,” Marta said last year. “[No one] broadcast women’s soccer. How would I have seen it? How would I have known that I could make a national team?” 

And yet, she did just that—and then became the very idol she had searched for. She went from playing barefoot on the street with grocery bags wadded into the shape of a ball to competing with boys to moving across the country to join an inaugural women’s side to dominating in yellow and blue. She plays with the sheer determination to get the ball in front of the goal and the precision to slot it into the side netting. Marta’s left foot is a national treasure: it alone has likely scored more goals for Brazil than Ronaldinho (33) and Ronaldo (62) combined. (In total, she scored 119.) She surrenders her body to the game, barreling through defenders and flying into the grass as the ball continues its trajectory, her afterlife in motion. Saturday’s gold medal match may have been her last international game, but when Brazil plays without her, Marta’s presence will remain: a twelfth woman on the pitch, a historic legacy. 

It’s a given, the same way it is now a given that she is the greatest of all time, that Marta’s success made her the reference for today’s national team. (Many of them, Brazilian media reported, were motivated to go pro because of her.) What may be less obvious is that her impact extends far beyond the country of her birth—to generations of little girls, and especially little girls of color, all around the world. Last year, when Brazil was eliminated after the group stage of the Women’s World Cup following a 0-0 tie with Jamaica, captain Bunny Shaw gushed: “Marta was my inspiration growing up and she still is….She’s not just an inspiration for me, but for a lot of young girls in the Caribbean and around the world.” Sophia Smith, in a press conference ahead of last Saturday’s Olympic final, said that words cannot “describe how grateful we are for a player like Marta who is an advocate for young players like us…we wouldn’t be here without [her]. Marta… changed the game forever.”

In 2017, in an emotional letter of encouragement to her fourteen-year-old self, Marta warned that “for a while, soccer will be solitary.” The fact that it isn’t anymore is due, in part, to her work—from urging investment in youth programs to advocating for equal pay across gender. In 2020, after years of advocacy, the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) announced that the women’s national team would receive the same allowances and minor tournament prizes as the men. Last year, the CBF introduced a plan to build 64 women’s clubs as counterparts to existing men’s teams by 2027. And in May, FIFA announced the next Women’s World Cup would be in Brazil. None of those decisions would have been likely without Marta. And though we celebrate her for it, it’s worth stressing that we shouldn’t have to, because she should not have had to fight for higher pay, or opportunities for girls, or respect, or gender equality—she should not have had to fight for any of it. As Defector put it recently: “Marta has always played soccer in a way that feels transcendent… [but] female players have never been allowed to simply be transcendent. They must be firmly planted in this world, shouldering the systemic inequalities and discrimination that have always pressed down on the women’s game.”

If Marta became the greatest of all time in this world, I wonder: what would she have been able to do in another one?  

Like all of Latin America, most of the globe, and a fair amount of American Marta fans, I was—of course—rooting for Brazil to win the Olympic gold last weekend. I was frustrated when they didn’t. But to mourn that loss (however undeserved) and to lament Marta’s trophy collection as forever incomplete is to miss the point of what she has done for the sport. I wasn’t heartbroken on Saturday because Marta retired1 on a podium filled with athletes who she inspired.

That day in 2009, the first time I saw Marta play, she lost. Boston became the first team to not only score against but defeat the LA Sol that whole season—and yet it was Marta that became my idol. When fans lined up outside the locker-room, it was Marta they were searching for. I remember the clamoring when she emerged from the dugout, and my mom calling out: Marta, melhor do mundo! (Marta, the best in the world!) She held out the ball she had caught, branded with the Breakers crest. Marta signed our green and white ball, my family jokes, because she heard my mom speak Portuguese, and saw a little Brazilian girl looking up at her with admiration.

I went on to play soccer for the next decade of my life. “How beautiful,” I wrote in a diary, years later, that my first experience as a fan was to root for women, to see Marta. Obrigada, melhor do mundo.

Este texto fue traducido del inglés y publicado originalmente aquí.

SI SER FAN significa sentir que conoces a alguien, ser fan de un artista significa sentir que te conoces a ti mismo. Escuchas las letras de las canciones y haces tuyos los amores o las pérdidas; te sientes, al menos temporalmente, duplicado. Eres la persona de la que habla la canción y la que escucha, el artista y el público, el escritor y el lector que se pregunta cómo su vida puede ser contada con tanta elocuencia por otra persona. En literatura, esta superposición podría considerarse un epitexto abstracto: una interpretación de una obra que afecta a la forma de procesar el original. Tú llegas a amar tu nueva versión, la voz que has reducido a las líneas que te parecen propias, y el artista acaba vendiendo un montón de discos.

Romper intencionalmente esta ilusión, entonces, es una reclamación vulnerable. Es un renacimiento de la persona dentro de la estrella del pop, detrás del espectáculo. Y es un recordatorio de que aunque podamos amar y apreciar una obra como universal -eso es a menudo lo que la hace tan hermosa-, siempre es, ante todo, de otra persona.

Esta verdad es la tesis del último proyecto de la cantautora chilena Mon Laferte, Mon Laferte, te amo, un documental en parte profesional y en parte casero filmado durante su primer embarazo y la gira de su octavo álbum. Es un retrato íntimo: la vemos regar las flores de la tumba de su abuela, casarse con su ahora marido, sentir las primeras patadas de su hijo, amamantarlo entre bastidores. Y es centrado sin disculpas en ella. Durante algo más de una hora, Laferte relata su niñez y su ascenso a la fama (“para contarte esta historia”, dice, “tengo que contártela como completa”), y nosotros la seguimos con la ayuda de su discografía y las imágenes de su gira. Cuando recuerda a su padre ausente, por ejemplo, vemos una interpretación de “Pa' donde se fue”; las reflexiones sobre su relación con su madre van acompañadas de una desgarradora interpretación de “Te vi” en un bosque; canta “Niña” sobre su embarazo y suena “Malagradecido” mientras describe su depresión. La propia película es un concierto, y aunque nos anime a aplaudir, llorar y cantar con ella, las canciones de Laferte vuelven a ser suyas.

Antes de pisar en cualquier escenario, incluso antes de pronunciar sus primeras palabras, Mon Laferte era Norma Monserrat Bustamante Laferte, de Viña del Mar, Chile. Era una de los miles de niños que nacieron durante la devastadora dictadura de diecisiete años de Augusto Pinochet, y una de los millones que vivían en la pobreza.1 Todos los días, cuenta la cantante, ella y su hermana subían a la ladera para recoger flores blancas secas que su madre pintaba, colocaba en ramos, y vendía. En casa, comían pan duro. Aprendí a cantar, dice Laferte, “por hambre”.

Tres décadas después, está claro cuán formativa fue su infancia, no sólo artística- sino también políticamente. En SEIS, el disco que lanzó unos meses antes de la gira representada en el documental, canta, sarcástica, a un tú gubernamental: “Tú no tienes la culpa de que la plata a nadie la alcanza…”, y denuncia las políticas económicas de la época de la dictadura (“ahora sí”, canturrea, “te va a cargar tu neoliberalidad”). Dos años antes, en 2019, cuando más de 1,2 millones de personas protestaron en Santiago contra la trifecta miserable de un presidente de derecha, una Constitución desactualizada escrita bajo Pinochet y una desigualdad social extrema -solo para ser recibidos con una brutal violencia policial-, Laferte protagonizó su propia protesta en la alfombra roja de los Latin Grammys. Mientras posaba para las fotos, dejó al descubierto su pecho, mostrando tinta negra a lo largo del esternón que decía “EN CHILE, TORTURAN, VIOLAN, Y MATAN.” Alrededor del cuello llevaba un pañuelo verde, símbolo del movimiento por el derecho al aborto en Argentina, y durante casi un minuto permaneció de pie mirando solemnemente al frente, con las solapas de su traje cruzadas cuidadosamente por encima del ombligo. Las imágenes de la protesta, aunque breves, aparecen en el montaje inicial del documental; quedan como la ancla de toda la película.

Pronto nos enteramos de que, si la pobreza impulsó la concientización de Laferte, la labor que siguió le dio forma. Con sólo trece años, empezó a cantar profesionalmente por unos míseros 1.500 pesos chilenos al día. (Ajustado a la inflación, eso equivale a unos cuatro dólares y cuarenta céntimos, o menos de 1.700 dólares al año, pero para alguien sin nada, se ríe, era mucho). La adolescente giraba a todas partes: a la calle, a bares, al circo, a tabernas, a festivales. Dejó de ir a la escuela. Era un secreto a voces que estaba siendo abusada por un “manager” depredador de 34 años -con él estuvo atrapada en una relación hasta los 18-, pero nadie dijo nunca nada. Durante cinco años, él se quedó con la mitad de sus ingresos. Le prometió que era la voluntad de Dios. (“A Crying Diamond” de 1940 Carmen, el primer álbum en el que Laferte canta en inglés, es la banda sonora de estas escenas).

Cuando Laferte logró escapar, fue en parte gracias a su participación en Rojo, un concurso de canto de telerrealidad que dio lugar a su primer álbum, La Chica de Rojo. “Fue mi salvación”, recuerda, al menos hasta que el programa empezó a ignorar sus denuncias de acoso por parte del productor Jaime Román. Laferte volvió a huir a los veintitantos años, esta vez del país, y se instaló en México, donde vive desde entonces. Fue “la libertad máxima”, recuerda. “Aquí no había pasado, no había una familia, no había amigos. No había nada... Empecé a vivir libre”.

México, por supuesto, tenía sus propios fantasmas -y Laferte acabaría enfrentándose a ellos-, pero en sus primeros años era una pizarra en blanco, lista para la reinvención. Fue en México donde Monserrat Bustamante se convirtió en Mon Laferte. Y es en México, desde un estudio casero conectado con una cadena serpenteante de alargadores a un enchufe de un estacionamiento -no podía pagar la cuenta de luz ese mes-, donde Laferte grabó la que sigue siendo su canción más famosa, “Tu Falta de Querer”.

Es en este momento crucial de su carrera, y en el recuento, que Laferte reconoce por primera vez la relación entre sus letras y sus oyentes, en contraposición a sus letras y sus sujetos. Recordando su sorpresa ante el éxito del disco indie, dice: “Todos querían escuchar las canciones... [aunque] yo no conté mi historia [y] la gente no sabía lo que me había pasado”. Fue maravilloso, durante un tiempo, ser amada sin contexto, adorada sin lástima. Tener fans. Pero el hecho de que comparta su historia ahora, casi una década después, refleja su deseo de ser conocida. De dejar constancia de la vida que dio origen al arte, aunque sólo sea para la posteridad. Todo lo que he hecho, la cantautora reflexiona, ha sido un esfuerzo “para que la gente me quisiera”. Mon Laferte, te amo, entonces, puede resumirse como un esfuerzo por ser realmente vista.

En 2021, justo antes de empezar la gira del documental, Laferte declaró a Paper Magazine que no era activista. “Si [lo soy]”, bromeó, “soy la peor”. “Porque los activistas dedican su vida, ¿verdad? Todo el tiempo. Y yo estoy aquí haciendo otras cosas”.

Mon Laferte, te amo hace guiños a muchas de esas “otras cosas”. Hay destellos a sus murales y pinturas y dibujos, a los enormes muñecos (sus “monstruos”) que la acompañaban en el escenario del Walt Disney Concert Hall, a su escenografía y abalorios. Y sin embargo, en todos los medios, sigue solidarizándose con quienes luchan por la justicia. Ha cantado himnos de protesta contra el feminicidio (“Canción Sin Miedo”); ha defendido una constitución que habría sido la primera en codificar el derecho al aborto; ha interpretado “Manifiesto” del poeta asesinado Víctor Jara en el 50º aniversario del golpe de estado en Chile; cantó “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz” junto a otros artistas chilenos; dedicó murales a los supervivientes de agresiones y a las víctimas de la dictadura de Pinochet; tuvo un concierto en una cárcel femenil y escribió sobre la injusticia del estado carcelario (“Se Va La Vida”); denunció la brutalidad policial. Puede que no veamos todo eso en este documental, pero sí está ahí.

Está ahí en el reconocimiento de que su fama no merecía el trabajo y la explotación que sufrió para conseguirla; que se merecía algo mejor como niña y mujer joven. Está en las monedas a las que recuerda que olía, y en la claridad de que la pobreza es tanto el resultado de injusticias estructurales como creadora de condiciones para otras: enfermedad, hambre, malas condiciones laborales, abusos. Está en su amor por todas las versiones pasadas de sí misma.

Tal vez Laferte no vea a una activista en el espejo porque entiende su trabajo como lo que se espera de ella como persona, como el mínimo cuidado. Tal vez no. Pero antes de desechar todas las etiquetas (y reconociendo que al fin y al cabo, yo soy una fan): hay una que Laferte se ha ganado, una y otra vez. Es una artista, en el más verdadero sentido de la palabra. +

IF BEING A FAN means feeling like you know someone, being a fan of an artist means feeling like you know yourself. You hear lyrics and recast lovers or losses as your own, and you are, at least temporarily, doubled. You’re the person who the song is about and the person listening, the artist and the audience, the writer and the reader wondering how their life could be told so eloquently by someone else. In literature, this layering might be considered an abstract epitext: an interpretation of a work that affects the way you process the original. You come to love your new version, the voice you have narrowed to the lines that feel like you, and the artist ends up selling a lot of records.

To intentionally shatter that illusion, then, is a vulnerable reclamation. It is a revival of the person inside the pop star, behind the performance. And it is a reminder that while we can love and appreciate a work as universal—that is often what makes it so beautiful—it is always, first and foremost, someone else’s.

This truth is at the core of Chilean singer-songwriter Mon Laferte’s latest project, Mon Laferte, te amo, a part-professional, part-home-video documentary filmed during her first pregnancy and eighth album tour. It’s an intimate portrait: we see her watering the flowers at her grandmother’s grave, marrying her now-husband, feeling her son’s first kicks, nursing him backstage. It is also—for all this reviewer’s hope of commentary on history and politics—unapologetically centered on her. For just over an hour, Laferte recounts her upbringing and rise to fame (“to tell you this story,” she says, “I have to tell it completely”), and we follow along with the help of her discography and tour footage. When she recalls her absent father, for instance, we see a performance of “Pa’ Donde Se Fue”; reflections on her relationship with her mother are accompanied by a heart-wrenching rendition of “Te Vi” in the woods; she sings “Niña” about her pregnancy and “Malagradecido” plays as she recounts her depression. The film itself is a concert—and though we may be encouraged to applaud, cry, and sing along, Laferte’s songs become hers once more.

Before she ever stepped foot onstage—before, even, she spoke her first words—Mon Laferte was Norma Monserrat Bustamante Laferte, of Viña del Mar, Chile. She was one of thousands of children born during Augusto Pinochet’s devastating seventeen-year dictatorship, and one of millions living in poverty.1 Every day, the singer narrates, she and her sister climbed up the rolling hillside to collect dry white flowers for their mother to paint, arrange in bouquets, and sell. At home, they ate stale bread. I learned to sing, Laferte says, “out of hunger.”

Three decades later, it’s clear how formative her childhood was, not just artistically but politically. On SEIS, the album she released a few months prior to the tour depicted in the documentary, she sings, sarcastically, to a governmental tú: “Tú no tienes la culpa de que la plata a nadie la alcanza…” (“It’s not your fault that no one can make ends meet”), and decries dictatorship-era economic policies (“you will pay,” she croons, “for your neoliberalism”). Two years earlier, in 2019, when over 1.2 million people protested in Santiago against the wretched trifecta of a right-wing president, an outdated constitution written under Pinochet, and extreme social inequality—only to be met with brutal police violence—Laferte staged her own protest on the red carpet of the Latin Grammys. As she posed for photos, she exposed her chest, revealing black ink along her breastbone that read “EN CHILE, TORTURAN, VIOLAN, Y MATAN” (IN CHILE, THEY TORTURE, RAPE, AND KILL). Around her neck, she wore a green bandana, the symbol of the abortion rights movement in Argentina, and for nearly a minute she stood staring solemnly ahead, the lapels of her suit crossed neatly above her belly button. The protest footage, though brief, appears in the documentary’s opening montage; it anchors the entire film.

Soon enough, we learn that if poverty prompted Laferte’s conscientization, the labor that followed shaped its form. At just thirteen years old, she began singing professionally for a meager 1,500 Chilean pesos a day. (Adjusted for inflation, that amounts to about four dollars and forty cents, or less than $1,700 a year—but for someone with nothing, she laughs, it was a lot.) The teenager toured wherever would have her: on the street, at bars, at the circus, in taverns, at festivals. She stopped going to school. It was an open secret that she was being abused by a predatory 34-year old ‘manager’—with whom she was trapped in a relationship until the age of 18—but no one ever said anything. For five years, he took half of all her earnings. He promised her it was God’s will. (“A Crying Diamond” from 1940 Carmen, the first album on which Laferte sings in English, is the soundtrack for these scenes).

When Laferte finally escaped, it was thanks in part to her casting on Rojo, a reality-TV singing competition (think Chilean American Idol) that led to her first album, La Chica de Rojo. “It was my salvation,” she remembers—until the show began ignoring her reports of producer Jaime Román’s harassment. She fled, again, in her early twenties—this time from the country—and settled in Mexico, where she has lived ever since. It was “the ultimate freedom,” she remembers. “Here there was no past, there was no family, there were no friends. There was nothing…I started to live freely.”

Mexico, of course, had its own ghosts—and Laferte would eventually confront them—but in her first years it was a blank slate, ripe for reinvention. It’s in Mexico that Monserrat Bustamante became Mon Laferte. And it’s in Mexico, from a home studio plugged in with a snaking chain of extension cords to an outlet in a parking garage—she couldn’t afford to pay her light bill that month—that Laferte recorded what remains her most famous song, “Tu Falta de Querer.” 

It’s at this pivotal moment in her career, and in the retelling, that Laferte acknowledges the relationship between her lyrics and her listeners, as opposed to her lyrics and their subjects, for the first time. Recalling her shock at the indie record’s success, she says: “Everyone wanted to listen to the songs…[even though] I didn't tell my story [and] nobody knew what happened.” It was wonderful, for a while, to be loved with little context, to be adored without pity. To have fans. But her sharing the story now, nearly a decade later, speaks to a desire to be known. To record the life that bore the art, if only for posterity. “Everything [I’ve done],” she reflects, was an effort “to be loved.” Mon Laferte, te amo, then, may be best summarized as an effort to be truly seen.

In 2021, just before going on tour, Laferte told Paper Magazine that she wasn't an activist. “If [I am],” she joked, “I’m the worst one.” “Because activists dedicate their lives right? All the time. And I’m here doing other things.”

Mon Laferte, te amo nods to many of those “other things.” There are flashes to her murals and paintings and sketches, to the enormous dolls (her “monsters”) that accompanied her onstage at Walt Disney Concert Hall, to her stage design and beading. And yet, in every medium, she continues to stand in solidarity with those fighting for justice. She’s sung protest anthems against femicide (“Canción Sin Miedo”); championed a constitution that would have been the first to codify the right to abortion; performed assassinated poet Victor Jara’s “Manifiesto” on the 50th anniversary of the coup in Chile; covered “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz” alongside other Chilean artists; dedicated murals to assault survivors and to the victims of Pinochet’s dictatorship; performed in women's prisons and written about the injustice of the carceral state (“Se Va La Vida”); denounced police brutality. We may not see all that in this documentary, but it is there.

It’s there in the recognition that her fame was not worth the labor and exploitation she endured to achieve it; that she deserved better as a child and as a young woman. It’s there in the coins she remembers smelling like, and the clarity that poverty is both the result of structural injustices and the creator of the conditions for more: illness, hunger, poor working conditions, abuse. It’s there in her love for all the past versions of herself.

Perhaps Laferte doesn’t see an activist in the mirror because she understands her work as what is expected of her as a person, as the bare minimum of care. Perhaps not. But before we cast all labels aside (and take this with a grain of salt, because I am, at the end of the day, a fan): there is one Laferte has earned, over and over again. She is an artist, in the truest sense of the word. +

I’ve had a playlist for a while called ‘covers and samples.’ These days, it has been a saving grace: a reminder that even if everything beautiful has already been written, writing it again only makes it more so. That how we listen—and that we listen at all—adds its own illuminating layer to art.

In some cases, I grew up with a cover, and only later learned there was an original. In others, I heard a track and immediately recognized where its sample was drawn from. In many, lyrics are translated from Spanish to Portuguese, or vice-versa—a testament to the unifying essence of Latin American music.

Here’s my annotated playlist:

1. la luna enamorada

I first really listened to Kali Uchis’ Sin Miedo del Amor y Otros Demonios in early 2021, and it quickly became one of my favorite albums of all time. I felt the tug of its nostalgia and let it carry me to research the album’s many homages. (Even its title seems to be a tribute: to her fellow Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel of almost the same name, Del Amor Y Otros Demonios).

“Telepatía” has the same concept as Brazilian rockstar Rita Lee’s “Mania De Você”—a gente faz amor por telepatia (telepatia)/no chão, no mar, na lua, na melodia.1 “Qué te pedí” is a cover of Cuban singer La Lupe’s original, and “la luna enamorada,” my favorite track on the album, is a cover of another Cuban classic: Los Zafiros’ “La Luna en tu Mirada.” At Amoeba records in Berkeley, I bought the original CD album, Bossa Cubana. Even its title weaves Brazilian and Cuban genres and heritage together.

2. Jobim, Moraes, and Bad Bunny

Last year, I was lingering in the dance studio after rehearsal when I heard Garota de Ipanema—but Bad Bunny. You guys, you guys! You know this is a sample, right? I asked. Of the most famous bossa nova song!? Written by Tom Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes and popularized by João and Astrud Gilberto?? I couldn’t hear “Si Veo a Tu Mamá” outside of Brazil. Or without picturing a beautiful woman passing by a bar on her way to the beach. Bad Bunny’s song, for me, just added a new layer. He got the girl, but then he lost her (if only this would happen with Kendall…)

3. Besame Mucho

I grew up knowing all the words to “Besame Mucho,” but without ever having heard Consuelo Velasquez’s original version. The song I knew, “Besame muiiiiichoo,” was an eight-minute Brazilian Portuguese accented cover performed by the legendary bossa novista João Gilberto. It’s one of my dad and my favorite songs to sing together, because it’s fun—and funny—to recognize and mimic all the spots in the lyrics where Portuguese slides off Gilberto’s tongue instinctively, marking the song as a language blend we call Portunhol. A true moment of pan-Latinamerican musicality and appreciation.

4. Dreaming of You

Since her passing, the Quintanilla family hasn’t allowed for any artists to record official covers of Selena’s songs—except for Isabel Marie Sanchez. The 20-year old Tejana covered “Dreaming of You” when she was just 15, in 2017.

Last July, Isabel Marie performed in an official Selena tribute concert at the San Francisco Symphony—and I heard her renditions of all the classics—Como la Flor, Bidi Bidi Bom Bom, Tú, Solo Tú…After the performance, I wrote in my journal: “When you think about humanity as collective, is it not the greatest honor to preserve memory, and love, and culture? Is [Isabel Marie] not now part of Selena and Selena part of her?”

5. Maria Maria (& Gracias a la Vida)

Two decades before Santana released “Maria Maria,” Milton Nascimento did. His ballad—no melodic relation to the latter, except the shared name—is an ode to a woman who “holds on” instead of living; a sermon about the need for that “strange habit of faith in life.”

It’s also one of the songs on my playlist that has two covers I adore. The first is Mercedes Sosa’s, a Spanish-language version with deep, melting notes that I feel in my lungs. I learned about Sosa’s cover this October, the night after I saw Silvana Estrada live. My mom, who came with me to the show, said that Silvana reminded her of Mercedes, and specifically the song “Gracias a la Vida.” I recognized that title, and told her that “Gracias a la Vida” was itself a cover, of Chilean folk singer Violeta Parra’s heartbreaking original—a song I had heard for the first time that same week, because Silvana Estrada listed it as one of her favorites in an interview I watched to prepare for my own conversation with her.

Everything is connected.

El canto de ustedes que es el mismo canto/ Y el canto de todos que es mi propio canto/ Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto.2 So go the last three lines of “Gracias a la Vida.” And sure enough, my words are hers.

The second cover of Maria Maria is Ludmilla’s, from last December. I love that she’s paying homage to a great, and preserving a cultural thread of Black Brazilian music and memory.

I’m returning to this post in October 2025 to add my new favorite cover of Maria, Maria. Here are my little cousins performing with their class at school in Minas Gerais, Brazil, the state where Milton Nascimento was raised. <3

6. La Mia Storia Tra Le Dita/Mi Historia Entre Tus Dedos/Quem de nós Dois

Okay, so the original here is not a Latin American song—but it may as well be! I think all of Latin America might know Gianluca Grignani’s melody.

This is also a case where I had absolutely no idea the version I grew up with, Ana Carolina’s “Quem de nós Dois,” wasn’t the original. I found out from a TikTok of Grignani singing in Spanish that I watched in disbelief. I called my mom to ask: Did you know that the original is in Spanish?! At which point she informed me that the real original was in Italian. Amazing.

7. LA CANCIÓN

Two springs ago, I was an assistant to the state manager for Brown’s student-led music festival, which meant I got to meet the lovely Maye. I introduced myself to her, her band, her music director, and manager in their makeshift dressing room, and then spoke with her backstage about how much it meant to me that she was here, that I loved her tiny desk, etc, etc. I asked her if there was a song that she was most excited to perform, and she answered: “The Bad Bunny cover!”

“You’re doing a Bad Bunny cover?” My eyes bugged out. “Yeah, La Canción!” Oops. I knew the song, but had never heard the original, and thought Maye had written it. I love that it’s a cover though, and love the cyclical homages that I see everywhere—connecting Maye to Bad Bunny, João Gilberto, and Consuelo Velasquez; and Silvana Estrada to Violetta Parra, Mercedes Sosa, Milton Nascimento, Ludmilla. A tapestry of Latin American cultural appreciation, talent, and care that I am proud to belong to, if only as a listener.

My takeaway from these dozen or so songs is this: Nothing is new, so everything is new. Make your art. +

It’s been four and a half years, but the world cup is a time capsule, and suddenly I’m seventeen again and he is alive, talking about how remarkable Pelé is. I’m thirteen and watching my mom take off her jersey at halftime out of shame. I’m nine, rooting for Brazil and gushing about Maicon’s physics-defying golaço at home but telling everyone at school who asks that I’m not Brazilian, they must be confused, I am Italian and Irish!—a different kind of shame.

Brazil will play a quarterfinal again this week. Pelé is sick. I am 22, and I am all these past versions of myself.

In the summers of my childhood, when we stayed with my grandparents in Montes Claros, I would sleep under a pink canopied mosquito net that was picked out specially for me. My step-grandpa would wake me up, usually in an all blue outfit—down to the flip flops—by singing. Bom dia amor/ Eu gosto tanto de você/Boa tarde amor/ Eu gosto tanto de você…Ai, Ai.1 I haven’t been able to listen to the song in years, but lately I’ve been listening to more music by the man who sings it, Jorge Ben Jor. I dance in my bathroom to Taj Mahal, and turn the volume up on my headphones for Filho Maravilha, Zagueiro, Goleiro. There’s a whole album of his songs that are inspired by soccer, proof that futebol and samba are mutually inspiring.

On Monday, after Lucas Paquetá celebrated his one-touch goal—Brazil’s fourth against South Korea—with a little dance, commentator Roy Keane reprimanded the entire team for being disrespectful. “I’m not happy with it,” he said. “I don’t think it’s very good at all.” Did you see what they said about the dancing?, my mom asked me over the phone. Que coisa!

After all, anybody who knows anything about soccer knows that when Brazil plays well, they dance on the ball. They play with joy—embaixadinhas2 in the box like they’re on the playground—and it’s infectious. I watched the last game in my office, and I laughed out loud at Richarlison’s three headers. I giggled even more after the goal that followed, when I listened to my mom’s message, her delight pressed into each word: Cê viu aquela jogada? Que coisa ma-ra-vi-lhosa! Eu vou ver o replay porque é muito bonito, meu deus!3

For a long time I’ve carried a lot of sadness, unable to celebrate beauty unless we win, or unless everything is perfect—forgetting that a goal I saw on television when I was nine years old was so meaningful that I can still see it when I close my eyes, that in that moment I fell so deeply in love with soccer I would spend the next decade of my life playing Maicon’s position. That when I was thirteen my mom taught me the national anthem, and I practiced singing it for days so that I could be in unison with the crowd before the next game. That in my step-grandpa’s last months, we were able to watch something that we both loved, together.

It has been so long since I’ve seen soccer so beautiful that I’ve laughed out loud. During the next cup, when I’m 25 and thinking back to now, whatever happens, I promise myself I will remember this fleeting joy. Roy Keane, let us be enchanted. Let us love. We deserve it.

The featured photo for this essay is by Marcio Jose Sanchez/ AP. The title is a lyric from Gonzaguinha’s O Que É, O Que É?

En el encantado vibrato de su voz, Silvana Estrada encuentra una tensión existencial entre la vulnerabilidad y el poder. Se encontrarán sollozando frente a la belleza, sonriendo a través del dolor y, si escuchan con suficiente atención, comprenderán que todo esto es lo mismo: que hay fuerza en la vulnerabilidad, esperanza en el dolor y semillas plantadas en el suelo de la desesperación.

La cantante mexicana de 25 años describe su nuevo EP, Abrazo, como una luminosa celebración de la vida, en toda su complejidad. La canción destacada del EP, ‘Si me matan’, es una meditación poética sobre la feminidad y una canción de protesta contra el femicidio; se ha cantado en marchas del 8-M y manifestaciones feministas en América Latina después de su lanzamiento.

Hablamos sobre la fuerza política del amor, colectividad, y sus planos para el futuro.

Mara Cavallaro: Quiero empezar con tus raíces, porque las llevas en tu música. En una entrevista el año pasado dijiste que a veces cuando escuchas música puedes “oír el paisaje”. ¿Puedes hablar un poco sobre esta idea en relación a tu propia música? ¿Cómo tus canciones evocan a Veracruz?

Silvana Estrada: Me gusta mucho la música que se escucha y entiendes mucho más allá de la persona que canta —la música que cuando la escuchas puedes escuchar la tierra, el paisaje, la raíz. Yo intento que mi música sea eso, que sea música muy conectada a la raíz. Aunque muchas veces experimento con otros sonidos y experimento con el folclor, intento siempre mantener mi raíz presente. Mi música guarda mucho la tierra de donde soy, mi pueblo, Veracruz. Especialmente [con] Marchita, lo que es una especie de homenaje también a mi familia, [el hecho de] tener instrumentos como el violín, como cellos, contrabajos, violas, [y] que todo sea grabado con instrumentos de madera, en una casa de madera, en el campo, es un homenaje a la manera en que crecí, porque mis padres son luthiers y ellos construyen esos instrumentos. Yo también crecí en una casa en el campo, entonces estoy muy conectada con la naturaleza. Crecí en medio de las plantaciones de café y de los ríos. Intento que todo eso —esta especie de hogar— se escuche cuando canto… para que todo el mundo que quiera sea parte de él. 

MC:¿Cuál fue el proceso de composición de las canciones de ‘Abrazo’?¿Cómo se compara con el proceso de escribir ‘Marchita’?

SE: Abrazo, este EP, lo escribí en cuarentena. Es muy loco porque Marchita es un disco que es mucho más introspectivo, mucho más solitario… pero [fue escrito] justo en la normalidad de antes de la pandemia. Y Abrazo es una mezcla de canciones que escribí por la época de Marchita pero que eran tan alegres que no podían estar en el disco… ‘Aquí’ [y] ‘Si me matan’, sí son canciones que escribí durante la pandemia y son canciones que creo que evocan mucha esperanza, mucha fé, mucho [de lo] vivido en el presente, mucha conexión. Justamente dentro de mi soledad de la pandemia —estar sola, encerrada— valoré mucho la colectividad, valoré mucho la sonoridad. Esa es la gran diferencia entre Marchita y Abrazo. Marchita es un disco muy solitario que es un viaje hacia dentro, hacia el propio corazón. Es un viaje muy obscuro, como entre cavernas, poquita luz. Y Abrazo es para mi un disco super luminoso, es todo el contrario. Es celebrar la vida, celebrar el amor, celebrar la colectividad. Celebrar las mujeres, defendernos, vernos unidas. Es fuerte. Tuvo que venir una pandemia y alejarme de mi gente para realmente valorar la amistad, la conexión, la comunidad. Es bonito. Me gusta mucho este EP porque me habla de una manera que me hacía falta escuchar. 

MC: Me gusta mucho esta idea del entrelazamiento del amor y la colectividad. Sé que en una entrevista con Ecleen Luzmila Caraballo dijiste que querías hacer una democracia del amor que sientes, que “No se lo voy a dar todo a un hombre… porque tengo todo este amor. Quiero dárselo a mi madre, a mi padre, a mis hermanos, a mis amigos, a mí misma… a mis plantas, a mis mascotas, al mundo”. ¿Puedes elaborar esta idea y como se refleja en el EP Abrazo?

SE: Cuando hablo de esta colectividad en canciones como ‘Se me ocurre’, [o] ‘Brindo’, creo que justamente me replanteo el amor como una fuerza colectiva —como un material emocional que creo que hemos aprendido muy mal. Nos han enseñado a través del amor romántico que todo nuestro amor una vez que tenemos una pareja tiene que ir direccionado a esta pareja, y creo que muchas veces dejamos de darlo primero que nada a nosotras mismas, y luego a nuestras amigas, a nuestras familias. En canciones como ‘Brindo’, o ‘Se me ocurre’, hablo de celebrar los amigos, de sí celebrar las conexiones pero celebrarlas todas. Dar las gracias por el amor que es maravilloso en todos sus facetas pero no olvidarnos de que es una fuerza que nos envuelve a toda la humanidad. Generar una democracia afectiva es muy difícil porque [crecimos] con todas las historias de las princesas que están solas en el mundo hasta que llega un hombre y las salva, y todo su amor se lo dan solo a su hombre. Creo que estas historias han hecho mucho daño e intento en mi música—que es muy romántica—hablar del amor desde un hogar mucho más soberano. Mucho más igualitario. 

MC: Pienso no solamente en la idea de amor como fuerza colectiva sino también como fuerza política. Veo esto con ‘Si me matan’. 

SE: Claro. ‘Si me matan’ [tiene] esta esperanza y este amor como capacidad política de entender un conflicto e incluso de luchar contra el conflicto. Ahora mismo en México el simple hecho de tener esperanza en que las cosas cambien involucra luchar. Es muy complicado ahora hablar de amor dentro del feminismo porque estamos viendo cosas terribles, las mujeres estamos en un momento [difícil] —siempre— pero este año en México han pasado cosas bastante violentas. En el mundo, lo que está pasando en [Irán]… siento que las mujeres estamos en un momento de mucho enojo y de mucha lucha, y el motor político que yo encuentro más sano para mi… es el amor. El cariño, las ganas de verme feliz y ver feliz a mi comunidad, creo que [es] mi motivación para tener opinión, para involucrarme con las causas que considero justas. 

MC: Es interesante también la idea que Abrazo es alegre, porque cada vez que escucho ‘Si me matan’, por ejemplo, lloro. ¿Cuál es la línea entre el dolor y el amor? 

SE: Es interesante la pregunta porque claro, Abrazo es un EP sobre la esperanza, la alegría, sobre la comunidad. Pero claro, ‘Si me matan’, a mi también me hace llorar, es [una canción] muy honesta y muy dura sobre lo que significa ser mujer. Yo creo que esta línea entre dolor y el amor y la alegría y la esperanza se difumina mucho cuando narras honestamente lo que sucede en tu realidad, porque hay de todo. Cuando yo quise hacer ‘Si me matan’ y quise hacer una canción que fuera una narración real de lo que yo sentía al ser mujer en este país, me di cuenta que incluso dentro de mi dolor y de mi pena, y de mi miedo había mucho amor, y por suerte todavía había esperanza. Eso lo quise meter porque convive dentro de nosotras todo el tiempo. Dentro de nuestro miedo y de nuestra soledad en sentir que tenemos muy difícil y que nadie nos cuida y que nadie nos defiende políticamente… existe la esperanza, y existe el amor. Todo eso está adentro. Creo que ‘Si me matan’ me ayudó a entender que estas líneas entre emociones se difuminan todas y son una sola cosa, que es nuestro sentir, nuestra existencia. 

MC: Para los que no conocen el contexto de ‘Si me matan’ —¿Para quién es? ¿Qué te motivó a escribir la canción? 

SE: Tardé mucho tiempo en escribir [‘Si me matan’] porque fue muy difícil encontrar las palabras. Es una historia de hace varios años cuando una chica [Mara Fernanda Castilla] —en ese momento era de mi edad, ella y yo, 19— y ella tomó un [viaje compartido] a casa de noche y no la volvieron a ver hasta que encontraron su cuerpo. Es una historia terrible, triste, y espantosa, pero la escuchamos todos los días, lamentablemente. Lo que más me impactó y lo que más nos impactó como mujeres en la sociedad mexicana [fue] la cantidad de noticieros [y] de informadores de radios que le echaron la culpa a ella con el argumento de ‘pues si la mataron, eso le pasa por salir sola de noche’. Y eso generó mucho dolor en nuestras comunidades, en nuestras mujeres, y comenzó un hashtag maravilloso, ‘SiMeMatan’, porque en México pasa mucho que si matan a una mujer siempre le echan la culpa… Siempre [digan que] es nuestra culpa, es terrible, y lo he visto desde que soy niña y siempre ha sido un tema que me ha impactado mucho, la deshumanización de las víctimas en este país. Es un tema de racismo, clasismo, de mil cosas. Entonces empezó #SiMeMatan y tú dejabas escrito en Twitter o donde fuera que querías que dijera de ti…‘Quiero que digan que fui madre de tres hijos, que trabajé, que estudié, que luché siempre por lo que quise’ y tal. Mucha gente empezó a escribir, a dejar escritas cosas que querían que se dijeran para que no se inventaran cualquier cantidad de estupideces sobre nuestras vidas. 

Desde los quince años viajo sola, vivo de noche, toco en bares. Terminaba de tocar y pedía un Uber, me iba al aeropuerto —todo sola, siendo mujer en este país. Era muy impactante pensar que para mi, si me matan van a decir que soy una mujer completamente incorrecta, porque para [los] ojos de una sociedad machista, y conservadora, pues lo soy, ¿no? Entonces quise dejar mi propia carta, hecha canción. Tardé muchos años en encontrar las palabras porque primero estaba muy enojada y acababa escribiendo desde el odio, desde el rencor, [pero] me pareció muy importante que justamente no necesitábamos una canción así… [Quería] esperanza —volver al amor como motor político.

Cuando hubo marchas super fuertes en Colombia, en las plazas ponían en las bocinas esta canción. Las 8-M en Latinoamérica… cantan esta canción cuando marchan. Estoy muy orgullosa y muy agradecida. 

MC: Pensando en el futuro —hay una línea muy clara entre Marchita y Abrazo. ¿Hay algún plan para lo que sigue? ¿Qué esperas?

SE: ¡Sí! En la cuarentena hice muchísimas canciones y tengo todo un disco de canciones nuevas que estoy trabajando y quisiera sacarlo el próximo año, probablemente en el verano. Estoy muy emocionada, son canciones que me gustan mucho… otra vez de amor y desamor [risa] pero porque es el tema que más me gusta, y eso. Estoy contenta de estar de vuelta en México para poder justamente trabajar todo este material y poder estarlo presentando por lo antes posible. 

Deep in the haunting vibrato of Silvana Estrada’s voice lies an existential tension between vulnerability and power. You’ll find yourself sobbing in the face of beauty, smiling through sorrow, and—if you’re listening closely enough—understanding that these are all one and the same. That there is strength in vulnerability, hope in pain, and seeds planted in the soil of despair. 

The 25-year-old Mexican singer describes her new EP, Abrazo, as a luminous celebration of life, in all its contradictory complexity. Its standout track, “Si Me Matan,”—a poetic meditation on womanhood and protest song against femicide—has been sung in 8M marches and feminist demonstrations across Latin America following its release.

In this Q&A, we speak about the politics of love, collectivity, and what’s next.

Mara Cavallaro: I want to start by asking about your roots, because you carry them in your music. You said in an interview last year that sometimes when you listen to songs you can “hear the landscape.” Can you speak a bit on that with relation to your music? How are your songs synonymous with Veracruz? 

Silvana Estrada: I love music that makes evident not just the singer but also much more beyond that—when you can hear the land, the landscape, and roots in the music. I try to make songs like that, very connected to my roots. Even though I often experiment with other sounds and with folclor, I always try to keep my roots present. My music carries the land I’m from, my pueblo, Veracruz—especially with Marchita, which is a sort of homage to my family. [The fact that] it has violins, cellos, double basses, violas, and that everything was recorded with wood instruments in a wooden house in a field is an homage to how I grew up, because my parents are luthiers and they make these instruments. I was also raised in a house in a field, between coffee plantations and rivers, and feel very connected to nature. I try to convey all of this—this sense of place—so that anyone who wants to can be a part of it. 

MC: What was your process for writing the songs on Abrazo? How did it compare to writing Marchita?

SE: I wrote the EP Abrazo in quarantine, which is crazy because Marchita is a much more introspective, solitary album, but I wrote it during pre-pandemic normality. And Abrazo is a mix of songs that I wrote during the same period as Marchita, but that were too happy to include on the album… “Aquí” [and] “Si Me Matan” are songs that I wrote during that pandemic that evoke a lot of hope, faith, our life in the present, and connection. It was during my solitude that I truly valued collectivity, and sound. That’s the big difference between Marchita and Abrazo. Marchita is a very solitary album—a journey within, to my own heart. It’s dark, cave-like, there is little light. And Abrazo is luminous, it’s exactly the opposite. It’s a celebration of life, love, collectivity. It’s a celebration of and a defense of women. It’s seeing us united. It’s strong. I had to live through a pandemic and become distanced from my people to truly value friendship, connection and community. It’s beautiful. I love this EP because it conveys something that I myself needed to hear. 

MC: I really like the idea of love and collectivity as intertwined. In an ILY Magazine interview you said, “I’m going to make a democracy of the love that I feel. I’m not going to give it all to a guy…because I have all this love. I want to give it to my mother, to my father, to my siblings, to my friends, to myself…to my plants, to my pets, to the world.” Can you elaborate on that idea and how it’s reflected in Abrazo?

SE: When I speak about collectivity in songs like “Se Me Ocurre,” or “Brindo,” I reframe love as a collective force—as emotional material that we have learned badly. We’ve been taught, of romantic love, that once we have a partner all of our love goes to them, and I think a lot of the time we stop giving it to ourselves, but also to our friends, and our families. On “Brindo” and “Se Me Ocurre,” I celebrate friends; I talk about how we need to celebrate all our connections, and be thankful for love—which is marvelous in all its facets—but without forgetting that it's a force that envelops all of humanity. Creating a democracy of the love we feel is hard because [we were raised] with stories about princesses, alone in the world until a man saves them, and to whom they give all their love in turn. Stories like that have done a lot of harm and in my music—which is romantic—I want to talk about love from a much more sovereign, egalitarian place. 

MC: I’m thinking of love not just as a collective force but as a political force. I see that with “Si Me Matan.” 

SE: Definitely. “Si Me Matan” has this hope and this idea of love as a political tool for understanding, and fighting against, conflict. Now in Mexico the simple fact of being hopeful means resisting. It’s hard to talk about love within feminism because we’re seeing terrible things, women are living through a very difficult moment—we always are—but this year in Mexico especially, there’s been a lot of violence. In the world, what’s happening in [Iran]…Women are angry, we’re fighting—and the best political motivation for me is love. Care. The desire to be happy and see my community happy is my motivation to be outspoken, to involve myself in the causes I find just. 

MC: I also think it’s fascinating that Abrazo is happy, because every time I listen to “Si Me Matan,” I cry. What’s the line between pain and love?

SE: That’s an interesting question, because Abrazo is about hope, happiness, and community. But “Si Me Matan” also makes me cry. It’s a very honest and tough meditation on what it means to be a woman. I think that line between pain and love, and happiness, and hope blurs a lot when we honestly narrate what’s happening. When I set out to make “Si Me Matan,” I wanted to make a song that was a real narration of what it felt like to be a woman in this country, and I realized that even in my pain and my grief and my fear there was a lot of love, and luckily, there was still hope. I wanted that to be in the song because it coexists within all of us, all the time. Inside our fear and our solitude, in our feeling that no one cares for us or defends us politically…there is hope, and love. It’s all in there. “Si Me Matan” helped me understand that the line between all these things blurs, and in reality they’re all just one thing: our feelings, our existence. 

MC: For those that don’t know the context of “Si Me Matan”— Who is the song for? What motivated you to write it? 

SE: It took me a long time to write [“Si Me Matan”] because it was so hard to find the right words. It’s a story from several years ago, when a young woman, [Mara Fernanda Castilla]—we were the same age at the time, 19—went home in a [rideshare] and was killed. It’s a terrible, sad, frightening story, but tragically, we hear it all the time. What most affected me, and what most affected us as women in Mexican society, was the amount of newscasts and radio commentators that blamed her, using the rhetoric that ‘Well, if they killed her, she shouldn’t have been alone at night.’ That generated a lot of pain in our communities, among women, and a marvelous hashtag—‘SiMeMatan’ (‘If They Kill Me’) —began to take off. Too often, people say it’s our fault, and it’s terrible. I’ve seen it happen since I was a kid, and that dehumanization of victims has always affected me a lot. It’s a matter of racism, classism, a thousand things. But for this hashtag, #SiMeMatan, people would write on Twitter, or wherever, what they wanted to be said about them. ‘I want them to say that I was a mother to three kids, that I worked, that I studied, that I always fought for what I wanted,’ that sort of thing. A lot of people began writing these messages, to record what they would want to be said about them, so that no one would make up lies about our lives. 

Ever since I was fifteen I have traveled alone, lived at night, played in bars. When I finished playing I would call an Uber, I would go to the airport—all alone, and as a woman in this country. It was striking to think that if I were killed, they would say I was exactly what a woman shouldn’t be, because in the eyes of a conservative, machista society, I am, aren’t I? So I wanted to leave my own letter, made into a song. I took years to find the words, because at first I was so angry that I was writing from a place of hatred, and rancor, [but] I realized we didn’t need a song like that. [I wanted] hope—to come back to love as a political driving force. 

There were very powerful marches in Colombia, and in the plazas they would play [“Si Me Matan”] from the speakers. The 8-M Movement across Latin America sings the song as they march. I’m so proud and grateful. 

MC: Looking forward—there’s a clear line from Marchita to Abrazo. Any plans for what’s next? What are you looking forward to?

SE: Yes! In quarantine I made so many songs and I have a whole album of new music that I’m working on and want to release, probably next summer. I’m excited, there are songs I really like…about love and heartbreak again [laughs] because they’re the themes I’m most drawn to. And I’m happy to be back in Mexico, where I can work on all this material and perform it as soon as possible.

That month, perhaps thanks to a growing international audience, Selena was a guest on El show de Cristina, a popular nightly newscast hosted by Cuban-American journalist Cristina Saralegui, in Spanish. There were about 70 people lucky enough to be in the live audience, and millions watching on television. Decades later, another half a million would watch the grainy recording on YouTube, as I did. 

Though memories of Selena Quintanilla Pérez—la reina—are preserved and retold by her family, a museum, a movie starring J.Lo, and now a Netflix show, primary sources are more rare. Documented sit-down interviews, like this one, are rarer still.

In the clip, Selena and Cristina speak about childhood fame, parental pressure, values, and love. Prodding questions about dating and revealing outfits make the talk show feel like a conversation between aunt and niece, with unwritten power dynamics surfacing in nervous laughter. At times, I want to leap on stage, cut the cameras, and demand better questions—or at least more respect—but the uneasiness continues on until the end of the program, when they switch gears to formally discuss Selena’s foray into fashion and business. (1994 really was a big year—in January, the singer opened a salon-boutique in Corpus Christi, Texas, called Selena Etc., where she sold her original designs).

Cristina beckons, and three models strut on stage to pose in silk organza trousers and sleepwear, shoulders so far back that their arms hang behind them. The audience applauds enthusiastically as they turn, and seemingly satisfied, Saralegui asks the child prodigy-turned international sensation-turned designer about the line’s range of sizes, joking that even when labels say they’re her size, the clothing can be awfully difficult to get into. Selena responds: “casi todos los diseñadores ponen—si es un dieciséis, los ponen que es un diecicuatro.”1 

“Catorce,” Saralegui interjects, correcting her Spanish. “Catorce, perdón!” Selena exclaims as she turns instinctually to face the audience, acknowledge her slip-up, smile, and stick her tongue out instead of biting it. “Disculpe!” she says, and before she can finish the word its syllables begin to bubble into laughter. “Así se habla Tex-Mex,” Saralegui teases. “Tex-Mex: diecicuatro.” Selena laughs, turns to the crowd again, and with her hand extended toward them says confidently, “pero me entiendes, verdad?”2

I do. 

Two years ago, in November of 2020, when I first watched this interview, I wrote in my journal: “I feel a kind of pull to Selena that I can’t really explain. I think it’s because she lived and embodied that ‘in between,’ that borderlands, and she lived it so gracefully.” She apologized, but also gently forced the crowd to acknowledge that they understood her. She made a small mistake, and her reaction was big and beautiful.

When people ask why—or how—her music is as popular nearly thirty years after her death as it was during her prime, this interview clip is what I turn to. Selena is the proof that we can stumble in our native languages and be adored. That we can be “Tex-Mex,” or, in my case, Brazilian-American, and be whole. That Latine identity is more about collective care and connection than proximity to a projected ideal. Selena’s aura and music are timeless because so too are our communal aspirations to belong and be seen. 

One day last month, at the Latinx newspaper I work at, my bosses were joking about Spanish language talk show hosts. I listened fondly to their teasing memories, but I was lost—until one of them brought up Cristina. “Oh my gosh! I know who that is!” I said, and stood up from my desk. (I had already started this essay, and was eager to talk about the video I had been obsessing over). They asked me how, and I stumbled through the explanation that I had only ever seen her once, in interview with Selena. My boss, Fátima, smiled. “Diecicuatro!” she exclaimed, and when I nodded she proceeded to quote the interview back to me, ending with pero me entiendes, verdad?

I didn’t know what to say, so I just stood staring back at her, nodding. I know how much Selena means, especially to Chicanxs, and to 1.5, or 2nd, or 3rd generation Latines. I’m writing about it. But I still feel surprised by moments like this, when people nod because they have already had the same thought, instead of nodding with curiosity.

It turns out, if you Google the word—or the not-word—“diecicuatro,” the first ten videos are edited snippets of that El Show de Cristina interview. “Selena’s Tex- Mex: ‘diecicuatro’” from 2018, “El diecicuatro de Selena <3” from earlier this year, “The ICONIC Diecicuatro” from last month…the list goes on and on for pages. The comments too. Maria wrote, “El diecicuatro más perfecto.” Ashley said, “Selena, eras tan preciosa y hermosa, que hasta tus equivocaciones las hacías ver tan bonitas y chistosas…siempre serás recordada aún en las nuevas generaciones…” Micaela commented, “mi sobrina le dijo diecicinco al 15 ayer, que tierno <3.”3

On August 26, Selena’s family released a posthumous album, Moonchild Mixes, on her behalf. My boss and I talked about it before we listened, skeptical about what the edited vocals would sound like, and whether the album was respectful in its immortalization or extractive in its distortion of time and grief.

Ultimately, though, we settled on the idea that with or without new music, Selena was timeless. How remarkable it was, we said, that Selena could be as relatable to me at 21 as she was to my boss in her early thirties as she was to my mom, who discovered her at seventeen and still cries watching videos of “Como La Flor,” as she was to the woman sitting next to me at the San Francisco Symphony’s Selena Tribute Concert this July, at least 50 and wearing a Selena barrette in her graying hair.

It’s with small moments like ‘diecicuatro’ that I realize I’m less unique than I thought, but in a good way. It feels good to belong.

“Como La Flor,” performed by Isabel Marie Sanchez and the San Francisco Symphony in an official tribute concert on July 9, 2022. Just before this, Isabel Marie looked up at the ceiling and asked the crowd to sing along, “so Selena can hear us.”

The cover art for the song is a photograph of Mon, who gazes out the window of an antique baby blue car, lips just barely parted, elbow resting on the sill, sleek black bangs framing her face. She’s wearing a periwinkle that blends in with the color of the 1965 Plymouth Valiant, and they begin to merge too, so that the car holds her serenity and she carries the confidence of its timelessness. More than anything, she looks at peace. 

In an interview with GQ Latinoamérica, Mon said that the melody for the song came to her as she was driving through Malibu with the windows down, wind blowing, listening to Fleetwood Mac. Me sentía muy bien, she said. Me sentía muy feliz, muy relajada, muy buena onda. She wanted to convey that calmness with a track that, unlike her others, wasn’t too vocally demanding. She wanted to be casi susurrando—como me sentía, she said.

When I heard it for the first time, though, I was going through a breakup. I was looking for more of an Algo Es Peor, for something I could scream-sing, or cry to. I remember thinking it was pretty. But I didn’t listen to another of her songs for months. 

The second time I discovered Mon, I was at a friend’s party. It was December, and we wore our nice clothes under winter jackets that we hung up by the door. I brought Guaraná, sold to me at a discount by the 102-year-old Portuguese man who ran a small grocery store in the neighborhood, and my friend Abby brought gin. The table was so full of food—empanadas, quesadillas, fruit, flan, chips, salsa—that we had to eat to make more room. We exchanged Secret Santa gifts. And as all good parties do, around midnight, the gathering devolved into karaoke. Val, the friend who had told me I looked like Mon, sang first. 

I was sitting on the bed, but I wish I had crouched to find the best angle and pulled out my phone to record, because I remember only what I felt and a humid navy blue haze. The more descriptive words fail me, I think, because I was so absolutely entranced by Val’s voice, by the lyrics, by the melody, by how it felt like I had heard this song before, like I had written it. I didn’t know the words, so I couldn’t have sung along, but it feels like I did, like I was part of the moment more than an observer of it. 

That night, we also sang Selena, Don’t Stop Believin’, Julieta Venegas’ Limón y Sal, which I hadn’t heard in years, and (obviously) All I Want for Christmas is You. Afterwards, I remember walking home two blocks, sleeping in my makeup, waking up without a hangover, looking at pictures from the night before and feeling disappointed, wishing I looked prettier. 

It wasn’t until over two weeks after that, when I was on a road trip with my parents in a car somewhere between Pittsburgh and St. Louis, that I listened to Tú Falta de Querer. And then listened to it again. And again. And again until I had memorized not just the name Mon Laferte but also all the words to describe my heartbreak. I remember wanting to scream out the window: Aún te amo, y creo que hasta más que ayer! Yo fui tu amiga y fui tu compañera! Veeeeeeeen, y cuéntame la verdad! Ten piedad, y dime por qué! ¿Cómo fue que me dejaste de amar? Yo aún podía soportar tu tanta falta de querer!!!! If you haven’t heard it, I suggest you pause your reading and go do so. It is absolutely the best break up song of all time. 

“I found your karaoke song,” I texted Val. “Your version is better tho.” She answered a few hours later. “That song is actually heaven. And that’s the singer I said you remind me of when I first met you!!!” Definitely a compliment. 

I listened to Mi Buen Amor, Amárrame, Amor Completo, Pá Donde Se Fue, Algo Es Mejor (again), and her newest album, 1940 Carmen (on which the best songs, in my opinion, are Zombie and Placer Hollywood). I texted the music festival booking board I was on at the time that we should bid her, recommending that “everyone pls listen to Mon Laferte over break.” Two days later, somewhere between St. Louis and Amarillo, Texas, I sent myself a text that began: “idea: a collection of essays about music” and listed my inspirations, including, of course, something about “mon laferte.”

I recognize that this is a long introduction, but anything I write about Mon is defined by the relationships that introduced me to her. Part of why I feel so drawn to her music is the fact that it reminds me of all these moments of friendship, of belonging, and of love. Clarice Lispector, one of the most famous Brazilian authors of all time, once wrote that she was proud to belong to Brazilian literature. I am happy just “to participate,” she wrote. I, too, am happy just to participate in the discussion of music, and I take quite a bit of comfort in the notion that I may belong to an idea. That I may belong to Brazilian music but not to Brazil, to Latin American music but not Latin America, that I may belong to what I love or what loves me. 

If I one day have the opportunity to interview Mon (as Val messaged me the other day, “never say never”), the first thing I would ask her is to what places, people, and ideas she belongs.

Mon Laferte was born Norma Monserrat Bustamante Laferte in Viña del Mar, Chile, in 1983. Which means Mon Laferte was born Norma Monserrat Bustamante Laferte in a country where memory of dictatorship hangs over everything like an atmospheric shroud, blocking the sun, tainting the rainwater, and seeding the soil, so that shrouds start fruiting on family trees. In 1983. 

Yo nací durante la dictadura, crecí en la dictadura y viví el paso a la democracia, en un país con muchas desigualdades, Laferte said in 2019. Es impensable que 30 años después de llegada la democracia, esto siga. 

‘Esto’—violence, human rights abuses, inequality, authoritarian governance, the consequences of capitalism—defined news coverage of Chile between October 2019 and March 2020. What began as a student-led protest against an increase in public transportation costs became a widespread manifestation against the right-wing president, Sebastián Piñera, an outdated constitution written under Pinochet, neoliberalism, and social inequality. On October 25, over 1.2 million people protested in Santiago, in what has since been called ‘the biggest march of Chile.’ But in a violent retaliation characteristic of nominally democratic right-wing states, police terrorized protesters. By the end of the year, at least 29 people were killed, 2,500 were injured, and 2,840 arrested. It remains unreported how many people were tortured or assaulted by police.

In November, on the red carpet of the Latin Grammys where she would win Best Alternative Music Album, Laferte exposed her chest in protest against this police violence. The black ink on her skin read: EN CHILE, TORTURAN, VIOLAN, Y MATAN. Around her neck, she wore a green bandana, the symbol of the abortion rights movement in Argentina. She crossed the lapels of her suit neatly above her belly button, stood for nearly a minute staring solemnly ahead, and then turned to continue down the carpet. The next day, Chile’s Congress agreed to a national referendum on the Constitution. 

Almost another year after that, in October 2020, the referendum vote finally happened, with 78 percent voting in favor of rewriting the document. 79 percent voted for it to be written by elected citizens in place of established ‘career’ politicians. And the resulting redrafted constitution, made public in early July, is groundbreaking in how it approaches rights—to work, health, housing, and more. The “visionary document [would] set a new standard for democratic renewal in the 21st century,” David Adler wrote for the Guardian. If passed, it would be the first constitution to codify the right to abortion and respond to the climate crisis.

On September 4th, Chileans will vote on whether to ratify it.

Something I appreciate about Mon is that despite her bold acts of protest, she doesn’t claim to be an activist. (Typically, it’s the other way around). If I’m an activist, I’m the worst one, she told Paper Magazine. Because activists dedicate their lives right? All the time. And I’m here doing other things—but I have concerns. In a different interview, she said: Yo lo único que sé hacer es cantar.

But singing, too, is protest. SEIS, released in April 2021, features two songs addressed to a governmental “tú.” On the first, La Democracia, Laferte sings, ironically:

Tú no tienes la culpa de que la plata a nadie le alcanza/ Tú no tienes la culpa de la violencia y de la matanza… The chorus repeats: Que alguien me explique lo que pasó (por la democracia, la democracia)/ Me confundi o alguien me mintió (la democracia, la democracia) Pa’ dónde fue? Quien se la robó? (la democracia, la democracia).

In English: It’s not your fault that no one can make ends meet/Violence and killings are not your fault…Can someone explain to me what happened (to democracy, democracy)/ Was I confused or did someone lie to me (democracy, democracy) Where did it go? Who stole it? (democracy, democracy).

Knowing the context of her November protest, it’s easy to read this critique as one of her homeland, Chile, but the song extends to any state that denies its role in human rights abuses and simultaneously assures of and applauds its democracy. In this way, it’s easy to read it as a song about Mexico, too, where Mon moved in 2007 and has lived ever since. 

After the first chorus, she sings, Tú no tienes la culpa de que persigan a los migrantes/ Tú no tienes la culpa de la masacre a los estudiantes, nods to the Mexican government’s violence against Central American immigrants and the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in 2014. In the latter case, because evidence was tampered with and people were tortured and forced to make confessions that corroborated the government’s narrative, nearly eight years later families are still seeking the truth.

Yo soy mexicana y soy chilena, soy las dos, Mon said in 2021. Uno es de donde quiere ser, de donde vive y donde está su corazón. Y mi corazón está para allá y para acá.

That she sings about Mexico the way she sings about Chile, though, is the proof of this statement. She talks about both with a particular sense of responsibility that comes from a deep love and sense of hope. We typically metaphorize land and place as ‘mother,’ but Mon talks about Chile and Mexico the way people talk about something they’re creating. In remembering, documenting, honoring, living, she is creating, too. 

Last January, at the same ever-sticky kitchen table where I first listened to Mon, I arranged mismatched bowls and plates with refried beans, onions, lime, tortillas, and southwest-seasoned chicken I had made for dinner with Val and our friend Ana. We spoke about art and dance forms as protest, recalled the chant y la culpa no era mia ni dónde estaba ni que yo vestía!, and thought about living as women, how important it was that we had each other. My laptop was open on the table, and Ana pulled up a song she wanted to choreograph to. 

It was Mon Laferte and Vivir Quintana's Canción Sin Miedo, a protest song against femicide. Nós queremos vivas, a chorus of women sang, and we inhaled the familiar pain in their voices, inviting it to rest at the bottom of our full stomachs. Si tocan a una, respondemos todas.

When one of us really liked a song, we would let it play until the end before channel surfing for the next round. These were moments of careful appreciation, and they were reserved for the best of the best—for the Bob Marleys, Lauryn Hills, Bobby Darins, Frank Sinatras. Often, we would all sing along, loudly, enclosed in the small universe of our Volkswagen convertible.

Radio car, if I do say so myself, is a fantastic game. But more importantly, it’s the reason I first listened to so many of the songs my parents were singing before I was born. I learned the memories they associated with different tracks—the first song my dad ever heard with synthesizers (“we thought this was so cool,” he said, shaking his head); the song my mom performed jazz choreography to in eighth grade; their wedding song. It was in the moments when they would request we pause to tell a story, or pause and tell me to listen, that I would fall in love. This is Prince, he was so good. This is Buena Vista Social Club. This is Bob Dylan—listen to the lyrics, buddy.

As vast as it was, my mobile music education was greatly supplemented by my mom’s small speaker. While she cooked, she chose between two CD mixes—one with Brazilian and one with Angolan classics. I remember sitting on top of our wooden table and dangling my legs as we listened to Marisa Monte, Milton Nascimento, Ivete Sangalo; running to touch our clementine-orange walls when Fuba (Encosta na parede) came on. When I got older, I would pretend to perform, spatula microphone in hand.

At some point, my mom lost the CDs. In the chaos of our many moves they were gone, and I’ve spent years now trying to recreate them with a Spotify playlist, adding every song I hear that quickens my heart with recognition and warm nostalgia. Once, I was getting a wax and a melody I knew I had heard from the CDs came on. I memorized the chorus while still on the parchment paper, repeating it to myself long after the song had ended so I could Google the lyrics when I left. I’ve worked backwards this way for years, having to hear a song to remember it.

Last year, my parents and I were road tripping from Connecticut to California when I had the idea to write a collection of essays about music. It would be an extension of the CD I was trying to recreate—another way to preserve, and share, my memories.

So….bem-vind@/bienvenid@/welcome to AMOR FM (!!), a newsletter with narrative essays about music, collectivity, politics, and the infinite ways they each overlap with every other aspect of life. If you’re here, thank you. I hope you stay on this channel a while, and maybe even let it play until the end.

~mara <3