One of my bad habits is to spend the hour or so before going to bed, typically around 2 or 3 AM, watching a recurring set of music videos in YouTube. They tend to be an irrationally eclectic mixture of stuff I really like at the moment, songs I am nostalgic for, and videos I watch for the first time when delivered by a very confused algorithm. In these late-night music binges, I gradually acquired an obsession: watching repeatedly a set of music videos by Latin American and Iberian artists shot in Mexico City’s historic center. These videos have been made since 2021 and I guess that the reason behind their choice of location is related not only to Mexico’s centrality in the Spanish-language music industry, but also as the result of Mexico City’s increased cultural status in the era of digital nomads. To me, they constitute a way to keep my city present as the pandemic made my trips to the hometown less frequent. The social and political reading of why Mexico City became a setting for the videos is something better fit for my academic writing. In this post I would like to leave that aside to focus on the reasons why these videos and the songs captivate me.
My obsession was triggered during one of these sleepless nights. Although he is well-known in Spain, I have never heard of him before late 2021, in part because Spanish language music has been so dominated by urbano and reggaeton that finding singer-songwriters often requires proactive research or algorithmic luck. When YouTube delivered the song to me, it was captivating: a skinny bearded Spanish hipster and the great Ximena Sariñana walking around the main streets of El Centro, outside the prominent Sanborns de los Azulejos (pictured above) all the way to Alameda park. The streets are uncharacteristically deserted, which appears to result from early morning recording at the time of home confinement. This does not stop Sariñana from picking up a bag with pan dulce from La Pagoda, a historic cafe founded by Chinese migrants. If you like singer-songwriters, the song is very good, a love song go a couple navigating social-media fueled obsession—a line in the song describes their posting about their happiness as “being so Black Mirror.”
I have always had a soft spot for well-crafted pop ballad (one of my favorite playlists in Apple Music is called “Amor Alternativo”). So drawn by my love of Mexico City I was motivated to understand the origins of what I just watched. I learned about Leiva’s Cuando te muerdes el labio, one of the few recent recent albums I can hear beginning to end without getting tired of it. It is made of fourteen songs in which Leiva sings alongside fourteen of the greatest female pop singers in the Spanish language. The list is truly astounding: Silvana Estrada, Elsa y Elmar, Zoe Gatusso and many other members of what could easily be a pop music dream team.
The Mexican connection of the album is deep. Many of the songs were produced by Adán Jodorowsky (the son of Alejandro, the filmmaker) in the country. The song “Cuando te muerdes el labio,” featuring the Argentine singer Daniela Spalla, makes reference to the Four Points Hotel in Colonia Roma. The videos are shot across the Spanish-speaking world, but two more of them feature Mexico City notably. In “Diazepam,” Leiva and Natalia Lafourcade embrace each other in a rooftop while singing a passionate song, captured by a 360-degree shot where many landmarks of Mexico City are visible. “Llegará,” a mellow and thoughtful song, is graced by a video in which Leiva and Catalina García, of the Colombian band Monsieur Periné, sing in a trajinera in the Xochimilco channel.
This discovery arrived in impeccable timing as I was writing the syllabus of a class on Mexico City. Part of what I did in the course was to create for every historical period a session called “sounds and images” in which I asked students to watch images from the time, as well as music videos. A lot of this was out of pleasure, of course, and I was led to other videos.
Thusly appeared “Tú y yo,” a collaboration between Monsieur Periné and the Malagueña singer Vanesa Martín. “Tú y yo” is written as a love letter in which a woman confesses her love to another woman. In this case, a building in Mexico City center becomes the setting which we see a variety of love relationships between people of different gender expressions and racial identities, as the song expresses the beauty of people falling in love outside normativity. Monsieur Periné is a cosmopolitan eclectic band that combines Colombian genres (cumbia, bolero, etc) with pop, jazz and other elements, often using the lead singer’s multilingual abilities. Mexico City is less prominent here than in Leiva’s videos, but still unmistakeable.
As I wonder why these songs are capturing me, a variety of factors are at play. After the pandemic, I changed my usual Mexico City hotel from a Holiday Inn in Reforma to the Hilton in Alameda. I have for many years avoided the Roma-Condesa neighborhood that has become so fashionable in part because the succession of hipster gentrifiers and digital nomads have created a version of the city that has little interest to me. Even if the Centro has been captured in part by the Airbnb crowd, the historical weight of its architecture and spaces and the fact that the area does not cease to be the place in which Mexico City’s class diversity meets has shielded it somewhat from the cultural erasure affecting other historical neighborhoods. It is also true that I have this nationalist pride of seeing Mexico City as a world capital, so the mere sight of it in the videos fills my heart with joy and longing. And as someone who has a soft spot for good quality love songs in Spanish, the combination between the music and the setting is irresistible.
In October 2022, the Venezuelan dúo Mau y Ricky, superstars of urbano, and the norteño singer Carin León performed an impromptu live version of their hit “Llorar y Llorar,” recorded in the Alameda park. Mau y Ricky are part of a royal family in Latin American music. Ricardo Montaner, their father, is a major balladeer from decades past, and their younger sister Evaluna Montaner, like her husband Camilo, is a well-known singer in her own right. The cultural encounter here is meaningful, because Carin León is a star of the new generation taking Regional Mexicano music to the top of the global charts, and the collaboration between urbano and regional in this song foregrounds the current number one, Grupo Frontera and Bad Bunny’s “un x100to.”
Neither urbano nor norteño are originally from Mexico City, and one could further remember that both of them are challenges to the predominant role that Mexico City media has had in the Spanish-speaking world. Even today there are music snobs who demean both genres and yearn for a restoration of rock and roll, ignoring the fact that Latin American rock en español was the foregrounding space of today’s magnificent musical eclecticism in the region. To be sure, I sometimes hope that the enormous musical diversity of Latin America was visible in the music landscape, rather than having years of urbano (and now perhaps regional) being the only genre available to global audiences. But it is undeniable that both urbano and regional are cultural forces that represent the mighty culture of today’s people in the region.
A Mexican artist cannot miss in this account and I will conclude the post with my latest obsession, a video I have been watching at least five times a day. Undoubtedly, Silvana Estrada is the most fascinating emerging singer in Mexico. Born in the coffee region of Veracruz, her singing style captures a variety of influences, including son jarocho and Baroque choir music. She is academically trained in the jazz program of Universidad Veracruzana. Her parents are luthiers and, in many of her performances, Estrada plays the Venezuelan cuatro guitar. Since her breakthrough collaboration with American guitar-player Charlie Hunter, she has released a series of extraordinary songs, including her first solo album Marchita, another one that I can listen beginning to end:
Although Estrada is known for her work with roots music, she is fully bilingual and oftentimes sings in English. She recently recorded a collaboration with Aurora sponsored by a project from the Mexican Tourism Office: a recording of the Norwegian singer’s hit “Cure for Me” to which Estrada added lyrics in Spanish, shot in Mexico City’s Chapultepec Forest. But the song that has truly enamored me is Estrada’s cover of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” and its video shot in the historic cantina called Bar Mancera in the centro.
The performance is very unique, because Vega’s trademark a cappella chords disappear until the end, in which they are not only interpreted by Estrada but also in an inspired cumbia rendition. Like her album, the song is arranged by the Venezuelan producer and musician Gustavo Guerrero, who has also accompanied Natalia Lafourcade’s journey into roots music. In addition, the emerging roots musician Laura Itandehui, a powerhouse in her own right, is a contributor to Estrada’s projects. You can see them perform together in this NPR’s Tiny Desk concert, which also features Estrada’s father.
The video is as Mexico City as can be. Bar Mancera is a remainder of the Mexican miracle, the mid-century wave of economic growth. Founded in 1940, it was originally the bar of a now extinct luxury hotel located in a mansion of colonial royalty: the Palacio de los Marqueses de la Sierra Nevada. The video’s aesthetic imports Vega’s diner imaginary to the tradition of the coffee establishment—a coffee cup of fine porcelain features prominently. The cumbia irruption at the end is accompanied by a troupe of Alameda weekend dancers. As perfect an encounter of NYC and CDMX, and of Estrada’s binational sensibilities as can be. When my obsession with this video wanes a bit, never completely, I hope another rendition of Mexico City’s center will be there for me, to imagine myself at 3 AM in the city of my loves, accompanied by music, in the borderline between reality and dream.