NPR Music - Alt.Latino: If the singer falls silent, life falls silent: Female power anthems

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

International Women's Day is more than a perfunctory holiday in many parts of Latin America. In Mexico City, for example, more than 120,000 people turned out on Sunday to protest femicide and celebrate the ongoing fight for basic rights for women in the country. In honor of the holiday, this week's episode debuts our female power anthems hall of fame, highlighting women in Latin music whose art challenged the status quo of their time. Plus, some on-the-ground reporting from Anamaria Sayre at the march in Mexico City.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Just to note before we get started, this episode mentions sexual assault and suicide. And if you or someone you know is in crisis, call, text, or chat with the suicide and crisis lifeline at 988. From NPR Music, this is all Latino. I'm Felix Contreras. And I'm Anna Maria Sayer. Let the Chisement begin. Okay, so Felix, last Sunday, I hope you're aware, was International Women's Day, and it's a month to celebrate. So March 8th in particular is acknowledged in many parts of the world as a day of notability right for women.

But in large swaths of Latin America, it is much more than a perfunctory holiday. It's a yearly recognition for the acknowledgement and support of basic rights for women. And Anna, you were in Mexico City on Sunday. What did you see? International Women's Day or Ocho M.E.M.A. in Mexico City is a huge deal. Mexico has one of the world's highest femicide rates to this. day and it's deeply embedded in everyday life. One third of murders is at the hands of partners or ex-partners. So every year on the 8th of March, women take to the streets to demand attention

and action. Over 120,000 people turned out in the streets on Sunday in Mexico City. Okay, so what you're hearing right there, Felix, is traffic lights being smashed to the soundtrack of I Can Buy Myself Flowers. It's a day of seeming contrast in many ways. The streets are lined with only female police officers. Some yell at them, others adorn them with flowers. The police response in particular to Femocide is often sluggish and incomplete, with some claiming that the government's limited response to these murders

is designed to keep women oppressed. Ni una mas, ni unassessi nana more. Not one more murdered one is something they chant over and over again. But Felix, amidst all of the chanting, there's a lot of singing, too. Think about the lineage of protest, resistance, and fight for the feminine that exists in the Latin American songbook. I saw so many signs that said this was the fight that had been started generations ago. They were now carrying that torch. Latin America's music has been defined in the past century by women who wrote and sang power into song.

So this week we're going to take a moment to bring you some of our favorite power tracks from some of all Latinos very own Hall of Fame Latin American female singers. Anna, you're up first. Okay, so we're starting with one of the most classics of the classics. Grazias Al-Bida by Violeta Par. Perfect

Disting The black of the black And in the high skylo

his straddado In the multitudes of the man that I am

Thanks to the life that that has So famous Chilean singer Violeta Parra published the song in 1966 before she took her own life in 1967. One of her final messages to the world, thank you to life.

And then in 1971, the beloved Argentine singer Mercedes-Sosa releases her version of the song. On an album, she released Paying Omage to Violeta Parra. This is her version. and in the multitudes of the man that I am. Thanks to the that I've done that I've done the

I've done the o'iddo that in all its ancho grava in noche and days grilles and canaries martyos, martyos, turbinas, I mean, you can't like wildfire

across Latin America. And it's really been a canon song ever since. You know, what's interesting to me about this song is that, I mean, I hear either Violeta Barra's version or Mercedes-Sosa's version, and it immediately takes me back to my college days in the late 70s. I'm out in California, part of the Chicano movement, like social movement, farm workers.

There was all this progressive political thought going on and people doing things with political thought. And one of the soundtracks was the whole Nuevo Gansion movement from Latin America, which Violeta Parra's song and Victor Harra, and all of those singers, they created that with their folk music. The themes were so universal that they applied for the fight for civil rights for Chicano's in the Southwest. And that's what I hear when I hear this music. I'm immediately taken back to the profound statements, the poetry, the music, all the stuff.

Women playing guitars, like singing the songs, it's just such a powerful moment. It's also one of those songs and one of those sentiments, Felix, that I think is really powerful in, in Latin America and Latino culture because it's so deeply felt with limited explanation. Like the basics of the song, I mean, it's almost eerie and stunning to think about Violeta Parra writing these lyrics just being grateful for her feet, for her breath. I mean, these basic elements of life right before she takes her own. And then to hear it reverberated in so many places for so many years, voicing Latin American struggle

or specifically as I heard it on Sunday the struggle for life for women by simply acknowledging its value there's something really powerful I was trying to explain it to a friend recently like the beauty of the song and she was like this just sounds kind of disturbing to me

but I was like you don't get it and then my other friend my friend who's Mexican was sitting there and immediately just starts singing the song and there's just this I think that there's something really powerful in the of life being this really deep form of protest. Yeah. That was two versions of Grasias Alida by Violeta Parra.

Okay, Felix, what do you got today? Okay, if anything is anthemic, it's this song, Guantanamera, performed by everyone's favorite Cuban Tia, Celia Cruz. It has a rich history of the lyrics, the songwriter, the lyric writer, many covers, but the most famous was anytime Celia Cruz sang it. Here's the first recording of the song that she did from 1967, her album Bravo. And the song has become one of the most expressive statements of love for Cuba, the island and the culture.

Check it out. That voice, man. That is going to be the through line of all of these songs, Felix. The voices. Yeah. Guantanamera means a person from Guantanamo, which is the eastern part of the island, which most people in the United States know because of the military base.

The lyrics were adapted from the poetry of Jose Marti, who was a writer, poet, and revolutionary during the fight for independence from Spain in the late 1800s. The song form is a Wahira. It's a very specific type of laid-back country sound. In Celia's hands, it creates a poignancy that other versions don't have because it's well known that after she left, she was never allowed to go back.

The government didn't let her back, not even for her mother's funeral. So there was some really bite of sadness on that. And she kept an intense love for her home and everything that she did after that. And it's one of those songs because no matter where you stand politically about what's going on in Cuba or the Cuban government,

both sides both look up to Jose Marti as a writer and poet and an expression of everything Cuban. And that's what the magic of this song is and her version of it, is that it celebrates everything that she loved about Cuba and that she had to leave behind. One of the things that excited me the most, Felix, about you bringing this song is that Celia has that unica ability to sound party, to sound light, to sound fiesta.

I mean, she never overtly talked about political things. She never, you know, overtly condemned the Cuban government in her music. And yet there's always a weight to everything she does. There's a weight to her party. There's a weight to her dance. There's a weight to her voice more than anything. It's a party anthemic voice, and yet it carries so much. And I think that that's something that you can hear in this song, especially.

You can hear it in her most. La Negra Tiena Tumbao. You can hear it in anything that she does is that there's a deepness, there's a depth, there's a sadness in some ways that I think makes it almost more danceable and more powerful. And that's the Cuban way, as it is in a lot of Latin America. It's a dance through the pain. Very well put. I mean, I've seen grown people cry when this song is played.

a restaurant or something. It's just, it has that kind of reach. One of my favorite versions is Seda singing with the Fania All-Stars in 1974, and it's not on a record, it's on a video. Celia and the Fania All-Stars were invited to perform at a music festival in Zaire in Africa, and it took place during the Muhammad Ali fight with George Foreman in 1974. They had this music festival. They had a lot of R&B acts, B.B. King, a bunch of other people. went along and they performed and the Funia All-Stars were invited to close that circle on the African diaspora. The performance I'm speaking about is a video of an afternoon. Oh, I know what you're talking about. The video of the afternoon rehearsal, man, because her voice is so relaxed. Oh, my God,

her voice is so relaxed. And then when the whole band comes in and the groove and the moment get good, man, she gives this amazing smile that makes me cry every time because it's so, Celia, it's everything about her. Her smile, her joy, and the way she inhabits the music, man, it just, it's melted in my mind. You've got to check it out. It's really spectacular.

And not Felix. We have to let the people hear it. That was Juan Tana Mera. We heard a 1967 version and then a little bit of video from 1974 from the great Celia Cruz. Okay, Anna, what do you got? So, I already cheat played Mercedes-Sosa. Now I'm playing Mercedes-Deges. Sosa de Verda with one of her own songs.

This song is called If Se Caya El Canto. I mean, if she's cajouettes of the people are the people of the the workers of the port of the persina who has to be

her to the way she starts that song. I mean the way she starts that song Felix. So, if the singer the singer falls silent, life falls silent because life itself is a song. This song is one of the best, I think, examples of writing about music from a musician.

Right? It's like, and the role that music plays, how essential it is to life, especially the people that made the record, people that were listening to the records, the people that she thought would like, listen to it, you know, Latin America, wherever. It's like it's, it's, it's so well written. I've always loved the, the intricacy of life and music and everything altogether. It's like,

without one, you don't have the other. And there's something really poignant about the use of that can see as this kind of, I want to say it's a reverence for life and it's also, again, like it's kind of acknowledging or even like fighting for the preciousness of life, which is something that I feel a lot in some of these best songs. It reminds me honestly a lot, Felix of Silvan Estrada's song, Simemattan, which is explicitly about Femocide. I mean, there's lyrics in there where she says, like, she opens that song saying, if they kill me, when they find me,

let them always say that I was a singer following my dreams. She says, like everyone I grew up with fear, but I went out a little. alone anyways to look at the stars and to love life. And there's this really beautiful, echoed active resistance in just living and acknowledging that life is fleeting. And I saw that also, you know, in the demonstrations on Sunday, Felix, a lot of this voicing of dreams, of things that people wanted to be saying, let me go study and return to my family with a degree and not as a body. Like I saw that sign repeated over and over gets. It's this this voicing of we understand that life is fleeting and we want it to be less. We want it to be just as precious

because we acknowledge it as precious, but we want it to feel less like something we could lose at any moment. It's like, is the act of resistance and a Mercedes-Sat in this song with that voice, it's so perfectly effortlessly there, that feeling. It's like I want to say it's a melancholy, but not even. There's not a word for it, except when you hear it, you know it. What I really like about what we're doing and taking time to think about these anthems and these vocalists is the way that, for example, at Mercedes-Sos and Celia Cruz, they're different cultures, different countries, different backgrounds, but their words are so profound, their performances, everything about them. And when you put them together and with the rest of the voices that

we're going to present here, it's like this tapestry of just amazing female voices and presence and lyrics and messages. We're going to take a break and then hear more voices right after this. Okay, we're back and Anna, we're going to go to Houston, Texas, 1934 with vocalist Lydia Mendoza. This is a track called Mal Ombre. She was born in 1960 in Houston. She was of a family of musicians and they traveled and performed for basically Mexican laborers from Texas to California and around. They followed the workers. And when she turned 18, she recorded on her own for the first time.

and that very first song she recorded not only became her most recognized song, it became a statement of female empowerment among the Mexican-American community and then much larger after that. This is Mal Ombre or Badman from 1934 from Lydia Mendoza. Don't you just want to sing that

to every single man in your life? Felix. You're a malvado, you're a mal-hombre. Two things stand out. First of all, the lyrics. because the story is of the life of a young woman who was seduced at a very young age by a man who was not a good guy, Malo Mere. Bad things happen, and then she survives to write about the experience and basically call him out.

That's how this song is described in various periodicals, online stuff. I've always interpreted the circumstances of this song as sexual assault of a woman who's not of age. Because when you listen to the lyrics, that first line, I was still a young girl when by chance you found me, And thanks to you worldly magic, the perfume of my honor you took. And then things got worse from there in the song. And through the song, Lydia Mendoza defies the subordination of women during that time. This is in 1930s and takes a self-affirming stance. It defied tradition of machismo and misogyny that can still be very much part of a Mexican or Chicano culture.

I think it's important to acknowledge to Felix that the event that she's describing is something that was, and to this day, is frequent. I think a lot more frequent than anyone wants to acknowledge, and I think especially at the time, I mean, there's something extremely revolutionary about releasing a song that is almost explicitly, if not explicitly describing these events. I mean, that was just something that you did not do. And so the practice alone of turning that into art,

and again, it's something that a lot of people turn those experiences and those feelings and what comes from them into art. To turn that into art, to perform it openly, I mean, that's power. Like, that is bravery on another level, really. That chorus is cold-hearted man, your soul is so wicked. It has no name. You're a pig. You are a cold-hearted man, Malombre.

And the other aspect of it, you know, we talk a lot about the cultural mashup in that area between northern Mexico and Monterey, Mexico, and San Antonio, you know, with the mixer of the German and Austrian influence. of waltzes, polos, accordions. We've talked about that a lot. She always performed with just her 12-string

guitar and her voice. And this song doesn't sound like a Corrido or Ranchera or anything back then. It has a tango feel. Which comes from right to southern cone, Argentina, Uruguay.

And I have her memoirs and she said that she heard the rhythm on the radio and wrote that song to that particular syncopation. So she's a well- a rancetta singer, but her most famous song is from a tango. And I wonder about her selection of a tango in a way because in some ways there's an

expression of anger here that maybe that's distinct, maybe from how she typically played, maybe the 12 string and her voice wasn't sufficient in this moment in this way to kind of like get out that feeling. And I was talking to a friend recently about, she was like, when I couldn't find any other emotion, anger was the first one. that I could grab onto. And I think that there's something about needing a sound that feels a little bit outside of your usual to be able to communicate such a forceful emotion.

And she sounds kind of angry, but more like definitive to me. There's an angry feel like that tangle does kind of feel like it's dancing with anger, but ultimately it comes out very definitive, which I think is a lot more effective in many ways. than just a straight ahead, grr, you know? Right.

The song is Mal Ombre from Lydia Mendoza from 1934. You're next. We've already made it to my last song. This is a song by our favorite Chilean adopted Mexican, Juan Laferte, talking about amazing voices. The song is called Seva La Vida. I love that you brought in a singer from right now because Mora LaFert is definitely one of these vocalists

along with like Natalia LaFercada, who they will be speaking about in the future the way we talk about Violeta Parra, the way we talk about Cedacruz, any of these women that we talk about in the past, they are them right now and then moving on into the future. Right. That's exactly, Felix, I was going to say. This is off of her 20-21 album,

but it fits right into this canon of a female power of the last century. Like she will fit perfectly right in there. She already does. And again, it's the combination of that striking voice that just carries so, so much, that ballad of a voice. And then the lyrics, I mean, the chorus of this is, life goes away from a little girl, from a grandmother. Oh, life goes away.

The cement cries for the injustice. And there's something especially striking to me that I've been thinking about this whole time, too, Felix, is the intergenerationality of it all. It feels really, really tragic and empowering. I think, you know, I saw little girls at this demonstration, like literally from babies to abuelas at this demonstration. And it's something that it affects all of us, right? and that's something that so many people with science saying, I'm here with my mom today so that she doesn't have to be out here for me tomorrow. Or I don't want to, like little babies, three years old with signs saying,

like, I don't want to grow up in fear. And that's something I think that no matter who you are, you know, as a woman, that's something I think of, oh, all the things that I do because my mom and my grandma couldn't is constantly a thought in my head. And as you move with the generations, the same pains get repeated, but also things change. And so there's something about Mon being able to encapsulate that so perfectly in this song. And oftentimes in what she does.

I mean, she's very rebellious and revolutionary in also sexual themes that she includes in her music and life themes. And she's just very unapologetic and brave, I think, in who she is as an artist all the time. Yeah, yeah. Okay, Felix, close us out. Okay, so I brought in another, curiously, we didn't compare. pair of notes and then we come like right on top of each other again with very similar themes. I brought in another contemporary anthem by a contemporary singer. And it's Kido Bailad from Ivi Queen. Okay, so reggaeton has been an adventure for me. It came of age just as I started to cover

Latin music full time for NPR. And for those that don't know the history, it was around late 90s, early 2000s. It started to develop. And at first it was considered underground music made by marginalized neighborhoods in Puerto Rico and initially Panama. And it became known for seriously misogynistic lyrics and an overall negative attitude toward women. When I first started listening to it, I had friends who had kids who didn't like any of it because of that. The track I'm going to play today,

challenge that and changed the world of reggaeton. It's from 2003, Reggaeton pioneer EB Queens, Kiro Bailar. You want to sweat and Pekart me The corpse rosar I tell you can't You can't provoke That's not

That's not going to I'm going I'm going to You want to play And peggart to me The corpse I tell you can't You can't

That's not mean to say That's a camera That's why Pap'i you I'm You know you're You know I'm sure you're Pekartes, I don't

I'm a problem Incaulte and buy This reggetton That we've got We've got to suddle We've got Felix, I'm so glad Felix, I'm so glad you brought this song in.

Felix, I'm so glad you brought this song in. Because, yes, it is a power anthem. Evie Queen was a trailblazer just by being there. Because you think about it. Back then, the scene was dominated by men. When I interviewed her in 2020, she said that her voice was so low that many thought that she was a man

and realized what was going on in the clubs and all that. She wrote this song. Check out the lyrics, okay? I want to dance, and you want to sweat and stick to me, our body's touching. And I tell you, yeah, you can tease me, but that doesn't mean I'm going to bed. I want to dance, you want to sweat,

stick to me, our body's touching. You can tease me, but that doesn't mean I'm going to band. Para la cam my boy. And then she goes, nah, nah. It's such an important moment. The cultural and social impact has been significant.

It made a big noise when it first came out. And it has only grown in popularity and significance to reach the point of being a true anthem. This is one of my favorite songs to reference Felix when people say that Perreo is misogynistic or it's sexualized in a way that's, that's wrong for women. All of these things can be true.

There are absolutely misogynistic reggaeton songs, but you also have people like Yvi Queen who write a song that says, she literally says, I'm the one who, I'm the one who directs, I'm the one who's driving this thing. Like, she completely revolutionarily says, I'm making a song that you can shake your butt to, if you want to, and you can do whatever you want about that. That one thing does not have to mean the other.

And I think that even looking at, you know, some of these songs that do have lyrics that feel anti-feminist or feel misogynistic, you can dance to them however you want to dance to them. You can use them, you can not, you can listen, you cannot. And there's something really deeply important about claiming the narrative around songs or a style of music that people condemn. Again, it's often men who are condemning Berreo as misogynistic. There's something, you know, there's so many layers to it and to say, no, I can dance however I want to dance. I can sing however I want to sing. And every passo, every step of this is going to be my decision and mine alone.

There's nothing stronger than that. You know, I've got to tell our listeners that in our 2023 El Tiny Celebration, our Latin Music Month, we invited Evie Queen. And she captured the power of the song and the message in that stripped down. arrangement she did with the string quartet and the piano. She was everything that she is, and she saved the song to the end. And it was just, it was just still so powerful, because the message is powerful, no matter what kind of context you put it in. Check it out. This is from 2023, Tiny Desk with Ivey Queen.

I know this is it my favorite. I know this happens to you, Anna. People ask you all the time, like, what is your favorite tiny desk? Man, if this isn't my favorite, it's near the top, man. The way that she delivered the song, you can hear the crowd interacting with her. She was, again, everything that she is in the power of that song, just completely stripped down. I just loved that moment.

It was so thrilling. thrilling to be part of it and then to see it over and over again. And the way those strings build to, I say this all the time, like, everyone kept coming up to me leaning up to the performance and they're like, how is Evie Queen coming in without drums? And I was like, she's Evie Queen. She can do it. She can do it with the strings. And she did.

I mean, you can hear it. It's so powerful. I think you can hear me screaming. No, no, no. I heard myself. That was Quiro Bealar. A couple of different versions from Evie Queen. It's going to close out our female power anthem.

What did you call it? Female Power Anthem's Hall of Fame episode. All of those songs fit exactly that. You have been listening to Alt Latino from NPR Music. Our audio producer is Noah Caldwell. The executive producer of NPR Music is Saria Mohamed. Our executive director of NPR music is Sonali META. I'm Felix Contreras.

And I'm Anna Maria Sayer. Thank you for listening.