Sweet Sorrow
By: Victor Cruz-Lugo

It’s been four years since Mexican-American musician Lila Downs became the first Latina to perform at the Academy Awards, an event that amounted to her international television debut. And it’s been three years since Una Sangre/One Blood took home the Grammy for best folk album. Since then, her roots-rich releases, which dig deep into her Oaxaca origins, have earned her a growing fan base. Venues in which she used to open for other acts, she now fills herself. With her latest release, La Cantina: Entre Copa y Copa, she’s managed to raise her profile to yet another level, even as she has crossed into a deeper realm of artistic maturity. With the immigration reform movement under full swing, her music, a hard-won expression of Mexican pride, has never been more relevant or better received.

We caught up with Downs while she was on a brief break between gigs for her European, Mexican and U.S. tours. In her life, as in her music, she remains the daughter of three cultures: Indian, Mexican and Anglo. Her father was of Scottish descent and her mother Mixtec Indian.“During my youth, I was always taken back and forth between Minnesota and …the Mixtec Mountains,” she says via phone from New York City, where she now lives. When Down’s father, a Minnesotan art professor, died when she was only 16, the event triggered a crisis of identity. “I did a lot of searching and found out that there are a lot of things that aren’t just in this life, and so I continued to search for things that made me feel stronger as a person,” she recalls. Today, you can hear the resolution of her crisis, in the deeply emotive style of her music.

It’s a resolution defined by what, and how, Downs has chosen to sing on this latest CD. En La Cantina marks the maturation of Downs as a vocalist precisely because it features the heartfelt emotionally cavernous love songs, in the form of rancheras, that she used to avoid. And, as any truly great singer knows, there’s nothing more challenging than singing convincingly about heartbreak. “I wasn’t related to songs that are just about emotion and love…because I hadn’t lived intensely enough to understand the profound nature of that kind of music,” she says. “That’s why I haven’t done rancheras until now.”

Now that she is doing them, she is proving how tough and sinewy the cord that binds her to her Mexican origins has become. La Cantina features 15 tracks, including soulful originals like La Cumbia de Mole, slit-your-wrists waltzes like Penas en el Alma, narcocorridos like El Centenario and even the exuberant son calentano El Relámpago. With living legend Flaco Jiménez’s
accordion adding authentic Mexican filigree, Downs has achieved true Chicano street cred. Through it all, Downs’ powerful alto voice cuts a path into the deepest pits of your heart, tears something out of there and somehow we as listeners wind up asking her for more of the same. H

WE’RE GOING TO MISS YOU Grammy Award-winning Colombian American artist Soraya died May 10, after a battle with breast cancer. The 37-year-old musician, born in New Jersey to Colombian parents, died in Miami. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000, she helped raise funds to boost awareness about, and find a cure for, the disease.