Julieta Venegas left her childhood home in Baja California more than three decades ago. She wanted to make it as a musician, and she knew she had to move to Mexico City if she wanted a real shot.
Her instincts were right — she ended up becoming a defining voice in Latin pop, releasing nine studio albums and selling out tours around the world — but she never stopped looking back at the northern Mexican soundscapes that raised her.
For years, Venegas sprinkled those traditional elements throughout her records, employing her trusty accordion on hits like "Lento" and "Andar Conmigo," or adding a banda brass section to live performances. But it wasn't until she spent nearly a decade living in Argentina, having worked with Latin music innovators including Ana Tijoux, Tainy and Bad Bunny, that the now 55-year-old star started to feel that familiar instinct pulling her back to where her career started.
That intuition turned into a transformative "memory project" for Venegas, one which manifested into a memoir tracing her earliest musical memories, a relocation back to Mexico and a sweeping new album that places the singer-songwriter's folkloric sensibilities front and center.
On Norteña, out May 14, Venegas taps collaborators including Natalia Lafourcade, Yahritza y Su Esencia and El David Aguilar to weave a rich tapestry of contemporary música Mexicana. On "Leyendas de Tijuana," Venegas imagines the city's streets during the Prohibition Era, back when Rita Hayworth danced in its clubs. Later, on the solemn "La Linea," she leaps into the present to address the ongoing separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Since her last album, 2022's Tu Historia, regional Mexican music has turned into a global powerhouse. At a time when the genre can often feel like a box that Latin artists may want to check off on a project — throwing a cumbia onto a tracklist because it's been proven to have massive commercial appeal — one of its earliest pop ambassadors slows down to excavate the history and identity of the place she comes from.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What does being norteña mean to you?
More than being norteña, I'm from a border city. I grew up immersed in two countries that are totally opposed to each other. At the same time, being neighbors, your daily life happens in a city that is very different from your country. In my house, Mexico was a myth. Mexico City was super far from Tijuana. At the same time, it's like, you're Mexican and yet you're on the border. It's kind of a weird mix. I think that the way that I make music, the way that I listen to music, has to do with growing up in that contrast.
What did it mean to put that identity front and center on this project?
It was a project that I started out of missing my family and Mexico because I was living in Buenos Aires. I lived there for eight years. Being there, I didn't realize at first that I was actually just trying to build myself a little space where I could think about this music and think about these landscapes — el paisaje del Norte, you know? I had always thought of maybe writing some kind of memoir, but I would always stop and say, "I'm more interested in doing another album than writing a memoir." But with this project, it sort of made sense. It was all a memory project to me, and so it has to do with the music being combined with what I wrote.
People will come in through Tijuana every single day. Some of them will stay in Tijuana; some of them will go. I mean, migration is just like an everyday fightJulieta Venegas
You had songs on Tu Historia, like "La Nostalgia," that focus on these themes of looking back and thinking about memory. But on this project, it widens out past your own history, to the history of Tijuana and of this region and these communities. How did you navigate telling these stories that are about you, but also stretch way beyond yourself?
I think that the stories are very connected to my own life, you know, to the things that I've gone through. But at the same time, there are certain things growing up in a border city that I always saw: people who were always there, waiting to cross. It's changed a lot. It's become so tough and more and more terrible. It's something that I grew up seeing, all these people who were trying to get to the other side and trying to build their lives back again. It doesn't matter how hard things get for them when they want to cross, they're going to keep trying because they know that they want to find something more for themselves.
I think that's very, very important to keep in mind when we're thinking about migration. It's not just numbers or "si, la migracion es un problema." No, people are definitely migrating for a reason or they wouldn't put themselves at risk like that. The cruelty of what's happening right now is that on the other side, you already made your life. You put your life back together, you have your family, and all of a sudden you're being separated because of some absurd external reason that has nothing to do with how you built your life. Even if you've been law abiding, if you paid taxes, it doesn't matter. I think it's terrible for humanity, because it questions what's really valid.
That brings us to "La Linea." It's [a story] of two people who were separated through a deportation. There's a literal line between them that ripped their life together apart. But the song doesn't sound angry. It sounds sad and bittersweet, but it almost feels like singing is a way of holding on to hope that there's going to be something better at some point. How did you think of the emotional tone of that story and that song?
I didn't want to make it a political song, because [ultimately] the problem is not political. It's human. I wanted to focus on the emotion of it — the emotion of every single day, trying to not lose hope. It's not something that magically is going to happen. If someone is in a situation like that, they have to wake up every day and find [hope] again. I think that song is about that, about feeling sad but feeling hopeful because life is made of all these different situations. For families that are separated, there's no way of thinking that it'll stay that way. Se tiene que revertir. It has to be fixed. So I think in the song, what I'm trying to say is, "I'm going to keep singing until I see you again."
Do you consider it a protest song?
No. I consider it a consolation song. Hopefully, somebody will feel a bit consoled by something like that, by a feeling that maybe they had and they sometimes don't want to feel. But sometimes you just need como un hilito – something that will pull you out of that situation or that state of mind. Because what I saw growing up in Tijuana is that it's an everyday occurrence. People will come in through Tijuana every single day. Some of them will stay in Tijuana; some of them will go. I mean, migration is just like an everyday fight. You have to solve things every single day. I'm hoping that somebody will feel that this song can be with them, at least for a day or more, and they can keep it in their minds.
I'm curious about your choice to bring [the Washington-based, regional Mexican trio] Yahritza y Su Esencia onto that track in particular, because I know that [the immigration struggle] is something that she lived through with her brothers, being part of a mixed status family in the U.S. Is that something you guys talked about working on this song together, or did that come up?
We talked about it after she recorded it. I didn't know about their story. They told me this after they had recorded it, and I couldn't believe it. Yahri just told me, "This really hurt. It hurt a lot to sing it because I relived what we went through."
As you were saying, [band member] Mando [Martinez] had a few problems, and he had to be back in Mexico for a few months. He was super young. He'd never been to Mexico. He was totally confused. It was the first time they'd been separated, and for them it was super traumatic. I didn't know this when we recorded it, but I found it so moving to be able to talk about it with them afterwards — knowing that they had been through it and they wanted to share their story.
This global phenomenon that Mexican music has turned into in the last few years — having more traditional elements, but also the blend of identity with a new generation who maybe grew up away from Mexico, but still feel very much a part of it and are expressing that through the music. What's it been like for you, as someone who's been making this music for a long time, to watch that happen in real time?
I love the mixing there is, all the different genres people are reinventing. For example, with the corrido tumbado, which I think is something that Natanael Cano invented — nobody had made that combination of instruments in norteño music. I find it really interesting how a bunch of new artists — Fuerza Regida, Yahritza y Su Esencia, Ivan Cornejo — are reinventing what we think of as Mexican music.
I think that my version of musica norteña is more inspired by Los Tigres del Norte, which is a band that we listened to at my house, and Juan Gabriel, who's maybe not norteño music genre-wise, but he's from Ciudad Juarez, so he's definitely a norteño. My imagining of el Norte is maybe not traditional folk, it's more like my interpretation of it. I have a lot of tuba. Tuba was definitely very important because it's just such a party instrument. Whatever you put a tuba in, it becomes a super festive song. I was inspired with the sounds and inspired with the stories and inspired with the genre, so it's all my way of telling it.
You've written so many incredible songs about romantic love: falling in love, falling out of love. But on this album, I think some of the most moving love songs are about friendship. They're about platonic relationships between women. Has that been more of a driving force in your creative process?
These last few years, I think yes, definitely. Friendship was an element that I needed to have in the album because it's been important for me to discover the importance of friendship. I think Argentina gave me that chance. I have great friends in Mexico, but in Argentina, I seem to have had more free time — more time for my personal life, more than my professional life. Argentina is so far from Mexico and the U.S.; I wasn't working all the time. I think in Mexico City, you're busier.
[On the album], I have the two extremes. One, [the song "Tengo Que Contarte" ft. Natalia Lafourcade], is the friendship that helps you out and gives you resilience, someone who is there listening to how you feel that day. And the other extreme is two friends who break up. I needed to write that song ["Amigas" ft. Marian Ruzzi] because that happened to me, but also because I realized I hadn't heard a song that talked about that.
I think it's something so many people can relate to: you drift apart from a friend or you have a misunderstanding, but you miss that person so badly. And yet we don't have as many pop culture references for that specific kind of pain and that specific kind of breakup. What was the process like for you in being like, no, I want to write a song about this experience?
I felt like the loss of a friend was important because when you lose a partner in the romantic sense, sometimes you go through a shock. You go through el desamor. I always say it's sort of like a cold; you feel terrible and then se empieza a mitigar, it gets better. But with friendship, I think it's slower. Es un duelo largo. It's just a really long process.
You never question that you're going to lose friends, and then when you do, it's always hurtful. The idea of forgiveness is something that we all need, but sometimes people can change so much that you can't. Sometimes you just don't understand each other anymore, and that really hurts because you miss the person you knew and yet that person is not the same person.
You wrote in your memoir that you loved being in bands, but that sometimes you felt like in a group setting, you avoided confrontation, so then you ignored some of your artistic instincts. You learned through a solo career that you have to follow your gut as an artist. How did that come up as you were working on this project?
This is the first time where I've said, "You know what? I'm just going to direct this." It's not that I was like, "It's time for me to produce and I'm the one who should be doing it." It's more like I felt that I already knew what I wanted. It was just so clear in my head. This project had been growing in my head and I had been imagining it for so long that when it came time to actually do it, I was like, "I really know what I want, so why am I getting all complicated trying to find a producer who's going to do a traditional album? I'm not trying to do a traditional album, I'm trying to do what I have in my head."
So I put a team together, and that was actually a really important process for me because I've always been very insecure. I've done so many albums, and yet I always felt like I needed somebody to help me out. Now, I did get people to help me, but it's more the team that I put together and the arrangers that I called. It was a totally different way of working, and I really enjoyed it. Also, I enjoyed having so much time to do it. It was a very slow cooked project. I was writing the text and I was writing the songs. I was reading about Baja California. I was about to move to Mexico. It was such an amazing year for me in that sense that everything was connected, every single thing I was doing.
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