With a sparkling smile and chic, refined poise, Mariana Yegros is finding growing international success fusion of Latin American cumbia music and electronica.
La Yegros, the stage name the Argentinian singer performs under, has been dubbed the “queen of electrocumbia”. She brings a modern, club-music edge to a traditional genre of dance music that traces its roots to Colombia’s African community.
Yegros divides her time between Buenos Aires and the city of Montpellier in the South of France. She established a base there after winning fans at European festivals and nightclubs with her first album, 2013's Viene de Mi, which introduced influences as diverse as reggae and Middle Eastern music.
For her latest album Magnetismo, she worked with Argentine composer Gaby Kerpel, who has been active both in cumbia and electronic music.
Currently in the midst of a two-month world tour, which takes in 18 cities in France and six in the United States – she recalls a recent New York performance at Lincoln Center. The enthusiastic crowd included a man in his 80s who got up, tossed away his cane and danced with a young woman.
“I always dreamed of making music that gets people dancing,” says Yegros.
“When I was a little girl I dreamed that people would be singing songs with me, and now that it’s happening it’s really magical.”
Created on the Caribbean coast of Colombia at a time when Africans and indigenous people intermingled under Spanish rule, Cumbia began spreading to other parts of Latin America in the 1940s.
The genre, which combines African rhythms and expressive dancing with more melancholic, indigenous elements, enjoyed a rebirth in the 1990s among the marginalised of Buenos Aires, in what became known as “cumbia villera” or slum cumbia.
“I don’t think that the prejudice against cumbia is over yet, but we’re going in the right direction,” says Yegros. “It used to be that the ‘chetos’ would look at people who danced cumbia and say it would be crazy to dance like that,” she adds, using a slang for Argentina’s elite class.
She noticed a change starting in about 2008, when high-end parties in Buenos Aires, especially those frequented by foreigners, would play cumbia, interspersed with electronic music. Cumbia mirrors the path of one of Argentina’s most famous cultural exports, the tango, which also had African roots and gradually won acceptance among the country’s elite before going global.
Yegros, who grew up in Buenos Aires but whose family is from the subtropical Misiones province bordering Paraguay and Brazil, initially faced challenges in building a following.
“I was living in Los Angeles and then in New York, and then I went with my band to try our luck in Buenos Aires," she says.
“It was a time of great crisis in Argentina and many people had left. It was a very hard time. Things didn’t happen. I was making electronic music and 10 people would show up, with five applauding and the rest falling asleep.
"It was a period of great frustration for me. I told myself: ‘I wasn’t born to be a singer’. I didn’t think I could achieve it.”
She decided to return to New York to join her husband and try to make a career in fashion, another of her passions. She remains known for her eclectic tastes in clothes. At the New York concert, she wore a minidress made by a Spanish woman in Shanghai, with a traditional folkloric design in fluorescent colours, paired with silver slippers equipped with small LED lights.
Her determination eventually paid off. Word-of-mouth buzz began to develop and concert venues gradually started to fill up.
She now performs with three musicians: an accordion player, a guitarist and a percussionist, all of them Argentines, who often rehearse with her online, over Skype or FaceTime. “I like to compose, but what I like most is singing,” she says. “Every night is like staking a claim that this is what I was born for and that I want to die like this.”
• Magnetismo by La Yegros is out now
* Agence France-Presse
