In the streets of Los Angeles, in June, as the city clashed with ICE, the most visible symbol of the protest was the Mexican flag, the tricolor raised over the haze of tear gas and black smoke. Online, the symbol of resistance against immigration raids was something softer. On Instagram and TikTok, the children of Mexican immigrants shared photos of their parents with the same trending audio: “Hasta la raíz,” a song released by the Mexican artist Natalia Lafourcade in 2015, not long before Donald Trump descended his golden escalator. “It’s personal because if my grandparents didn’t risk their lives migrating 'Pal Norte,’ I wouldn’t be the first one in my family to graduate college,” Grecia Lopez, a radio and TV host, wrote in an Instagram post that included a grainy film photo of her grandfather, with “Hasta la raíz” playing over it. “Hasta la raíz,” which means “to the root,” is putatively a breakup song, but, in the past decade, it has served as a sort of anthem for Mexicans in the United States. “I carry you within, to the root,” the chorus goes, in Spanish. “Even if I hide myself behind a mountain, and find myself in a field full of sugar cane, there’s no way, my moonbeam, that you can leave.” If Lafourcade’s lyrics sound sentimental, that just makes them well-suited for the way American-born Mexicans feel about Mexico. Last year, I was catching up with a journalist friend who grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, when she told me about visiting her relatives in Mexico City for the first time. I asked her, cheekily, if she played “Hasta la raíz,” as she landed at the airport. “Shut up,” she told me. “The way I actually did.”

In March, as ICE arrests under the new Trump Administration topped thirty thousand and the President threatened new tariffs on Mexico, I arrived in Veracruz, a port city on Mexico’s east coast, and caught a cab up into the mountains to meet Lafourcade in her home town. Lafourcade rarely talks about politics; in her public statements, she avoids endorsing any parties or movements. I still wanted, however, to find out what the forty-one-year-old singer was putting in her music that, in 2025, had turned it into a form of protest. As the cab drove along a coastal highway, fields full of sugarcane stretched out to the horizon. We began to climb into the mountains, and fields gave way to jungle, and then to the sumptuous green of coffee trees. I had plans to meet Lafourcade at a son jarocho concert in Xalapa, a university town in the mountains. (Son jarocho, meaning “Veracruz sound,” is the state’s folk music, one of the oldest musical traditions in Mexico.) I got to the venue—and took a seat at a small attached café—early. A dusty Toyota Prius pulled up to the curb outside and Lafourcade, wearing a flowing denim shirt and a large, handmade ceramic necklace, slid out from the back seat and turned around to offer a hand to her fellow passenger, her mother. Inside, patrons exchanged grins as the famous singer found her seat, though everyone was careful to remain quiet. At the front of the café, Alejandro Loredo, a folk musician, was giving a talk about the importance of preserving Mexico’s vast array of deep-rooted regional music.

In his arms, Loredo cradled a jarana de arco, a version of a traditional string instrument that he played, unconventionally, with a bow. Loredo had made it based on descriptions of some of the earliest string instruments that the Spanish brought into Mexico—“which first arrived here in Veracruz, of course,” Loredo said. (In 1519, Hernán Cortés anchored his ship around a hundred miles east of where we sat.) Lafourcade nodded intently as Loredo spoke about the importance of using madera endémica, wood native to Veracruz, to build his instruments. Lafourcade leaned back in her seat and gestured for me to come closer. She pointed at Loredo. “I love that,” she whispered.

As Loredo finished his speech, a procession of folk musicians came up to Lafourcade, greeting her warmly. In some ways, it was an incongruous scene—a female pop star surrounded by older male folk artists. But in the past few years Lafourcade has become well known in the places where people still play son jarocho. That’s because, after gaining mainstream stardom in the Spanish-speaking world in the two-thousands, Lafourcade made a startling pivot. In the following decade, she began releasing albums of folk music. It’s difficult to find an analogue for this sort of artistic transformation in the United States. She inhabits the space that a pop star like, say, Sabrina Carpenter might, if Carpenter suddenly began recording Woody Guthrie songs. Lafourcade herself speaks modestly about this transformation. In the café, she was deferential, almost shy, as she spoke to the gathered soneros. “I wish I could play like them,” Lafourcade later told me. When she became interested in son jarocho, in her thirties, she didn’t feel that she properly understood the music of her home state; it was familiar to her but unknown, like a tree in her yard that she had never learned the name of. That’s why spending time with folk musicians—in the mountains of Veracruz, in fishing villages on the coast—had become so important to her. “I just want it to be what I’m breathing,” Lafourcade said.

In recent years, a surprising array of popular artists have made a turn toward tradition. Bad Bunny’s latest record pulses with salsa rhythms; Beyoncé put out a country album. In Mexico, one of the most popular new acts is Peso Pluma, a twenty-six-year-old who sings corridos, a genre popular with ranchers. But Lafourcade’s transformation is more complete. “It’s a kind of oft-told story: at some point, she became more interested in her own roots, and the music of her parents,” David Byrne, of Talking Heads, told me. “But she jumped in with both feet.” Byrne began listening to Lafourcade when she released her early albums, “Casa” (2005) and “Hu Hu Hu” (2009). “They weren’t exactly rock; I would say a little more like trip-hop or something like that,” Byrne said. When, in the early years of her career, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times asked Lafourcade about her influences, she mentioned Fiona Apple and Björk. Then, in 2015, she released the album “Hasta la raíz.” “Musically, it made a statement,” Byrne said. It was still indie music—the coursing guitar on the title track wouldn’t sound entirely out of place next to a Father John Misty song. But the guitar is a huapango riff, a rhythm that cane harvesters and fishermen, in a place like Veracruz, have stomped their feet to for hundreds of years. Byrne enjoyed the album, and, on a whim, he went to see Lafourcade play a free show at Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors festival at Damrosch Park, in 2017. “I went not knowing how popular she was,” Byrne said. The park was so packed with Lafourcade’s fans that Byrne could barely see the stage. “I was way, way in the back, thinking to myself, ‘O.K., well, I’ll buy tickets next time.’ ”

As Lafourcade and the other musicians chatted in the café, a young girl and her parents began guiding guests into the concert hall, a simple bamboo room with high ceilings, and windows made out of glass recycled from bodega fridges. Lafourcade, her mother, and I were guided up to the top of wooden bleachers in front of the stage, which swayed precipitously underneath us. Lafourcade’s mother gripped her daughter’s knee, and Lafourcade turned to me and said, only half joking, “Don’t move at all during the concert.” For the first couple of songs, as Loredo played alone, we all remained still. But, as even more musicians joined Loredo onstage, Lafourcade couldn’t resist: I looked over, and she was playing the drums on her knees and swaying back and forth to the rhythm from the marimbol. “Sweet cane, brave cane,” one of the soneros sang out in Spanish. As the music swelled, Lafourcade’s mother forgot her fear and began clapping her hands along with the music. “Bueno!” Lafourcade shouted.

The state of Veracruz stretches out along a quiet line of steep volcanic mountains, which cascade down into the Gulf Coast. In 2019, Lafourcade decided to quit her life in Mexico City and move back to her home town of Coatepec, a city filled with crumbling haciendas built hundreds of years ago, and surrounded by lush hillsides of overgrown coffee plants. She told her then boyfriend, a Venezuelan documentary filmmaker named Juan Pablo López-Fonseca, that she had made up her mind. “The only people we know there are your mom and her friends,” he told Lafourcade. He couldn’t go, but he knew Lafourcade well enough to know that wouldn’t stop her. He helped her load up her car, and she drove east out of Mexico City.

Lafourcade told me recently that she thought of this move as going to Veracruz, not leaving Mexico City. But there were reasons she’d grown tired of the capital. Lafourcade’s manager, Rocío Alcazar (who is also her second cousin), told me that Lafourcade couldn’t go out for a coffee in Mexico City without getting mobbed by fans asking for selfies. “It’s a locura,” Alcazar said. Lafourcade had been famous since she was a teen-ager. Going back to Veracruz gave her a way to reconnect to her childhood.

Lafourcade was born in Mexico City, in 1984. Her father, Gastón Lafourcade, a Chilean who fled Augusto Pinochet’s regime, was once a harpsichordist and a master craftsman of the instrument. Her mother, María del Carmen Silva Contreras, is a pianist and music educator. The couple separated when Lafourcade was a toddler, and Silva Contreras took her daughter to live near family friends—artists who had settled on a ranch outside of Coatepec. Lafourcade grew up swimming in creeks and playing in the woods of the hillside property. On her sixth birthday, she told her mother that she wanted to ride one of the horses. Silva Contreras told Lafourcade that she was too small, but Lafourcade simply waited for the adults to go inside before approaching one of the mares. She came up behind the animal’s tail; the horse tensed, then kicked her in the face.

After the incident, she needed reconstructive surgery, and had brain inflammation so severe that when she tried to look up, all she saw was black. Even once she was well enough to leave the hospital, she had trouble walking more than a few steps. Lafourcade had been a talkative, impetuous child, but, in the months after the injury, she was laconic and subdued. Doctors told Silva Contreras that her daughter might never be the same. “They said I might not make it in school, I might not make it in a career,” Lafourcade said.

“I told them ‘No,’ ” Silva Contreras said, looking at me intensely over the table at dinner after the son jarocho show. “ ‘I’m going to bring her back.’ ” Silva Contreras told me that she knew her daughter had a rare musical ability (when Lafourcade was just nine months old, her mother had overhead her harmonizing with the tones of their vacuum cleaner). Now Silva Contreras tried to use music to help Lafourcade regain her development. “The first problem was one of willpower,” Silva Contreras said. “I needed observation, imitation, curiosity.” Inspired by Montessori-style education, Silva Contreras followed where Lafourcade’s interest led. If one day she wanted to dance, they danced; if another day she wanted to sing songs, they sang songs. Silva Contreras is convinced that this winding path brought Lafourcade back to herself.

Picking around a kale salad, Lafourcade said that the mark this experience left on her—besides a thin scar, shaped like a horseshoe, between her eyebrows—was a belief in her own intuition. In those early years, following her predilections was how she regained motor skills and relearned how to speak. After two months of healing, she went back to school, where music remained her obsession. Around the time she turned ten, Lafourcade and Silva Contreras moved to Mexico City, and she became preoccupied with the idea of becoming a singer. Silva Contreras didn’t take this seriously at first. But she helped Lafourcade make a recording studio in their bathroom, with a keyboard and an eight-track set. One day, Silva Contreras got an unexpected call from the Mexican media conglomerate TV Azteca; Lafourcade had called the company seeking a role, and now it was offering her a tryout for a musical program. Silva Contreras decided to let her audition, thinking it could be an educational experience. “There were a hundred girls there. They all looked like Barbies,” Silva Contreras remembered. Surprising her mother, Lafourcade was a success, and, at just fourteen, she joined a teen pop trio called Twist, performing on a TV show of the same name.

At dinner, Lafourcade talked about these years without a hint of pleasure in her voice. “I was too young,” she said. The other members of Twist teased her when they saw an embroidered bag her mother had made her. They said that she was “too hippie,” and that she was going to get kicked out. Across the table from me, Lafourcade smiled with sharp satisfaction. “But the opposite happened,” she said. After less than a year, the TV station disbanded Twist, but the group’s manager began working to build a new act around Lafourcade. At one point, the station brought in new potential bandmates for her. “They were these delicious girls. They were teen-agers but they looked like adults. They looked like the Spice Girls,” Lafourcade said. “They’re too tall—I’ll look ridiculous,” she told her manager. “You’ll grow,” he said, shrugging. (At forty-one, she still hasn’t reached five feet.) She began recruiting friends from her school, a music academy called Fermatta with a campus in Mexico City. By this time, she understood that her voice was only one part of why the industry liked her, or other female artists. “I picked friends I thought were very pretty,” she said. “But I learned they weren’t ‘TV pretty.’ ”

Ximena Sariñana, who today is a famous Mexican singer and actress, was a year below Lafourcade at Fermatta. Sariñana recalls Lafourcade as “the absolute popular girl.” “I would be in the cafeteria with my nerdy musician friends who only listened to grunge and Pearl Jam, and suddenly Natalia would go into the cafeteria surrounded by a bunch of girlfriends,” Sariñana said. “She’d be making a lot of noise—she was so fashionable, loud, and always, always very herself, very comfortable in her own skin.” One day, Sariñana was doing her homework with her headphones on when Lafourcade came up and tapped her on the shoulder. In a friendly tone, Lafourcade told Sariñana that she had heard Sariñana was a good singer. Lafourcade got more serious: “But are you a really good singer?” she asked. Lafourcade was still writing and recording her own songs, and she needed backup. “When we spent time together at the piano, and I understood what she wanted to do, I was, like, O.K., I understand why she would need really good singers,” Sariñana said. Within a few semesters, Lafourcade had dropped out of school: she had a record contract with Sony.

When Lafourcade released her first album, “Natalia Lafourcade,” in 2002, she became a household name in Mexico. (If you have a Mexican in your life, see if they can hum the chorus to “En el 2000”; the song was ubiquitous on the radio that year.) By then, Sariñana and Lafourcade were close, and Sariñana watched Lafourcade, who was then seventeen, struggle with this new fame. She recalled that Lafourcade bristled against the pop-princess marketing that the label pushed on her. In those years, Sariñana said, “you were either very alternative and very rock—which was mostly men in bands—or you were very pop. And if you were pop, you were plastic, and people were telling you what to wear and how to sound.”

Lafourcade soon tried out the other side of the Mexican pop-rock binary. At Fermatta, Lafourcade had worked with a group of three musicians to produce her demos, and she recruited them into a new band they called Natalia Lafourcade y la Forquetina. “I definitely think it was something she needed to do at that point, because it must have been really lonely to be a solo artist at seventeen,” Sariñana said. The band released only one album, the alt-rock “Casa.” The album won a Latin Grammy in 2006. Then, after months of touring through the U.S. and Mexico, Lafourcade called her bandmates to her house and told them she was done. “I told the band they could keep everything, they could keep the name, I just needed to leave,” Lafourcade said.

Silva Contreras, recalling that time, said that she had seen that her daughter would need a way out, and that Lafourcade would need to feel like she’d made her own decision. Silva Contreras had a close friend who lived in Ottawa, and this friend found an English-language program at the local university. Together, the two women filled out an application for Lafourcade. When an acceptance letter arrived, Silva Contreras handed it to her daughter: “Look, the university has invited you to come study!” Lafourcade, taking the bait, moved to Canada. (If Lafourcade was ever offended when she discovered this subterfuge, she doesn’t show it—when Silva Contreras told me the story over dinner, Lafourcade laughed and joined in on the telling. “I had no idea,” she said.)

Heading north was a chance to stop being famous. When other Latino students recognized her in Ottawa, Lafourcade told them that she wasn’t interested in being friends with other Latinos, that she didn’t want to speak Spanish. She also tried to distance herself from music, but, when she moved in with a few classmates, she couldn’t avoid it: her “bedroom”—a couch in the living room—was where her roommates held rehearsals for their Fela Kuti cover band. “I loved it,” she said. At our dinner table, she began loudly humming the bass line to Kuti’s song “Zombie.” When she returned to Mexico City, she also returned to recording, and released “Hu Hu Hu” (2009), a folk-pop album, with three songs in her new English. At the 2009 Latin Grammys, it was nominated for Best Female Pop Vocal Album.

The album’s success meant that, in 2010, Lafourcade received a coveted invitation. That year, Mexico celebrated its bicentennial, and she was asked to sing in a concert in the capital. On La Día de la Independencia, in September, more than a million Mexicans poured into El Zócalo, the central plaza in Mexico City. As the renowned conductor Alondra de la Parra led a full orchestra, Lafourcade, in a white dress with white flowers in her hair, performed some of the great standards of the Mexican songbook. As she sang the chorus to the iconic “Cielito Lindo,” alongside singers Ely and Lo Blondo, she opened her arms wide and welcomed the audience to sing with her. “Más fuerte, México!” she called out. Hundreds of thousands of voices rang out in response: “Ay, ay, ay, ay, canta y no llores.” Lafourcade felt euphoric. “I was singing Mexican music, for Mexican people,” she said. “That night, with the orchestra, was like a root that pulled me to the heart of my country.” Onstage, she felt a sense of her career changing. “I don’t want to sing in English anymore. I don’t want to pretend to be any indie artist. I want to learn to sing this music,” she remembered thinking. When she went back home, she immersed herself in classic Mexican music: the boleros of María Grever and Alvaro Carrillo, the rancheras of José Alfredo Jiménez, and, most important, the canciones of Agustín Lara.

Lara, born in 1897, was a crooner, Mexico’s Cole Porter. Like Lafourcade, he was born in Veracruz, and some of his most beloved songs are about the state. “Veracruz, it vibrates in my being / One day I will have to return to your distant shores,” he sings in one chorus. Lafourcade had grown up listening to Lara, but, as she tried singing some of his most familiar songs, she had a rare experience: failure. “I felt very far away from it,” she said. “I didn’t even know how to approach singing those words.” With her guitar and a hard drive full of Lara’s music, she moved into a cabin in the mountains, on the same ranch where the mare had kicked her all those years ago.

On a warm morning, a couple of days after we’d had dinner together, Lafourcade picked me up in a Jeep outside my hotel in Coatepec. As we drove north out of the city, she told me we were following the same route she used to take to elementary school. The road was like a green tunnel, enclosed by tropical species of oak. We climbed higher into the hills, and she turned the Jeep off the road, toward a cattle gate. “This is it,” she said as we pulled into a driveway. We were on the ranch of her childhood. As we got out of the car, two large Xoloitzcuintles—a wonderfully bizarre hairless Mexican dog breed—recognized her, and they ran up to greet us. She bent down and petted them, and then stood up. “Let me show you where I recorded ‘Mujer Divina,’ ” she said.

Lafourcade led me up to a cabin, an elegant one-room studio with whitewashed walls. A mattress lay on a raised platform, and there was a simple wooden desk by a generous window. Large, smooth river stones served as stools. Lafourcade sat on the desk and gestured toward the window; outside, a magenta bougainvillea hung luxuriously in the sun. “I spent months here,” she said. “I would work all day, and Rocío would come knock on this window when it was time for dinner.” On the ranch, Lafourcade was hosted by one of her oldest family friends, Rocío Sagaón, a renowned ballerina, who had danced alongside Pedro Infante during the golden age of Mexican cinema. When she and Lafourcade met in the evenings, “Rocío would always ask me what I found so interesting about Lara,” Lafourcade said. The questions were subtle enough that Lafourcade realized only years later that Sagaón had been trying to get her to consider Lara’s infamous womanizing (he was married six times). But, even without Lafourcade noticing its effect, Sagaón’s gentle instruction still pushed her to think about the role of women in Lara’s music. Who was the “mujer divina”—the divine woman—he sang about? What were her characteristics, besides her desirability?

In the cabin, Lafourcade spent hours listening to another artist from Veracruz, Antonia del Carmen Peregrino Álvarez. Better known as Toña la Negra, the Haitian Mexican singer had become renowned in the forties and fifties for her sultry, sophisticated interpretations of Lara’s songbook. Unlike Lara—who was almost always yearning and mournful in his songs—Toña sounded amorous and hopeful. Lafourcade loved Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, and, in Toña’s music, she found similar depth. “But it was in Spanish!” she said. “I felt like, ‘Oh, this is the sound of Veracruz.’ I could hear the port, I could see the colors.”

When Lafourcade released “Mujer Divina,” a year after she arrived at the ranch, it stunned her fans: instead of an indie album, Lafourcade had created twelve covers of Lara songs, built around a series of duets with prominent Latin American artists, including the Bossa Nova luminary Gilberto Gil. Lafourcade was audacious with her interpretations. Take “Limosna,” one of Lara’s longing, slow boleros. In Lara’s song, Lafourcade noticed an energetic fiddle, dancing around the singer’s voice; in her version, she replaced the violin with a ukulele and sped up the tempo, making the once plaintive song playful and self-confident—“Just give me a bit of your touch,” she sings happily in the chorus. Lafourcade reworked Lara’s “Copla Guajira,” into a new song, adding entire verses. Whereas Lara sang, “Whenever you talk to me about love, you tell me a lie,” Lafourcade sings, “Talk to me about loves that make me feel more alive.” “She’s a punk,” the singer-songwriter and producer Adán Jodorowsky, one of her collaborators, said.

To coincide with the album’s release, Lafourcade débuted another project: a thirteen-episode TV series, “Mi Mundo Privado,” showing her life around Mexico City as she worked in the studio. While filming the show, she got to know a tall, gentle Venezuelan working as a producer on the project—López Fonseca. The two were soon in a serious romantic relationship. I asked Fonseca recently if, while working on the show, he’d tried to engineer some drama for it. “I think the fact that I didn’t do that is why she liked me,” López said, chuckling. For years, the couple diligently endeavored to keep their relationship out of the press; even the Mexican gossip blogs did not know who Lafourcade was dating.

When “Mujer Divina” came out, her audience rewarded her risks. The album was a commercial hit, and it won her another Latin Grammy. Soon, though, Lafourcade fell into a bout of depression. In travelling deep into Lara’s songbook, she had become lost—she didn’t have a sense of her own music anymore. Taking time away from Mexico, she swam off the coast of Cuba and hiked into the mountains of Peru. As she began to get out of the funk, she visited the home of Leonel García, a Mexican singer and composer. She told him that she wanted to write a song that was properly Mexican—but not a caricature, not a ham-fisted mariachi. García’s parents were from Tamaulipas, a state just to the north of Veracruz, and he pulled out something from his childhood: huapango, a deep-rooted folk genre from Mexico’s east coast, in the homeland of the Huasteca people. Huapango is built around a 6/8 time signature, and García began strumming a 6/8 riff on his guitar. Lafourcade was entranced, and García told her to start singing. She sang about mountains and rivers, jungles and cane fields, plant spines and sacred smoke. The song became “Hasta la raíz.”

I was shocked when Lafourcade told me, over drinks soon after we left the ranch, that she hadn’t been thinking of Veracruz when she wrote the song. By that time, I had hiked in the mountains and swum in the river in Coatepec. I had seen a curandero, a folk healer, smudge a woman with sacred smoke. I asked Lafourcade if, when García had played the huapango riff, it might have moved her because it evoked Veracruz. “That’s it,” she said, nodding. “I think that that is the magic inside of making these projects—it is like raising the hand and saying, ‘Hey, I like it this way.’ ” Driving through Xalapa in her Jeep, she told me that, before she returned to Veracruz, she had wanted to be an “international artist.” Things changed when she created “Mujer Divina.” “That wasn’t a goal anymore for me. I think I started to fall in love with Mexico,” she said. She navigated us onto the highway, and we made our way back south, to the house she’d had built in a forest outside of Coatepec.

To get to Lafourcade’s home, we turned down a rough dirt road that plunged into a forest and brought us to a gated house with a large garden—a modernist creation surrounded by dense trees. While filming “Mi Mundo Privado,” she had brought López, along with the camera crew, to see the land. In the following years, as the two became more serious, they began working with an architect to design a home of wood, glass, and volcanic stone. “We wanted the feeling of this house to be a life hundida entre árboles”—submerged in the trees, she explained.

During this time, Lafourcade and López were living together in Mexico City, and they spent weekends in Coatepec, camping in the unfinished home. Even when it was completed, they continued thinking of it as a sort of artist retreat. Then, in 2019, Lafourcade announced that she would move to Coatepec full time. “In my mind, I was, like, I need that to be my house. I live there, I work there, and I do everything from that place,” she said. The following year, global calamity hit. López fled Mexico City for Coatepec, where the pandemic still felt like something on the news. The two went to speakeasies, where soneros and jazz musicians from the universities of Xalapa played underground shows. (She told me that she felt guilty at times for breaking quarantine.) One day, when she and López were in their garden, he turned to look at her. “I could live here,” he said. She chose her next words carefully. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Estoy 100 por ciento,” he said. He and Lafourcade were married in Peru in 2021, but they kept their relationship secret from the press until recently. When I visited, in the spring, the couple looked radiantly happy. At the time, neither of them knew that the singer was pregnant with their first child; the baby was born at the end of November.

The years that Lafourcade and López spent working on their home in Coatepec gave the singer an excuse to visit Veracruz often. She released two linked albums, “Musas Volume 1” and “Musas Volume 2,” in 2017 and 2018, creating what she called “an homage to Latin American folklore.” She reinterpreted a broad swath of the Mexican canon, putting her touch on boleros by artists such as María Grever, one of the country’s most internationally renowned composers. After fleeing to New York City during the Mexican Revolution, Grever gained her fame writing jazz-age hits like Dinah Washington’s “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes,” but she also worked to introduce Americans to traditional Mexican music. “There is such a cultural richness in Mexican music, its Hispanic and Indigenous origins and how they mix,” Grever once said. As part of the album, Lafourcade tried her hand at writing her own son jarocho songs. “Tú sí sabes quererme,” a charging love song, remains one of Lafourcade’s most popular—and probably best—tracks. At the beginning, a jarana player counts out the son jarocho metre. Later, the chorus becomes a call-and-response: “You know to love me / the way I like to be loved,” she and her band sing.

By the time Lafourcade released “Musas,” son jarocho had become one of her obsessions. In 2017, Ramón Guitérrez, one of the most prominent jarana players in Veracruz, had invited her to a huge son jarocho festival at a nature reserve called Luna Negra, or “black moon,” on a tiny river island called Tacamichapan. This was a more rough-and-tumble part of Veracruz, and Lafourcade felt nervous about going by herself, but Gutiérrez gave her the address of a gas station where they could meet. It was a twelve-hour drive down the coast, on rural roads, and, as she got closer to Jaltipan, she began to see dozens of young musicians on the side of the road, holding their instruments, with thumbs out. Small wooden barges carried Lafourcade and the other musicians out to the island, and, on the boats, they played their instruments and sang son jarocho. She told me that she felt her perspective of her life widen. “I think that helps to see these kinds of different universes happening at the same time as mine,” she said.

At her house, we sat down at a table in her garden for lunch with López. As he spooned salsa on a tetela, a cheese-filled tortilla triangle, López told me that he and Lafourcade had spent the past few years travelling through villages in the state, exploring different traditions. In the countryside, son jaracho is played in large gatherings called fandangos, in which the village constructs a tarima, a large wooden stage, and the entire crowd gathers around as dancers stomp the rhythm of the music. López told me he’d learned that, in some fandangos, only women dance to the sones; in others, men and women dance together. Some villages arranged the tarima to the cardinal directions. “They take it very seriously,” López told me. “If you call for a fandango, that means there’s going to be food, there’s going to be drink—people are going to show up from far away, because everyone answers the fandango call.”

After lunch, Lafourcade led me through the house to a patio made of volcanic stone, which led to a building with tall, airy ceilings: her home studio. Inside, an engineer was at work mastering the sound on the music videos for “Cancionera,” her latest album. “Cancionera” is a concept-based project; Lafourcade explained that she envisaged it as the work of an alter ego, the cancionera, the songstress—the mysterious part of her personality where her music comes from. During our time together, Lafourcade often described her ideal of songwriting as a sort of flow state where music emerges like water out of a spring. “Cancionera, don’t stop surprising me / you who can whisper verses to time,” she sings on the title track. But the album also suggests how fruitful her study of folk traditions has been: after the first songs, “Cancionera” proceeds as a series of collaborations with up-and-coming Spanish-language artists, including Los Hermanos Gutiérrez (two Ecuadorian Swiss brothers who play Western guitars in the style of Ry Cooder or Ennio Morricone) and Israel Fernández (a Romani flamenco singer from Spain). I talked to several of the collaborators, who spoke adoringly about Lafourcade, remarking on how interested she was in playing with their own sound and influences; she also had involved them in an impressive promotional stunt. The album was recorded, on physical tape, in a single take with cameras rolling, as Lafourcade and the other artists changed outfits and recorded an album-length music video.

“Cancionera” was nominated for eight Latin Grammys this September, and, as Lafourcade spoke to the engineer, I looked at a bookshelf of Grammys built into one of the walls, over a small shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe. I counted eleven of her eighteen Latin Grammys—the most held by any female artist (Shakira has fifteen, and Lafourcade won two more just a few months after I visited). On the shelf below these, I saw four more Grammys in a different color. “Those are my gringo Grammys,” Lafourcade said from the producer’s booth, walking over to where I was standing. “You can pick them up if you want.” Moving around the walls of the studio, she showed me more of her keepsakes: a gourd played in Indigenous Oaxacan music, her jarana. A donkey jaw hung next to a wooden replica. “That’s one normal quejido and a vegan quejido,” she said, picking up the wooden version and shaking it.

Before I met Lafourcade, I had expected her to describe her turn toward Mexican tradition as a reclamation of identity: as I heard her tell the audience at a concert in New Jersey this summer, “I completely love being Mexican.” But, the first time we spoke over the phone, she told me that she thinks she might have found the same passion that she found for Mexican music in any number of world traditions—flamenco, jazz, Afrobeat. “I’m looking for solidity,” she said.

As the sun set on Veracruz, Lafourcade brought me up a staircase to the roof of her studio. Cool air had begun to sink down from the white-capped peak of Cofre de Perote. Her house is built on a hill and, below us, I could see fields of cane glowing in the orange light. As I turned east, I could make out the smokestack of a large sugar mill. “That’s an ugly thing,” Lafourcade said. “It is so important, it’s such a deep part of Veracruz. But it has taken so much nature and—oh, look! Look at the bird.” About twenty feet below us, a toucan flew among the branches. I asked her if she could tell me the names of the trees. She nodded seriously, and pointed out banana trees, sandalwood, kapok, and bougainvillea. “We also have palo mulatto—a lot of palo mulatto,” she said. “If you take a branch of palo mulatto, and you put it in the earth, it grows,” she told me. “It’s a beautiful thing.” ♦