There is a Julieta Venegas before the accordion and the unbeatable choruses of Me voy, Lento, and Limón y sal.
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Before Andar conmigo and Algo está cambiando, and collaborations with Ana Tijoux, 31 Minutos, and Bad Bunny.
Before the “Latin American pop stardom,” there was a girl who grew up in constant transit between Tijuana in Mexico and San Diego in the United States, absorbing the noise of a border city, seeking refuge in books and in the keys—first ivory, then plastic—of a classical piano.
That is the territory explored by Norteña: memorias del comienzo (Northern Woman: Memories of the Beginning), the autobiographical accounts of the Mexican singer-songwriter written during a long pandemic stay in Argentina and published in Chile by La Pollera publishing house.
The book functions as a window into her formative years, stopping just before she moved to Mexico City—to begin the solo career that would bring her into our ears. Precisely there, in a house with four siblings and two parents dedicated to photography, is where—she notes—”for us, The Cure got along well with Juan Gabriel.”
Far from the traditional rock star biography or the anecdote-filled account of excesses and sensational revelations, the musician chooses an intimate, contained, and at the same time, overwhelmingly honest narrative about her life in northern Mexico.
One of the central themes of the text is the city of Tijuana. “I always say that I never get carried away because I arrive in Tijuana and they bring me back down in two seconds,” says Julieta Venegas from a Zoom window. But the author not only describes it as her home but also as a unique “cultural ecosystem” that shaped her worldview.
“Growing up in Tijuana means growing up in two places at once,” she comments. This duality of growing up in northern Mexico, consuming bilingual culture, crossing the border to buy second-hand records or books, and coexisting with the harshness of a commuter city, a transit point, runs through Norteña.
“The border is very present in literature,” says Julieta Venegas, “but it’s very difficult to represent. I simply felt that I lived it; I can’t imagine what it’s like to be born in one place and not have these elements of tension.”
“Tijuana was a city that sought to be a province, a refuge to grow up peacefully and all that. And people from the U.S. who came to party were not well-regarded,” she explains. “There was no internet; U.S. culture, music, cinema were imposed on us, they were much more present because only three Mexican television channels arrived, and they all looked bad; we got used to growing up with that English influence.”
“(For the book) I was reading many writers from Tijuana, and I think Luis Humberto Crosthwaite is one of those who best represents it. Tijuana gets into his language, into his images… it’s in everything he writes,” says Julieta Venegas.
The author portrays that era with agile prose, with simple, direct, and declarative sentences. And she does so from positions such as love, loneliness, and memory: “When you return to a place you missed, even pains that seem without solution settle,” she writes in Norteña. She also talks about her family dynamics—being part of a large family, with a twin sister—and how reading became her first great refuge.
“It relaxes me that this is growing in my head,” Julieta Venegas declares from Zoom about the origin of her writing: “I always think of Joe Brainard’s I Remember, who is a New York artist, who would say I remember, I remember, I remember, and after three I remembers, you already want to talk about what was happening to you.”
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For those who follow Julieta Venegas today, her facet as a reader is no secret (she often recommends readings on her social media with the same enthusiasm with which she talks about music), but in Norteña, she details how those first books opened up an indispensable inner world for her to later be able to write her own songs.
“This whole project was a slow-cooked project,” she assures. “I think I’m going a little against the speed that this era demands.”
Among her influences for Norteña, she acknowledges Vivian Gornick (“I love her, it was the first time I read a memoir that seemed like a novel”), James Baldwin, and Virginia Woolf, and her habit on tours of reading memoirs by other musicians. “The vocalist of Everything But the Girl, Tracey Thorn, has several very beautiful books. There’s a girl named Kristin Hersh, from Throwing Muses, who has a book called Rat Girl, which is almost a novel,” she recommends.
Before lyrics, the transition to music naturally occupies a fundamental place in Norteña. Julieta Venegas says she was educated as a composer more than as a singer. She recounts her years of studying classical piano—her comfort zone—with a teacher who later passed away, the discipline this required, and the inevitable clash with her own teenage interests.
Then her first flirtations with the local underground scene emerge, her participation in early bands like Tijuana No! and the discovery of ska, punk, and alternative rock. But the narrative is deliberately interrupted before the release of her first studio album, Aquí, in 1997.
“Loneliness is something super important in my life,” Julieta Venegas thinks about one of the concepts she develops in the book. “Nobody should want to be alone, but in reality, there are people who do want to be alone sometimes.”
(A parenthesis.
It was in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic when the author began the Norteña project while living—paradoxically—in the south of the world, in Argentina.
There she began to gather memories of the north, pieces of recollections that ended up becoming this book, and then, an album that she initially thought would be traditional norteña music, but which, during the writing process, she decided to mutate into her own interpretation of the genre, mixing childhood memories.
Indeed, at the beginning of the song Esquina del Mar, she sings: “I feel disoriented, lost in the south.”)
But returning to the book—and to conclude—in Norteña, there is, at the same time, a reflective look at the young woman she was, full of doubts, fears, and intuitions, and how she recognized in her mother an apparently frustrated singer, who would later operate as a kind of beacon amidst the grays of uncertainty.
“My family, I believe, did form that connection with music that I have (…) I feel it really comes from my mother and her family,” she says via Zoom. Parents, or in this case the mother—Julieta Venegas seems to imply—wish for their children to surpass them.
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