The New Yorker:

The former teen pop star has become a new emblem of “Veracruz sound.”

By Jack Herrera

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. 

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