There is a phrase that has accompanied me since I was a child, although it took me years to fully understand it. It is by Gabriel García Márquez, and it says that lineages condemned to a hundred years of solitude do not have a second chance on earth. I always read it as a warning. Today I read it as a challenge: what if the second chance existed? What if it was where it always was in the bond, in the embrace, in not leaving each other alone?
In 18 days I start a residency of 12 concerts in Madrid. The numbers overwhelm me: more than 600,000 tickets, the largest residency in the history of Europe, a stadium for 55,000 people that is rising in Villaverde, built for music and not for football. But I am not writing to talk about numbers, but to tell why.
This started with pain. It started when I saw our people persecuted simply for being Latin, families forced to live in fear. In the face of that, anger is legitimate. But I chose to respond with a celebration: the biggest we could imagine. Because the most powerful response to fear is to exist with all the strength, all the joy, and all the dignity in the world.
And for that celebration I chose Madrid. Because here something happens that the world deserves to see: Latin immigration is not tolerated, it is celebrated. Spain has embraced it, and that embrace has made it younger, more vigorous, more creative. Integration moves us by its naturalness, perhaps because five centuries ago it was the Spaniards who crossed the ocean. We share language, memory, gestures, after-dinner conversations. The Atlantic, between us, stopped being an ocean a long time ago. It is a bond. It is said of Madrid that those who are from nowhere are from here.
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That is why, next to the stadium, we are building something more: a city. Thirty hectares to celebrate and understand our culture, with more than one hundred artist friends, where each visitor can experience Latin culture through the path they choose: literature, dance, music, fashion, gastronomy, cinema, art. A city to meet, crossed by a concept that is the heart of all this: the Latin bond in the era of digital solitude.
We live in an extraordinary and dangerous time at the same time. I am not one to renounce the future, but we already know something for sure: this era has an unprecedented capacity to isolate us. Millions of people watch the lives of others through a screen, increasingly alone, more anxious, sicker. Loneliness has become a silent epidemic that doctors now measure like any other disease. I have felt it. You have felt it.
In the face of that epidemic, Latinos have something to offer. It is not science, it is something prior to science. It is in our cultural DNA: the embrace, the dance, the shared table, the bond as a way to survive. We are a culture that turned pain into rhythm, that learned in five centuries of mixing that no one is saved alone. The whole world senses it: that is why our music and our dance cross all borders. The world does not consume Latin culture as a trend: it seeks it because it recognizes in it the tools it will need. The recipe against digital loneliness already exists. We wrote it, unknowingly, over five hundred years.
And if I talk about mixing, I talk about myself. I was born on a continent named after an Italian, Amerigo Vespucci. In a country named after another, Columbus, who crossed the ocean financed by the Spanish Crown. I was raised in Barranquilla, where the heart learns to beat to the rhythm of the African drum before learning to speak. In my Colombia there is a town, San Basilio de Palenque, where a language born from Africa is still spoken — and it was the first free town in America —. I carry in my blood the Spaniards who came to America, in my hips the rhythm of the Middle East from my father, and the resilience of the indigenous peoples of this land. And I have two Spanish children, the mixing did not end five centuries ago: it continues now, in them. I do not talk about mixing: I am that mix. My music is that mix. And what I want to celebrate in Madrid is, simply, how well it suits us to be so mixed.
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García Márquez was the great explorer of that territory. No one understood like him the bonds, the imagination, happiness, the mix that we are. Macondo is not a town: it is a mirror. That is why he inspires everything we are building: he taught us that in our culture the real and the magical coexist without conflict, and that is not naivety, but wisdom.
And I want to propose something more, with all respect and all affection. Let’s not only talk about Hispanism: let’s talk about Latinidad, an even broader embrace. Hispanism is beautiful, but it falls short for all that we are. Spanish is Latin; Portuguese, Italian, and French are too. And all Latin Americans are Latins. Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, does not speak Spanish, it speaks Portuguese. Hispanism does not reach to embrace it; Latinidad does. We are a nation without borders that has been building itself for five centuries: the mix of Africa, America, and southern Europe. I do not judge humans from five hundred years ago with today’s perspective; I hold on to what we are: a fusion that is our wealth.
And that is where music comes in, my craft, my whole life. Because music does exactly the opposite of the screen. The screen separates you; music brings you together. A song does not ask you where you come from or what passport you have. It says: sing with me, dance with me, cry with me if necessary. And suddenly, you are no longer alone.
That is why the closing of each night will be a carnival. Because carnival is the ultimate expression of a people born from that fusion. How could we not pass through Cádiz and the Canary Islands, through my Barranquilla, through Brazil, through the Caribbean, through Central America? Carnival is Africa, America, and Europe dancing together, colors, talents, embraces, laughter. It will be our psychomagic act: all together, saying out loud what this project wants to demonstrate.
That in Madrid we are all Latins.
That loneliness does not have to last a hundred years.
And that lineages that learn to embrace do have a second chance on earth.
