<\/p>\n
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. \u201cThey said I might not make it in school, I might not make it in a career,\u201d Lafourcade said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI told them \u2018No,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Silva Contreras said, looking at me intensely over the table at dinner after the son jarocho<\/em> show. \u201c\u00a0\u2018I\u2019m going to bring her back.\u2019\u00a0\u201d 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. \u201cThe first problem was one of willpower,\u201d Silva Contreras said. \u201cI needed observation, imitation, curiosity.\u201d Inspired by Montessori-style education, Silva Contreras followed where Lafourcade\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Picking around a kale salad, Lafourcade said that the mark this experience left on her\u2014besides a thin scar, shaped like a horseshoe, between her eyebrows\u2014was 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\u2019t 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. \u201cThere were a hundred girls there. They all looked like Barbies,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n At dinner, Lafourcade talked about these years without a hint of pleasure in her voice. \u201cI was too young,\u201d 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 \u201ctoo hippie,\u201d and that she was going to get kicked out. Across the table from me, Lafourcade smiled with sharp satisfaction. \u201cBut the opposite happened,\u201d she said. After less than a year, the TV station disbanded Twist, but the group\u2019s manager began working to build a new act around Lafourcade. At one point, the station brought in new potential bandmates for her. \u201cThey were these delicious girls. They were teen-agers but they looked like adults. They looked like the Spice Girls,\u201d Lafourcade said. \u201cThey\u2019re too tall\u2014I\u2019ll look ridiculous,\u201d she told her manager. \u201cYou\u2019ll grow,\u201d he said, shrugging. (At forty-one, she still hasn\u2019t 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. \u201cI picked friends I thought were very pretty,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I learned they weren\u2019t \u2018TV pretty.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n Ximena Sari\u00f1ana, who today is a famous Mexican singer and actress, was a year below Lafourcade at Fermatta. Sari\u00f1ana recalls Lafourcade as \u201cthe absolute popular girl.\u201d \u201cI 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,\u201d Sari\u00f1ana said. \u201cShe\u2019d be making a lot of noise\u2014she was so fashionable, loud, and always, always very herself<\/em>, very comfortable in her own skin.\u201d One day, Sari\u00f1ana was doing her homework with her headphones on when Lafourcade came up and tapped her on the shoulder. In a friendly tone, Lafourcade told Sari\u00f1ana that she had heard Sari\u00f1ana was a good singer. Lafourcade got more serious: \u201cBut are you a really<\/em> good singer?\u201d she asked. Lafourcade was still writing and recording her own songs, and she needed backup. \u201cWhen 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,\u201d Sari\u00f1ana said. Within a few semesters, Lafourcade had dropped out of school: she had a record contract with Sony.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2214501,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[21990,378466,305035,21800,22149,359124],"class_list":["post-2214500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-albums","tag-mexicans","tag-mexico","tag-music","tag-musicians","tag-traditional"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Natalia-Lafourcade-Reimagines-Mexican-Folk-Music.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2214500"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2214502,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214500\/revisions\/2214502"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2214501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2214500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2214500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2214500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}