Natalia Lafourcade Reimagines Mexican Folk Music

Key Highlights

• “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.