Julieta Venegas Has A Good Memory

Julieta Venegas grew up in Tijuana, a city that sits at Mexico's northwestern edge and the United States' southwestern edge.

Maybe it makes sense that someone raised in a city suspended between identities would resist fixed categories herself. Julieta Venegas has spent much of her career moving fluidly between musical worlds.

Like Tijuana itself, Julieta seems most comfortable in the in-between. She was born in 1970 in Long Beach California, and raised in Tijuana. Her parents enrolled their children in music and art classes partly to keep them occupied and out of trouble. Julieta quickly showed herself to be a gifted, deeply intuitive musician, who learned to play all kinds of instruments credibly, including accordion, piano, and guitar.

At 21, following the same intuition that had pulled her toward music in the first place, she left Tijuana for Mexico City with no clear plan, only a conviction that she needed to go.

Within a few years of moving, Julieta was making music that sounded unlike almost anything else in Latin pop.

She released her first two albums Aqui and Bueninvento in quick succession. Then in 2003 came Sí which included the hits "Andar Conmigo," "Lento" and "Algo Está Cambiando."

Si turned her into one of the defining voices of Latin music in the 2000s. She helped make room for women who wrote their own songs and didn't have to choose between alternative credibility and mainstream popularity.

Julieta herself has won multiple Latin Grammys and a Grammy, sold millions of records across Latin America and Spain, and even enjoyed a recent mainstream crossover moment with the song "Lo Siento BB :/" which she sang with Bad Bunny and the producer Tainy—it has racked up over a billion streams.

After nearly three decades of resisting fixed categories, Julieta is returning to the place where that sensibility began. This year she releases Norteña, an album that turns back toward the border city where all of that started. She describes it as a tribute to the feeling of growing up on the border.

Norteña was imagined as a series of duets, written largely in collaboration with Mexican songwriter El David Aguilar. The album considers questions of friendship, estrangement, loss, nostalgia and celebration, and features guest appearances by a long list of Latin alternative royalty, from Meme del Real to Natalia Lafourcade.

At the same time she's publishing Norteña: Memorias del comienzo, a book that also examines her early life and the intuition that drove her in the first place. The two projects were developed in parallel.

Here she talks about what it means to be Norteña and the long journey that led her out of Tijuana to Mexico City, international stardom, and ultimately back home.