Julieta Venegas’s New Album Pays Tribute to Tijuana

For singer-songwriter Julieta Venegas, homesickness has proved a powerful drug. Her latest album, Norteña, is the Mexican singer’s ode to life in northern Mexico, and specifically Tijuana, where she grew up—but it took eight years of living abroad in Buenos Aires to make her return, musically and literally.

A Sound Rooted in Home

The record, released in May, pays tribute to the sounds, stories, and art of this part of Mexico. Venegas dug into her family history in Baja California and turned to generations of authors and artists inspired by the city’s liminal space, from its Spanglish inclinations to the fact that it sits physically closer to major US cities like Los Angeles than it does to Mexico’s capital.

“It’s an aesthetic choice to write from the border,” Venegas says, speaking of how languages, culture, and a sense of place collide in Tijuana. The album is infused with the sounds of northern Mexico’s folk tradition, which beautifully captures the blur of influences that shapes the city itself.

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To achieve this sound, Venegas is joined by other artists with cross-border sounds, like the band Yahritza Y Su Esencia, and musicians dedicated to reviving regional acoustic styles, such as Natalia Lafourcade.

More Than Just a Border

The inspiration for the project began while Venegas was living in Buenos Aires and missing home. It started with her sister, a photographer working on a project about Santa Rosalia in Baja California. The project focused on her grandfather, who was ten years old when the rest of his family died in Santa Rosalia during a cyclone.

That memory has always been present in the family, and the project was a way to heal. Venegas explored scenes of missing someone, crossing the border, and the Spanish concept of añoranza. She read a lot about the state, its history, and poetry, as well as novels by writers from Tijuana.

We’re a border family, so our relationship to it is very much an everyday thing. But it’s very different when you have the possibility of crossing the border versus when you don’t. In her family, Mexico was the center of everything that was discussed, but in an everyday sense, they had the US right beside them. They listened to American radio and went to the supermarket in the US whenever they needed to.

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There is a big contrast, and you see it as soon as you cross the border, even just the way the streets are designed and thought of in Tijuana. The city has been constructed out of necessity, more than design. It’s been built the way that people need, and people need every corner of it.

People who are doing music or literature in Tijuana have to be very independent. They actually self-publish a lot of books in Tijuana, because it’s very hard to be seen from Mexico City, where the industry is based. Venegas went through the writings of Luis Humberto Crosthwaite and Rosina Conde, and other people who see their literature as rooted in Tijuana. The language is very mixed up, which Venegas sees as an aesthetic choice.

Collaborations and Reality

As far as border towns go, what makes Tijuana so singular? All border towns have their own thing. I don’t know if it’s because Tijuana shares a border with California, but there seems to be a lot more tourism going on, so there’s a lot of exchange. The way it’s portrayed is a place where people sort of invent tourism for people from the US. Travelers come and buy artesania that only exists in Tijuana, and they think they’re actually seeing Mexico. It’s very much a fantasy.

But growing up there, Venegas felt she had the best of both worlds. She had the possibility of living in two countries at the same time, which gave her a very open mind about what culture can be.

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The song “La Línea”, on the album, is all about this idea of the border as a dividing force, and it features another great group of artists, Yahritza Y Su Esencia. Venegas definitely wanted Mexican guests on it. Yahritza is Mexican, her parents are from a small town in Michoacán and her family has migrated from Mexico to the US where she was raised. Venegas can totally relate to that, being from a border city.

What Yahritza Y Su Esencia is doing is very much Mexican popular music. They’re rewriting the way Mexican popular music is being made right now, and Venegas really wanted them to be on the album. She didn’t realize that their story was so close to the story of “La Línea” and it was very emotional when they eventually talked about the song. She told Venegas her experience of recording her part, which is the exact moment when two people are being separated by deportation, and it’s actually something that happened to her family.

That specific moment of separation is what the song captures. It’s a healing experience for the artist, and the listener. The album isn’t strictly political, Venegas says, but it reflects the reality of daily life in a border city. You see people struggling to cross the border, or people coming back because they’ve been deported. That’s something she saw every single day growing up in Tijuana.