We Need To Talk About Rosalia

Maybe it’s just me or maybe it really is this way but lately, the Latinx community seems to be in the news for the wrong reasons, though through no fault of our own. This has been the summer of appropriation, from spa water to the clean girl aesthetic and now to what Hailey Bieber is calling “brownie glazed lips”–or what is essentially a lip look invented by Black and Latina women that has been around since our mothers and aunts were old enough to hold a dark lip pencil and lip gloss in the 90s. It seems like everyone wants to be Latinx these days without actually being Latinx. 

But what was so interesting about Hailey Bieber trying her hand at cultural appropriation this month was her fans pointing out that her mother is, in fact, Brazilian. They tried using this as a rebuttal against the argument that she wasn’t acting like a classic white person gone wrong but to me, this was missing the point. Taking an established aspect of a community’s culture as your own, pretending you invented it, and renaming it as something else is one of the most obvious steps in the colonization handbook. And like it or not, it’s exactly what Hailey did and her being the daughter of a Latinx mother doesn’t absolve her of the harm she committed, especially as someone who still reaps the benefits of being white. 

This line of thinking reminded me of the age-old debate in the Latinx community about Rosalia: the famous face of new flamenco and reggaeton, the reason for the sudden resurgence of these classic music genres in the modern age. There’s no question about her talent, no doubt about her prowess at the music but she nonetheless remains a complicated figure for many, for different reasons, because of the music she chooses to make.  

Because of how she’s made a name for herself in reggaeton, it’s easy for many in the Latinx community to write her off as an appropriator and a modern colonizer. After all, it’s a genre that was invented by Black Puerto Rican rappers, that holds history, nostalgia, and cultural significance for people in Latin America. And yet Rosalia, a white girl from Spain, has received many Latin music awards in the U.S. and taken up space alongside actual Latin artists, all to great controversy and discourse. She may not be re-branding reggaeton as her own but she is profiting off of it as someone who isn’t part of the community it comes from, which is another method of colonization. From this line of thinking, it’s not hard to name her a modern colonizer, to resent her for the ways she’s profited off her white privilege, her identity as a Spanish person (a.k.a a descendant of colonizers), and a genre that wasn’t hers to begin with–but just because it’s easy to argue this doesn’t mean it’s right. 

This discourse punishes Rosalia for colonization she had nothing to do with and, rather conveniently, forgets that her family is from Catalan–a region that, like most of Latin America, was also colonized by the Spanish empire. Even her great-grandfather himself was Cuban, meaning that she does, at least, share some Latinx heritage. 

But again, I’m reminded of the questions I had for Hailey’s defenders: does being Latinx, no matter how little, absolve Rosalia of the legitimate harm she’s caused? Regardless of where she’s from, is it fair to say she benefits from white privilege and the U.S.’s flawed understanding of where the lines between Spanish-speaking people, Spaniards, and Latinx people lie? 

Of course, Rosalia’s work with flamenco is a whole other problem, one where her being from Catalan rather than Spain actually works to her disadvantage. In addition to the Latinx community, she’s also been accused of cultural appropriation by the Spanish Romani people. They first invented flamenco and used it as their one avenue of expression, which was limited under Spanish rule. Purists of this kind of music even argue that because she’s from Catalan, her use of flamenco isn’t even legitimate as an art form.       

My knowledge of these claims and my opinion of their own legitimacy is limited and not mine to make. But what I can say is that it’s rather ironic that people all over the world simultaneously see her as Spanish and yet not Spanish enough, and either way, she’s the subject of much controversy. Which has me thinking that maybe we are also a part of the problem. 

From the Latinx perspective, much of the way we think and talk about Rosalia is based on our own flawed understanding of race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, and ownership. If we were truly honest with ourselves, we’d know that many of us don’t have to go that far back to find our European ancestors, whose descendants we now criticize and separate from our own identities. That many of us are in fact white and that reggaeton was whitewashed, rewarding and benefitting white Latinx musicians, far before Rosalia ever came along. By the community’s own logic, white Latinxs don’t even own the reggaeton music they’re so passionately defending.  

That’s not to say the harm Rosalia’s caused is invalid but she’s only one part of a much larger discussion, one player of many in centuries of colonization and how cultural appropriation functions as a symptom of that history. The truth is, there is no easy solution, no easy verdict. But we can at least do the work within ourselves to decide what this controversy is really about, our place in it, and where we as a community can move forward from here.