‘We need anger to fight for our lives’: Mexican musician Silvana Estrada on grief, violence and the indignity of ‘el ghosting’

Estrada’s lovelorn debut album won her a Latin Grammy, but for its follow-up she wanted to leave sadness behind. Then, the very different losses of two friends brought out a newfound sense of fury

Silvana Estrada spent 25 years “not knowing how to get angry”, she says. “That cost me so much energy and dignity.” Sadness, though, she had always understood: “I live with her very close to me.” Now 28, the Mexican singer-songwriter grew up outside Veracruz, a city on the Gulf of Mexico, “witnessing violence from so many angles”: rampant femicide, narcoculture, environmental attacks on the coffee plantations and rivers of her home. As a lonely teenager, she discovered Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald. They helped guide the darkness she felt and introduced her to vocal improvisation. Estrada, born to a family of luthiers, started making her own music, played on a four-string Venezuelan cuatro and inspired by Mexican son jarocho (folk music). The title of her acclaimed 2022 debut, Marchita, translates to “withered”; the record offered a spare, devastating, deeply poetic account of first love gone awry.

“I consider her one of the richest artists of our time,” says her peer and mentor, the Mexican songwriter Natalia Lafourcade. “Her voice is freedom, it is birds of paradise, it is Mexico and Latin America. It reflects a deep connection to love, nature and human relationships.”