Janet La Valdés performs her version of Mama Inés

January 25, 2021

# Translation

In the voice of Janet Valdés, Mamá Inés comes back to life. In her recently premiered version of the congo tango that saw the light in a zarzuela by Eliseo Grenet and Ernesto Lecuona, all previous versions are reincarnated.

With the help of her music producer Alejandro Meroño, the singer known as La Valdés brings her tangible and Cuban version of the 21st century. "It's the surplus that peeks out and hides, it's Havana and it's also New Orleans. We didn't set out to make it different, but rather to listen to what it was asking for."

Although she could list a thousand reasons to include this classic in her new album, "we simply connected with the strength of the earth, with the spirits, and let ourselves be carried away with absolute reverence for the music. It's a Mamá Inés that wants to reach the youth renewed and nourish them with our history. It's an archetype, a character that overflows the song and that makes any Cuban who evokes it anywhere in the world smile and feel warmth in their chest."

For this daughter of Yemayá, that song represents subtlety, companionship, feelings, the desire for connection, "everything that is contained in sitting down to have a cup of coffee, that warmth that goes beyond the coffee. I used to ask my grandmother why the smell of coffee was so sweet and the taste so bitter and she would laugh. Later I understood that's how life is."

The artist from Regla feels herself as much "that godmother caring for, advising and scolding my goddaughters; as Belén escaping and living intensely in youth." Mamá Inés has the power to make you travel through time, "to give you back sweetness, to take you to the grandmothers who are no longer here and the music that doesn't sound much anymore. It's every mother and every daughter."

Recreated in the popular imagination of the island as a voluptuous slave woman (presumably a midwife) with coffee in one hand and a cigar in the other, Mamá Inés symbolizes a process of social transformation, "of conquest and triumph: the Black history that overcame and ended up shaping and sculpting our culture."

According to La Valdés, "we cannot think of Cuban today without thinking of Black as a distinctive seal, of national pride. It's good to value reality as it was, with objectivity: those Black people who 'asked permission' from the cabildos 'to sing and dance,' prevailed."

Diversity is the watchword throughout the phonogram "Ay Mamá Inés, llegó La Valdés," because it proposes a tour through the different faces of a woman. From the perspective of photographer May Reguera, in charge of the image for this production, "Mamá Inés is each one of us. It's my grandmother Alla and all the other grandmothers of the world, my teacher Antonia, my godmother, and it's also you, me and all of us. It's the taste of coffee, dance, culture, identity and above all human history that is reflected in our skin, in our wounds and in our scars."

worldwide, the idea came up to make covers for each song on the album and release the singles one by one while things got organized, which is still scattered."

In the photos for Mamá Inés, the red walls of her garage came into play along with a pumpkin and a bouquet of red flowers she had in her house for Changó. "With Janet, who lets herself be carried away by my ideas, and all the beautiful girls who supported us dressed in red, in front of a red background, it was as if Changó was there making it possible. I'm certain that Mamá Inés is fire and she is red, and so is La Valdés."

The audiovisual shows that woman who transforms with time and the experiences that humanity has had to go through. "Mamá Inés has been through a lot, many economic, social, human circumstances, abandonments, betrayals, but there is also much love and strength to lift her up."