She says she still can’t believe it. Angela Alvarez has just been nominated for the Latin Grammy Awards, the Spanish-speaking version of the American Grammys, in the best new artist of the year category, all at 95 years old and with a career of only a few months, launched thanks to her grandson. son, Carlos, who brought his talent to light. She says she still pinches herself to believe him.
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Because singing was a dream she had given up on long ago, when she was 14, in Cuba. It was there that she was born in 1927. As a child, she learned to play the piano, the guitar, she sang until she considered making it her job, but her father refused in one sentence: “You sing for yourself, for the family, but surely not for the rest of the world.” She is 14 years old, she runs, puts away her dream and tells herself that life goes on.
She got married, became a housewife with four children, and then the Castro revolution came. In 1962, the threats of nuclear war became more and more credible, so like many Cubans, she sought to leave. She put her children on a boat for Miami but had to wait several months before being able to join them and disembark in the United States alone, without her husband, who remained on the island. And above all, without speaking a word of English.
La passion por la música en las palabras de Ángela Álvarez, nominada al #LatinGRAMMY as Mejor Nuevo Artista ✨ pic.twitter.com/xtW7Zyr3rR
— The Latin Recording Academy / Latin GRAMMYs (@LatinGRAMMYs) November 2, 2022
For years, she does odd jobs to feed her children, picking tomatoes in greenhouses, cleaning empty offices at night. But at the same time, her guitar never left her. Discreetly, Angela Alvarez plays daily, as her father told her, just for her, until the day when her grandson, Carlos, himself a musician, realized that not only did his grandmother sing, but that she sang her own compositions, pieces that tell of her life, her pains, her joys.
He therefore offered to record it, in a real studio, in Los Angeles. With a real orchestra, she put on track more than fifty songs. Fifteen were selected to make the album which was released in 2021, “Angela Alvarez”, and which earned her a nomination for the Latin Grammy Awards. The ceremony will be held on November 17, but regardless if the award slips past her, Angela Alvarez says she achieved her dream and the lesson, “is that you should never say to yourself ‘I can’t’, because you canshe told the Washington Post, you always have to try.“Including therefore at 95 years old.