Fifth
Harmony, the Simon Cowell-engineered quintet with which she'd performed
girlbossy pop anthems, was in her past. Now, if not exactly carrying Martin's
torch, she was warmed by the flame he had ignited on the same stage, two
decades prior, with a famous performance that heralded the so-called
"Latin explosion" in the United States.
On her
third album, Familia, Cabello — who is half Cuban, half Mexican, and lived in
both countries before immigrating to the U.S. at age 7 — embarks on a more
immersive exploration of her musical heritage.
Abandoning
the revolving-door approach of previous albums, whose credits read like a
directory of pop producers, Cabello locked in with a smaller group of
collaborators including Latin pop veterans Cheche Alara (Thalia, Natalia
Lafourcade) and Edgar Barrera (Maluma, Natti Natasha).
Cabello is
a credited writer on all her post-5H songs, and her Instagram essays offer
further evidence of her active pen. In a recent one, she mused on the state of
perpetual otherness she experiences as an immigrant, mentioning frustration
with the limitations of her Spanish and feeling like an outsider in Latinx
spaces. "I want so badly to sit at a table I don't belong to as much as
everybody else," she confessed.
