Grief demands its own impossible language. To confront the death of a loved one (or the lingering melancholy of diasporic displacement), you have to bend the rules. It requires new idioms, new phrases, new forms of expression altogether. To contend with these feelings, the Los Angeles-based musician Fabi Reyna, aka Reyna Tropical, turns to the wisdom of a pithy neologism: malegría.
Borrowed from a 1998 Manu Chao song, the term mimics “bittersweetness” by colliding the Spanish words for “bad” and “happiness.” It’s a concept that captures the radiant emotional spectrum of Reyna’s debut full-length, released two years after the death of her bandmate, Nectali “Sumohair” Díaz, in an e-scooter accident. The record is an imaginative meditation on the possibilities of diasporic genre collage: Reyna, Díaz, and new collaborator Nay Mapalo collect hues of Peruvian chicha, Mexican zapateado, Congolese soukous, and a handful of other styles, glazing them over each other like a highly saturated watercolor painting. With its loose construction, inventive arrangements, and liturgical tranquility, Malegría is an incisive exploration of the porosity of diasporic life.
Reyna is a nimble guitarist, able to glide fluidly between genres and settle in the space in between. “Lo Siento” is built on a bare-bones lyrical refrain about carrying knowledge that is painful, but the looping soukous melody feels soaked in marigold-colored light, as if she’d harnessed apricity itself. “Conexión Ancestral” is a high-gloss stylistic detour with a punchy four-on-the-floor foundation. “Suavecito” is a beaming prayer for serenity, built on dapples of Afro-Colombian percussion and a galloping dembow riddim. The song features London producer Busy Twist and Franklin Tejedor, one-half of Colombian electronic duo Mitú. Tejedor comes from a long line of percussionists in the UNESCO-recognized town of San Basilio de Palenque, the first free Black village of the Americas. He lends his voice and drumming to the track, opening the song with a spoken intro in San Basilio’s creole palenquero language. With its shimmering guitars and clacking folkloric drums, “Suavecito” reflects Reyna’s most exploratory impulses, conjuring an indelible moment of tropical futurist magic.
The album is dotted with voice memos of conversations Reyna had with Díaz, doubling as a window into the pair’s creative process while also reflecting back on the album’s broader themes. In the interlude “Mestizaje,” an unnamed narrator speaks about the dangerous colorist racial ideology that has shaped her family and so many other Latin American ones, in which marriages with white partners are encouraged in order to produce “better-looking” children. Malegría succeeds, in part, because Reyna isn’t afraid to confront the ugly parts of Latin American culture, too.
Often, Reyna finds solace by attuning to the natural world. Field recordings of chittering birds or cresting tides offer the album a faunal and aquatic texture; it’s as if Reyna is humming a tune on the beach, or perhaps singing beneath the verdant rainforest canopy. Much of the album was recorded in these environments, a choice that feels like a conscious attempt to reconnect to the knowledge embedded in ancestral lands stolen by colonialism, exile, and displacement. For example, “Huītzilin,” named after the Nahuatl word for “hummingbird,” transforms grungy guitar streaks and scattered chirps into a slow ballad about welcoming life’s eternal transformations. Reyna’s diaristic and pictorial lyrics are often simple or repetitive, which makes them even more impactful, especially when she delivers them in her hushed vocal register. It’s as if you’re listening to a friend share their deepest secrets over an ASMR mic, their lulling tones offering the curative power of self-awareness.
There’s a familiar, if hackneyed, saying among Latin American diaspora kids: “ni de aquí, ni de allá” (literally, “not from here, not from there”). The phrase tries to capture the liminality of diasporic life, but inadvertently, it has glossed over significant differences in citizenship, race, and class, instead suggesting the experience is homogenous. Still, the maxim gestures at a very real sense of isolation, estrangement, and grief that is difficult to shake. It’s a feeling Reyna is acutely aware of, and one she speaks to directly on “Cartagena.” “Y así te sigues moviendo/Con la tristeza en tu cuerpo,” she sings, acknowledging the melancholy that inhabits diasporic bodies, even in moments of joy. In its summery melodies and impressive stylistic experimentation, Malegría asserts that the experience of diaspora can never be fixed to a single definition or affective state. You always exist in multiplicity, carrying the beauty and the sorrow together.
