As people bustled to their seats, music by some of Latin America’s eminent songwriters played softly in the Chan Shun Concert Hall in preparation for musician Natalia Lafourcade’s arrival. Lafourcade played two nights at the Chan (June 19–20, which had been rescheduled from Sept. 27, 2025) promoting last year’s Cancionera, her 11th studio album.
Cancionera combines the exaltation of Mexican and Latin American folk music that Lafourcade has devoted much of her work to (beginning with 2012’s Mujer Divina: Homenaje a Augustín Lara) with original and personal lyrics. It’s how she’s managed to retain a loyal following worthy of a major pop star.
Minutes before the performance, the Chan Centre’s Head Curator Jarrett Martineau addressed the crowd with a land acknowledgment and thanked them for selling out Lafourcade’s two shows, the first of which was her Vancouver debut, and the other, the last show of the venue’s 28th season.
The event was pitched as stripped-back, with Lafourcade relying mostly on her voice and acoustic guitar. The staging itself was minimal; in front of a deep blue backdrop stood a black upright piano, to its left a simple wooden chair and table with a dimly-lit lamp, a clear bottle and several indistinguishable trinkets scattered across its surface.
Lafourcade opened the show by theatrically emptying the battered briefcase she had brought onstage as she sat on the piano bench. She threw scraps of crumpled paper off to the side before settling on a yellowing page that she stretched out in front of her to read. After a long breath, she began playing the first notes of “Apertura Cancionera,” the opening instrumental track of the album. She then transitioned to “Vine solita” from her 2022 album De Todas las Flores, a ballad reflecting on life’s brevity that can be distilled into the adage “We All Die Alone.” Despite this slightly morose opening, the night would be characterized by a sense of unfettered joy, both from the artist and her enthusiastic audience.
Following a rendition of “Pajarito colibrí”— also from De Todas las Flores — Lafourcade moved away from the piano and towards her guitar. She mostly stayed at the little table, occasionally walking across the stage to sing to her “friend, la cancion.” La cancion is a sitting figure that appears in much of the promotional material for the tour, a bodiless character made up of a bright red, flowing blouse and trousers, with a bouquet of dried flowers in place of a head and a painted mask fastened where a knee would be. Lafourcade used this stage dressing as a personification of “song” itself, representing the legacy of past songwriters. While initially visually striking, the device felt half-baked and somewhat underutilized — after she leaned toward “her” for a brief serenade, it seemed as though the physical embodiment of the theme tying the album together was mostly forgotten.
Over the last decade, Lafourcade has come to personify a feel-good, almost treacly nationalism that was on full display Saturday night. Sporting a modified charro outfit, she wore her hair in a tight braided style, with red ribbon woven into the longer braid running down her back, a hallmark of Mexican folk dancing traditions. That feeling of a broad yet deeply resonant identification with Mexico — its people, its music and its humour — lived in the crowd as well. Audience members waved and hung the tri-colour from the balcony, donned dresses, shirts and belts displaying colourful bordados, unleashed full-throated gritos and cheered every time Lafourcade took a sip of her mezcal.
She prefaced some songs with a brief explanation or anecdote in English, expressing her gratitude and surprise at her tour having made it all the way to Canada. She spoke on how she associates this country fondly with the time she spent in Ottawa in her early twenties, when she was still questioning the validity of a music career. However, the majority of her spoken interludes and interactions with the audience were carried out in Spanish, in an unmistakable Mexican vernacular. Though she was grateful to everyone in attendance, the familiarity with which she spoke in her native tongue made clear that longtime fans were her main addressees.
The final few songs were among her best-known (including “En el 2000” and “Tú sí sabes quererme”), though it hardly felt like a reward for our attention. Throughout her performance, Lafourcade imbued her singing with her trademark and infectious vivacity. Expressions softened and bodies swayed as the crowd sang along to the night’s encore, “Hasta la Raíz,” an ode to her homeland and formative experiences, which has taken on the status of an anthem for many.
Just before the show started, Alfredo Zitarossa’s “La Canción del Cantor” drifted across the concert hall. This was likely intended as another homage to a giant of Latin American popular music, Lafourcade honouring her predecessors in ways big and small. Instead, I was reminded of a friction between aspects of her work and the less-than-gauzy background of some of the most important contributions to this category of popular music.
Other examples include the work of Mercedes Sosa against the backdrop of the Argentine “Dirty War,” Caetano Veloso’s music during the 1964–85 military dictatorship in Brazil and the existence of the Nueva canción (“New song”) movement, which spanned across the region beginning in the 1960s. These were artists who made use of, and expanded upon, the existing musical vocabulary of their respective regions, while challenging increasingly limiting national narratives. They often faced harsh consequences for doing so. Lafourcade’s context is different: the Mexican state in the 21st century cannot be described as a dictatorship, but there is plenty of turmoil to draw upon — like femicide, and more recently, ICE’s escalating deportations and arrests of Mexican-Americans, among other groups. This is not to say that all Latin American music needs an explicitly (or creatively disguised) political outlook, but among some of its most enduring songwriters, the influence is unmistakable. Lafourcade gestures toward these figures in an attempt to situate herself within a broader musical history.
Lafourcade is a talented musician and an enigmatic performer — and stubbornly impossible to dislike. She has shown herself to be a brilliant chronicler of all that there is to celebrate about Mexico. In my opinion, celebration can be a potent balm, if an insufficient remedy.
