mon laferte, te amo [english] (2024)

IF BEING A FAN means feeling like you know someone, being a fan of an artist means feeling like you know yourself. You hear lyrics and recast lovers or losses as your own, and you are, at least temporarily, doubled. You’re the person who the song is about and the person listening, the artist and the audience, the writer and the reader wondering how their life could be told so eloquently by someone else. In literature, this layering might be considered an abstract epitext: an interpretation of a work that affects the way you process the original. You come to love your new version, the voice you have narrowed to the lines that feel like you, and the artist ends up selling a lot of records.

To intentionally shatter that illusion, then, is a vulnerable reclamation. It is a revival of the person inside the pop star, behind the performance. And it is a reminder that while we can love and appreciate a work as universal—that is often what makes it so beautiful—it is always, first and foremost, someone else’s.

This truth is at the core of Chilean singer-songwriter Mon Laferte’s latest project, Mon Laferte, te amo, a part-professional, part-home-video documentary filmed during her first pregnancy and eighth album tour. It’s an intimate portrait: we see her watering the flowers at her grandmother’s grave, marrying her now-husband, feeling her son’s first kicks, nursing him backstage. It is also—for all this reviewer’s hope of commentary on history and politics—unapologetically centered on her. For just over an hour, Laferte recounts her upbringing and rise to fame (“to tell you this story,” she says, “I have to tell it completely”), and we follow along with the help of her discography and tour footage. When she recalls her absent father, for instance, we see a performance of “Pa’ Donde Se Fue”; reflections on her relationship with her mother are accompanied by a heart-wrenching rendition of “Te Vi” in the woods; she sings “Niña” about her pregnancy and “Malagradecido” plays as she recounts her depression. The film itself is a concert—and though we may be encouraged to applaud, cry, and sing along, Laferte’s songs become hers once more.

We can love and appreciate a work as universal—that is often what makes it so beautiful—it is always, first and foremost, someone else’s.

Before she ever stepped foot onstage—before, even, she spoke her first words—Mon Laferte was Norma Monserrat Bustamante Laferte, of Viña del Mar, Chile. She was one of thousands of children born during Augusto Pinochet’s devastating seventeen-year dictatorship, and one of millions living in poverty.1 Every day, the singer narrates, she and her sister climbed up the rolling hillside to collect dry white flowers for their mother to paint, arrange in bouquets, and sell. At home, they ate stale bread. I learned to sing, Laferte says, “out of hunger.”

Three decades later, it’s clear how formative her childhood was, not just artistically but politically. On SEIS, the album she released a few months prior to the tour depicted in the documentary, she sings, sarcastically, to a governmental tú: “Tú no tienes la culpa de que la plata a nadie la alcanza…” (“It’s not your fault that no one can make ends meet”), and decries dictatorship-era economic policies (“you will pay,” she croons, “for your neoliberalism”). Two years earlier, in 2019, when over 1.2 million people protested in Santiago against the wretched trifecta of a right-wing president, an outdated constitution written under Pinochet, and extreme social inequality—only to be met with brutal police violence—Laferte staged her own protest on the red carpet of the Latin Grammys. As she posed for photos, she exposed her chest, revealing black ink along her breastbone that read “EN CHILE, TORTURAN, VIOLAN, Y MATAN” (IN CHILE, THEY TORTURE, RAPE, AND KILL). Around her neck, she wore a green bandana, the symbol of the abortion rights movement in Argentina, and for nearly a minute she stood staring solemnly ahead, the lapels of her suit crossed neatly above her belly button. The protest footage, though brief, appears in the documentary’s opening montage; it anchors the entire film.

Soon enough, we learn that if poverty prompted Laferte’s conscientization, the labor that followed shaped its form. At just thirteen years old, she began singing professionally for a meager 1,500 Chilean pesos a day. (Adjusted for inflation, that amounts to about four dollars and forty cents, or less than $1,700 a year—but for someone with nothing, she laughs, it was a lot.) The teenager toured wherever would have her: on the street, at bars, at the circus, in taverns, at festivals. She stopped going to school. It was an open secret that she was being abused by a predatory 34-year old ‘manager’—with whom she was trapped in a relationship until the age of 18—but no one ever said anything. For five years, he took half of all her earnings. He promised her it was God’s will. (“A Crying Diamond” from 1940 Carmen, the first album on which Laferte sings in English, is the soundtrack for these scenes).

“He killed the last drop of her happiness/ And took all of her youth/ And that makes him feel good/ He knows that God understands him/ Because God is also a man”

When Laferte finally escaped, it was thanks in part to her casting on Rojo, a reality-TV singing competition (think Chilean American Idol) that led to her first album, La Chica de Rojo. “It was my salvation,” she remembers—until the show began ignoring her reports of producer Jaime Román’s harassment. She fled, again, in her early twenties—this time from the country—and settled in Mexico, where she has lived ever since. It was “the ultimate freedom,” she remembers. “Here there was no past, there was no family, there were no friends. There was nothing…I started to live freely.”

Mexico, of course, had its own ghosts—and Laferte would eventually confront them—but in her first years it was a blank slate, ripe for reinvention. It’s in Mexico that Monserrat Bustamante became Mon Laferte. And it’s in Mexico, from a home studio plugged in with a snaking chain of extension cords to an outlet in a parking garage—she couldn’t afford to pay her light bill that month—that Laferte recorded what remains her most famous song, “Tu Falta de Querer.”

It’s at this pivotal moment in her career, and in the retelling, that Laferte acknowledges the relationship between her lyrics and her listeners, as opposed to her lyrics and their subjects, for the first time. Recalling her shock at the indie record’s success, she says: “Everyone wanted to listen to the songs…[even though] I didn't tell my story [and] nobody knew what happened.” It was wonderful, for a while, to be loved with little context, to be adored without pity. To have fans. But her sharing the story now, nearly a decade later, speaks to a desire to be known. To record the life that bore the art, if only for posterity. “Everything [I’ve done],” she reflects, was an effort “to be loved.” Mon Laferte, te amo, then, may be best summarized as an effort to be truly seen.

It was wonderful, for a while, to be loved with little context, to be adored without pity. To have fans. But sharing the story now, nearly a decade later, speaks to a desire to be known.

In 2021, just before going on tour, Laferte told Paper Magazine that she wasn't an activist. “If [I am],” she joked, “I’m the worst one.” “Because activists dedicate their lives right? All the time. And I’m here doing other things.”

Mon Laferte, te amo nods to many of those “other things.” There are flashes to her murals and paintings and sketches, to the enormous dolls (her “monsters”) that accompanied her onstage at Walt Disney Concert Hall, to her stage design and beading. And yet, in every medium, she continues to stand in solidarity with those fighting for justice. She’s sung protest anthems against femicide (“Canción Sin Miedo”); championed a constitution that would have been the first to codify the right to abortion; performed assassinated poet Victor Jara’s “Manifiesto” on the 50th anniversary of the coup in Chile; covered “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz” alongside other Chilean artists; dedicated murals to assault survivors and to the victims of Pinochet’s dictatorship; performed in women's prisons and written about the injustice of the carceral state (“Se Va La Vida”); denounced police brutality. We may not see all that in this documentary, but it is there.

It’s there in the recognition that her fame was not worth the labor and exploitation she endured to achieve it; that she deserved better as a child and as a young woman. It’s there in the coins she remembers smelling like, and the clarity that poverty is both the result of structural injustices and the creator of the conditions for more: illness, hunger, poor working conditions, abuse. It’s there in her love for all the past versions of herself.

Perhaps Laferte doesn’t see an activist in the mirror because she understands her work as what is expected of her as a person, as the bare minimum of care. Perhaps not. But before we cast all labels aside (and take this with a grain of salt, because I am, at the end of the day, a fan): there is one Laferte has earned, over and over again. She is an artist, in the truest sense of the word. +