Vivir Quintana – a revolution powered by music
Since I am in Mexico, I am introduced to singers and bands that have little, if any, recognition North Of the Border. The fact that they sing mostly in Spanish also makes them less visible to most gringo Americans. Every now and then, I run across a talent that is Mexican but so good or so revolutionary, I think he/she deserves visibility NOB, as we call it. One of those is Vivir Quintana, whom I featured in last week’s Hot Half Dozen. With a Spotify audience of 410,000 and thousands more on other platforms, she has reached a pretty high level of visibility, both in Mexico, her primary market, and in the US, which has the second largest number of her fans.
Which is probably why I received quite a lot of feedback about my recommending her song “Era El o Era Yo” last week – mostly positive, and much of it very thoughtful.
So who is the woman whose songs seem to stir people up and attract so many listeners? First, Vivir Quintana is one of the female voices moving into Mexico’s traditionally male regional music scene—norteña, corridos, and banda. But she is more than that. She blends these regional folk traditions with poignant social commentary—a kind of regional Mexican rap in its lyrical thrust.
Born Viviana Monserrat Quintana Rodríguez in 1985 in Coahuila, she grew up in a family that valued education and music. Vivir began playing guitar at 12 and later studied music formally as well as Spanish—she has a degree in it—and worked as a middle school Spanish teacher. As rules and customs around women singers loosened, she gradually gained recognition performing in bars and collaborating with respected Mexican artists.
Her music—especially her corridos—reflects activism rooted in real lives and struggles, shifting the focus away from glorifying violence to honoring the stories of women. She literally turned the regional Mexican ballad, the corrido, on its head. The few women who sang corridos up to then, like Chavela Vargas or Amparo Ochoa, generally sang traditional songs. Quintana changed this with her album “Cosas Que Sorprenden A La Audiencia” (Things That Surprise the Audience)—a collection of first-person narratives of women imprisoned for defending themselves against abusers, offering not just empathy but a call for societal reckoning and transformation. She was the first to use the corrido as a platform to demand justice, dignity, and education to fight gender violence and, as she demonstrated in “Era El o Era Yo” (It Was Either Him or Me), she still is.
If you don’t understand the Spanish but are interested, as I am, in how music can and does change societies, translate the lyrics online and follow along. You can watch a revolution in the making, powered by music.
Patrick O’Heffernan
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