@adivunsolicited: Beyoncé's B'Day 20th anniversary reissue paid homage to two icons: "Irreemplazable (Como La Flor)" reworks "Irreplaceable" around Selena's own vocals, and "Cuerpo (Tumbao)" with Maluma samples Celia Cruz's "La Negra Tiene Tumbao," a song where Cruz is singing about her own Black womanhood. Both were estate-approved. Selena's family publicly backed it. And still, a chunk of the Latino community reacted with "she can't sing," "she's overrated," "she just wants a Latin Grammy." Beyoncé has been recording in Spanish since 2007. Her Spanish holds up better than JLo's. This isn't really about talent. It's about who gets to be embraced as an honorary member of the culture and who gets pushed out of it. Kacey Musgraves, a white country singer, gets praised for her Tejano covers. Rosalía, from the country that colonized half of Latin America, makes dembow and sells out Coachella. A Black woman from Texas does the same thing Selena did, drawing on the Black artists who shaped her own sound, and she's told to sit down. Even Selena wasn't spared this: when she first came up, she was called a no sabo kid and told she wasn't "Mexican enough" because her Spanish wasn't fluent. None of this is random. It's the residue of colonial racial hierarchy: mejorar la raza campaigns, the mestizaje myth in Mexico that rebranded the erasure of Indigenous people as a "beautiful blend," pelo malo, the pressure to marry lighter. Most of what gets celebrated as Latin American culture, the drums, the dance, the flavor, traces back to Blackness. Forgetting that and reaching for hatred instead isn't protecting the culture. It's doing the work of white supremacy for free. #beyonce #selena #celiacruz #latinotiktok #BlackTikTok

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Wednesday 09 September 2026 00:12:58 GMT