“Can I see your return ticket?” the stone-faced immigration officer asked. “Of course,” I answered, instinctively reaching for my pocket in search of a phone I knew wasn’t there—like a millennial phantom limb.
I apologized and explained I’d just been mugged in Bogotá, smiling through two broken front teeth. She replied with a blank stare. I understood; the last few years have been all crumbling global economies, apocalyptic plagues, and throngs of desperate migrants searching for better quality of life. My story was neither new nor especially tragic. After a long beat, she said if I had a computer I could connect to the Wi-Fi, but if I planned on getting into Argentina I’d have to produce proof of departure. It was indelicate but standard, and I did still have my laptop, so the bureaucratic procedures were quickly resolved.
Dazed, I stepped out of the airport, the midnight air momentarily snapping me out of the brutal, still lingering hangover. But there was no abating my own guilt.
I fucked up . . . What am I going to do now? . . . Did I really need to drink beer, rum, and viche? . . . Hmm, that tooth is broken but attached . . . Where the hell is she?
My inner audit adjourned once I spotted the neon-pink flash of Dat García’s puffer coat, waving to me from her car. She stepped out and gave me a hug—divining how badly I needed it—her seven-year-old daughter bouncing in the back seat. Putting my misgivings about a child’s late-night hyperactivity aside, I got in the car for the short ride back to the avant-pop singer’s Ezeiza home. Her living room was a hybrid of Pee-wee’s Playhouse and a minimalist art gallery, complete with stark-white walls, hanging installations, and scattered instruments. Over on a sewing form she was building a costume for an upcoming tour, draped in as much color and surrealist texture as her latest album, Las fuerzas almadas.
“What can I feed you?” she wondered out loud, rummaging through her fridge and pulling out leftover roasted sweet potato and homemade hummus, a couple of hard-boiled eggs appearing soon after. It was heavenly mush, and certainly more nourishing than the knuckle sandwich I’d had for dinner the night before. Gratitude, apologies, and Advil followed, then I slipped into a coma in her guest room. About five hours later I was up and running, shotgunning coffee and headed for the door. The van was there. That morning I was scheduled to speak at a panel on Latin American music journalism produced by legendary Seattle radio station KEXP in partnership with Argentina’s Ministry of Culture. No big.
It was September 2022 and I’d been on the road for about a month. It was also more than a decade since the last time I set foot in Buenos Aires, the old-meets-new world metropolis where the majesty of its neoclassical French architecture is surpassed only by the towering bravado of its citizens. After an hour’s drive into the city, the van dropped me off at a university near the nation’s congress and I took a quick look around. The old girl looked good. Streets were cleaner, people more fashionable—just don’t ask too many questions about their bank accounts. Argentina’s currency woes are its own Pandora’s box.
I rolled my luggage past security and made my way to the employee cafeteria turned VIP green room where the whole KEXP team had assembled. Albina Cabrera, host of the popular Monday-night program El sonido rushed to me: “Richard, amigo, ¿cómo estás? If you can’t do the panel, it’s fine—we’ve already set up a dentist appointment for you.” Of course I was doing the fucking panel; the least you can do with trauma is use it as an icebreaker. “Wow, you can take a punch,” chimed in Alaia D’Alessandro, one of the camera operators for the upcoming week of live sessions and cofounder of Seattle art-rock band Tres Leches, impressed by my mostly unbruised face. I noted that my dad would be proud to hear it and moved toward the conference hall.
The panel went by smoothly. I shared the stage with Martha Estrada of influential Guatemalan music outlet El Timbre Suena, and Argentine rock writer and radio eminence Alfredo Rosso, who recounted pearls from his illustrious fifty-year career. Then came friends from the audience. Publicist Emilia Hernández handed me a bag containing alfajores and an iPhone I could use for the rest of my trip. I was honestly more excited about the scrumptious caramel-filled cookies than rapid email access. Then came Linxes, the post-pop duo from the neighboring city of La Plata, who I’d gotten close to during their recent tours of Mexico, where I was then living. “Come on, the dentist’s office is nearby—we’ll walk you over,” they said, grabbing my bags and sharing details about their excellent next album, Nadie recuerda tu entrada al mundo. Minutes later, as I sat bedraggled in the dentist’s posh eighteenth-floor waiting room, I finally had some time to run back the events of the previous thirty-six hours.
The dark, frigid Bogotá street. The man’s arm around my shoulder. Chasing him when I couldn’t find my phone. Tackling him to the ground. Punches. A knee to the face. Spitting out a tooth shard. The altitude keeping the wind out of my lungs as we struggled. It was stupid zigzagging from the bar to the hotel, but it was a five-block walk and my New Yorker pride wouldn’t allow me to cab such a short distance. Bogotá is sketchy enough in the daytime, and everyone told me what would happen at night. Yes, incredible music and culture abound, but in recent years the city has also been wracked with social, political, and economic hardship. Two teeth and a phone was a bargain compared to what that evening could have cost.
On the flip side, this particular crisis was proof of concept for the work and energy I’ve poured into the Latin American music community since I became a fanatical hipster in 2012 and a proper industry professional sometime later. Album reviews, niche profiles, and countless tickets purchased for obscure underground shows all parlayed into outstretched hands. I’ll spare you the bulk of my résumé—which includes writing for publications such as Rolling Stone, Remezcla, Bandcamp, and this one—but if you peruse the six hundred episodes of my podcast, Songmess, you can map in real time both my quixotic commitment to “the scene,” as well as the many friendships I’ve cultivated in recondite corners of the Americas. I sometimes joke that I could crash-land in any city and quickly secure a friendly couch and a cold beer. The Bogotá incident proved a version of that to be true, as dozens of fellow music weirdos rallied around me, online and IRL. Thank goodness for indie karma.
OK we’re about a thousand words into this thing, so I might as well introduce myself: My name is Richard Villegas, and I’m a music journalist. I was born in New York City and raised in the Dominican Republic. My dad is Colombian and my mom is Nuyorican (Puerto Rican from the city), and over the years I’ve lived in the Caribbean, the United States, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. I’m neither a nepo baby nor a military brat nor Carmen Sandiego. This is just the course of my life, and I have the debt to prove it. But the thing about kinda being from everywhere is you end up being from nowhere at all, which has kept me moving. A lack of national or cultural anchors fostered in me a much broader worldview, and fixating on music from a vast and diverse region such as Latin America—yeah, and Spain—catalyzed my wanderlust and artsy tendencies into an actual career. Home is a pit stop, patriotism a vicious rumor.
In 2022, I was again feeling the travel itch. I’d caught wind of the Bogotá Music Market with its many showcases and networking opportunities, as well as a landmark run of KEXP live sessions taking over Buenos Aires—both scheduled for September. Strategic social media inquiries revealed August music festivals in Ecuador (a destination on my wish list for ages), and some slick flight manipulations yielded cheap northbound tickets out of Chile for October. This wasn’t my first community production of The Motorcycle Diaries, and I knew I’d be a shell of a person by the end, so I also allotted a few weeks of rest in the Dominican Republic to visit my parents and eat way too many yuca fritters.
With my road map and event calendar set, and devoting roughly two weeks to each country, I gave my Amex the workout of a lifetime. The unspoken truth about indie scenes, especially in cash-strapped Latin America, is that if you can afford to live off art, you probably come from money. I, dear reader, am not the rogue heir to an oligarch’s fortune. Instead, I usually strike a healthy work-adventure balance by cobbling insanely ambitious plans, conducting a zillion interviews for Songmess, and using that research to pitch stories at the different publications to which I contribute. Covering Latin American indie music doesn’t rake in millions, but I usually break even in the end. Plus, earning money from fist-pumping in mosh pits and living to tell the tale is way more rewarding than the droning comfort of a desk and computer screen. Any additional overhead is worth every penny.
I was off! In mid-August I flew out of Mexico City and into Quito, which could pass for Bogotá’s little sister with its red-brick buildings, verdant hills, and streets that also demand eagle-eyed alertness. The city was more cosmopolitan than I expected, and word of a new metro train system quickly cemented the Ecuadorian capital as a hidden South American gem deserving greater buzz than it gets. I’d also followed the country’s music scene for years, with its lingering ’90s rock en español nostalgia and some fresh alt-pop projects.
The first barn burner of the trip was my interview with Pedro Bonfim, singer and cofounder of indie rockers turned electro-philosophers Lolabúm. Across the band’s records, as well as in our conversation, gauzy poetry and social critique bleeds into folksy fútbol references, the samba of Bonfim’s Brazilian roots dancing with diligently studied cumbia and pasillo records from Polibio Mayorga and Benítez y Valencia.
Once we were finished, he invited me to the pre-party for Festival ContraCorriente, the cornerstone of my visit. I have a high tolerance for industry theater but the event was wack, so we fled to a concert at a local bohemian haunt. Refusing to pay the inexpensive Uber fare, we instead hopped in the back of a friend’s pickup truck, laying flat on our backs, and I got my first real tour of Quito from a uniquely disorienting vantage point. As we chuckled nervously about not getting stopped by the cops, Bonfim turned and paid me one of the great compliments of my career: “OK, you’re for real.” We closed out the night at El Parque de las Tripas, or “Innards Park,” where bowls of fried pig tripe and stewed Andean corn and potato came accompanied with spiked, cinnamony drinks called canelazo to help rein in our buzz.
The next day, it was festival time. I headed toward Itchimbía Park, near the historic center, and began to climb. Oh yes, climb. You can’t find a flat plain in Quito to save your life and even the airport is on the other side of a mountain range, forty-five minutes outside the city. I came upon a massive line of patrons getting patdowns, which made sense since the festival was free and government sponsored, drawing a diverse crowd with an omnivorous lineup of rap, metal, pop, and electronic artists. A few WhatsApp messages later, I was skipping the glacially paced queue and breaking into the festival through a back doorway reserved for medical staff.
Inside, I ran into Bonfim, who credited the palpable excitement in the air to this being one of the first major public events since the pandemic shutdown. The scenery was stunning, offering a 360-degree view of the Andes and Quito’s colorful urban sprawl. I also spotted Costa Rican pop singer Leena Bae, who’d just come off the stage with her drag queen DJ, MariPosona. Back in my New York days, I was deeply entrenched in drag and gay nightlife, so Mari and I became fast friends. My single favorite memory from the festival was watching Ecuadorian progressive metal band Minipony while sharing dollar bottles of moonshine, called puntas, as both our faces melted in the field.
My time in Ecuador was especially wondrous, perhaps because it was the only country on my itinerary I had not previously visited. Rallying through my exhaustion, I rose on Sunday and marched into Quito’s historic center to explore old churches and the mausoleum of Antonio José de Sucre, the Venezuelan general who led crucial insurrections during South America’s independence movement of the early 1800s. From there I rushed to my coffee date with Quixosis, who, sensing my chuchaqui (the local slang for “hangover”), brought me back to his family home for a bespoke hourlong DJ set, sifting excitedly through his vinyl collection.
Quixosis is the psychedelic alias of electronic producer Daniel Lofredo, and his grandfather was the founder of the seminal Andean music label Discos Caife. Treasured archives believed long lost were recently rediscovered and reissued as cinematic compilations via the English imprint Honest Jon’s Records, and the whole process was meticulously documented on the podcast Sonido perdido: CAIFE. As his name suggests, Quixosis is a master of sonic delirium, and that afternoon he pierced through mine with a mix of pasillo, cumbia, bomba, and Andean flute music. The robust listening session was a master class in Ecuadorian ethnography, populating a regional microcosm of Black, Indigenous, and mestizo communities and sounds.
Alas, the road beckoned, and that night I hopped a bus to Cuenca, an even higher, even more dazzling city in the clouds. I arrived at dawn, and my hotel was located in a colonial town square. Upon checking into my room, I looked out the window and saw a goat herder guarding his flock from the incoming ultramodern monorail. Magical realism in motion.
My time in Cuenca was short, and so I prepared for my handful of interviews by exploring the city to the tune of spectacular local artists. I walked through the archaeological sites of Pumapungo Museum while listening to indie rock troubadours La Madre Tirana, while Neoma’s bilingual electropop boomed in my ears as I took in exhibits at the Municipal Modern Art Museum. The biggest impression was left by Letelefono’s uproarious yet devastating epic, 𝝮, a concept album about being trapped in Latin America, whether for financial reasons or the strict immigration laws fomented by our overlords in the Global North. The glitchy, romantic, and harrowing LP first soundtracked a leisurely stroll down the Tomebamba River, which splits Cuenca down the middle, and later lent Wagnerian grandeur to my descent into the hot, sticky Gulf of Guayaquil.
If Quito and Cuenca embodied the Andean archetypes of starchy comfort food and woolen clothing, arriving in Guayaquil felt like falling through a wormhole to the Caribbean. A melange of Dominican merengue and Bad Bunny reggaeton hits filled my ears, and cuisine rooted in seafood and plantains was a dead ringer for childhood lunches on Quisqueya’s northern beaches. The next day I took to the street, walking about three hours from the swanky neighborhood of Urdesa down to Guayaquil’s seaside Crystal Palace. The venue hosted the final edition of Funka Fest, a youthful fete featuring the likes of Venezuelan reggaeton star Danny Ocean, Mexican psych balladeer Ed Maverick, and local R&B chanteuse Chloé Silva. I eventually took my leave, rushing back to my Airbnb and packing my duffle bag. My time in Ecuador was over.
It’s funny. Up until now this travelogue has been a pleasant memory exercise unspooling the spirit of adventure that guides much of my work. However, recounting the next leg of my journey, in Colombia, makes me uneasy. I’m not resentful of the mugging—I’ve actually returned three times since it happened—but we’ve always had a strained relationship, the country and I.
My first visit was in 2011, when my sister was living in Medellín, our dad’s ancestral homeland. She was studying art and fashion design, and I was livin’ la vida loca down in Santiago de Chile. We went to museums and had some chic meals, even traipsing over to Bogotá for a few days, but I found socializing difficult apart from a fleeting nightclub fling. As I headed back South with a belly full of buñuelos and my neck covered in hickeys, I still couldn’t grasp what this country was supposed to mean to me, or if it needed to mean anything at all.
I returned to Colombia for music festivals in 2015 and 2017, at the peak of my nightlife schmoozing skills, and still people were cold and distant, which was at odds with the tropical effervescence I’d been sold through music, television, and tourist brochures. Years later I understood those were fragments of an identity also shaped by decades of traumatic drug and guerrilla wars that made Colombia the butt of countless hack jokes and sepia-toned films. Gradually, the melancholy and mistrust I’d encountered came into perspective.
In 2022, I embarked on my fourth Colombian trip with a bit of apprehension, but some new variables on my side. I had at least one friend in Bogotá: Bolivian music writer Javier Rodríguez-Camacho, author of the essential Latin American indie music bible, Testigos del fin del mundo. He was my host as well as interlocutor, advising on which venues to avoid and which egos to stroke. I also came with international media clout, a stacked agenda of meetings and shows at the Bogotá Music Market, and a clear purpose to interview as much of the national underground as possible.
In Bogotá, I was most intrigued by a scene of cumbia revivalists tapping into the popular tropical orchestras of the 1970s. Groups Frente Cumbiero and Meridian Brothers have long led a discursive roots movement that exults Colombian musical traditions as worthy and transcendent as rhythms trickling down from the North, though rarely praised or acknowledged at the same level. In recent years, that torch has passed to rowdy kids operating under the umbrella of label In-Correcto, who’ve updated these countryside traditions with hip urban codes. One especially delightful party at their arts space, La Yunta, devolved into a boozy jam featuring cumbia jocks Felipe Orjuela and Gato ’e Monte, rock pixie Paula Pera, and local trap trailblazer Ha$lopablito. It was the night of boundless indie chaos I’d been searching for in Colombia for years.
That triumph dissipated when I arrived in Medellín for a series of unfortunate events out of Lemony Snicket. Not a single artist answered my interview requests, a friend recommended horrendous accommodations in the spring-breaker pandemonium of El Poblado, and even a lovely bathhouse romance turned unexpectedly transactional, if you catch my drift. Five days in the city and my biggest success was catching up on email and diving deep into the catalog of local techno label TraTraTrax. Though Medellín has never agreed with me, the tacky fashions and boring booming reggaeton industry that transformed it into a Miami-esque Instagram paradise have greatly rehabilitated its reputation, once shorthand for horrific drug cartel violence. As hollow and uninspired as I find someone like reggaeton superstar J Balvin, I’d much rather music and culture be the face of the city than Pablo Escobar.
For all my Medellín frustrations, my next stop, Cali, exceeded my wildest dreams. A bastion of Black diasporic pride, the city affectionately known as the capital of Colombia’s Pacific Coast welcomes a constant influx of migrants from shipping towns and fishing villages who bring centuries of musical, spiritual, and culinary wisdom. Like the people, the music of Cali is an exquisite patchwork of Afro-descendant marimba and drums, blaring salsa instrumentals arrived on merchant ships in the 1960s, and fiery, socially charged hip-hop.
On my first day in the city, I walked to Viche Positivo, the restaurant of renowned cantadora and educator Nidia Góngora, who schooled me on the generational knowledge passed down by women in towns across the Pacific through songs of worship called arrullos and alabados. All this before she served me a fish and coconut milk stew called tapao, accompanied by a shot of viche, a delicious sugarcane digestif that is the house specialty. I then met brothers Dawer X Damper in the studio for a sneak peek at the Afro-futuristic world of reggaeton and cumbia dreamt onto their debut album Donde machi, later garnering a Latin Grammy nomination.
I returned to Bogotá soon after, now on the road for about a month and with forty excellent interviews stored in my phone. Over the moon, I celebrated my final night in Colombia with a farewell twirl at a party put on by Frente Cumbiero’s Mario Galeano, who blasted vintage cumbia, merengue, and champeta records through a towering wooden sound system somewhere downtown. For every new musician friend I encountered that night, I did a shot, accepting the hangover ahead knowing I’d sleep through most of it on the plane to Buenos Aires. I’ve already told you what happened next, so I hope you don’t mind me fast-forwarding through the crunch of my shattering teeth and on to the next episode.
“Is the floor . . . vibrating?” I asked Martha during the soundcheck for Juana Molina’s hotly anticipated KEXP session, which was being broadcast from the cupola of the monolithic Kirchner Cultural Center, formerly the century-old Buenos Aires Central Post Office. Indeed, you could hear the vaulted panels rattle under the bass of a synthesizer, heralding the arrival of one of Latin America’s foremost experimental music goddesses and an artist I’ve often described as the patron saint of Songmess. “I will interview her,” I whispered, uncertain of how.
Molina’s hypnotic performance—which you can enjoy in full on YouTube—was the culmination of a weeklong run of sessions put on by the famed Seattle radio station, who’ve long championed global sounds and in recent years ramped up their Latin music rotation. I attended riveting sets from noise punks Blanco Teta, rapper Sara Hebe, and indie rock stalwarts Mi Amigo Invencible, recording wonderful, candid interviews with my newly borrowed phone. (Though I’d managed to recover all my files via the cloud, nightly backups had just become mandatory.)
I spent most of my time in Buenos Aires zipping back and forth between interviews in quaint home studios and late-night empanada stands. Every chat ended in “You should talk to . . . ” and each concert begot more concerts. It was amazing capturing a scene in the midst of creative ebullience. It was also exhausting, and I left little time for my own amusement. Don’t get me wrong, what I do is fun. But Buenos Aires is an incredible city to sit in a café all day sipping wine and watching beautiful people pass you by. I was worn ragged. A cough began to rumble in my throat, but then my phone buzzed.
“I got her,” read the message from publicist Melissa Restrepo, a plucky Colombian transplant who’d become my fixer for especially tricky interviews. “Juana Molina?” I typed, incredulous. “Yup,” she responded, followed by a laundry list of instructions. I was to go to Molina’s country house fifty miles outside the city by way of two trains, a bus, and a couple of lengthy walks. I had one hour to speak with her; no pictures were allowed. The terms were acceptable, and I’ve never minded a no-selfie policy. The next day, I filled my bag with provisions—an auxiliary battery, a couple of bananas, a Halls blister—and started toward a rural corner of Buenos Aires Province.
It took most of the morning to reach the gates of Molina’s house. They were discreet, not to say shabby. I messaged her manager that I’d arrived and he greeted me shortly after, accompanied by a procession of eight dogs. The property was filled with trees and plenty of space for the animals to run and play. I spotted the house but was motioned to sit on the porch of a garage turned recording and rehearsal studio. Coffee and biscuits awaited. A few minutes later there she was, dressed in loose gray pants, a saffron sweater, and well-loved Crocs, her unruly gray hair still moist from a recent swim.
We spoke for two hours, and she was kind enough to repeat many of the tales already told to other journalists. Her mother was a model and interior decorator, and her father a tango singer who taught her to play guitar. As a struggling musician in the 1980s, she found steady work as an actress, excelling at comedy. In 1991, her sketch show Juana y sus hermanas became a national sensation, but she walked away three years later to build a family and pick up the musical instruments she’d abandoned for far too long. Her fame put her on the path of hitmaker Gustavo Santaolalla, who produced her first album, Rara, in the popular alt-rock style of the day. Dissatisfied with the cookie-cutter approach, she began self-producing all her work moving forward. Molina’s unconventional storytelling and eerie, loop-based atmospheres transformed her into one of the most revered and referenced Latin American musicians of the past twenty years, counting Björk and David Byrne among her many fans.
When it was time to go, she opened the gate and dogs flooded the street. She picked up a pup missing large chunks from his ears. She’d named him Evander, like the boxer. I turned back to wave goodbye and thank her once more, and with the low sun shining behind her I brought my hands to my face and mimicked snapping a photo. We chuckled, and I was off to the train. The whole three-hour ride back to my Airbnb I studied that little mental Polaroid, pondering a singular artist of wry humor and a hero that did not disappoint. Once I arrived, I collapsed onto the bed. The shivers had gotten the best of me, and tomorrow was travel day.
I was in the homestretch. I rendezvoused with my friend Luis—who’d come down from Mexico City to pursue an ill-fated romance with a local paramour—and we rushed to the train station. La Plata was only an hour away, and Festival Capital had some heavy hitters on the bill: trap boy demon Dillom, guitar-shredding vixen Marilina Bertoldi, and cumbia institution La Delio Valdez. Luis ran between stages as a feverishly excited fan, whereas I was just feverish. I wrapped myself in a thick poncho and caught most of the shows sitting on a hay bale, praying the weekend would end quickly. Perhaps I should’ve stayed home, but that’s not what I crossed the globe to do.
Come Monday, Luis went back to the capital while I hopped a bus headed further south to the beach getaway of Mar del Plata. Prioritizing recovery, I canceled my interviews with the city’s excellent crop of post-punk bands and instead roamed up and down the breathtaking boardwalk, occasionally ducking into a café for shelter and a bowl of hot pasta. It was early October and South American spring had only just begun, so every sharp gust off the waterfront sent shockwaves through my body. After a few days I felt stronger, and it was time to fly. As I looked out the plane window and got lost in the vastness of the snowcapped Andes, I decided to use my time in Chile to slow my roll.
I could trace back every time I’d eaten a completo over the past decade. The notorious Chilean hot dog covered in diced tomato, pureed avocado, and a thick smear of mayonnaise is the type of dish that walks the line between garbage street food and a Michelin-rated delicacy. My last completo was in 2019 during a visit from my partner, who insisted on going to the sole Chilean restaurant in Mexico City. Before that it was 2017, when we were living in Jackson Heights, New York City’s bustling South American cosmopolis. Two years prior, I’d actually come down to Santiago de Chile to—you guessed it—cover a music festival, which was a fun opportunity to reconnect with friends and the city that was my home in 2010 and 2011.
In October 2022, I was broke, financially and physically. I was couch surfing in the living room of local indie rock royalty, Chini.png and Niños del Cerro’s Simón Campusano. They, too, were broke, as was every working artist attempting to survive the one-two punch of a pandemic and Chile’s ongoing revolution and constitutional restructuring known as the Estallido Social. We ate completos almost every day, no longer a nostalgic treat reminiscent of adventurous glory days, but a cheap source of nourishment. I haven’t eaten another one since, nor do I crave them.
I conducted about twenty interviews during my time in Chile, largely conversing with luminaries from the fabled indie pop scene that made Javiera Mena, Dënver, Gepe, and Álex Anwandter idols and critical darlings throughout the 2010s. But I really did slow down. My first week there was all about Dano, a handsome art curator and photographer I’d met some years back in a Brooklyn dive bar. We reunited at a restaurant specializing in Patagonian comfort food—that is, salmon and lots of starchy mashes—guzzling wine and kissing for hours. The spark was still there, and broke or not, sage words from my mother reminding me to “be present” rang in my ears.
We planned a retreat to Valparaíso, and it was the sort of magical weekend escapade out of a Cameron Diaz rom-com. Dano rented an apartment with a view of the ship-filled bay, the city’s iconically colorful hills stretching into the periphery. We scaled the touristy Cerro Alegre, dipping into every restaurant, boutique, and art gallery, and later explored Valparaíso Cultural Park, a former jail converted into a vibrant community center. We lazed on the grass before going for an afternoon snack, gazing upon the Pacific and toasting champagne glasses, cheeky glances indicating it was time to go home and resolve some of the sexual tension pent up over the years and miles. Dano and I eventually returned to Santiago, and though more shows and interviews happened, they all pale in my memory next to the passionate kiss we shared under a bridge on my final night in Chile. Misty eyed and chubbed up, we hugged and walked our separate ways. The odyssey was over.
I actually rested on the eight-hour flight from Santiago de Chile to Santo Domingo. My parents came and got me from the airport and we drove through the island’s central mountain range to the other Santiago of my life, nestled in the center of the Dominican Republic. The next few days were occupied by eating and sleeping, as well as visits to the family dentist, who picked up where my quick but effective Buenos Aires patch-up left off. In two months I visited ten cities and completed a hundred-plus interviews. I began jotting down story pitches and a release calendar for Songmess, which as I type these words nearly two years later, is still airing episodes from the lot.
In mid-November I returned to Mexico City, bristling at the chilly winds of winter. Maybe I just longed for the tropical snuggles of the past few weeks, but the Mexican capital felt colder, grayer, and lonelier than ever before. Extensive conversations with my parents had planted a seed, and I could sense change blooming within me. The trip had left me in crippling debt, justified as an investment in my career and personal brand. I still stand by that decision, but it didn’t make the precarity of my life any less vertiginous.
I spent another year in Mexico before packing my bags and fully relocating back to the Dominican Republic—my new base of operations, complete with a refreshed support system of family and friends—and dramatically reducing the social rush that had become such a drain. Trust me, you stop enjoying the party if you never leave. A few months later, my mother and I went for coffee with one of her close girlfriends, who was shocked by my return to island life.
“So you’re done traveling?” she asked, wide-eyed.
“Ha! No,” interjected my mother. “He’s already plotting where to go next.”
I am. Always. I’ve long since made peace with my perpetual foreigner status. And besides, next could also be home. As long as there’s music and a story, I’m happy to go find out.
Richard Villegas is a music journalist, podcaster, and professional chismoso with bylines in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Bandcamp, and Remezcla. When not raging behind his desk in the Dominican Republic, you can find him traipsing through Latin America in search of fresh underground music and a cheap local beer.
Illustration: Alvero Tapia-Hidalgo.