The Latin Grammys are moving to Spain. People had thoughts.
By Fidel Martinez | Los Angeles Times | FEB. 23, 2023 | Photo by Martina Ibanez-Baldor
Every week, I’m briefly paralyzed by the panic that I won’t have anything to write about for the newsletter. Despite my obvious lack of faith, the content gods always bestow me with a topic.
And boy, was I blessed this week!
On Tuesday morning, Andalusia board President Juanma Moreno announced that the regional government had struck a sponsorship deal with the Latin Academy of Recording Arts. As part of the arrangement, Moreno said, the 2023 Latin Grammy Awards will take place in Spain.
In a statement to Billboard, Latin Academy CEO Manuel Abud said the Andalusian capital of Sevilla will likely host, but the organization is “still working through the logistics with [their] partners TelevisaUnivision.”
The announcement fell on my lap like Maná—winners of nine Latin Grammys and four “Gringo Grammys”— from heaven. I instinctively headed to Twitter to see how folks were taking the news.
“Pique to host or we riot,” quipped a follower, a premise so funny I legitimately spent 10 minutes trying to envision the thick tension in the room as the Spanish footballer awkwardly presented his ex-partner Shakira with the Latin Grammy Award for “Best Diss Track.” (That’s a real category, right? I don’t know. I don’t watch.)
But the most common response seemed to come from people who took issue with something with the word “Latin” being used in the same sentence as Spain. After all, as any geography buff can tell you, the European country isn’t part of Latin America. It didn’t help that the announcement came on the heels of Rosalia, who is Hispanic but not Latina, making history and collecting ample hardware at last year’s award show.
Suffice it to say, the Latinks are salty.
It’s a valid gripe, one which I share. But taking this approach also means you’re giving the Latin Recording Academy too much credit. After all, their definition of what constitutes something as Latin music is more loosey goosey than yours or mine. They don’t care where you were born. All they care about is that your music be in Spanish or Portuguese. That’s it.
What’s wild is that your music doesn’t even have to be entirely in those languages. Per the Latin Recording Academy’s own website, you can submit a song to the “Song of the Year” category as long as it contains “at least 51% of lyrics in Spanish or Portuguese (or accepted languages or dialects) and must be a new song.”
Clearly their definition of what makes something “Latin” is as vague as Rick Caruso’s.
The truth is the Latin Grammy Awards have been contentious from the onset. As former Times journalist Alisa Valdés reported in 2000, the first ceremony was rife with controversy, from Mexican label Fonovisa accusing the organizers of favoring Sony Music and the Estefans to claims of segregation. (The aforementioned report is very much worth your time, by the way. Not only does it highlight that the first Latin Grammy Awards were held a year earlier than scheduled to capitalize on Ricky Martin’s crossover success, but that *NSYNC also performed, which lol.)
I want to make something claro. The Andalusian local government isn’t the bad guy here. As my colleague (and spoiler alert, next week’s guest writer) Suzy Exposito explained to me when I asked for her take on the matter, Spain is going big on music tourism. Moreno said that the sponsorship deal, which cost his local government 18 million euros, could yield as much as 500 million euros in economic benefits. I’m no finance bro, but a 28-fold return on your investment seems like a pretty good deal to me. If the object is to cash in on Latin American culture, then getting the Latin Grammy Awards is not a bad bet.
But in the immortal non-English words of Bad Bunny, they may want to be Latino, “pero les falta sazón.”
