It would be difficult to find a better candidate than Carlos Vives (Santa Marta, Colombia, 1961) to represent the cultural ties that unite Spain and Latin America. That is why he is the headliner of the third edition of Hispanitat 2023, a celebration that from October 6 to 15 offers Madrid 165 cultural activities, including 86 concerts with artists from 16 countries. Vives will open on the 14th at the door of Alcalá with the presence of Ana Mena, Diego Torres, Niña Pastori, Rozalén and Carlos Baute, among others. “Do you know that the first Vives who arrived in Cartagena were from Sitges? And the Restrepo [his second surname] came from Asturias, which is the name of a small town. And check if they left descendants, that today there are festivals in Colombia called the Restrepadas and Máiraca, that thing fills a stadium!”, he recounts proudly.
Carlos Vives, the first Latin artist to win a Grammy (today he has two, and 15 Latin Grammys), has just been awarded an honorary doctorate in Social Sciences by the Universitat del Nord de Barranquilla in recognition of his research on the roots of current Colombian music and the spread of the country’s global culture. “Sometimes I think that the reason life brought me to Spain was to understand myself and my country, to be able to have a message today: we must value who we are. In our continent, for different reasons, we have not felt proud of anything we are; we forget our African heritage; of the indigenous, we don’t even talk about it… And many years ago, art helped me to understand Colombia, to understand the difficulties in recognizing ourselves, the wars, the violence. Art taught me to understand my surnames, what the pre-Hispanic cultures gave us, what Africa brought and what all this left in our music, gastronomy, politics, literature… Understand me as Colombian and understand the problems we have due to not recognizing each other”.
Carlos found happiness together with chemical engineer Claudia Elena Vásquez 20 years ago. “In life, something like this had to happen to me. Life was very hard, she treated me very badly, but since I met her she has been a driving force for me. He pushed my career forward because he believed in me more than I believed in myself. We all deserve a Claudia”. The artist has two older children from his second wife and two more with Claudia, still teenagers. He has educated them all in the same way and he is sure that he will not find them doing perreo: “When you reach adulthood, do what you want with your life, but you have to be careful with the message that is given to the younger ones . It’s not that I don’t like sensuality, but there are things that sometimes I see that… I assure you that there are vulgarities that my children will say no to, because they had parents who educated them. And it’s not about forbidding them things, but about what you read to them before bed and the music they grow up with.”
Since the Alcalá door show is called Carlos Vives y amigos, it is obligatory to ask him about who was his intimate, Shakira: at the end of May, a like from the author of La gota fría a a photo of Gerard Piqué and Clara Chia on Instagram destroyed a decades-long relationship. That was at the end of May, and despite Vives withdrawing the like and apologizing and deflecting the indiscretion to his community manager, the friendship with Shakira remains in the frozen section. “The truth is that the last time I spoke to her was when we were there, because I live in the same building in Bogotá as the doctor who operated on her father. I haven’t heard from her for a long time. I don’t know how it must be, I think it’s good”, he answers about his new life in Miami.
