The last installment of My house is yours had India Martínez as an exceptional guest, in a talk with Bertín Osborne where the singer opened up on the channel and brought to light the problems of bullying and violence suffered during her childhood, going through how the romance with his current partner arose, to the origin of his stage name.
And it is that India Martínez is not the real name of this artist of international stature, but the underlying meaning is what gives meaning to this Spanish woman, of Cordoba origin, who saw in her new name a way of expressing her art. So much so that she, as she assured the presenter during her talk, when they proposed it to her, she felt most identified.
India Martínez’s childhood was not easy. “Leaving school with fear was a reality,” said the singer. And it is that growing up in a marginal neighborhood meant suffering bullying, but also dealing with violence. Like on one occasion, when the father of a friend of hers held a gun to her head. “I was shocked,” she recalled.
However, moving to Almería with his family was his salvation and the moment in which his life changed. There, this 11-year-old girl, named Jenifer Yésica Martínez Fernández, began her musical career. “People started calling me ‘The girl from the port’, because she was there where she sang to everyone,” she recounted.
Over the years and after turning seventeen, India entered a musical contest outside of Almería. There she met a music producer who offered her to record her first album. An album, by the way, that she would release in 2004 under the title Azulejos de Lunares.
But before this moment, the producer told her that she had to change her name to give it a more commercial name, because the two names together, Jenifer Yésica, “do not go together” and “it was not very flamenco”.
Here, the artist told her that her friends used to call her Pocahontas, like the protagonist of the Disney movie, “because of my physical features, because I look like an Indian.” A few days later, the producer called her to tell her that she had already found her stage name. This was India Martinez.
“And he was right,” explained the interpreter, “because I felt identified. It is a name of the world, racial, exotic and from anywhere. It’s how I feel.”
