Her Way: How an Obscure Mariachi Singer Went from Quinceañeras, to the World Series, to Kendrick Lamar

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky.

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Hold on.

Let me close the door.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

This is really cool for me to have you on the show, Dara Barrera, because, you know, I've been walking around.

I live in New York City.

Okay.

And I've been walking around listening to your music for a couple of weeks now.

You've been the soundtrack to my everyday life.

Thank you for the invite.

Thank you for having me and your podcast.

I'm very happy and nervous because like I've been telling everybody my English, like Celia Cruz used to say, my English

not very good looking.

So I'm going to try to do my best.

And well, I'm happy to be here.

Your English is beautiful so far.

I've been practicing.

It speaks, though to how crazy I imagine your life must have been

since November.

Oh my God.

I don't know if you can see my under eyes black.

I haven't slept well since November 22nd when GNX album came out.

It's been crazy for me.

It's been like, oh my God, I didn't imagine this impact.

Dara, you turn on Kendrick Lamar's new album, and the first voice you hear is not Kendrick Lamar, it's you.

Yesterday,

Thank you.

Kendrick, thank you, God, for this opportunity.

How do you describe what you were doing before that album?

I've been doing a lot of things, reality shows, working a lot, recording my music, my CDs.

It's been like up and down, up and down, and it's been very difficult to me.

But I never give up.

I never give up because this is my passion to sing.

That's what I do to live, singing every weekend in weddings, quinceañeras, private parties, birthdays, funerals.

And

I do it with all my heart because I love my work.

I love my job because I love to sing.

I love to transmit that happiness or sadness.

And

always looking for an opportunity to do something more big in my career.

After this, GNX album is happening.

How has the quinceinera business been

since you debuted on GNX?

The other day I went to a quinceañera to play and the quinceañera was, oh my god, she's the one to sing with Kendra Glamar and she's on the quinceañera.

The young people, the quinceañera, they were like all over me.

Can I take a picture with you?

Can I take a picture?

Can you sing first?

Can you sing the part when you with Kendra Lamar?

Okay, I'm Maria Chiri, and I'm starting like,

and they're like, oh my God,

it's crazy.

It's something that makes me wonder how Kendrick Lamar discovered you in the first place.

I was singing for a Fernando Alenzela tribute at a World Series for Snake game in Coyer Stadium.

They contact me after that and they told me to sing my style.

I went, I sang, and

the rest is Coria.

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So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

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You know, when I told Deira Barrera, today's guest, that I'd been listening to her music while walking all around New York City at the top of the show.

I wasn't referring to her music with Kendrick Lamar on GNX.

What I was referring to was her earlier catalog.

The kind of stuff that you're hearing underneath me right now,

which I'd only discovered because Kendrick, who's about to play the halftime show at Super Bowl 59, in case you hadn't heard, had somehow discovered her.

Mariachi music is our culture from Mexico.

It's trumpets, violin, violin, guitars, bass player, the big guitaron,

makes all together all kinds of rhythms, happy songs, sad songs.

Deira Barrera, like Kendrick, lives and breathes and embodies the city of Los Angeles, which is a city on fire in a country where the newly inaugurated president is now threatening mass deportations back to the place that Deira is originally from.

And the fact that all of this is happening while Deira is finally enjoying a suddenly prosperous second act in her career, appearing on no less than three separate tracks on the biggest album of the year at age 49, seemed worth finding out about.

I had questions for a person that I had absolutely heard, but knew very little about at this point.

And it turned out to be a story about sports and family and this musical genre, which is resonating uniquely, I think,

at this moment.

Because mariachi can feel like the saddest thing you've ever heard,

but also the happiest.

And Mariachi can

unir cultura together, to put culturas together, no matter if you're whatever you are, no matter colores, colores, nana, la música del mariachi es universal.

It is a rare thing to have a genre that can be played in the opposite parts of the emotional spectrum.

We can play everything, we can play everything.

Yes, yes, you can now be on a song reincarnated about Tupac.

You can be on the closing track of GNX, Gloria.

You can have a co-writing credit on all three songs?

I've been working since I was

very young, like around 16 years old.

I started singing with my mom and my sister.

I learned my first lessons with my mom because she used to play guitar.

And she taught me how to play guitar and sing.

My Agualito, he was a singer too.

My mom, my uncles, my Tia, everybody, they sing.

So when I was very young, little,

well, my family is partly animal.

All weekends, like they bring music and they start singing.

So I always there with them, hearing my mom sing.

And I was like, I want to sing too.

I want to sing.

When I moved from Mexico to here, to Los Angeles, we started singing every weekend in different nightclubs of South LA, gain money to pay rent, to pay bills, to eat.

That's what I do to live.

Since I was a little girl, I was dreaming that someday something big is going to happen to me.

By the way, I listened to you on Lavos.

Ah, yes, yes, La Vos, Mexico.

Goosebumps.

That was during the pandemic,

and I was like here at home like a year doing nothing.

So I was like, oh my god, I have to do something.

I don't want to be home anymore.

So I decided to go to Lagos, Mexico, and I left.

When I go to reality shows, I don't go to like, I want to have the first place.

No, I just go there to enjoy, to learn, to get to know new people.

I feel so blessed, so happy with you.

But as for why this story is truly a sports story,

you should know that the person Deira Barrera was most excited to get to know was the athlete responsible in his own way for Kendrick discovering Deira in the first place.

A true Los Angeles legend named

Fernando Balenzuel.

1990.

If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky.

Fernando Valenzuela was a folk hero in the realest sense.

And I need the kids out there to understand this part because he was a left-handed pitcher who would kick his leg high into the air and gaze up towards the heavens before throwing a screwball that seemed to defy physics.

And maybe that alone would be charming.

But the guy also was the first and only player in the history of baseball to win the Rookie of the Year Award and the Cy Young Award for best pitcher in all of baseball in the same year, 1981, which was also, by the way, the same year that he won the World Series with the Dodgers.

And all of it was simply known as Fernando Mania.

Who's there out on the mound?

He's a little bit round.

It's Fernando

He looks so relaxed.

He's a chubby cofax.

That Fernando.

Every hater's appalled when they see his crew ball to the mound.

He hops off of the mound.

Fernando became an icon.

And eventually, in retirement, a radio announcer, working up in a booth at Dodger Stadium, commenting on the games with his partner in Spanish.

But before all of us, and here's the part that was key to Fernando's lore in Southern California, he and his parents, who were farmers, had lived in a town of roughly 500 or so people in Mexico's northwestern state of Sonora, a town called Echo Waquila,

which one visiting newscaster from a local LA affiliate described this way.

The Valenzuelas told me they were simple and primitive people as they invited me into their home.

Fernando's room was just like he explained it to me.

Small, with one bed.

That's where he and his five brothers slept.

The six sisters all slept in another room.

The baseball field was just a hop, skip, and a jump from this house.

And while he slept at home, it was on this baseball field he spent most of his time.

The field had no backstop, paper bases, no fences, and tree stumps were used as benches.

And this scene, the scene of this field in this tiny town, was intimately familiar to somebody else, it turns out.

A future singer named Deira Cornejo Barrera, who just happened to be born nearby.

So my dad used to play baseball too with Fernando's brothers.

I remember when I used to live in Sonora still when I was like around eight years, eight years old.

And when we knew that Fernando is here in Chihuahua, everybody, let's go, let's go if we can see him.

And I remember Fernando used to come out.

in the door and he used to to throw to throw balls to us to all the kids.

We were like

running like crazy.

Oh, we have a Fernando Valencia ball.

So it was, I have

very good memories of that.

But I never met Fernando Valenzuela in person since like around seven years ago, seven years ago, because another friend that works with Fernando, Pepe Iniguez, they worked together for the La Dias de Inte radio station.

He introduced me.

And one time I met Pepe Iniguez in a birthday party that I went to play.

They hired me.

So, hey, you're Pepe Inigues, blah, blah, blah, lego, hey, tell Fernando that I'm Deira Cornejo.

I know

he knows who's my dad, blah, blah, blah.

Oh, yeah.

And he told me, when you go to Dodger Stadium, call me and come and say hi to us.

And I'm going to introduce to Fernando Alenzola.

And yes, he was very serious.

At first, he was very serious.

And I told him, oh my God, Lege,

I'm from the Yajuara de Sonora.

My dad is Antonio Cornejo.

Oh, yeah, I know who is your dad.

He used to play very good baseball with his brothers.

So we started to have a friendship, very, very, very nice friendship.

And

he was always

telling us jokes.

bad jokes, but I have to laugh about it.

I want to explain Fernando Valenzuela to people who maybe aren't as familiar with baseball.

He's somebody that my friend Bill Plaschke, who writes for the LA Times, called the most celebrated Dodger, the most popular Los Angeles Dodger ever, the most impactful Los Angeles Dodger ever.

And I was there to sing when they retired his number.

Yes, yes.

So that was August 11th, 2023.

They finally retired the great Fernando Valenzuela's jersey.

Tonight, we are here to honor, celebrate, and retire the number 34 of Fernando Valenzuela.

How did you get booked for that kick?

Fernando always

went to see me at a restaurant that I always play on Sundays.

And after he played golf, he got there very early to have breakfast and listen to our music.

And like joking, like talking always with him, joking, I asked him, Hey, take me to the audience.

I want to sing there.

I need to sing there because everybody there, my friends, everybody, and I have to be there too.

He always telling me that she didn't like Mariachi at all.

He always telling me, I don't like Mariachi.

I like Banda.

You know, Banda, that the big, that tuba, the very noisy, noisy.

He liked that.

So when they retired, his number, I asked him, why you don't bring Banda Recordo, the most famous banda of Sinaloa, Mexico, very famous.

Oh no, because I want you to play.

I want you there with your book.

So one day he took somebody of the crew, of the Dodgers, they call me Fernando Valencia, wants you to sing for the retired number.

Your wife, oh my god, for reals?

I was in the newspapers and the noticias, noticeros, oh, Deira Barrera from Viajuarez Onora, she was the singer that Fernando asked for to go to sing for his retired number.

So

I was everywhere.

They were talking about me everywhere.

But a little more than a year after that, a year after Fernando Valenzuela's Jersey retirement ceremony, on October 22nd, 2024,

the headlines across northwestern Mexico and Southern California were dominated by a different kind of news.

A sad night for Dodger fans and for all of baseball.

Dodger legend Fernando Valenzuela has died.

Team announcing the news tonight, just days away from the Dodgers' return to the World Series against the New York Yankees.

Fernando Valenzuela was just 63 years old when he died of septic shock in Los Angeles, right before the start of one of the most highly anticipated and highly rated World Series in recent baseball memory.

And when it came time for the Dodgers to figure out how to honor the most celebrated, most popular, most impactful player in their franchise's history, before a game that everybody, by the way, in Los Angeles was absolutely going to watch,

team officials orchestrated one moment that was meant to be.

When Fernando passed, they they called me right away to if i wanted to do um the tribute to sing there and of course i i said yes not even thinking about oh it's the first game of the world series yankees and dodgers i i didn't think about that i just think about

that i want to sing for my friend

And I got there very emotional, very sad, because it was too fast.

I didn't think that he was gonna pass.

To honor Fernando Valenzuela, who is

truly one of the most important players in the history of sports in America, did you know which song you wanted to start with?

Yes, yes.

Yo text daña.

I was singing there looking at the cabin when he used to sit to connect the game with the Spanish radio station and I will always go there to say hi and I was singing and looking at the videos and looking up to the cabin and he wasn't there and it was very like sad for me.

The people who were like screaming his name, when I put my voice very, very high, they were like, oh, my skin were like chills.

And now that he's my angel, he's my angel, and I feel sad because he's not here anymore.

But I can feel that he's doing a lot of things for us.

We won, Dodger.

The series, the World Series, yeah.

Start the party, Los Angeles.

Your Dodgers

I'm sorry, you're in New York, right?

I was going to say that was painful for me.

You're a New York fan.

Painful for me, but now that I understand the backstory, it's hard not to root for you, Dara.

I mean, in some sense, that is a dream also.

Okay, so there is another angle to this completely surreal story that we've been reporting that I cannot help but be curious about, especially from Deira's perspective.

Because this part of the story, first of all, is currently moving its way through the court system as we speak, culminating in what should be a historic moment in popular culture at the Super Bowl next month.

And also,

because Dara Barrera, a woman who learned how to sing from her mother in this tiny, tiny town in Mexico, has implicitly taken a side in an extraordinarily public and extremely North American type of feud.

Oh my god, I have new friends now.

Oh, Kendrick Lamar sons are my friends now.

A war of words turning into a full-blown feud between two of the biggest names in rap, Kendrick Lamar and Drake.

The Pulitzer Prize winner is definitely spiraling.

The two longtime rivals battling it out in a matter of days, releasing eight new songs one after the other with the intensity heating up over the weekend.

Drake,

you know that, brother.

He's gone ahead and filed a lawsuit against his own record company, Universal Music Group, for Kendrick Lamar's not like us.

Attorneys for Drake save the song, which is aimed at the Canadian rapper, is an example of valuing, quote, corporate greed over the safety and well-being of its artists, end quote.

And so, yeah, I just wanted to know, in general, had you been following Drake versus Kendrick, all that before you became a collaborator of Kendrick?

You know what?

I'm not really

listening to rap music.

I want to be honest.

I always listen to Mariachi, Mexico music.

And that raised another question for me about the conversation that Dara Barrera had with Kendrick Lamar and his camp when they brought her, a true outsider to the genre, into their famously private studio for the first time.

I told them, you know what?

I don't know how to rap.

No, we don't want you listening.

We don't want you.

We want you to do your voice, your voice, your potente voice,

vibrato.

Puerto.

Yes.

Okay.

Yes.

I put my headphones there, okay?

They put music, and I start playing singing and singing and singing and singing.

And that's it.

The beginning of Whacked Up Murals, which is the first track on this album, of course.

Can you translate what the words you're singing there, what they mean?

Siento aqueous presencia.

Siento aque tu presencia.

I feel

your presence here.

La nocha, dia nocha.

Last night, night.

Y nos podemos a yorad.

And we start crying.

Yesterday, somebody whacked out my mural.

I didn't know what it's all about because

I just went to record and I never listened to the song.

So I was like, okay, what's going to happen?

It sounds like you were.

Yorar, it sounds like

you were crying too when you heard that.

I was crying, yes, without knowing what is going to happen later.

Do you remember when you first realized, when you first learned that, in fact, you were going to be the first sound on GNX?

It was a surprise because

I was like, I went to record and then I didn't hear anything.

I remember my friend called me and she told me, Do you hear the new album?

You are on it.

And not only one song.

You were on three songs.

Query flexanto mirada.

i was in arizona with my aunt and my mom for a wedding they don't know about rap music so they asked me okay who is this guy oh my god he's the most famous of rap singers of the world and i'm there in his new album Part of what I think people are learning though, because of your collaboration with Kendrick is that, Mariachi, that Mexico is such an enormous part of, of course, Los Angeles, which is obvious to every Mexican person or anybody who is actually in Los Angeles.

It's 50% Hispanic Los Angeles.

Yeah.

And yet, and yet people are sort of realizing now for real, like, wait a minute, Kendrick picked this Mariachi singer.

And now they're realizing the history that you guys share culturally.

He was bringing it all together, our music together, and music doesn't have any boundaries.

And

there is no race.

There is no color.

There is no frontiers.

Nothing

rap and mariachi imagine.

That's a beautiful example of how can music can get together all

cultures from all the world.

Something that I didn't appreciate, but I was doing a little bit of research about how many songs a good mariachi needs to know.

Because it's again, you play every type of event, happy, sad, celebrations, funerals.

So about how many songs would you say you know?

My friends, they always call me, oh my God, Data, you know a lot of songs.

You're like a, you know what, Procola, when you put money and put music?

Oh, a jukebox.

Oh, okay.

You're a jukebox because you know every, every, every

song in the world.

They ask me for a song.

Oh, yeah, I know it.

I know it.

You mentioned Salia Cruz before, and I was like, okay, so she obviously knows Guantanamera.

Of course.

that's an easy one.

You want me to sing it?

I would love nothing more

than that.

I have my guitar here.

I have my guitar here.

mera

Yo solludo embre sin sero

Tegonte cres la palma

Yo solludo precin sero

Tegonte crece la palma Antes de porir yo quiero yantar misverso se la máantana mera

guaquira vuantana

Oh my gosh, it's such a beautiful song.

Oh wait, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.

I got one more.

Do you know any Sinatra?

You got to know some Sinatra.

Frank Sinatra, yes.

My Way.

I record that song My Way, but Spanish version.

So it's one of the songs that makes me cry every time I sing it.

Yesterday, somebody asked for that song and I was singing and looking at my mother, she was there.

And like, I started crying because

she has dementia.

So it's very sad to me.

because she's my fan, my number one fan.

And she don't know what's going on, but she only knows that

she loves to hear me singing.

So I was singing it my way yesterday and I started crying because I feel very

sad to see my mom there.

And

she was a singer when she was young.

She sings professionally too.

And like she's living the dream.

with me, the dream that she couldn't do more.

And she's living it with me.

And I just want to do a lot of things before she forgets who am I.

I just want to do it for her because

she always

telling me, you have a lot of talent, Mija.

You sing beautiful.

People love you.

I want you to be more like famous and thinking everywhere.

And I want to do it because

before she forgets,

who am I or

I don't, I'm sorry, I get very emotional when I talk about my mom's

dementia.

And it gets me by my heart.

So sometimes I say, one, like, mom, come on, let's sing, because it's a therapy for her.

And she loves to sing.

She sings beautiful.

Music is

beautiful because now that she's sick with dementia,

she can sing every sonnet.

She doesn't

forget

the lyrics of the songs.

And that's a very, very good therapy.

What do you hope for Mariachi as

a form of music?

I just want to take my music all over the world.

So with this

GNX album of Kendri Lamar, I think it's going to be more connecting more people, more people.

with our music together.

So very honored and orguyosa.

How do you say orgosa?

proud, proud to be to

that I am Mexican woman and

in the name of all my Mexican mariachi friends, women that we've been here working a lot, trying to take our music more up levels.

And because we're a woman, it's very different.

It's very difficult to be a woman.

There's a lot of machismo that sometimes they don't let us do.

It's changing.

todo está it's like we're we're having more opportunities now more so in name of all my friends women talented women that i know a lot in name of them and i feel very proud to have my mexican flag

and

being sonorense mexicana i just want to do the best so they can they can

feel proud of me too.

I want to see you play the Super Bowl, Dara.

I want you to be there.

I want you and Kendrick to be there in New Orleans for the Super Bowl.

We're praying together.

This is what we're doing.

Yeah, I have this Mira.

I always, every night, I play Virgin Cita de Guadalupe.

Every night, La Virgin de Guadalupe.

I always ask God in La Virgin Cita to do the best for me.

to let me do.

If I gonna be there, I'm gonna be there because then.

So I don't know, but I have it in my mind that, okay,

anything can happen.

Imagine first woman, Mexican Mariachi, at

me too.

There, me too.

Me too.

It's gonna be historia.

And I'm pretty sure, Dara, that you're gonna do it your way.

My way.

Am I mad?

All right, so the episode isn't over yet.

Thank you for sticking around.

And the reason I'm still here is because I wanted you to know that after my conversation with Dara several weeks ago now, her life did turn back to relative normalcy.

She was still working every single weekend at quinceaneras and parties and restaurants.

But then the LA fires broke out.

And they were close enough that Dara could see the flames from her own front door, not far from Altadena.

And that night, she told us,

felt like a horror movie.

Her home ultimately wound up being okay, thankfully.

But her clients, the people who had just been marveling, as we had discussed, at having this woman from the Kendrick Lamar album in front of them performing privately for them,

they weren't all as lucky.

And all of them began canceling their parties altogether.

Because, of course, of course, they had to do that.

Which is how the other night Deira found herself at the seafood restaurant where she regularly performs.

And a customer approached.

and asked the human jukebox, that is Deira Barrera, to sing a song called Ami Manera,

or, as it's known in English, My Way.

And as Deira hit this chorus,

and this was just as she told us that she would,

she began to cry.

She was thinking about the suddenness of loss, she told us.

She was thinking about the fires, about Fernando, about her neighbors, about Los Angeles, about her mother, the woman who had taught her to love music in the first place.

And yeah,

sadness and happiness.

Sadness and happiness.

They really can feel like two strings on the same instrument.

And so, what Deira Barrera did, all that Deira Barrera could do there in the corner of that restaurant, is what she hopes to do in front of the entire world.

At the Super Bowl, maybe, if we're lucky.

She sang.

This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metalark media production.

And I'll talk to you next time.