Canter Bridge

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This is the sound of a brilliant career reaching its apex. Unless Gloria Estefan surprises us with a turn no one could anticipate, Mi Tierra will go down as the best music she ever produced.

That’s no small statement, since Ms. Estefan has been wowing fans with one top-selling album after another from back in the days of the Miami Sound Machine.

I first came to know Gloria as a Latin singer while I was living in Latin America. Only subsequently did I become fully exposed to her English-language pop persona. Though Gloria was only two when her family emigrated to the US from Cuba and is therefore fully bilingual and bicultural, my opinion has always been that she excels when performing in Spanish.

Mi Tierra may well prove the point.

Backed up by rhythm and sound of astonishing consistency, Gloria sings a dozen winners (that’s twelve out of twelve) on this CD despite some daring and unconventional moves (‘Montuno’ and ‘Tradición’).

Surprisingly, her opening gambit (‘Con los años que me quedan’) got the lion’s share of this album’s air time in spite of it not being the strongest piece of the puzzle. The gem among the dozen is ‘Mi Tierra’, which I believe to be the most poignant musical statement of the emigrant’s dilemma ever peformed. There is a moment in this song when, amidst the nostalgic description of old Habana’s streets and alleys, Ms. Estefan asks, ‘Can I ever go back there? … Yo no sé‘ (= ‘I don’t know’). The three-syllable staccato of her ambiguous reply touches every emigrant’s secret knowledge that you can never truly go back to where you came from. Her unexpected response to a self-posed question leaps out and grabs you by the throat. It is one of Gloria’s finest moments and a hypothetical pickle that events in her native land may soon give her an opportunity to confirm or refute.

‘No hay mal que por bien no venga’ projects the Latin American spunk and survivability that make it a region to grow old in with a smile.

Estefan has never had the pure horsepower of Latin stalwarts like, say, the late Celia Cruz. But whatever she has lacked in natural talent has been more than compensated by the class, consistency, and good public citizenship that she has exercised now into the stage of mature motherhood.

I hope she exceeds Mi Tierra. But I can’t imagine it happening.