A 95-year-old Cuban-American grandmother has won best new artist at the Latin Grammy Awards after being forbidden to pursue music as a child. She is the oldest musician ever to be nominated in this category. In her speech, the nonagenarian thanked her grandson, a composer, who recorded her voice, which earned her the stardom she has long deserved.
Singer-songwriter Angela Alvarez tied for the best new artist in the 2022 Latin Grammys on Nov. 17, alongside artist Silvana Estrada.
She later got married and had a family of her own. After the Cuban Revolution, Angela made the decision to send her four children with the 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children that went to the United States in 1962 to flee the communist oppression. Angela was eventually able to join them, and her family later settled in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
However, during those years her love for music never left her side. It became a crutch during the painful years separated from her children, a comfort after the loss of her husband and daughter to cancer, and a blessing when building a new life in America. Angela always played for her children and grandchildren, until Carlos decided his grandmother deserved to shine brighter.
“Every chance she had to grab a guitar, she was singing to us,” Carlos, 42, said. “One day, I called her up and I said, ‘I want you to sing me the songs that you compose.’ She walks out of a room with these notebooks that was, like, more than 40 songs, and the songs were like a diary of her life.”
In 2016, a friend asked Carlos what he was waiting for, and that is when he realized the time had come to record his grandmother’s music from his home in Los Angeles. In doing so, actor and producer Andy Garcia got wind of Angela’s story and was moved enough to produce a feature-length documentary on her life, “Miss Angela,” which was released in 2021.
