La Doña Wrote Her New Album for Immigrant, Working-Class San Francisco

An independent artist in the middle of a breakthrough might be tempted to contort herself into an industry-approved mold. But La Doña isn’t just any artist.

The San Francisco singer, producer and bandleader has spent the past few years building her national profile on the festival circuit (even Barack Obama is a fan). But even as her reach grows, she’s doubled down on her commitment to her working-class, immigrant San Francisco community and liberation politics. When her management team didn’t see her vision, she broke up with them and placed a bet on herself. And while the majority of the music industry stays silent on Gaza, La Doña has spent the past year calling for a ceasefire in the streets and on stage.

La Doña’s latest album, Los Altos de la Soledad (out Sept. 6 via Empire, with support from the California Creative Corps Fellowship), arrives as her most ambitious work yet. The exquisitely layered, deeply collaborative project features contributions from La Doña’s music students, a 23-person orchestra and acclaimed musicians like Berkeley jazz flutist Elena Pinderhughes and New York Dominican guitarist Yasser Tejeda, among others. It digs deep into musical styles La Doña has spent a lifetime studying — boleros, corridos, cumbia, reggaeton — and pulls them into a snapshot of love and life during tumultuous times of war, class struggle and gentrification.

“I have to follow the music,” says the artist, whose real name is Cecilia Peña-Govea. “I can’t really follow the market or follow an audience or follow what’s expected of me. I have to just follow the creative ideas that come to me, which is really liberating, but also really scary because it’s all on me.”

The title track of the album, a lush, symphonic bolero assisted by Awesöme Orchestra, is a thesis statement on how La Doña leaned into solitude during a time when her personal and professional worlds turned upside down. On top of becoming her own manager, she spent last year navigating the end of a long-term romantic relationship. And for the first time in her life, the youngest child of activists and musicians — who’s accustomed to the happy chaos of collaborators and friends swirling around her — decided to sit with herself and face fear and discomfort head on.

La Doña emerged with a profound belief that in order to grow outwardly, she needed to deepen her roots. Those include a political tradition going back more than half a century in San Francisco — of solidarity with Palestinians fighting for rights and self-determination in Gaza and the West Bank.

“The struggle for Palestinian sovereignty and liberation has been part of this transnational struggle for the liberation of all Third World people,” says La Doña, noting that she sees it as parallel to the Indigenous Land Back movement.

A particularly fiery moment of Los Altos de la Soledad arrives on “Corrido Palestina.” After protest chants blare in the interlude “El Mundo Se Levanta” (“The World Rises Up”), La Doña’s vocals swell with determination as she calls out the Biden administration for sending arms to Israel. “No se puede silenciar nuestros gritos y canciones” (“They can’t silence our cries and songs”), she affirms as the horn section resolutely marches forward.

Yet being this outspoken about a war supported by the majority of the U.S. political establishment has its risks, as La Doña experienced firsthand during her summer tour, when a small group of audience members took offense to her activist stance on the stage. “Everybody wants to see an artist because … they’re inviting you into their lives, into their creative process, into their creative output,” she says. “And then all of a sudden they say something that you don’t like, and you feel like you have license to contact promoters, contact agents, contact funders, arts institutions and try and silence me or tell me to apologize for saying ‘free Palestine.’”

Instead of shying away from the topic on Los Altos de la Soledad, La Doña decided to give the people protest anthems. In addition to “Corrido Palestina,” the dark reggaeton track “Córrales” — which takes aim at corrupt police — features a chilling spoken word section by San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin that follows the money from violent oppression at home to U.S.-backed conflicts abroad: “If you turn down the television low enough / You can hear San Francisco begging for more war profiteering,” he deadpans.

For La Doña’s collaborators, her willingness to take a stand connects them to a larger purpose. “I think she’s always had a stance that the role of the artist is to say your truth, to stand up for what’s right, to use music — or whatever art you’re doing — for the greater good,” says Naomi Garcia Pasmanick, the saxophonist and backing vocalist in La Doña’s band who also has directed many of her music videos.

With the heartsick banda track “Confesiones,” reggaeton post-breakup party anthem “Mejor Que Matarte” and symphonic bolero “El Regreso” as lead singles, Los Altos de la Soledad has serious range, and pushed La Doña to level up her technical abilities. In the studio, she brought together her band, the featured artists and 23 Awesöme Orchestra musicians, plus arrangers and guest producers. She recorded poetry, protests and interviews, and developed lyrical concepts, or “story maps,” with her music students in San Francisco and Oakland classrooms.

David Möschler, Awesöme Orchestra’s conductor and founding artistic director, was impressed with how she got so many collaborators on board with her vision. “There’s a lot of intention behind all that detail, and a lot of history and a lot of respect for what came before,” he says, “and then wanting to … lift up her whole community, and everybody in her band and that she works with.”

That sense of upliftment comes through most clearly in a pair of tracks that connect the album’s A and B sides: “La Ida de Luisito” and “El Regreso.” The first song features Luis, an 18-year-old music student of La Doña’s, in his own words over a strumming guitar. As he reminisces about his grandfather playing the instrument every morning in his hammock in Guatemala, he also reveals that he’s in the U.S. without his family, unable to return home because of safety concerns. With cinematic strings and vivid lyrics that romanticize the Guatemalan landscape (“El cielo rompe en mil pedazos con la aurora” — “the sky breaks into a thousand pieces with the sunrise”), “El Regreso” beautifully captures a feeling of uprootedness and alienation immigrants and refugees know all too well, and links Luis’ struggle to those fleeing violence in places like Honduras and the Philippines.

La Doña concerns herself with “undertold stories,” and this grassroots way of songwriting with community input has been deeply gratifying. Her artistic ambition is steadily expanding, as is her audience, but it’s that bottom-up approach of listening to people, and that deference to tradition in pursuit of a new sound, that has made her music so singularly soulful.

As she puts it, “As my project grows, it’s my intention that the roots grow deeper as well.”

La Doña celebrates Los Altos de la Soledad with an album release party at Cafe Du Nord in San Francisco on Sept. 30. Tickets and details here.