Yolanda Pérez

Among the women who have taken up banda singing, Yolanda Perez stands out in a Mexican genre long led by male voices. The style, built on brass sections and rumbling tubas, took root across Mexico and the southwestern United States, where Perez ranks among its Mexican-American artists while having spent her entire life on U.S. soil. Born in Los Angeles on May 20, 1983, she grew up in that majority-Latino metropolis and developed complete fluency in both English and Spanish from childhood onward. Although banda’s standard language remains Spanish and she most often records in that tongue, Perez sometimes switches to English and recasts a soul or doo-wop standard in banda form. In the same way that the late Tejano singer Selena and fellow banda/corrido artist Jenni Rivera—known throughout the regional Mexican scene as La Diva de la Banda and la Primera Dama del Corrido—have done, she contributes a distinctly Chicana viewpoint. Her pop-tinged take on banda and corrido owes much to daily life inside Los Angeles’s expansive Mexican-American population, the setting where she first performed traditional Mexican songs as a youngster and drew steady support from her father, Refugio Perez. A musician who performed with the Mexican ensemble Pancho Villa, he gave his daughter the nickname la Potranquita. She continued singing at a steady pace through her teenage years, and at nineteen she signed with Fonovisa Records, a leading imprint in the regional Mexican field. One year later, in 2003, the label issued her first album, Dejenme Llorar, when she turned twenty.