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It's Latino Usa by Mariano josaf Today. The Tiara's a musical group of sisters singing about Latina empowerment, self love, and politics. The Tiaras have been playing together since they were just little girls. They travel around Texas and perform at different gigs to try to get their name out there. The trio of sisters would walk on to a stage start playing, but they weren't always taken very seriously.
It was pretty hard because we were young and we were in a music scene that was catered towards men. We were playing a lot of different gigs, the lineups would be predominantly men. We would get a lot of different looks when we were on stage.
That's twenty years old Toy, she's the lead singer of the band.
It was hard to find that niche of Latinas and music, so we felt like we had to be that for ourselves. We've made it here and we're just so proud of ourselves and we want to inspire those other younger musicians and especially Latinas that are finding themselves in that place.
That same passion and drive for owning who they are and creating music is also shared with her two other sisters. Here's twenty two year old Sofia, the band's drummer.
I don't know, I just feel like beats inside of me just come naturally when I hear a song. When we're making songs, something just clicks and me, honestly, I don't know how to describe it.
And older sister, twenty four year old Tiffany.
I would always listen to classical music too, and I just imagine myself being on like those big stages, having an orchestra and everything that kind of vibe.
Now, these Edmanas are living their dream, bringing their meal music to an even bigger audience. They're catchy tunes dive into themes of Latina power and self love, and these sisters are also not afraid to get political. Now I'm going to hand things off to all three of the Tiaras, Toy, Sophia, and Tiffany. They're gonna tell us more about the role of sisterhood in their creative process and inspiring future generations of Latino and Latina musicians.
Here are the Tiaras in their own words, Blue.
Ken Susca of the Hi. My name is Torri Balgietra. I am the youngest of the band. I play guitar and I am the lead singer of the Tiaras. So the start of the Tiaras was from pretty humble beginnings. Our parents really raised us in a household that was immersed in music and culture and family and love, and
it was really cool. Our dad was a DJ right after he was a breakdancer in the eighties, so he picked up the turntables and stuff like that, and we were born and we followed him to all of his different events, and we kind of just fell in love with music and how it changed people's emotions and body
movements and brought people together. And one day, my sisters had been taking music lessons because they naturally showed some interest in, you know, banging on pots and percussion and just trying to spend more time with our grandmother playing piano. And there was one day third grade I was in music class and I saw my teacher playing guitar and I was really really interested. I was like, what is
this world like? The guitar is filling up the room and making everyone sing and dance and so right after that I got lessons and we realized we were in the same household playing instruments that pretty much go with a band. And then we just started playing covers together and then writing the songs that were kind of bad, but it needed to happen for us to you know, innovate and make our own songs. But it's been a long time. We've been together for about a decade, but
we've been sisters forever. And now we're the Tiaras. Welcome the Tiara Girl, the tr Girls, Tierra Girl.
The Tiara Girl, the Tiaras.
We are changing our fand name. Yes, we're still Austin's favorite young Latina sister power trio, but we are growing up. Yes, we are formerly known as the Tiara Girls, and we recently changed our name to the Tiaras because of the simple fact that we're growing up. Like I said, we started very young, we were tweens, preteens, and now we're entering our twenties. So we want to honor the fact that we are growing up. We're women now and we want to keep our roots of you know, Tiara, and
that came from our last name. Our last name is Balcierra. So we took the ending of that and changed the spelling a bit, had a little play on words. It doesn't have to mean a crown, but it can. We
embrace whatever whatever way people want to interpret it. But we wanted to do that because we felt like we were maturing with our sound, We were finding our path in life, in our identities and music in our community, and we wanted to bring people along with us, our supporters that were there with us from day one, We wanted to bring them with us on this new era that we're embarking, and just for the simple fact that we're not girls anymore and we want to represent Latina
woman in that way. The role of sisterhood is very, very impactful in my life, specifically because I grew up with a queer identity in a Mexican American household, so it was very It was pretty daunting at a young age. It made me feel invisible, very alone. But I had my sisters there with me, and I was able to tell them my secrets and they were able to hold them for me for many years and to always you know, pipe me up about speaking up and coming out and
stuff like that. And they they were very good and encouraging me to create a song about it, which is let Love Free.
My Love's got a place son from the.
I would say writing the song let Love Free was a very big journey for me. It started, the meaning of it changed every step of the way. I think it was born from the simple just fact that I wanted to be free. I was just like really tired. I was like my parents know. And the pinnacle moment for me was telling my grandmother. Because you know, you grew up Mexican American. Their grandmother is the foundation of the family. She's the one that feeds us, that nourishes us,
nourishes our hearts and mind. And after I came out to her, you know, I felt full and it was it was weird because I was like, it's just my grandmother, but it was like, I don't know, my world was
kind of just colorful after that. But I wanted the song to have a universal meaning because I wanted this piece of art that we created to fall under the categories of self love, of releasing a love that does not serve you anymore, of you know, letting love free, and coming out and living your truest identity.
I love it.
Nice. It just feels so beautiful to be able to sing that to different crowds now and to say I'm queer, I'm gay, I'm a lesbian on the stage because you know, I grew up and I think at the age whenever we began to play was when I started to know. And now that I can like fast forward into the moment of being like, this is my song that I wrote, this is my coming out song, and it's just so crazy. I always imagine my younger self watching us in the crowd,
cheering us on. It's so beautiful because now that we've released a music video, we've had messages of you know, there was a Mexican dad that messaged us and he said, I showed the music video to my thirteen year old daughter and she said that it pushed us to have that conversation and her to come out and to be just immerse herself in her identity and to allow me
to love on her in that way. I feel so grateful that the music video and just this piece of art that we created was able to push that moment forward for others. My name is Tiffany Bartierra. I am
the oldest sister. I played bass well, when Torri wanted to or decided she wanted to come out, Me and Sophia knew for a while, and I would take her dates and stuff and I would lie for her, and I never really ever felt like I was forcing her, like Okay, you need to tell them, and I knew that it was on her time, and we were always supportive about do you want us to be there when you tell her parents? Is that something you want to
have privately? And I feel like Tory has always been kind of like an old soul, and I felt like when she came out, she grew wiser, and I was like, I don't know how that's possible, but I felt special that I could hold that secret for her. And then I felt whenever she came I was just like so happy that she could live her life and not have to feel like shame or embarrassment or feel like she
was living two different lives. Yeah, I definitely view it as our music as anthemic, and I think that's also because I listened to a lot of that music myself. I think I have artists that I listened to like definitely, like Gwen Stefani, in no doubt, I think would have been up that she had such a cool style, making me feel like I can hold this power and go
throughout my day. Currently I feel like Megan is Stallion, all these female artists, like they just put out all this music that makes you feel that power in yourself and I want to be able to create that type of music too, Like I feel like I can't go that just like motivates me throughout my day to do anything that type of music and like leave it to
the people. That was definitely like, okay, let's make music for people who want this change, so that let's make music for people who need this inspiration, who want to hear want their voices to be heard. And I love that we can make this type of music and have people listen to it and feel the same way that we're feeling.
You gotta leave.
They still.
We had a big expressive way.
It's Tory was the one who came up with the idea for leave it to the people. And that was during or after like the twenty sixteen elections.
We the citizens of America are now joined in a great national effort to rebuild our country and restore its promise for all of our people.
And we were all I feel like that was a moment in our lives where we became very political and we were educating ourselves about the systems and the people who are in charge of those systems and different injustices that were taking place, and understanding that this is affecting
our lives and people who look like us. I think as a band, I guess it is an intention of ours, but I feel like naturally it just comes to us to make some of our music a little bit political, or maybe you can interpret those messages as political because our dad kind of shows us all the things that are happening in the news and educating us, and we have these conversations, and as adults, as women, as brown people, I feel like we have that power and responsibility to
bring this to the light of our audiences because we know we have people in power that are listening to us. My name is Sophia. I am the drummer of the Tiaras,
and I'm the middle Sisters. If Yeah. I feel like our songs carry really heavy messages and a lot of them can be something you don't really want to talk about, which is why we put you know, some groovy feel to it gets you dancing but when you really think about the lyrics, you're like, wow, you know, it opens the conversation for something you probably don't want to talk about,
but we do. We need to talk about it, we need to create change, and we want to make it fun at the same time, which is why we're mixing it with like these groovy beats and music. So usually Toy's the one that comes up with like a little melody some lyrics, and then she'll show it to us. And usually that's when I start like kind of hitting on the table, showing a couple beats of like what I think should go there, and Tiffany and Toy can easily give me an ugly face like no, that doesn't
go there, and like we don't. I don't take it seriously, you know, or they can be like, oh yeah, I keep going. So like, the ability to like just voice our opinions so easily is like usually how it goes, and usually how our songs get created. So I guess like fast, but also like in a calm way at the same time, because we're not like, oh, like I don't want to say this because I don't want them to think I'm like mooh, we're able to like say
anything and everything. And I love that we always communicate through our eyes when we're on stage, which is honestly, like so comforting to have that feeling because you know that we have each other's back. We have these little like signals when like, oh my gosh, I am not going to know this part. We're going to switch it up without even saying one word, which is like, like you need that because if you mess up, you have to, like,
you know, play it off super smooth. But also you know our practices making music, it's super smooth, super It's fun because you don't have to feel like you have to be careful with your words. If you don't like something, if you want to be creative, you could just speak up. I don't know, it's just super comfortable, and I really I was thinking about that too, like yesterday when we were playing, like, this is so fun experiencing something with
your family. We're already so close and this is just gonna be a great memory to have done the road. I've been saying you every day.
That is already you thought, it's.
Even though you're standing in Lo So when we were making so Chinguana, I remember like going to or playing a lot of gigs and stuff and hearing changunna be used all the time, and honestly, we didn't use it as that much, but being around it, we found ourselves being curious about it. So we got to like know the word where it stems from, learning the history of it, asking our grandma about it, and when we said it,
she was like, whoa, Whoa'll calm down. We're like, I mean, now there's a different meaning, and we had to explain that to her. So but yeah, we took those experiences and you know just how we our journey is with music, we realized and with ourselves. We realized that we are too ching guanas. So we wanted to make a song, an anthemic song, you know, get people women excited and realizing that they're chimguanas. The things that they're doing are
just so badass. And when we created the song, you know, Torri brought it to us and I feel like we put a lot of that Mexican like goumbia feel to it, which was super fun. As a drummer to start playing, I actually brought in my friend Flamencia and I asked her about like some of those beats to add into it. So she Got has definitely one of my favorite songs to playing so loud but.
Happy like so many so.
Diesel. So my favorite thing about being in the Tiara's band is I remember this one gig we had where a little girl came up to me and she hid this big smile on her face with her dad, and he was like, Oh, this is my daughter. She's actually wanting to learn the drum set. Can you talk to her, like give her some words of encouragement because you know, she's sort of wanting to give up because of how hard it is, but also not being able to see
many girls her age doing what she's doing. Having that moment with her was I kind of like gave her words that I would have given myself at that age, and it was, I guess full circle. It was crazy, like looking into her eyes and trying to give her, you know, those words to keep her going. But that was definitely one of the best moments of my life.
There's this movie, I think it's called Soul. It's a Disney movie, and there's like a part where like if you into the zone and you like this, they see the people in the zone and you get into this different world, and I feel like that's where I go with my sisters on stage and I just escape from everything and I'm focusing on the music how it's making
me feel. I like to see people, you know, in the audience dancing, smiling and singing and creating that happiness and maybe creating that moment for them to escape from whatever's going on in their lives too, And I just feel that every time we play a show. We played in Dallas and it was I think the first time that I was just reminded of the power of our band and how we were creating spaces of joy and emotion.
For people that look like us.
And I think it's so special because we grew up, you know, having to scan out the crowd and adjusting our set list, adjusting our demeanor because of that. But now we've stepped into like some new pairs of shoes and and we're comfortable with just being who we are and creating that space of of dance and movement, of singing and seeing people like already knowing our songs. Is so crazy because it makes us rewind back to the moment where we were creating it and we were like,
this is good enough. I hope people love it. It's just it's a reminder that we're powerful and we love creating spaces of joy for people that look like us and people that want to celebrate us.
So came to me shade the giant.
See all.
Know that it's been trying fighting, swe are dying.
This episode was produced by Rinaldo Leanos Junior.
It was mixed by jj Carubin.
The Latino USA team includes Victoria Estrada, Andrea Lopez Cruzado, Jni mar Marquez, Marta Martinez, Mike Sargent, Your Saudi and Nancy Kujillo. Nile Ramirez is our co executive producer. Our director of Engineering is Stephanie Lebau. Our senior engineer is Julia Caruso. Our marketing manager is Luis Luna. Our theme music was composed by Zenia Rubinos. I'm your host and executive producer marieo Posa.
Join us again on our next episode.
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Latino USA is made possible in part by the Heising Simons Foundation. Unlocking knowledge, opportunity and possibilities. More at Hsfoundation dot org, the TAU Foundation and w U. K. Kellogg Foundation, a partner with communities where children come first.
Megan THEE Stallion has a like a badass way of like Cali, you cheese, Damn let me talk.
No, okay.
I agree with all my sisters about because we listened to basically the same thing.