Latin Power Players
Meet Maluma the Mogul: From Selling Sandwiches to Running an Empire
Eighteen years before he sold out stadiums across the globe, Maluma was selling ham and cheese sandwiches. “That’s where my entrepreneurial spirit comes from,” he says, a proud gaze peeking out from behind his black-rimmed, orange-tinted shades. As a 10-year-old in Medellín, Colombia, Maluma (born Juan Luis Londoño Arias) would neatly pack his homemade sandwiches and tote them to Hontanares Elementary School, where he would sell them alongside lollipops. Then he would put the money he made back into his sandwich startup. “I bought more bread, more ham, more cheese and started to grow in the sandwich industry,” Maluma says, letting out an infectious chuckle. “I’d come to school with my sandwiches and people would ask me, ‘How much do they cost?’ And I’d say, ‘How much do you have?’ ” F...
Meet the Voices of Latin Protest Music
One of Brazil’s best-known singers and political activists, Veloso purposely wrote this upbeat tune about freedom in a rock’n’roll style, hoping to provoke Brazilian youth as a military dictatorship engulfed the country. Though Veloso’s use of electric guitars drew boos from a festival crowd, the song still became one of the most revered of the tropicália movement, and Veloso’s most popular in his five-decade career, with its urgent refrain about wanting “to keep living”: “Why not? Why not?” Víctor Jara, “Manifiesto” (1974) The Chilean singer-songwriter and Communist activist wrote this hauntingly wistful folk song — a testament to his reason for becoming a revolutionary artist — just weeks before he was tortured and shot to death by soldiers of Augusto Pinochet in the dictator’s September...
