With the holiday and cold here in NYC, I’ve been watching lots of movies at home. This past weekend I caught another film featured on the PBS Voces series, Celia, the Queen, about Celia Cruz.

Celia the Queen by Joe Cardona
Celia the Queen is a loving look at the amazing life and legacy of a woman whose voice symbolized the soul of a nation and captured the hearts of fans worldwide. Erupting onto the Cuban music scene as the lead singer for La Sonora Matancera, Celia Cruz broke down barriers of racism and sexism. With the powerful weapon of her voice and the warm tolerance of her heart, Celia soon became all things to all people. The film shows the diversity of the people whose lives she touched, from stars like Quincy Jones, Andy Garcia, and Wyclef Jean to ordinary people all over the world who loved not only her music but her incredible spirit. A co-presentation with National Black Programming Consortium.

What I found most interesting was how Afro-Latino and Pan-Latino Celia was in terms of the kind of music she sang and with whom she worked with while remaining rooted in lo Afro-Cubano. The film features other musicians she workd with like Johnny Pacheco, Oscar De Leon, and Willie Colon. What I also found interesting was how apolitical the film attempted to be. Not once was Fidel Castro mentioned and in a clip of Celia, she herself refuses to call him by name, but rather just speaks of how she worked even harder outside of Cuba post-Revolution to make sure her sick mother could get what she needed.