Shakira’s Children
Joachim Ladefoged/VII, for The New York Times
Homecoming: Shakira (left) outside the Pies Descalzos school in Barranquilla, Colombia, the night before the school’s dedication in February. She has built five schools in her country since 2004.
Published: June 2, 2009
Last October, on the plane from Miami to San Salvador, Shakira stared into her MacBook, pondering. The next morning, she was to give a speech on the importance of early-childhood development to an Ibero-American summit meeting that would gather most of the heads of state of Latin America as well as the prime minister and king of Spain, the prime minister of Portugal and a select group of somewhat lesser dignitaries.
Joachim Ladefoged/VII, for The New York Times
No hooky here: Shakira's fans await her arrival at the school.
This was not the usual venue for Shakira Mebarak Ripoll of Barranquilla, Colombia. That would be stadium-size, and could be anywhere in the world, filled with thousands and thousands of fans, the people who have made her among the biggest-selling female vocalists on the planet. But Shakira has this other side — she began charitable work right after she had her first big hit, at 18 — and two years ago she, her longtime boyfriend, Antonio de la Rua, and some of their friends conceived the idea of a loose union of Ibero-American singers, called ALAS (“wings” in Spanish), which would use the power of their fame to mobilize fans, and the politicians fans vote for, to advance the cause of early-childhood development. Since then they had rallied most of the biggest pop stars in the Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking worlds; held enormous concerts in Mexico and Argentina; gained the philanthropic support of some of Latin America’s richest families (as well as Warren Buffett’s son Howard); and captured the attention of a good number of heads of state. Now, flying down to El Salvador, staring at her Mac, she was, perhaps, approaching her moment of political breakthrough.
“It’s already too long!” she said, smiling resignedly as she typed out her speech. “And I still have more I want to say.” Tap tap tap. At the back of the eight-seater plane was the Spanish megastar Alejandro Sanz, scratching out his own speech, his girlfriend next to him, in a leggy bundle, nursing a bad cold. His relaxed focus contrasted with Shakira’s nervousness, and periodically Shakira ribbed him about it, which made him grin. Tap tap tap.
She turned back to look at him. “I’m afraid,” she said in Spanish, her face momentarily still.
“Y por qué?” Sanz asked.
“Because it’s so important.”
The little group — a publicist, a manager, an aide, the already mute girlfriend — went silent. Then Shakira returned to her speechwriting as we passed above Cuba.
Celebrity philanthropy, rock ’n’ roll philanthropy, is no longer a novelty, but what Shakira and ALAS were trying was indeed new. They were looking to use the power of pop to help the populations not of distant impoverished lands but of the Ibero-American world from which they come. They have a policy focus — early-childhood nutrition, education and medical care — that is on a scale beyond the reach of private charity. It requires the steady effort of the state. It cannot be addressed by rich countries’ check-writing. So the trick is to take pop celebrity, marry it to big business and permanently alter the way Latin American governments help care for the young and the poor. What the golden-haired young woman staring at her laptop was trying to do was a tall order, given the fragility of celebrity influence, the dubious track record of Latin American governments in providing social services and the lengthening shadow of a global recession that was straitening everyone’s budget. But she is not someone whom it would be reasonable to underestimate.
Shakira’s normal manner is intense and preoccupied, with interruptions of bright enthusiasm; but with fans she is all attentive patience. As she prepared to exit the plane in San Salvador, she kept her back to the small crowd of airport employees, adjusted her hair and composed her features. Then she flipped the charisma switch, turned, released the full wattage of her brilliant smile and descended the stairs.
Once we were in the S.U.V.’s, the pace quickened. We had an armed escort, sirens blared and we moved very fast along a narrow road past brightly colored hammocks strung up inside fruit and vegetable stands made of boards and rusting tin. She told me in English that she had been here before, “many times.” She said that with her first and second albums — actually her third and fourth, but she doesn’t like to speak of the first two — she toured constantly through Latin America, “to every radio station, even the smallest,” slowly building an audience. Her theory, which would have meshed well with her somewhat extreme work ethic, was that the hard effort would pay off in loyalty.
“All an artist needs,” she added, by way of explanation, “is her fans.” The odd thing was that she looked so sad when she said it.
That third album, “Pies Descalzos” (“Barefoot”), came out when Shakira was 18. It was a huge hit, and she quickly took some of the profits and put them into projects for feeding and educating children in Colombia. The chorus of the title track begins, “You are part of an ancient race/With bare feet and blank dreams/You were dust, you will be dust.” Not all her songs have this kind of melancholy, but a lot of them do. While her high-energy, hip-slinging persona has taken her fame to the heights, it is this very intimate, often suffering, sometimes insecure and wised-up voice that won her fans as she trooped along the byways of Central and South America, one radio station at a time.
Speeding along in the S.U.V. past the rickety roadside stalls of San Salvador, Shakira kept her focus on practical policy: “It has been scientifically proven,” Shakira said — as Bono told me in an e-mail message, “When she gets going on the subject of child poverty she can be pretty scary” — “that a kid that receives proper stimulation and nutrition during these early years will develop all their potential in life: intellectual skills, learning abilities, social and emotional abilities. . . . So many other countries in Asia or in Europe are already putting early-childhood development at the top of their agendas, and we want our heads of state to do the same.” To that end, she told me she would insist on obtaining promises of action and the establishment of an early-childhood working group at this year’s Ibero-American Summit. “We want that every president walks out with a firm commitment. We want to make sure that they will go back to their countries with those children between zero and 6 years old in their minds, and understanding very well what early-childhood development initiatives mean.”
The meeting’s working committee would, helped by ALAS’s research wing in New York and a more political headquarters in Bogotá, establish and define best practices and help states develop pilot projects in at least five countries. Shakira explained that “the idea is that this committee could report back during the next summit in Portugal in 2009,” looking back on what was accomplished or at least presenting “a very concrete plan” for future accomplishments, to be agreed and acted on before the 2010 meeting. Of course, even the most concrete plans can vanish into a bureaucratic void. Much depended on how strong the committee’s pulse would be, under the leadership of Enrique V. Iglesias, a former head of the Inter-American Development Bank (for more than 17 years) and once Uruguay’s foreign minister. A great deal also depended on how well ALAS’s Bogotá office was able to bird-dog projects and generally keep momentum up when there were no pop stars around.
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Joachim Ladefoged/VII, for The New York Times
Statues don't lie: A sculpture of Shakira outside Barranquilla stadium.
In private or public, Shakira often uses the sound bites of the expert social entrepreneur. “I grew up in the developing world, I grew up seeing injustice,” she told me. “I grew up in the middle of a severe social crisis, left and right wings fighting with each other, people in the middle caught in the crossfire. I’ve seen millions of people displaced in Colombia. But I’ve also seen that, in countries like mine, when a child is born poor, he will die poor, unless he receives an opportunity. That opportunity is education. It’s that helping hand that they’re looking for. Latin America is a young continent, it’s malleable, it’s flexible. We still can change.”
ALAS may seek to change Latin America, but it also represents something very traditional — the power of concentrated wealth. Its president, Alejandro Santo Domingo, is the 32-year-old scion of Colombia’s formidable Santo Domingo family. The vice presidents are Shakira’s boyfriend, de la Rua, who is a son of a former president of Argentina, and Alejandro Soberón, a very successful Mexican entertainment promoter and developer. He is a business associate of Carlos Slim, one of the world’s richest men (and a prominent stakeholder in The New York Times). Slim is on ALAS’s board, as are Joseph Safra (Brazilian banker and investor), Alejandro Bulgheroni (Argentina; oil and gas), Emilio Azcárraga (Mexico; broadcasting) and Stanley Motta (Panama; airlines). Latin America is run by families, and together the ALAS board accounts for a significant portion of the region’s economy. Could Latin America’s richest philanthropists succeed in reducing its crushing levels of inequality when generations of strongmen, technocrats, guerrillas and reformers have failed?
Over the past decade, Latin American governments have increased their spending on primary and secondary education, which have improved significantly. But early childhood was much less of a priority, and according to Inter-American Development Bank (I.D.B.) figures, 46 million children in Latin America under the age of 6 are going without basic health care and education. Governments have been working on early-childhood development more in the past five years, although it remains an immense challenge to get a country’s health, education and social-service ministries to work together. And the recession has indeed led Latin American governments to look to richer countries for help in financing social services.
The evening I arrived in El Salvador, I discussed ALAS’s aspirations with the president of the I.D.B., Luis Alberto Moreno, at a heavily defended ultramodern hotel. Security was very tight for the meeting, with large parts of the city closed to normal traffic. As you drove through the dim streets, you’d see few people until, at the edge of the light cast by a stray street lamp, there would appear a clump of small men with big rifles — or else a single sentry, trying to blend in with the foliage. Latin America is far from the fire zone it once was. There are young adults now who don’t really remember the civil wars. Yet it took a tremendous political heave to bring many Latin American countries out of the serial miseries of the late cold war and into some semi-peace with themselves. And if it was so immensely difficult to do that, might it be all too easy to slip back? This, as the economic skies darkened, was the unofficial theme of the meeting. It preoccupied Shakira, of course: just as she was getting the attention of this powerful audience, they might be newly able to plead poverty! And it preoccupied Luis Alberto Moreno, who has advised Shakira and whose bank is one of the principal vehicles for Latin American development.
A former Colombian ambassador to the United States — and businessman and government minister and, in the bloody 1980s, television journalist — Moreno is a very shrewd observer of Latin American politics and politicians. We were both old enough to remember El Salvador’s civil war and to think of the country partly in those terms, but as Moreno pointed out, the generations have changed. In ours, “We first took sides, then looked for solutions. That’s not the way they” — the younger generation, including Shakira — “look at things.” This younger generation is more practical. It is also more global. “What I think Shakira and that whole group did,” he said as our first beers arrived, “was to touch on a new generation of Latin Americans that, with their music, has become global. It is a generation that she represents.” With her Lebanese ancestry and English-language songs — with her huge bilingual hit “Hips Don’t Lie,” done with the Haitian-American singer Wyclef Jean, for example — Shakira showed how universal a Latin artist could be. At the same time, in a difficult balance, she has tried to stay Latin American. “When you compare everything that everybody has done — Bono and others — toward Africa, it has been largely G8-type artists, or from G8 countries rather, looking to Africa,” Moreno explained. In the case of ALAS: “Latino artists are looking to Latin America, and I think that is unique. And I think that is extremely powerful, because their relationship is deeper as a consequence.”
The depth of engagement brings with it many complexities, not least the prospect of glamorous people having to take on unglamorous work. “Doing programs on early-childhood development, for the most part, has to be done by governments,” Moreno said. “This gets into something very complex, which is understanding how governments work, which is not an easy thing. Especially how governments spend, how the whole process of a budget takes place. And, at the end of the day, it’s all about a budget.”
I told Moreno how, on the drive in, Shakira said to me that, for an artist, all audiences are the same, but that she was now learning that politicians are a different audience, and not all audiences are the same after all. “What is equal to politicians and artists is that they both try to achieve as big an audience as they can,” Moreno said. The artists “do it with music,” while politicians “do it by selling hope and building up people’s aspirations. And yes, there is a gap of knowledge, probably more for the artists — to understand governments and how they work. Their star power is so strong that they get accustomed to solving problems easily.”
The next morning, Shakira went to the conference hotel for a ladies’ tea. If you have heard her music or seen her videos, you might have to strain to imagine her at a ladies’ tea. Yet this was where gender, fate and ambition had led her: to a tea with the wives of the assembled presidents, before her conference appearance. Shakira’s feminine allure is at once limiting and critical to her power. At a Columbia University forum last fall, Jeffrey Sachs noted her attractiveness as part of his speech, quoting Wyclef Jean’s line from “Hips Don’t Lie”: “She makes a man want to speak Spanish”; Shakira took the compliment, if that is the right word, gracefully. In person, she inhabits her attractiveness with a pleasant carelessness, as if to say, Why would I want to be any other way? In her songs and videos the repertory is much wider: rage and hunger; sheer athletic joy; easygoing, self-confident lust; physical insecurity (one of her English lyrics memorably makes use of the phrase “lose those pounds,” and elsewhere she sings of her “humble breasts”); and an acute sense of the physical and mental pain of attraction. In an essay written when Shakira was 22, Gabriel García Márquez remarked not just on Shakira’s “will of granite” but on an “innocent sensuality that she seems to have invented by herself.”
She got there by stages: a child prodigy, she recorded two albums she did not like for Sony, and acted in a soap opera, and won the “Best Bottom in Colombia” contest, all by age 17. This hot-teenager period ended in some kind of crisis; she emerged from it a mix of dark spirits and high energy. She became a pop star, with a particularly strong following among young women and girls. By her mid-20s she was changing again, blonder now, not quite so innocent, the rhythms more adventurous: still danceable, but less poppy. This was the persona that went into the two-album “Oral Fixation” series, which made her more famous still, and rich, and took her to the point where she could aspire to influence the public policies of an entire region.
The presidential meeting appeared to require subdued glamour, and for her late-morning speech Shakira wore a light gray dress with her hair down. At her entrance, diplomats discreetly took photos from their chairs, while a Salvadoran military officer strode up, cellphone before him like a prow, until he nearly collided with her.
The president of El Salvador welcomed her, Sanz and Fher, the lead singer of the hugely successful Mexican rock band Maná. Then Shakira began: “We are here to initiate the creation of a grand alliance, between the public sector and civil society, to protect the most fragile people in our population, the children.” She noted the economic crisis — “We realize that the coming period will be a difficult one” — but moved on to her talking points. She cited research to the effect that “for each dollar invested in the early education of a child, this child will eventually return to the state $17” (an I.D.B. figure). She spoke of the “regional working group” that would be set up as a result of this meeting, describing its structure and goals, then concluded, “Let us find the strength to defend the very youngest in these difficult times.”
When the speeches were over, Shakira bolted to a reception room. The president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, proved to be a fleet-footed head of state and was soon trying to charm Shakira with praise. With slicked hair and a forceful black mustache, Zelaya came from a big landowning family and was well into an undistinguished term tainted by scandal. Unsmiling, Shakira pressed him for specifics on his early-childhood programs and to make concrete commitments for the future, which put the man back on his heels. In came Chile’s president, Michelle Bachelet, and Shakira turned to her happily, crying out, “Mi heroína!” and embracing her. They chatted for a while, with the Honduran struggling to insert himself into the conversation.
Back into the S.U.V.’s, back along the narrow road with motorcycle cops fore and aft and a helicopter above, back into the jet, and soon San Salvador was beneath and we were off to the northeast and the Caribbean. Had I been able to see, Shakira asked, whether the eyes of Colombia’s president, Alvaro Uribe, teared up when he spoke at the meeting?
I had wondered about it, too, but couldn’t tell, though I was sure his voice had caught.
This is Shakira’s difficult dance: to be close enough to the politicians to move them, but not so close that you become their tool and their enemies become your enemies. The Salvador meeting in October was a high point, but by the beginning of this year there were mutterings — questions about what it had really amounted to. Was it just a very fancy photo opportunity? ALAS was preoccupied with some internal issues: in a short time it had gone through two executive directors and, by the time of the Salvador meeting, was on to a third. The size of ALAS’s promise was still much larger than its activities and impact: a classic political problem.
This provided an opening for Shakira’s enemies. She had never taken a public position for or against President Uribe’s grinding war — popular but quite bloody — on the decades-old insurgency of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The influential Colombian columnist María Isabel Rueda wrote in El Tiempo on Feb. 1 that the country had twin pop-political poles: the singer Juanes, who openly supported President Uribe and generally took political stands (and whose music was more self-consciously Colombian); and Shakira, whom Rueda tagged as diplomatic, unwilling to take a strong stand (for or against Uribe, for example) and, in her international style, “more Canadian than Colombian.” Now that is hurtful.
The controversy had roots: Juanes led a peace concert at the Colombian-Venezuelan border in March 2008, at a time of tension between Uribe and President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and Shakira did not participate; conclusions were drawn from this fact. In her column and a long interview the next day with the singer Miguel Bosé, a key ALAS backer, Rueda was poking at something, trying to make a stir. If Shakira was going to hold herself above politics, Rueda seemed to ask, then why should she have any claim on political power? Who exactly was Shakira to be leading a political movement? Who elected her? At least on a local or national level, an artist can seem to be quasi-elected, or accountable: because his appeal and artistic territory are local, he is subject to recall by the local audience. A global artist, by contrast, can transcend the local dynamic in pursuit of a more universal (or at least regional) message — and might lose her accountability.
There are abundant oddities here: the ancestrally Lebanese Christian educated by nuns in Barranquilla going on to become an international sex symbol; the political player who stays out of politics. It’s the job of Shakira’s boyfriend and all-purpose adviser, de la Rua, to smooth these contradictions and perform the alchemy of pop politics. Early-childhood development, he said, somewhat disarmingly, was such a blameless goal that, once it entered the political discourse, it was impossible to oppose. “It’s a fashion that we are creating,” he told me in English. “We are forcing a modern president to talk about early-childhood education. If they don’t know what it is, we make them look bad, in a way.” Having created a fashion, ALAS was now, with its research capacity and political-lobbying arm, aiming to help give substance to it. “Presidents are reacting, and nobody wants to be behind,” de la Rua said. “So every president is asking their minister, ‘What are we doing in early-childhood development?’ ”
His hope is that ALAS will have a life without Shakira. “We would love to see that happen,” he said. “We would feel very proud to see that the foundation is working on its own.” The stature and charisma of popular singers would then be something like a renewable resource to be called on by ALAS for the shaping of public policies. And if Shakira or another artist were to be dragged into political battle, at least her enemies would not become ALAS’s enemies as well.
One lyric Shakira takes special pride in is from “Hips Don’t Lie,” when she sings, “En Barranquilla se baila así” — “In Barranquilla they dance like this.” A Caribbean port town, notable in Colombia for its ethnic mix (Basques and Arabs, in particular), Barranquilla is not a thriving place these days. You can occasionally still spot a horse-drawn cart clopping through town. But it has a highly engaged citizenry, an exuberant annual Carnival and a tradition of achievement in the arts. This is where Shakira’s story began. Her father’s marriage was falling apart when he met her mother, Nidia Ripoll. Their only child, Shakira, captivated them. She was intellectually and artistically precocious, reading and writing and singing and dancing. Her father lobbied the nuns at Colegio La Enseñanza to admit her early, and when he later had trouble making the school payments — his jewelry business was going through hard times — he told the sisters: “Don’t worry about the money. Shakira is going to be famous. I will pay.” She sang at birthday parties; she won all the local talent shows (and there were many). In talking to her childhood friends and former schoolteachers, I found myself almost laughing at the sheer consistency of the story: the extremely intelligent, limitlessly ambitious girl, a natural leader, whose little body emitted a sound you could hear across town.
Barranquilla is also where her charity began. The Colegio La Enseñanza required students to help teach reading and writing to poor kids. This took young Shakira to La Playa (“the Beach”), a neighborhood of squatters, mostly, next to a band of swamp where the Magdalena River reaches the sea. It is among the most desperate sections of greater Barranquilla, which is saying something. Shakira formed the idea of helping the children of La Playa once she had fulfilled her father’s vision of global fame and fortune. And now here she was back, 15 or so years later, two days after her 32nd birthday, to dedicate what one member of her entourage called “her masterpiece”: a pre-K-through-high-school colegio in minimalist exposed-cement style, complete with a dance studio, a lovely pond and an artificial-turf soccer field.
It was such a tranquil place — organized, focused and calm — in the middle of a tumbledown neighborhood. What Shakira has done here is simpler than ALAS, with its political maneuverings. She has built five schools since 2004. The schools are real, with a fixed number of children getting a good education in a safe environment. The simplicity ends there, of course; earlier that day, at the old school across the street, some parents were lined up, too late, hoping their children might be able to attend Shakira’s colegio. (The school is public, but its classes had already been selected by application and lottery.) In the streets of La Playa, I met kids who were going to attend the new school, and they were predictably thrilled; and I met kids who were going to be in the regular schools. They were struggling with the knowledge that they had already missed what was probably the only great chance they would ever have.
Later that day, Shakira wandered up and down the hallways with de la Rua, her parents and María Emma Mejía (the head of her personal foundation and a key adviser). When the crowds gathered outside the school spotted her, they would shout her name, and she’d wave and smile. The rest of the time she was all seriousness, asking questions, examining every corner. When I told her how nice the school looked, she said, with a grin: “It better. I paid enough for it.” There was no bitterness in it, but there was no joy either. She was such a mix of charm, control and anxiousness. It was hard to know whether she took much pleasure in her achievements. Her childhood friends tended to say she seemed less happy now than she had in years past. I suppose that’s the kind of thing people will say about someone who has traveled a long way from them. Still, it reminded me of the lyrics from a song on her last album: “What is your guess, darling?/Have I lived too much, too fast?/. . . Can you tell me how I used to be?/Have I missed my chance?”
Near dusk, on her way to a photo shoot, Shakira climbed the school’s central staircase with some difficulty, using the railing and gently lifting her hips up at each stair. (“On various occasions she has had an irregular heartbeat, inflammation of the colon and skin allergies,” García Márquez wrote 10 years ago, noting that toward the end of one tour she had to be carried from the stage once the performance ended.) After the photo shoot she asked to be left alone before beginning a round of news conferences. The sun was setting. She sat at the top of the stairs for some time, looking to the northwest, across the pretty new quadrangle with its blocks of sod, then the rusting rooftops of La Playa, and on to the breakwater at the mouth of the Magdalena. When the sun had gone she strode in heels to a room crowded with journalists, smiled convincingly and gave interviews until well past 10 o’clock.
The next day involved another exhausting round of visits and speeches to inaugurate the La Playa school. President Uribe was there, and he spoke at length about early-childhood education, which Shakira took as vindication. (The facility has, of course, a state-of-the-art early-childhood wing.) There were speeches and performances and more speeches, then a party at the mansion of a prosperous Barranquillan, followed all too closely by breakfast meetings and a press junket to Quibdó, a bend in the Atrato River, where Shakira built a school five years ago for children displaced by Colombia’s internal conflict.
On the flight to Quibdó, Shakira wanted to talk, again, about early-childhood development. She said that Latin presidents “want to be on the same ship as, you know, Obama and some of the other presidents. They’re noting that this is becoming a priority for so many other governments in the first world, and that the underdeveloped countries should not stay behind.” She endorsed Obama, sang at his inauguration and spoke with him backstage. Obama asked her about her coursework at U.C.L.A. (Shakira’s career stinted her education.) He asked her, she said, to “help” with Latin America. That’s the kind of thing that can boost a person’s confidence. (So was Bill Clinton’s visit to the Barranquilla school in March.)
The Quibdó school was impressive, a clean, safe, earnest place with Internet access (via satellite), on a dirt road pitted enough to require four-wheel-drive cars. Shakira talked to most of the students, or so it seemed. It was extremely hot. Shakira appears not to perspire. Nor does her energy flag. I heard this attributed in part to clean living; she had, for example, celebrated her recent birthday with rounds of ice skating and bowling.
Back at the Quibdó airstrip, Shakira posed with various soldiers — they were part of the ongoing counterinsurgency in the area — and then we took off. The journalists and others on the plane started to drop into sleep, leaving Shakira in the unaccustomed position of being inactive. She looked around. Her adviser, María Emma Mejía, went forward in the cabin to chat. Mejía is a former foreign minister and education minister of Colombia, and a serious politician. She knelt in the aisle and they — together with Trevor Neilson, a philanthropy adviser — talked about future plans as the other passengers rested. What about a nutrition program in El Salvador? What should they talk to Howard Buffett about for a next project? How big should their next moves be? They talked rapidly, in English mostly (for Neilson’s benefit). Mejía returned to the rear of the plane after 20 minutes, saying with a world-weary smile, “There, we had our board meeting.” Shakira turned to Antonio de la Rua and, with her gaze fixed on his face, started talking with him about what to do, what to do next in this relentless and unlikely life.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/magazine/07Shakira-t.html?_r=2&ref=global-home
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