I grew up in London from the age of seven. I had come from Buenos Aires, the only place I knew till then. I remember lots of dinner parties with long dark-haired, poncho-wearing folk, and evenings of fierce political debate with invariably a splinter group on a smoky top floor of more intense folk plotting revolutions in far off places.

That was all fascinating, until I discovered music. I remember the exact moment. It was 1981 and I was 9 years old, squeezing through what seemed like a forest of flared jeans, to get to the stage at what was then called the Hammersmith Palais. When I got to the front, my eyes fell on the beautiful black man on stage, who filled my ears with a playful, sweetly percussive sound that I'd never heard before; so rich yet with an easy simplicity, joyful, yet so so tender. Overwhelmed with emotion I didn't know whether to dance or cry. 

I still thank the flaky babysitter, whoever she was, who failed to turn up that night, forcing my parents to sneak me into my first ever concert on a cold winter’s night. Gilberto Gil had cemented my love of music forever. More importantly, it made me feel for the first time that what made me different, and at times embarrassed, like when my mum waited for me in the playground in those dreaded ponchos, was suddenly something I wanted to be part of. 
 

Jose and I met in 2001, twenty years later, upstairs at Bar Lorca in Islington, a popular salsa club at the time. I had just come back from Latin America, where I had spent most of my twenties, as a journalist, like my dad. Jose was pretty much fresh off the boat from Venezuela. He was a massive music fan, who was running a Latin music record store, and I was writing a book. Even though we met dancing salsa, Jose was most impressed with my collection of Argentine rock, Spinetta, Charly Garcia, Soda Stereo, who he was crazy about (though I was more of a ricotera)

From the day we met we’ve been inseparable. We joined forces in life and in work, building a family and a cultural institution at the same time. About a year after we met, Jose, who had always been a salsa fan, came back from his record store with a CD, Tego Calderón’s El Abayarde, the 2002 seminal reggaetón album. “This is the future of Latin music,” he said.

Jose soon began running London’s first reggaetón clubnights. He pioneered the urban Latin music scene in London with his La Bomba nights at Ministry of Sound, which he then took to Europe, and produced the UK's first ever Reggaeton Festival. At the time no other music curators or media pundits in the UK were taking notice of reggaetón.

While Jose was promoting reggaetón nights, I began a Latin culture magazine, determined to fulfil an unfinished dream of my dad who, back in the 1980s, started a Latin American magazine in London, before his Venezuelan investors pulled out. From then on, Jose couldn’t stop coming up with ideas, and I would take up each baton and run.

The next thing we knew, on top of the clubnights and LatinoLife media, we started The LUKAS (Europe’s only Latin Entertainment Awards), a red carpet event inspired buy the MOBO Awards, celebrating Latin achievement in the UK. It wasn’t till 2016, however, that we launched LatinoLife in the Park (initially called La Clave Fest).

By then LatinoLife magazine and LUKAS Awards were going strong, although not making any money of course). Jose’s club-nights were giving a platform to first generation UK-Latin rappers, LatinoLife magazine was promoting Latin culture from my own perspective as a UK Latina and The LUKAS was our effort to give more visibility, recognition and profile to Latin American artists in the UK.

But it felt like we weren't really making an impact: while The LUKAS was a brilliant a VIP red-carpet gala, that everyone wanted to be at (the likes of David Gilmore and Vivienne Westwood would tell us it was the best awards ceremony they’d ever been to) after the amazing party, and us exhausted, no festivals would book our award-winning Latin artists. For The LUKAS to have some kind of legacy, we decided we had to do a festival ourselves, one that showed off our unique UK Latin identity rather than focus only on international names.

The Most Important Thing is to Begin

I had come to the UK as a toddler and Jose as a teenager, but neither of us felt represented by the Latin music events being put on by UK promoters, because of the type of acts (not always most popular with Latinos) and the absence of our community in them. We wanted to tell our own story, as opposed to an often clichéd, low-quality one (say salsa dancing on Strictly ) or lumped together, out of context, in a World Music offering. We wanted to present our own version of ourselves and reclaim the narrative about us. We wanted a festival Made by Latinos, for Everybody.

But where to start? The best piece of advice I’ve ever been given was when I interviewed Jaime Lerner,  the former mayor of Curitiba. I had been sent to this city in Southern Brazil by a US magazine as part of an article on ‘cities that work’. By implementing a revolutionary public transport system, the Lerner had transformed his city into one of the most socially integrated in the Southern Cone. How did he do it? “The most difficult thing of all,” he said. “is to begin.”

With no money, our only option with the festival was to start local and start small. We were living in Hornsey in North London at the time, which happened to have its own festival centred around the plaza in front of an amazing Art Deco listed building that was the Hornsey Town Hall. It was a lovely community event, only that the full diversity in Haringey wasn’t represented. We figured it could definitely do with an injection of Latin joy and so approached the organisers about us taking over a day. 

Of course, we were never going to start small. We wanted to do EVERYTHING; a proper cultural take over. And so we approached art galleries, small venues all around the area, and ended up in over 20 venues. We had poetry readings, intimate Jazz concerts, a pub gigs, even two theatre pieces, a human tower competition, a street parade, with Bolivian monsters and drumming troops and samba dancers marching down Crouch End Broadway to the amazement of locals doing their shopping. This was the start of what is today the Big Dance Extravaganza of 500 dance groups that has become one of LatinoLife’s most popular features to this day.

We were ambitious from the beginning. In the 6 weeks leading up to the day of the festival, we infused the neighbourhood with Latin culture, via workshops and talks in schools and community centres. We sent salsa celebrities and salsa teachers into schools, organized a free school trip to Lin Manuel Miranda’s ‘In the Heights’, and organised a school assembly talk by the Colombian ambassador.

Not surprisingly, with crowds spilling out into the streets, by 2018 were told that we were getting too big for Hornsey. After months looking for another venue, the Mayor of London, who had now started offering his funding, kindly offered us the Scoop, the stunning bowl scooped out of the ground beside the then egg-shaped City Hall, between London and Tower bridges.

Being in central London attracted people from all over the capital, and our audience doubled. This was the year that the crowd really took over. Omar Puente jumped among the people with his violin and sent everyone crazy, Latin Fun Machine and Yanet Fuentes got the whole 5,000 plus audience line dancing, and the day turned into a full on salsa rave in the middle of the city. Never had The Scoop been so alive.

 
Alas, again, we had become a victim of our own success; we’d brought so many people that the bowl was overflowing. We were told we would have to find somewhere else. Homeless again, where could we go? With councils now making big bucks hiring their parks out to major festival promoters, pickings were slim. Ah but a stroke of luck…back in Haringey, the Friends of Finsbury Park had told us they were in talks with Haringey Council about being given a day to celebrate the park’s 150th anniversary, could we help them? The very organisation complaining about major events in Finsbury Park wanted LatinoLife in the Park - a free event, accessible to all and loved by those who attend - to help restore the park’s original intention as ‘The People’s Park.’
 
Still a two person show, we weren’t ready to be a park festival. But offers like this didn’t come every day. What an opportunity for us, and more so for artists; London was finally to get its first Latin major park festival for years, and for the first time ever, it was UK Latin artists that were headlining.
 
And so it was that in 3 years, we had gone from being a tiny community festival to a major park festival. In 2019 we had 40,000 people in Finsbury Park, and it was literally just Jose and I and a few helpers. That was the year Jose ended up in hospital, such was the strain of the juggling act.

When finally, in 2021, we did get a production manager, he jokingly asked if Jose would be stage managing, whilst filling in for the drummer, grilling sausages at one of the food stalls AND refereeing the kids football tournament that we’d decided to put in the middle of the two stages (utter genius or complete madness). There were no hospital visits this year, only a long drive across London with a car load of stinking garbage, thanks to some misbehaving traders. As we paid the dodgy geezer at his processing plant, it was a reminder that, feeling on top of the world after miraculously pulling off another joyous festival, there was still the rubbish to take out!

By 2022 it became clear that there was a new energy that was taking centre stage, and it belonged to young people. We had drawn a whole new audience of young people. as we pushed the young UK urban Latin artists to centre stage. We were the first UK festival to feature UK Urban Latin talent, singing their very own London-Spanglish, And inviting dancehall and grime artists they grew up with. The crowd’s reaction was unbelievable, giving the festival a whole new energy. We could see what a buzz it gave young Latino artists. They were on the big stage, like their urban music peers, and the next generation in the audience could see themselves in the future.

When I think of us, I think of a bullfighting scene: Jose in a ring provoking me with his red cape of ideas; me charging at them like they are actually possible and stubborn enough not to stop until proved right or wrong. We are both idealists and naturally entrepreneurial (or suckers for punishment) and have more than once ended up collapsed in a bundle, wondering what are we doing and why and who started it.

Now LatinoLife in the Park is the UK’s largest one day Latin music festival, the only Latina-run major park festival, voted the UK’s most inclusive festival (FestSpace). And yet it is now just one in a whole ecosystem of activity, that we take “into the park” every year to say, this is who we are.

It’s amazing to see how diverse the festival has become. We see  Afro-Caribbean women in traditional head gear, others head scarves, men in turbans others baring torsos all dancing to Mexico pop hits. We see Mexicans and Bolivians dancing to salsa, Argentines and Cubans dancing to samba.

2026, almost 25 after Jose and I first met and started working together, it seems that I grew up in and call home has finally got the music that I grew up with. With Bad Bunny just having produced a kind of fever over in Tottenham, with the British media talking about the joy and warmth of his music, the same things I first felt at nine years old. Even though Brazil and Puerto Rico are different places with different language, there is a commonality and in African roots of their musical culture.

Since it began 10 years ago, LatinoLife in the Park’s growth has mirrored a global cultural phenomenon: Latin Music has gone from being a niche genre to the most consumed music genre in the world, LatinoLife in the Park has grown from an obscure community festival to the UK’s largest Latin Music Festival.

LatinoLife in the Park is not only the best place to discover authentic Latin music, its the best place to discover unique homegrown Latin talent right here in the capital. As the single biggest employer of Latin talent, contracting over 700 performers LatinoLife is the launchpad that help build the careers of young UK Latin artists, in the hope that some will find their way to the forefront the global music industry. Who knows, perhaps one of the UK artists you’ll see at LatinoLife will BE the International headliners of tomorrow. The difference is that they’ll be singing in Spanish and Portuguese.

LatinoLife in the Park will take place on Sunday 19th July in Walpole Park, London W5 www.latinolifeinthepark.com