With Mexican and Salvadoran roots in the San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles, Angelica Garcia has spent the last few years creating a new, second family for herself within the welcoming community of Richmond, VA. This multicultural dichotomy shapes her new album Cha Cha Palace – her Spacebomb Records debut and follow up to 2016’s Medicine for Birds. The album finds Garcia confidently assembling a “mental scrapbook” of her journey for listeners, and for herself, all the while confronting a lifetime of feeling split between two identities.

Pulling inspiration from her experience growing up in the predominantly immigrant Latinx communities, Garcia’s roots are woven all throughout Cha Cha Palace. And like Lorde and Billie Eilish, she isn’t afraid to tear pages out of her diary and share candid emotions that might be difficult, and oftentimes daunting. The past is always present within her memories, songs, and art, from lead single “Jícama,” to her covers of the traditional Mexican folk song “Llorona” (on which she duets with her mother) and Jose Alfredo Jimenez’s “La Enorme Distancia,” here improvised by her grandmother as included as a vignette. “Guadalupe” – which references La Virgen De Guadalupe (a Catholic icon of the Latinx community) – is a meditation on the deity as a dynamic 14 year-old who is the epicenter of a culture, and the power and responsibility that comes along with that.

This kind of humanity and honesty that audiences seek is found in spades throughout Cha Cha Palace. Two years in the making, the album is the result of Garcia’s daily experience of finding her own sense of identity and place, feeling torn between saying and doing, of being a voice and speaking with your voice, of being Latinx while being American.