San Antonio cumbia rising star Vanita Leo continues to shine on new EP Cumbiamante

All killer and no filler, Vanita Leo’s new EP is full of radio-ready jams. Credit: Anisha Patil

Cumbia-pop diva and rising San Antonio star Vanita Leo is scheduled to drop her excellent new EP Cumbiamante this Friday on all streaming platforms.

The cohesive eight-song release is the latest and most substantial product from Leo’s fruitful collaboration with LA-based Alan Vega. The young cumbia producer has a knack for melding the traditional with the contemporary, which fits Leo’s approach to a T.

Fans will already know and adore the two tracks at the heart of the EP — Leo’s most recent single, “Caballito,” a sassy, upbeat cumbia with impressive vocals, and “solo tu bb,” a dreamy, wistful tune released in May 2024.

But what a fitting home they’ve been given in Cumbiamante.

The title of the release loosely translates as “cumbia lover” — double meaning intended — and it plays with the fact that all the tracks are love songs of one kind or another and almost all cumbias.

All killer and no filler, the EP is full of radio-ready jams, showcasing a polish and a unique sense of artistic identity, rooted in the past but pointed into the future. It also displays a vocal charisma rare for any artist, let alone one so young. Leo is just 22.

“Kais Mal,” a playfully vengeful and lovelorn cumbia diss-track, and the crushingly beautiful bolero “San Antonio,” are both instant standouts, in addition to the pair of gems mentioned above.

The cohesive flow of Cumbiamante also impresses. In a music milieu that sees fewer and fewer artists releasing EPs or albums, Leo and Vega have crafted a work that tells a sonic story. Every note seems both natural and necessary.

Leo told the Current that her work with Vega has helped her grow into herself as a creative force.

“He has helped me a lot with learning who I am as an artist and essentially continuing to find myself,” she said.

Leo added that she’s getting better at “staying authentic to myself and learning to decide what I do and don’t like for me and for my brand” — the kind of self-assured pursuit at the heart of artistic maturity.

For his part, Vega credits the power and versatility of Leo’s voice for making her a dream collaborator.

The pair established their working relationship through an Instagram correspondence, of all things. And, in some ways, it feels as if each was waiting for the other to begin exploring their full potential.

After all, Vega’s songs with Leo are well aligned with the impetus that drew him to cumbia more than five years ago and away from the punk and rock he started out with.

“I just wanted to challenge myself to dig more deeply into my roots, and my transition into the musica Mexicana space was a part of that,” Vega said. “And, now, it’s all I do.”

Indeed, the themes of roots and history — familial and otherwise — continually arise in conversation with both artists.

Leo said her decision to open the EP with the song “San Antonio” comes back to a “sense of melodramatic nostalgia” that reminds her of the working musicians in her family and the “beautiful romance” of her hometown. Although the song almost didn’t make the release, it now seems like the only way it could possibly have opened.

Leo’s made a video for the song, which will be released Friday with the EP. We’re told that videos for the remainder of the tracks, in true cumbia-pop diva fashion, are to follow.

“In the moment when we wrote that song there were so many worries from family members and friends that I was going to move to LA,” Leo said. The inclusion of the track felt good as a reminder to everyone — maybe to herself, especially — that “San Antonio will always have my heart.”

“My whole brand as an artist is about being a Mexican American kid from San Antonio and what that means and what it means to fall in love with that identity,” she added.

When asked about the value of celebrating her identity in a society that continues to demonize and terrorize immigrants from the Latinx world, Leo seemed to know exactly what she wanted to say, but proceeded with magnanimity.

“Without touching too much on politics, or identity politics…” She paused to consider her words.

“I mean, colonizers have always wanted us to forget our identities, our roots, our motherland,” she continued. “This is not new, it has been going on for generations, these attempts to rob us of our history. So, when we come together as a community and we embrace our identity, it’s like a big middle finger to the colonizers, the living ones and all the dead ones.”

As Leo’s star continues to rise — which it’s almost certain to do, given both her talent and vision — it’s clear she will become even more of a force to be reckoned with. Especially since she’s carrying both her own history and the tumultuous history of a region and its music into the future in a way that’s uniquely hers.

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San Antonio cumbia rising star Vanita Leo continues to shine on new EP Cumbiamante

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