The Afro-Latina artist, singer, and poet duendita has been mining the depths of her own interiority for years. As she’s examined her connection to brown and black communities, the legacy of trauma she’s inherited, and her place within the spectrum of human loneliness, she renders her feelings in disarming R. & B. that is weighty with history and emotion. On her piercing song “blue hands,” she sings, “I wish you a long, long, long black life / this is for the girls that vanish in the night in blue hands.”

Text by Julyssa Lopez