Jennifer Lopez Felt She Sung Better in Spanish Than in English
Jennifer Lopez may be from the Bronx, but she has Hispanic roots that she couldn’t be prouder of. The prolific singer only found herself getting closer to her heritage when she started singing in Spanish.
What Jennifer Lopez has said about making music in Spanish
Lopez found something new about herself as an artist when she sung in her family’s native tongue. Although she’s of Hispanic descent, she admitted to having difficulty learning the language.
“I grew up speaking English,” she once told Glamour. “My parents moved here when they were very young, and my two grandmothers were the only people in my family who spoke Spanish. It wasn’t until I did Selena [1997] that I started actively trying to learn the language. I realized I was going to have to do interviews in Spanish and didn’t want to be embarrassed. I still can’t say I speak it perfectly, but I speak it much better now.”
Lopez would honor her love for music and her Hispanic roots with her fifth studio album Como Ama Una Mujer, which was recorded entirely in Spanish. Co-produced by her ex-husband Marc Anthony, the experimental record was one of Lopez’s many successes. The album reached number 10 on the Billboard 200 chart, and was the first Spanish record to enter Billboard’s top 10 at all. Although learning the language was daunting, she became enamored by the process of singing it. So much so that she felt it made her a better artist.
“I love singing in Spanish,” Lopez said in an interview with Billboard. “Honestly, I think I sing better in Spanish than I even do in English. That’s a big part of who I am.”
Lopez hasn’t released another Spanish album since Como. However, she hinted years later that it might not be her last Hispanic record.
“I’m always working on a Spanish album. I never finish it. But you don’t want to put anything out until you feel that it’s the right thing at the right time. I’ve been working on some songs on the album for three years, [and these two new ones], we did them and we put them right out,” she said.
Jennifer Lopez once shared that she didn’t want to act in Spanish
Whereas Lopez embraces singing in Spanish, she doesn’t feel the same about acting in the language. She had to speak a bit of Spanish in the feature Selena. El Cantante, which she also did with Anthony, was another film that focused on Lopez’s Hispanic background. But in her younger years, Lopez felt it was better to avoid Spanish-speaking roles for the most part.
“I don’t think I could get it right, because I have to think about the words a lot, and if you can’t dominate, it’s difficult,” Lopez once told Hola! (via Cosmopolitan). “I would not act well in Spanish.”
But in Lopez’s more mature years, she felt it was important to exercise her power in the film industry to create more representation for her community. She took steps towards achieving this goal with Marry Me, which she collaborated with Colombian singer Maluma on. It was noted that Marry Me featured a rare casting where two of the film’s three stars were Hispanic. Owen Wilson, who’d play Lopez’s love interest in the film, was the third star.
Lopez revealed that the movie’s racial makeup was an intentional choice.
“I’ve been doing movies for 25 years now, and I’ve done 40-something movies,” she said. “There have been three to four movies in my entire career where I’ve had Latino costars. So with my production company, one of the things we wanted to do with this film was have an international star who could be right there with me to make an album that was bilingual. That was a big deal for us. That has always been the goal of my career, to show diversity in the different characters that I can play.”
