PALOMA MAMI

One of 2021’s most exciting new pop voices is a Chilean American who’s blending R&B, reggaeton, and her own unique style

paloma rocío castillo astorga was just 18 when she wrote her first song. She self-released it as a single — “Not Steady,” a gauzy, Spanglish R&B reproach to an overzealous suitor — with a music video that she filmed in the parking lot of her tía’s apartment complex. Within a few months, she became the first Chilean American artist to sign to Sony Music Latin. “Literally, ‘Not Steady’ was the first song I ever wrote, ever sang, ever recorded,” she says.

That was almost three years ago. Right now, she’s trying to stay very still so as not to disrupt her WiFi: She recently moved into a new place, in Santiago, Chile. It’s a change of pace from how she spent much of 2020, quarantining and recording her upcoming debut album in Puerto Rico. “Honestly, if it hadn’t been for making music, I don’t know what I would have been doing,” says the singer, 21, who records as Paloma Mami. “Going crazy, probably.”

Born in New York to Chilean parents, Paloma grew up in uptown Manhattan, where she fell in love with genres from R&B to Latin pop. Her father is an architect and her mother worked in interior design. Each gave her a distinct artistic inheritance. “My mom was obsessed with Marc Anthony,” she remembers. Her father introduced her to Amy Winehouse, Gwen Stefani, and Avril Lavigne. “I had my little punk-rock moment like everybody did,” she says, with a laugh. She remembers always being surrounded by jazz, citing Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Frank Sinatra.

New York was its own teacher. At her school, which was made up of mostly white students, she’d ask classmates to call her “P,” modulating her middle name from Rocío to Rose. She heard reggaeton by Daddy Yankee and Don Omar while growing up in the city and during her summer visits to Chile, a bridge that connected her to a musical identity that felt like home.

At 16, Paloma was at what she calls “the peak of [her] rebellion.” She’d skip school often — she recalls a total of about three months’ cumulative absence. When her mother found out, she was “devastated.” “We were all . . . breaking apart in a way, me, my sister, and my mom,” she says. They ended up moving to Chile, where they’d be closer to family and away from the expenses of New York. “I thought it was going to be the worst thing, and it ended up being the best thing that ever happened,” Paloma says.

In Chile, she began to pursue music for the first time, outside of karaoke and family parties. She appeared on a Chilean TV talent competition and dropped out after two weeks, disillusioned with the lack of creative control. Before long, “Not Steady” was a hit and Sony signed her. “Believing in yourself gets you far, guys!” she says.

The fame, and the whiplash, were instant. “I was all over the place,” she says. “That was the hardest thing to overcome: to realize that . . . none of it is real.” Her 2019 single “Don’t Talk About Me” is a rebuke to the haters from middle school and high school, and the new ones who say she’s “not Chilean enough.”

Paloma hopes to see the music industry stop doubting women, especially early in their careers. From the start, she was wary of doing guest features, recalling the pressure to hop on tracks with “the biggest artist of the moment.” “Usually at that time, it was always a guy,” she says. In 2019, she released “Mami,” a song honoring the power of the feminine archetype, without which, she sings, “there’s no heaven ni reyes.” The song samples Puerto Rican reggaeton pioneer Ivy Queen’s 2003 song “Quiero Bailar,” echoing its theme of feminist autonomy.

In October, Chileans voted with a 78 percent majority to replace the country’s constitution, imposed in 1980 under Augusto Pinochet’s regime. “It’s a beautiful country that has been suppressed for a very long time, and the people are taking it back,” Paloma says. She admires her country’s teenagers, including the metro-fare protesters who catalyzed a movement against economic inequality in late 2019.

This year, Paloma is excited to keep writing her own story. “I have a lot of . . .” She trails off. “Actually, let me not tell you,” she says, with a selfassured laugh. “Surprise.”

“Chile is a beautiful country that has been suppressed, and the people are taking it back.”