La India returns to Lehman and gets personal with The Press

With her eccentric style filled with mystical glamour, La India -- The Princess of Salsa – returns to Lehman Center for her third annual Mother’s Day concert.

With a career spanning more than 30 years, La India received the Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s Premio Lo Nuestro, a Spanish language awards show for Latin music. 

Her songs served as empowerment ballads during the third wave feminist movement of the 90s, when women of color began to join the cause and sexual harassment training in the workplace was still a fresh concept. McSorley’s, the 171-year-old watering hole in the East Village didn’t have their first female employee until 1994 – the same year La India’s groundbreaking album dropped, “Dicen Que Soy/They Say That I am.” The song “Ese Hombre/That Man,” filled with lyrics of a woman scorned, was heralded as the ultimate break-up anthem of the time amongst Hispanic women.

“Es un gran necio/un estúpido engreido/egoista y caprichoso/un payaso vandidoso/inconsciente y presumido/falso enano rencoroso/que no tiene corazón.”

“He is a huge bother/a stupid conceited man/egotistical and unpredictable/a vain clown/inconsiderate and smug/false bitter dwarf/who doesn’t have a heart.”

However, the lyrics were not her own. Charged with Spanish guitar and belted with the same heartfelt torment, the song was written by composer, Manuel Alejandro and originally sung by Rocio Juardo for her 1979 album “Señora.”

According to a 2024 interview with Billboard’s Griselda Flores, La India didn’t sympathize with the words, saying, “I love men and I didn’t feel anger towards them. I thought, ‘How am I going to sing this?’”

But sing it she did, and the song sat at number one on Billboard’s Tropical Airplay for five weeks, catapulting her Salsa career.

But La India wasn’t always her name. Born Linda Bell Viera Caballero in San Juan, Puerto Rico on March 9, 1969, she moved to the Bronx as a toddler and grew up all over the Boogie Down.

“Westchester, Parkchester, 140^th and Cypress Avenue -- even in Castle Hill where I still always go to this day,” Caballero told The Press, adding that whenever she visits the Bronx, she makes a point of grabbing a slice at Yankee’s Pizza on Westchester Avenue.

She was a product of her environment, getting into freestyle music in the mid-80s with the likes of John “Jellybean” Benitez and joining the freestyle group TKA, made up entirely of Puerto Rican musicians.

“Jelly was like, ‘Well, look, we're not going for Linda. It's a typical name, and Linda Bell sounds Southern and you're not from Nashville,” Caballero recalled laughing. “I went to speak to my grandmother and I said, ‘Grandma, what am I going to do?’ And she was like, ‘You need to go by the name of India.’”

India was a name given to Caballero by her grandmother due to her caramel skin and black, lustrous hair. The name was trademarked and Caballero ran with it. She went on to tackle a solo career and released her debut album, “Breaking Night” in 1990.

It wasn’t until she made the move to Salsa that she became known as La India. Singing with a live band is what drew Caballero to the genre and she credits Salsa legend, Eddie Palmieri for paving the way for crossover artists like her.

“He was a living legend, a living icon,” Caballero said of the Grammy-award winning musician who won for Best Latin Recording in 1975. “He won and he opened those doors.”

She went on to do several collaborations with legends like Tito Puente’s and the late, great Celia Cruz, the Queen of Salsa who is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in 2003.

“My godmother,” Caballero told The Press.

She also sang with fellow crossover artist Marc Anthony. Their 1994 duet, “Vivir Lo Nuestro” was another chart-topper, also hitting number one on Billboard’s Tropical Airplay for five weeks.

She loves to laugh at her own jokes. Her voice is strong and heavy with a thick Puerto Rican-Bronx accent. She lives in Puerto Rico with a zoo of pets, including 14 dogs, two cats, turtles, fish and birds.

“My canary right now is singing while we’re doing this interview,“ she told The Press with her signature chuckle.

She keeps video cameras on them all when she can’t be home to take care of them. She also spoke on more serious topics, like body image.

For years, fans and the media have commented on Caballero’s weight, a symptom of her thyroid disease and an issue she has battled with, both physically and psychologically.

“I had to take the punches of people saying, ‘Oh, she’s fat,’” she said. “But 90 percent of the crowd that was my female fans, they didn’t care that I was fat, they came to hear me sing.” 

Caballero found a camaraderie and comfort in her fans that she couldn’t find in her own mother. Their relationship was always tumultuous. Caballero told The Press that she took the brunt of her mother’s resentment, bred from the abusive relationship she had with her husband, Caballero’s late father.  

“If he was dysfunctional, if he was a womanizer, if he wasn’t good to her, why should I be blamed for that?” she said rhetorically.

She has tried to repair her relationship with her mother over the years to no avail.

“It means a lot to me to continue to celebrate Mother's Day, no matter if I don't have my mother by my side,” she said of her upcoming concert. “I have to learn to love myself and accept that God gave me a beautiful voice and a beautiful career[and] fans that love me.”

Catch La India at the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday, May 10 at 8 p.m.