Angelica Garcia remembers the first time she sensed that “Jícama” had the people’s ear. The 2019 song had yet to be released, but the musician was giving an early preview during a show in Hollywood. “I see you, but you don’t see me,” her voice rang out in its anthemic opening line—“and people just started singing along!” Garcia said in a conversation last month in New York. Call it musical telepathy, or universal truth. “There is no way they knew that song.”

It was early on a Wednesday morning, a few hours before a Greyhound bus would ferry her home to Richmond, Virginia, and the 26-year-old was mixing off-duty comfort (Sin Fronteras sweatshirt, orange Nikes) with full-tilt makeup: matte blue eye shadow with exaggerated, painted-on lower lashes. Garcia had worn the now signature beauty look two nights earlier for a solo set in Bushwick, and if I’d surveyed the crowd more closely, I would have spotted an homage. “Somebody actually came to my show and had put my makeup on!” she said, still marveling.

Fans turn up where you least expect them—which brings us to the second time that “Jícama” caught attention: when Barack Obama put the track on his 2019 year-end list. That day, Garcia, foggy from a red-eye flight to Philadelphia, mistook the text messages flooding her phone (“I’m crying right now!”) for bad news. “And then I saw,” Garcia said, with a baked-in incredulity at finding herself in the company of Beyoncé, Rosalía, and Bruce Springsteen. “You can’t pitch Obama! It was very crazy.” When I asked if his daughters might have clued him in, she laughed: “That would honestly freak me out even more.”

The presidential endorsement (one that quite a few candidates might appreciate ahead of Super Tuesday) has lent a glittery sheen in the run-up to Garcia’s latest album, Cha Cha Palace, out today. Of course Obama loves a winding groove, but he’s “bicultural too,” Garcia pointed out, “and that’s an American experience that a lot of people have: feeling like you’re one way when you’re with your family, but then you have to go out into the world or the workforce,” she said. At the Bushwick show, she pronounced her first name the Spanish way, with an aspirated G, but she often anglicizes it. “That’s maybe some psychological shit that I still have to process.”

A Los Angeles native like her mother, Garcia spent much of her childhood at her maternal grandparents’ home, a Mexican-Salvadoran household pulsing with sound. (Her biological father is from Mexico as well.) “My mom, aunt, and uncle all sang—mariachi music, ranchera music,” said Garcia, describing how the siblings, as children, would perform together at rodeos. “I grew up hearing harmony, hearing how to fit myself into what my family was already singing.”

With her stepfather’s encouragement, Garcia auditioned for the downtown performing arts high school, LACHSA, where she majored in vocal jazz. (Classmates included the Haim sisters and Phoebe Bridgers.) It was a formative time—her sinewy vocal trills speak to serious study—but sometimes a difficult one. “I’d go to school, and everybody was like, ‘I’m eating kale salad,’” Garcia said, “and then I’d go home and my grandma was like, ‘I made you a quesadilla. What—you don’t want my food? You don’t love me?’” For a teenager in wellness-obsessed California, food was a “source of anxiety,” she said, citing the hips and boobs that unceremoniously arrived at 14. “But it’s also such a source of identity.”

That’s why certain lines throughout the album read like shopping lists. “Jícama, jícama, guava tree” is the earworm in Obama’s head; pan dulce later gets a shoutout. In “It Don’t Hinder Me,” Garcia sings about a favorite ritual with her grandmother: peeling mangoes at the dining room table, sticky juice everywhere. When she moved to Virginia with her mother and stepfather at 17, it was that visceral connection to Latinx culture—the food, the language, the sounds of mariachi on the train to school—that Garcia missed most. Mango in Virginia, she told me, “it’s in a container at a gas station, chopped up.”

Still, there are misconceptions about Virginia. “People think: Thomas Jefferson, Confederate monuments,” Garcia said. “I totally understand that, and that is definitely there.” But Richmond itself—with an arts university and a cross-pollinated music scene—has the upside of “creativity without the pressure of industry yet. People are still just really down to help each other, to make things and to create.” (That’s why you might also catch Garcia singing in a local psychedelic surf-rock band.) As much as Cha Cha Palace is her love letter to a much-missed Los Angeles, the relative remove of Virginia helped crystalize her own voice and drive those taproots down even further.

The album has its family moments. Garcia’s mother (who used to perform as Angelica and landed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1991 for her cover of "Angel Baby") turns up on “La Llorona,” a short, ghostly track with layered harmonies; you can hear a mournful kinship with Mitski, whom Garcia has supported on tour. The song was the opener at the Bushwick set, where, alone on stage, the musician juggled a looper, a sample pad, and a guitar while managing to throw her voice to the metaphorical rafters. She remembers practicing her audition songs for her mother, who’d sometimes insist on a do-over. It wasn’t a matter of being off pitch. “She was like, ‘I didn’t believe you.’ And she’s right,” Garcia said. “When you sing, you’re telling a story. And if your story is not important [to you], why would anybody believe you?”

That manifests onstage as a full-body effort. ("Do you want a booty shake or guitar?” she polled the audience at one point, when deciding on a song.) “I’m definitely not worried about looking pretty when I sing. I gave up on that; I have to use my whole mouth!” she said of her unguarded expressions. That approach connects with the philosophy laid out in a “Guadalupe” lyric: “Your power isn’t defined by your physique.” She thought of her two younger half sisters when she wrote those words, and even cast them in the accompanying video. “The 16 year old was like, ‘Is this going to be dumb?’” Garcia said with a smile. “But it was pretty cool because today she FaceTimed me and she had wing eyeliner on. I guess I’m not dumb anymore!”

The cat-eye is a longtime staple for Garcia (she likes Wet n Wild's liquid liner), but the hand-drawn lashes and blue eye shadow—an opaque NYX formula, applied finger paint-style—were a one-off experiment that stuck. “I feel like a lot of artists would agree that when you step on the stage, you have to almost embody a more exaggerated version of yourself,” the musician said of the retro look, imbued with ’80s melodrama and a hint of postwar grit. “It’s a protection, but it also is a way to just channel all your strength.” Garcia paused. “I don’t know who she is, but I really like her.”

That goes for a lot of early listeners, who might find themselves dipping into the album, only to track down a live show. Early this spring she tours with Vagabon, followed by her first European circuit in May. “It’s important for people, especially people outside of the country, to know that the loudest voices aren’t necessarily representative of our country,” Garcia said. “I’m just glad to be another voice in the conversation.”

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