Songs for the road, songs for growing up in Ecuador
By Nicole Ruf (with Lydia Lovell)
On the drive from Quito to the coast, somewhere where the mountains start turning into hills, right before the road starts to smell like salt, you’ll find people waving a fan of mixed CDs at your window. The CDs come in plastic sleeves, with blurry, sun-
faded covers; unofficial compilations of Shakira, Marc Anthony, and some English pop songs that snuck in by mistake. The kind of thing that would be illegal anywhere else, but is a cherished roadside service in Ecuador.
My mother always bought one for our road trips, rolling down the window of her Chevrolet Grand Vitara, exchanging two or three for a 5-dollar bill, and placing it into the car’s CD player (back when they still had those).
Growing up in Ecuador means being raised on these CDs; music chosen for you by chance, mood, or whatever the man on the roadside happened to burn that day. It means house parties, bars on the beach, chivas rattling through Quito blasting technocumbia and reggaeton. It means your memories come prepackaged with rhythms you’ll always know how to move to. Here is my version, my life, mixed-CD style. Fifteen tracks, and two decades of life told the way we tell everything: through music.
Track 1: ‘Inevitable’ by Shakira
Shakira was my mother’s favourite co-pilot. I must have been five when I mastered the twin arts of (1) screaming lyrics I didn’t understand and (2) pretending I had a deeply complex emotional life. Years later, I would come to understand the lyrics; the sharpness, the confessions, the ache. I realised I had been learning womanhood all along, in the car, taught by Shakira and my mother on cheap CDs.
Track 2: ‘Si No Te Hubieras Ido’ by Marco Antonio SolÃs
A song recited by my mother, sister, and I in the backseat of a taxi, ignoring the driver’s stares. A song sang ironically at first, until one day it wasn’t. One day you’re twenty-one, wiping the kitchen floors, and suddenly the smell of floor cleaner and warm, clean linen, and this song become layered with your mother’s voice under your own, the way she once sang it while doing the very same house chores.
Track 3: ‘Mariposa Traicionera’ by Maná
My favourite song at age six, sang at the top of my lungs with the kind of heartbreaking sincerity reserved for children and telenovelas only. My stage, the beach in ManabÃ, my microphone, a half-melted polito ice cream. This song tastes like vanilla ice cream covered in brittle chocolate, like sticky cheeks from it blowing into my curls with the wind, and mixing with sea salt and sunscreen. Everything about it messy; the beach, the hair, the singing, me.
Track 4: ‘Chan Chan’ by Buena Vista Social Club
My father’s car was a moving archive of his music taste, and mine too. We played a CD I burned myself, learning to master the art of the Desktop’s CD reader and Limewire; Buena Vista Social Club, Paulina Rubio, and the entire soundtrack of Grease (I still don’t know how I justified pairing Chan Chan and Summer Nights). I see my father looking at me through the rearview mirror, my sister sat next to me in her car seat. The song is soft, warm, melancholy. Salsa lessons standing on my father’s feet. It makes the world slow down, suspended in time.
Track 5: ‘Niña Bonita’ by Chino y Nacho
Perhaps the first song I discovered on my own. A cornerstone of Latina American childhood in the 2000s; school buses, birthday parties. It still feels like hearing a secret told to a friend on the playground, a reminder of simpler concerns.
Track 6: ‘Tabaco y Chanel’ by Bacilos
The passage between girlhood and adolescence. A soft introduction to teenage emotion, wrapped in a melody that was always playing on the radio. This was the beginning of a very specific teenage ache: wanting to be older, to feel things deeply, for life to feel cinematic.
Track 7: ‘Me Rehúso’ by Danny Ocean
If adolescence had a scent, mine would smell of warm pavement, sweaty palms, and teenage boys’ cheap cologne. And this song. This song is holding hands with the boy I like when nobody is looking, it is spin the bottle and my first kiss on a Friday night when my parents thought I was with friends. It was learning that butterflies could live in the stomach, and the undeniable sense that life was beginning.
Track 8: ‘Atrévete-Te-Te’ by Calle 13
My song. The song that made my friends turn to me on the first beat. It smells of aguardiente drank straight from the bottle, parties in someone’s backyard, and muddy shoes the day after. It is my first parties; loud, badly lit, perfect. It gave us permission to dance, to be bold, to flirt. I still know every lyric, I always will.
Track 9: ‘Beneficios’ by La Máquina Camaleón
The song that made me fall in love with Ecuadorian music. Music from my own generation, music that could feel mine. It is hosting parties in my house that people still mention. It is that emotional turbulence you only really experience at seventeen; where friendships crack and reform, first love tastes like risk, and lust feels like discovery.
Track 10: ‘Nunca paran’ by MULA
Senior year. It is the soundtrack of la pera (senior ditch day). It is bad decisions and drunk conversations and dancing on sticky dancefloors because it was our last chance to be that young together. It meant freedom, the naive kind that comes right before life starts.
Track 11: ‘Solo Tú’ by Don Medardo y sus Players
This song is Ecuador. Crowded streets, fiestas de barrio, clumsy dancing at family gatherings. A beloved classic. The kind of song that makes you homesick in the way only music can. The kind that makes distance feel heavier, and floods with memories of so many people and places all at once.
Track 12: ‘Ocho cuarenta’ by Rodrigo
The first song ever properly dedicated to me. It was the beginning of learning to love outside the world I knew. It taught me cuarteto, and patience, and that sometimes love looks like letting yourself dance (badly) to someone else’s music. It is the song of leaving home, of falling for new places, and new people. It is the sound of first love.
Track 13: ‘Todo Se Transforma’ by Jorge Drexler
It marks a change, it accompanies strange autumns and cold winters, it hugs and comforts and warms my soul, it is lyrical genius, and I will always wish I had written this song.
Track 14: ‘Se fue la luz’ by LATIN MAFIA
My first year of university. It is overpriced bottles of wine from a college bar, freedom mixed with fear, and becoming a new person. It is a tipsy walk to Jimmy’s, and corner shop noodles at 3am, and smudged mascara. It is new friendships forming in spaces where lights have gone out.
Track 15: ‘Té para Tres (MTV Unplugged)’ by Soda Stereo
Every year since I turned seventeen, I play this song at 23:59 on my birthday. A quiet ritual, a grounding, a promise perhaps. A mixtape of grief, love, and the ache of growing up and letting time pass. It is the reminder that even far away, even changed and aged by time and travel, I am tethered to where I come from – and always will be.
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Nicole Ruf, a native of Ecuador, is a student at Durham University, Durham, England.
Credit: Palatinate
