Gloria and Emilio Estefan Praise Miami for Inspiring Legendary Latino Sound: ‘We Are Interwoven’
variety.comBrooke Mazurek It is an impossible game I keep asking Gloria and Emilio Estefan to play, the game of hypothetical “what-ifs.” Although the husband and wife duo are currently in Vero Beach, Fla., where they have a getaway home and resort, their focus is set squarely on Miami.For the better portion of five decades, the Magic City is the place the Estefans have called home, and during the “It’s a Wonderful Life” rabbit hole I’ve asked them to spiral into, we’re playing out who Gloria and Emilio — and the city of Miami — might have become had the most important couple in the history of Latin music not stayed rooted there.“What if you’d left and moved on?” I ask them.Gloria and Emilio are, after all, at a point in their lives when they’re able to tap into the gift of perspective.
Time has passed, more than 100 million albums have sold, 38 hits have climbed the Billboard charts, Gloria has won eight Grammys and Emilio, 20, and two Presidential Medals of Freedom received.
The duo have the ability to look back now, and when they do — when they answer the question of Miami without the Estefans, the Estefans without Miami — the answer, of course, is simple. “We are interwoven,” Gloria says definitively. “We would not have made the music we had made had we grown up anywhere else.
That I can guarantee you.”“How are you going to leave your family?” Emilio chimes in, his accent still rich with the rhythmic intonation of Cuba. “Miami is family.”But to understand the interwovenness, you first have to understand the Estefans’ story — the story of Cuban immigrants who sought the American dream and found it 90 nautical miles away in Miami.
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