"Te Kamelo" Dedication to My Elementary School Students
I have spent the last three months teaching music online at the elementary school where I have been working for the last nine years. I have never had to do anything like this before in my entire life, and neither have my students in their 5-12 years of life.
I learned so much about music, about communicating, about sharing my ideas, and about the importance of connecting in these lonely times. When it was time to share the final music activity for the school year, I chose to record a song for them with one of my oldest friends and music collaborators, Arturo Martínez, otherwise know as "Espiritu Gitano" (The Gypsy Spirit.) He wrote this song originally in dedication to the 9-11 tragedy. But over the years, we have been singing it in different contexts that each seem to redefine the meaning of the song, and yet the message is still the same: LOVE CONQUERS ALL!
For my youngest students, I prefaced it by saying that this song is about missing people when times are hard. It has some words in English, Spanish, and Caló, the language of the gypsies in Spain. I told them to make sure to listen to the message I sang for them in English towards the end, and to clap along with me and sing along with me whenever I repeated the name of the song, TE KAMELO, which means "I love you." Thank you, Arturo, for the vulnerable sensibility that makes all of your music so special. And thank you for allowing me to be a part of the evolution of this song over the last 20 years!
