Luz Elena Mendoza Ramos says they left Portland with a “very broken, heavy, anxious, angry heart.” They’re FaceTiming from their Mexico City apartment, almost three years after leaving Portland and a few weeks after celebrating their 42nd birthday, with their “little rescue mutt terrier” Primo in their lap. Mendoza Ramos’s band Y La Bamba found love in Portland’s late-aughts and 2010s indie music scene, but they’ve always felt misunderstood as an artist. Easy, sticky labels—however misinformed—found them early. “Now there’s a little bit more density; now you’re this, you’re that,” Mendoza Ramos says. “When I was 24? ‘mariachi-folk.’ You know what I’m sayin’?”

Success was confusing and compounded questions of assimilation and identity. “I didn’t have a mirror for so long—of someone doing the same thing as me,” they say. “I’m not the only one: neurodivergent, Mexican American, queer, whatever-the-fuck.” They didn’t like what the pressures of the scene had made them into, and Mexico presented an opportunity for self-discovery, for tracing their ancestral lineage and seeking out a different way to exist within a culture, a personal rebuilding that’s palpable on their latest album, Lucha, which they recorded between Portland and Mexico City.

They haven’t been back to Portland much, but their music has an enduring place in the city’s fabric. “I feel like I’m still in the community there,” Mendoza Ramos says. “Oregon feels like home to me still.” And they are coming back soon. The occasion for our interview is their upcoming performance at TEDxPortland, on April 27.

What’s your studio like? 
It’s not a fancy music studio. I don’t need crazy stuff, just enough for me to be creative.

What do you need to be creative? 
I need it to look good in here, man. My friend Victoria Aguilar Solís just finished that mural behind me. She’s an amazing artist from Chihuahua. I need a lot of journals, my computer, some palo santo around, my plants. Snacks, dude, fuck, man, maybe some chilaquiles or something.

What are you obsessed with? 
Sci-fi and shoes, Bart Simpson. I’ve been collecting clowns. I love clowns.

Let’s start with the shoes.
I love my [Nike] Cortezes right now. I’ve been into sneakers lately, I think because my style has changed a lot. I’m she/they, but I feel [gender] fluid, and that’s changed how I dress.

And the clowns?
Real talk: a friend of mine was collecting clowns, and it reminded me I used to collect these pictures of Ricardo González Gutiérrez [a.k.a Cepillín]. So I started collecting little clowns. I have more in my storage unit in Portland.

Where are you a regular? 
Bosque de Chapultepec (Chapultepec Park), it’s like the Central Park of Mexico City. It’s an escape from the chaos of the city, and it also has this little lake/river with swan paddleboats. And it has a lot of museums: The National Anthropology Museum [Museo Nacional de Antropología], the Water Garden Museum [Jardín del Agua Museum] with Diego Rivera’s murals. There’s a dog park, even a carousel. I filmed my music video—the one with Devendra Banhart [for the song “Hues”]—at that park.

The new album is called Lucha, which means “fight,” right?
Mhmm.

It came after a big move, and after assembling a new, more diverse band. Are you still fighting, or have you created a more comfortable space to make music?
Leaving the United States has been the biggest blessing for me—to go to the motherland, where my family is from. It’s like I’m in a different portal. I don’t know how to explain it, but it makes sense that I’m here. It’s not comfort [but] a more established sense of self.

One interview I read suggested this may be the last Y La Bamba record. Is it?
I’m still making music. I did feel like it was the last album I was going to make because it was a hard album to make. You can hear it in my voice. [Music] is what I know. It feels like I need to do it. It feels like healing, but it’s also killing me. When I wrote that song for my friend who passed away, Sumo, from Reyna Tropical—that song, “Eight,” it was like a collage of me in the height of my emotions. In the lyrics I say, “Esto es el final [“this is the end”] / Nothing is like before [“nada es como antes”].”

How do you decide whether to sing in Spanish or English? 
It’s intuitive. Lately I’ve been writing in English, which is interesting. I wasn’t writing a lot of songs in English when I was [in the US]. I don’t know if it’s a subconscious thing, [but] it could very well be that somewhere inside of me there’s still the insecurity of saying things right in Spanish. Just recently I started asking myself [why I’m writing in English], processing that, and being okay with it, healing whatever urgency I had to write in Spanish, you know, being in white spaces, in Portland. I just always want to think for myself. Does that make sense?

The agency that comes with singing in a foreign language? 
Yeah.

What are you listening to lately?
Silvia Pérez Cruz’s album Toda la vida, un día. That song “Nombrar es imposible” is bringing me back to life. [Sings] Yo quisiera cantar / Para curarme, which is like, “I would love to sing to heal.” It gives me goosebumps. It feels like prayer. There are no constraints on her delivery; it’s just fluid. And who doesn’t want to lay in a river, and just be taken by it?

Is there an upcoming Portland album you’re looking forward to?
Isabeau Waia’u Walker. She’s in the studio right now, so I’m definitely looking forward to hearing that; I haven’t heard anything yet.

She’s in your band, right? 
Yeah, and she’s recording where I recorded the last three records—Entre Los Dos, Mujeres, and the beginning of Lucha—with [the producer] Ryan Oxford at The Center for Sound, Light, and Color.

Who’s your dream collaborator? 
Selena, because—oh my god—she was one of the biggest influences for me. I definitely saw myself in her as a little kid.

One piece of Portland art everyone should know? 
My mural. My face. That one art mural that’s on—no, I’m kidding, don’t [laughs].... I haven’t even seen it yet, but there’s a mural with me in it. [It’s called the Portland Music Mural, on the east wall of the Mayer Building at 1130 SW Morrison.]

If you could have coffee with a dead Portland artist? 
Elliott Smith. I’d talk about mental health; talk about being a sensitive person, feeling othered; talk about the songwriting process in a real way. What the hell is going on? What-are-you-really-going-through? kind of conversation.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.