The plan was to throw a party.
Diana Gameros put it all down on paper, a detailed musical map designed to flip the script about immigration via a set of classic Mexican boleros she’d sung with her grandmother “and celebratory songs I wrote after finally returning to Mexico,” she said.
She’d spent more than a decade living in the Bay Area without legal status before procuring a visa that allowed her to visit her family in Ciudad Juárez. The new songs reflected her determination “to change the immigrant narrative, to see immigration as an opportunity to celebrate the greatest journey,” Gameros said.
Working closely with Women’s Audio Mission, she was awarded a major grant from the Gerbode Foundation in the fall of 2023. But as she started production on the new project a series of family travails and her rising dismay at politics foreign and domestic put a damper on her carefully considered blueprint.
“I lost a nine-year-old nephew in a tragic accident, and a cousin who’s like a sister to me, her husband died in Mexico,” Gameros said. “My grandmother, my favorite person, fell ill, and my mother was diagnosed with stage four cancer. Then there was Gaza. Trump takes office. All these things were happening.”
Instead of cursing the darkness, Gameros responded with “Volver a la Luz” (Return to the Light) a gorgeous collection of songs featuring many of her longtime collaborators. Rather than a celebration, she delivered a thoughtful benediction.
Returning to Brava Theater on Sunday, Nov. 23 to celebrate the album’s completion, Gameros is offering a preview of the 2026 release joined by many of the artists featured on the project. The eclectic cast of artists includes clarinetist Patrick Wolff, percussionist Aaron Kierbel, trombonist Sophie Powers, Camilla Boutros on trumpet and electric oud, and a contingent from Inspector Gadje Balkan Brass Band.
Volver a la Luz. Art work by Max-o-Matic
“I’ve always been an artist who responds to the times, but I kept putting it off,” Gameros said. Realizing she needed to recalibrate the project, she contacted Gerbode and got the okay to deliver something quite different than what had been described in the grant proposal.
“I needed to write the album that my heart and the times were calling me to write,” she said. “I surrendered to stillness, did a lot of spiritual work and felt a strong connection to ancestors, to a lineage of musical women. Slowly I started to feel this guidance, an open joyful gathering where the living and dead dance together. I was going to be guided as I wrote the songs for this album.”
Gameros, who got her start in the Bay Area performing weekends at the Mission’s sadly shuttered Roosevelt Tamale Parlor, has always been drawn to collaborating with other women. It’s no coincidence that she’s marked the release of her previous albums with concerts at Brava Theater, which is owned and run by Brava For Women in the Arts. Or that she once again joined forces with Minna Choi, the founder and director of Magik*Magik Orchestra.
In many ways, Gameros opened new doors for Magik*Magik, which Choi launched as a graduate student of composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 2008. She was living at 16th and Dolores when Magik* was born around the corner at Maxfield’s Coffee, “where I wrote the business proposal,” Choi said.
The ensemble became the house orchestra at John Vanderslice’s original Tiny Telephone studio on San Bruno Avenue, specializing in providing arrangements for rock and pop acts. “We did the for a couple of years, and we only ever worked with men,” she recalled. “Maybe women don’t feel they deserve that. An orchestra is a big statement. Whatever the reason, not a single women artist reached out to us. Diana was the first.”
The track, “En Juárez,” is one of the standouts from her 2013 debut album “Eterno Retorno.” Magik*Magik contributes to two pieces on “Volver a la Luz,” including “Little Wing,” a commission from the SongWriter podcast inspired by Susan Orleans’ book “On Animals.” At Brava, Choi will be on hand leading a string quartet.
Based in Berkeley for the past decade, Gameros has spread her creative wings wide. On Dec. 15 she performs as a special guest with the San Francisco Girls Choir at the Davies Symphony Hall program “Esperanza del Futuro.” She connected with the choir’s longtime director Valérie Sainte -Agathe through Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project at Noe Music when she performed there two years ago.
“She invited me to be part of this program featuring pieces by Mexican composers,” Gameros said. “I’m joining on guitar on my newly commissioned song that Mina is writing a choral arrangement for.”
Gameros is also a founding member the Movement Immigrant Orchestra which was co-founded by Inspector Gadje percussionist Marco Peris and polymathic vocalist and songwriter Meklit (who connected her with Stanford University’s Institute for Advancing Just Societies).
“I love my career,” she said. “Just when I think it’s the most diverse, it gets even more so.”