Pope Francis, the 266th pontiff of the Catholic Church, died on Monday at age 88, the Vatican has announced. Cardinal Kevin Joseph Farrell, the Vatican’s Camerlengo of the Apostolic Chamber, made the following statement: “Dearest brothers and sisters, with deep sorrow I must announce the death of our Holy Father Francis. At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the house of the Father. His entire life was dedicated to the service of the Lord and of His Church. He taught us to live the values of the Gospel with fidelity, courage, and universal love, especially in favor of the poorest and most marginalized. With immense gratitude for his example as a true disciple of the Lord Jesus, we commend the soul of Pope Francis to the infinite merciful love of the One and Triune God.” In Rome, mourning bells were ringing in all the churches.

Francis, the first Latin American pope, was elected in March 2013 at a historic moment for the Church, following the resignation of Benedict XVI. Joseph Ratzinger stepped down exhausted and defeated by the palace intrigues and corruption in the Curia, and for finding himself powerless to undertake the internal reforms required by the Vatican, from the Holy See’s financial institutions to the sexual abuse scandal. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, an Argentine Jesuit, was chosen to undertake a renewal of the Catholic Church, to modernize it and push through pending reforms. With a sometimes impulsive and energetic character, he certainly stirred up a gale in social matters, with his unprecedented criticism of the current capitalist system, and in internal reforms, albeit with mixed results, causing deep divisions along the way.

For the most conservative sector of the Church, he even went too far. A genuine front opened against him, among those who viewed him practically as a dangerous left-wing populist. But the enormous expectations he aroused also disappointed the most progressive sectors, who expected more profound changes in the reform of the Curia, the ordination of women, and sexual doctrine, as well as greater collegiality in decision-making. In one of the Church’s key issues, the fight against pedophilia, he was deeply involved with drastic regulations and decisions — he forced the entire Chilean bishops’ conference to resign — but the rest of the hierarchy, the bishops and the Vatican bureaucracy, did not always follow his lead and put up resistance.

Pope Francis’ 12 years at the head of the Catholic Church witnessed a revolution in many areas, starting with the fact that for nine years, two pontiffs cohabited together, until Ratzinger’s death on December 31, 2022. This situation generated plenty of debate at the time, but the passing of the years showed that it led to hardly any issues. And it set a precedent.

What is certain is that, in his election alone, Francis was a pioneer in many aspects: the first Latin American pope, the first non-European pontiff since the 5th century, the first Jesuit pope, and the first one to be called Francis, a choice of name that said it all. No pontiff before had dared to name himself after a radical saint who stood up to Vatican pomp and dedicated his life to the needy. He chose the name because of the words the Brazilian cardinal, Claudio Hummes, said to him as he embraced him after his election: “Don’t forget the poor.” Francis did not do so, and he also set himself aside from the traditional uses and customs of the office, seeking simplicity and directness.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a descendant of Piedmontese Italian immigrants, was born in Buenos Aires in 1936 to a humble family in the Flores neighborhood. He graduated in chemistry, then studied philosophy and joined the Jesuits in 1958. He was named provincial superior of the order in Argentina between 1973 and 1979, during the military dictatorship, and from his position he helped several politically persecuted people to flee. This experience marked his political vision, as did the fact that he was the son of immigrants, and his youthful enthusiasm for Peronism.

However, he was then relegated for a few years within the society, a period he himself defined as “dark,” until 1992 when he was appointed auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires by John Paul II. From then on, his stature grew — he became a cardinal in 2001 — to the point that, in 2005, after the death of Karol Józef Wojtyla, he was a clear papal candidate and one of the most-voted in the conclave. However, Benedict XVI was elected, a recourse to continuity after the long pontificate of John Paul II, at a time when the course the Church should follow was uncertain.

Ratzinger’s resignation placed the Vatican back in the same position, and on that occasion, Bergoglio was quickly elected. He was 76 years old and it was already intuited that his pontificate would be brief, but a period of reforming impetus was sought. Francis’ revolution was mainly in the social sphere and in his open criticism of the excesses of the current economic system, the most direct of any pontiff to date. He harbored a special concern for ecology and climate change, an issue to which he dedicated no less than his first encyclical, Laudato sì (Praise Be to You), in 2015 (the previous one, Lumen fidei (The Light of Faith), from 2013, was actually one that Benedict XVI had left half-finished and he completed). He further incised his critique in the next, Fratelli Tutti (All Brothers, 2020), which lambasted neoliberalism and populism. The fourth and last, Dilexit nos (He loved us, 2024), was the most theological and spiritual, a call to act with the heart, beyond the logic of money and the cold calculation of algorithms.

Francis navigated the Church into the 21st century, facing its current dilemmas (and, as of 2016, with an Instagram account). He forged still uncertain paths that it will be up to his successor to decide how best to travel: the fraternal acceptance of homosexuals and transsexuals, allowing the blessing of couples, and allowing them to be godparents; the entry of women into high positions in the Curia and a call to “de-masculinize the Church” — although he froze the most controversial issue, that of female ordination — and the outreach to divorcees who have remarried.

If there is one word that sums up the priority of his mandate, it is “periphery,” those who are on the margins of society, of the cities, of the frontiers, those who are far from power. It can be seen in his travels — 47 visits to 66 countries — in which he almost always avoided the great powers or countries with a strong Catholic tradition, such as Spain, where he never set foot. He only considered going to the Canary Islands because of the crisis of migrant arrivals from Africa. His first trip, in fact, defined his line from the outset: it was to the Italian island of Lampedusa, a point of arrival for migrants. To them and to all people, believers and non-believers, he wanted to leave a message in his autobiography, published in January 2025, reduced to a single word, the title of the book: hope.

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On March 15, Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele turned 238 different stories into one. A day earlier, 26-year-old Luis Carlos José Marcano Silva called his mother from a migrant detention center in Texas. Adelys Del Valle Silva was celebrating her birthday in Margarita Island, Venezuela; she was happy to hear her son’s voice, but noticed something strange. A few hours later, another call came in. Her son was crying. He didn’t want to ruin his mother’s day, but he had to tell her that he was going to be deported to Venezuela the next day. He couldn’t understand, if he had done nothing wrong in the almost year and a half he had been living with a temporary permit in the U.S. after crossing the border and applying for asylum, he told his mother weeping. If he was removed from the country, he thought, his wife and two daughters, aged eight and three, who had arrived with him, would be left behind alone. Adelys tried to comfort her son. They would find a way to be together once he was back home. But Luis Carlos never returned. He was deported from the United States to El Salvador and detained in an infamous maximum security prison. His mother and wife have not heard from him since.

Luis Carlos is at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT, along with 237 other Venezuelans, after Donald Trump’s government deported them under the alleged claim that they are members of the Tren de Aragua gang, a group declared a terrorist organization on the first day of the Republican’s return to the White House. And he did it to the Central American country thanks to the complicity of one of his biggest allies in Latin America, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who has boasted of the agreement to receive alleged criminals from the United States. The practice of sending people to a third country is increasingly used and is not illegal in principle, but none of the deportees were brought before a judge and, since they have been in the Central American jail, none of their relatives have received any proof of their condition.

In the case of at least 137 of the 238 deported Venezuelans, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, enacted in 1798 and only previously activated in the War of 1812 and the two world wars. This law allows for the expulsion of foreign nationals if they can be proven to be part of an invading force. The U.S. administration’s argument, in line with its anti-immigrant discourse, is that these men, whom it labels as gang members mostly without proof, amount to a conquering army.

Family members of the deportees argue that this is not the case. Many recognized their sons, brothers, nephews, or husbands in the images that Bukele published when they arrived in El Salvador. In them, Bukele, who is set to receive $20,000 a year from the U.S. government for each prisoner, boasts of how these men were greeted with their wrists, hips and ankles shackled, along with 23 Salvadorans accused, for their part, of being members of the MS-13 gang.

As do hundreds like him, Noel Guape, uncle of deportee Roger Eduardo Molina, suspects that his nephew’s fate was sealed the moment the government saw the tattoo of a crown on his chest. He was being routinely interrogated by immigration agents at the Houston airport on January 8, where he had arrived from Bogota with his papers in order after following a UNHCR asylum program. “The officials told him that they had investigated and that they could see that he had no criminal record, and what kind of record would he have if it was his first time in the United States?”. Still, since that day Roger has only slept in detention centers or jails, and has not seen his girlfriend, who was traveling with him and was immediately returned to Colombia.

The fact that tattoos are for U.S. authorities one of the indicators for identifying suspected members of the Tren de Aragua was confirmed at the end of March, when the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published as evidence in a lawsuit a Department of Homeland Security guide that establishes a point system for determining whether a suspect belongs to the gang. Reaching eight points is equated to being a gang member, a very easy sum to achieve under the criteria detailed in the document. For example, having tattoos such as a crown, a train, a watch, or the popular phrase “Real hasta la muerte,” by reggaeton musician Anuel AA, is worth four points. Wearing sportswear from U.S. teams such as the Chicago Bulls or the Jordan brand awards another four points.

Such tattoos and clothing are very common among young Venezuelans. For Adelys del Valle the conclusion is simple: “Being Venezuelan is now a crime.”

Venezuelan journalist Ronna Rísquez, author of the book El Tren de Aragua: La banda que revolucionó el crimen organizado en América Latina (Tren de Aragua: The gang that revolutionized organized crime in Latin America, Editorial Dahbar), assures that according to her own research, tattoos or clothing are not indicative of gang members, and she also doubts that those deported are really members of the group. “It is likely that there are members of the Tren de Aragua in the United States, but there are no details or official evidence coming out of a police investigation. When you try to look into it, it’s like scraps that an official said at some point.”

Moreover, adds Rísquez, since an operation by Venezuelan authorities in 2023 in the Tocorón prison in Aragua state dismantled its center of operations, the group has been weakened and its activities and dynamics are unclear, while the whereabouts of its leaders are unknown. “To call it a terrorist organization is absolutely disproportionate. They don’t even come up to the soles of Al-Qaeda’s shoes and neither if we compare it even to the Mexican cartels [also declared a terrorist organization by the Trump administration], that are singled out for bringing in tons of drugs that have killed thousands of Americans. That doesn’t mean that the Tren de Aragua are saints, of course.”

Human Rights Watch (HRW), which is conducting its own investigation, has confirmed the absence of criminal records for most of the Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador. They have been exhaustive, and have searched for such records in Venezuela, in the United States, at the federal level and in each of the 50 states of the nation, as well as in other countries through which the deportees have passed at some point, such as Colombia, Peru or Chile. There are some who do have warrants for their arrest, and a few who have committed minor offenses. The conclusion of the organization, however, is that this is a case of a mass arbitrary detention and forced disappearance.

The deputy director of HRW’s Americas Division, Juan Pappier, justifies the application of these categories: “At no point were they notified that they were going to be deported to El Salvador. And they were sent there from one day to the next. The U.S. immigration authorities erased their cases from the database used by lawyers and families to locate people who have open cases or are detained. When they call ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), at best they are told that their family members were deported, but nothing else. In other words, there is a constant refusal to confirm the whereabouts and fate of these people, which constitutes an enforced disappearance under international law.”

The government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela shares on this rare occasion the opinion of an organization that has repeatedly denounced him. On March 24, a Salvadoran law firm hired by the Venezuelan vice-presidency filed a habeas corpus before the Supreme Court of El Salvador to demand the immediate release of the Venezuelans imprisoned in Bukele’s mega-jail. Senior officials of the Venezuelan regime have been in contact with relatives of the detainees and have promised to do everything possible to secure their return to Venezuela. However, the country has no diplomatic relations with El Salvador, so there is much uncertainty about the success of the mission.

After a month without news, the anguish of family members is growing. They all know about the allegations of mistreatment and human rights violations at the CECOT, the prison where the deportees are being held. And these become all the more frightening when they have already heard them describe the terrible conditions in U.S. detention centers.

Julio Rafael Fernández Sánchez was held for eight months in one of these centers in the state of Arizona, after being detained in the border city of Nogales on July 18 last year along with his wife, Carolina, and their 17-year-old son. They entered the country with an appointment they got through the CBP One application, which the Biden administration launched to expedite entries and asylum requests, after six years living in Peru, where they set up a small motorcycle cab business, and several months working in a taqueria in Mexico City. The woman and the teenager were released, but Julio never left the center. The moment they saw the tattoo of a clock on his arm, an anniversary gift from Carolina, his luck turned.

Four days passed before Carolina was able to talk to him. “They said they were going to question him and everything went fine. But there he remained. I even got him his criminal record because he thought that’s why he wasn’t getting out. And months went by and nothing,” says the wife, who talked to Julio every day. “He said he couldn’t talk much because the calls are recorded. But at one point he said that it hurt a lot to raise his arm, that he had a tear. And I didn’t understand, if he said he slept well. But he pretended to be strong so as not to worry me. What did worry him was that he couldn’t go to the bathroom [due to stomach problems]. He would go 20 days without going, and he would ask for a pill or something and they wouldn’t give him anything,” she says, her voice breaking as she imagines her husband, who turned 35 years-old last Thursday in the black hole of the CECOT, suffering.

Several relatives have gone so far as to fear that their sons or husbands would commit suicide because of the terrible conditions. For this reason, at this moment, as if it were a kidnapping, the least they are asking for is proof of life of the detainees from the Salvadoran government.

The battle in the United States is now legal and revolves around the denial of due process. As the flights loaded with migrants accused of being invading gang members departed, a federal judge named James Boasberg ordered the suspension of the law justifying the deportation because the detainees had not been in court, as required by law. The government ignored that order —Bukele’s message mocking Boasberg, shared by several senior Trump administration officials, encapsulated that moment: “Oopsie… Too late,” he wrote on X— and that has precipitated a legal showdown that has quickly reached the Supreme Court.

The issue may yet escalate into a constitutional crisis over the limit of Trump’s executive power if he chooses to defy court orders. Currently the decision of a divided Supreme Court that allowed the use of the Alien Enemies Act, but which also determined that a deportation must be ordered by a judge, governs. Judge Boasberg said this week that there is a basis for holding the government in contempt, while the Supreme Court prohibited early Saturday morning the expulsion of a group of Venezuelans detained in Texas while their case is analyzed in court.

On the other hand, rights groups, led by the ACLU, have sued the government, arguing that the conditions for invoking the old law —a war or an actual invasion— are not met. Last month, Appeals Court Judge Patricia Millet was blunt: “The Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act.”

But while that battle is being fought in the highest courts of the country, the relatives of the detainees must live with the silence from the CECOT. In the last month, EL PAÍS has told the stories of several detainees, such as Arturo Suárez-Trejo, Frizgeralth Cornejo, Brayan Palencia Benavides, Alirio Belloso or Mervin Llamares. In all these cases, relatives in Venezuela, Colombia or the United States keep their voices raised to make their situations public and increase pressure on the authorities. In private, they endure the pain of uncertainty.

“Not knowing anything is the hardest thing,” says Nataly Villalobos, sister-in-law of deportee Alirio Belloso, 30, originally from the western Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, and who entered the United States through the southern border in November 2023. “The whole family is very sad and desperate.” They have had to split up. Alirio’s brother has stayed in Maracaibo, but his wife and mother have temporarily moved to Caracas in order to follow the steps the Venezuelan government is trying to take. Alirio was arrested in a police raid in Utah five days after Trump took office. He had been working as an Uber driver for a few months and had no police history, as evidenced in his immigration record.

In Colombia, where 24-year-old Brayan Palencia Benavides’ entire family has lived for a decade, his mother, Amine Ester Benavides, has lost her appetite: she feels guilty if she eats three times a day when she doesn’t know if her son is being fed properly. Brayan was detained on January 30 in Los Angeles when he went to an immigration appointment to regularize his status after more than a year in the country, during which he worked in construction with an uncle in Miami. “I am very sad,” Amine says plainly. Her husband, Erly Palencia, uses another adjective: “She is stunned”. The consulates have not responded for Brayan. Nor have they been contacted by the law firm hired by the Venezuelan government. “The only one I talk to is God, he is the one who gives me strength and he will defend Brayan,” says the mother.

Hope for the families of deportees has taken the form of Kilmar Abrego García, the Salvadoran migrant mistakenly deported to his home country on the same flights as the 238 Venezuelans, despite a court order prohibiting his removal from the United States. His case has made headlines in the U.S. and international media recently and the Supreme Court has unanimously ordered his return, a rare vote in a court clearly divided 6-3 along ideological lines.

So far, neither the Trump administration nor the Bukele government has shown any willingness to do so. In the Oval Office, during the Central American president’s visit to the White House last Monday, the press asked several times about this issue. Both Bukele and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi flatly rejected the idea. A few days later, Congressman Chris Van Hollen visited El Salvador to fight for his return to Maryland, where his U.S. wife and three daughters are demanding his release, and to confront the government’s counterattack that portrays him, with scant evidence, as a danger to society.

In the case of the Venezuelans, despite the fact that figures like Kristi Noem, Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary, have said they should spend the rest of their lives in the CECOT, HRW believes the most promising option is judicial and media pressure on the U.S. government. The Venezuelan route has the profound obstacle of the non-existent relationship between the Maduro and Bukele regimes and the lack of judicial independence in El Salvador. While there is not even a hint of a possible international strategy.

The immigration machinery set in motion by Trump since he took office for the second time has shown in just two months that his cruelty is not shy. Quite the contrary. The policy of performative terror unleashes in millions of people in the United States the fear of being caught in the clutches of the Republican government and released into a maximum security prison that, in a dialectical coincidence worthy of analysis, boasts of being the guardian of terrorism.

No information comes out of its walls. There is no word on how the deported men are doing, or whether they know of the anguish of their families. Outside, the world talks about them now and then, while the global order is shaken by the same man who sent them there and suddenly made 238 independent lives have only one future.

June 11, 1988, changed Tracy Chapman’s life. That day, a massive tribute concert was held at Wembley Stadium in London to celebrate the 70th birthday of South African activist Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison between 1963 and 1990 for his opposition to apartheid. More than 90,000 people packed the venue; 600 million watched the event on television. The lineup included a large cast of renowned musicians: Sting, Eurythmics, Al Green, Joe Cocker, Bryan Adams, Jackson Browne, George Michael, Simple Minds, Peter Gabriel, Whitney Houston, Dire Straits, Bee Gees… Film luminaries such as Whoopi Goldberg, Richard Gere, and Richard Attenborough roused the audience with fiery speeches. And among so many iconic names appeared Chapman, a 24-year-old newcomer with a guitar in her arms.

“I still have it,” she says in a telephone conversation with EL PAÍS from her home in San Francisco. It was a beautiful Martin D-18E, different from the one she used to record her only album at the time, but just as meaningful: “The director of my school and several professors gave it to me as a surprise gift because they knew I needed a new one. So I love that guitar.”

Chapman, now 61, studied anthropology at Tufts University, near Boston. She had recorded her first demos at the university’s radio station. Used to playing in intimate theaters after the release of her album, facing such a large audience made a strong impression on her. “It was absolutely new for me; I was tremendously overwhelmed by everything,” she says. “I watched some of my musical idols walk by backstage and felt very emotional. I also felt excited looking at the crowd, which was the largest I’d ever seen in my short career. I felt very proud to be there, at such an important event honoring Nelson Mandela. I experienced a mixture of emotions.”

As if there wasn’t enough pressure already, she didn’t perform just once at the festival — but twice. Hours after her first set, Stevie Wonder left the stadium due to technical problems, prompting the organizers to ask her to sing again. “The producers realized that, since I was performing solo and acoustically, it would be easy to place me anywhere. I was waiting backstage with my manager, and the organizers came over and said, ‘You’re here, we need you!’ So we ran from the dressing room to the stage. Basically, they pushed me out there. Only minutes passed between them saying, ‘This is it,’ and me starting to sing. It was a bit chaotic.”

That appearance had the unlikely effect of turning the then-young singer-songwriter into a late-1980s pop star. Sales of her self-titled debut album, which had reached 250,000 copies before the concert, soared to over a million just one week later. It shot to number one in the U.S., the U.K., and many other countries — an unimaginable feat at the time for a stripped-down, folk-style album in an era dominated by glitter, glamour, and dazzling productions.

“When the album came out, in 1988,” she explains, “it was unusual for the time. Especially because the production was austere. Maybe that was the difference from what radio stations were programming or labels were publishing. Maybe that’s what made it stand out.” It won Chapman three Grammy Awards: for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance (for the single Fast Car), Best New Artist, and Best Contemporary Folk Album. Chapman and other sharp-minded women of her generation, such as Suzanne Vega and Tanita Tikaram, restored the shine of singer-songwriter music from the previous decade.

Now, Tracy Chapman is being reissued on vinyl, after being out of print for years. That’s the reason Chapman — who’s stayed largely out of the public eye since her last album, Our Bright Future, in 2008 — is reconnecting with the media.

That album stood out not only for its stripped-down sound; its cover — featuring a simple sepia-toned portrait of Chapman, with her short dreadlocks and gaze turned downward — also broke away from the technicolor frenzy of the era. But even more significant than its visual or musical style was the subject matter of the songs. Instead of singing about parties, hookups, and excess, Chapman tackled social issues: revolution (Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution), sexual assault (Across the Lines), domestic violence (Behind the Wall), war (Why?), and a world without hope for young people (She’s Got Her Ticket).

Chapman says her motivation for addressing those topics wasn’t so much about wanting to make people think, but rather to capture the unease of the environment she grew up in. “The inspiration for many of the songs on the album comes from my own experience and what I observed around me. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Cleveland, and I saw those kinds of concerns in older people, as well as the working class struggling to support their families. Just as my mother and the families of my friends also struggled, working in tough industries like the steel industry. That sparked my interest in these topics from an early age and encouraged me to write about them.”

The daughter of separated parents, Chapman began playing the ukulele — gifted to her by her mother— at the age of three. At eight, she began composing songs. “I did it because I loved music and poetry, and it was a natural way to unite those two loves. I composed to entertain myself and ask questions. I observed the world and tried to represent it in song. It was always something I did for my own pleasure. It wasn’t until later that I discovered that other people were interested in listening.”

Most of those lyrics — if not all — could still be applied to today’s turbulent world, 37 years later. “People have told me they feel those themes still resonate; that those songs, unfortunately in some cases, seem to speak to the current moment and the struggles we all face as people try to deal with race, violence against women… These are issues that unfortunately still have relevance. We’re still not getting the answers, so I guess, when you look at it that way, those songs are still important.”

In the United States, Donald Trump’s authoritarian drift continues to stoke fears among much of the population, who watch in alarm as hard-won progress is rolled back. “I’m worried about democracy right now,” the singer admits. “All Americans must be vigilant to ensure that our democracy is healthy, which includes people being able to exercise their right to vote. I’m not afraid of Trump, but I am worried.”

Although most young people’s musical tastes are moving in other directions, she is confident about their social awareness: “Absolutely. I think each generation asks the same questions and seeks the same answers as the one before. They may approach finding those answers in a different way, but I think there is still commitment.”

After the surprising success of her debut album — six million copies sold in the U.S. alone — Chapman found herself in the spotlight when she released her second album. Crossroads (1989) was less successful, although it went platinum in the U.S. (over one million copies sold). Unexpectedly, her career surged again in 1995 with the release of New Beginning. Thanks to songs like Give Me One Reason, that album reinvigorated her career, selling five million copies.

But her relationship with commercial success ended there. In the 2000s, Chapman released five more albums, all of which were poorly received; the last, Our Bright Future, came out in 2008, meaning that the singer-songwriter has not set foot in a recording studio in 17 years.

“I’m not disappointed at all with the reach my career has had,” she says. “The only measure for me is simply that I’ve had the opportunity to express myself however I wanted, and I must say that over the years I’ve felt connected to the fans who have been willing to follow me, beyond record sales or any kind of commercial success. I’ve had a considerable amount of success in terms of sales and awards, and I view my career as long and very satisfying. I never even expected to be on the charts, so I’m grateful for the success I’ve had.”

Her most recent appearances have been few and far between. In 2015, her performance of Stand By Me, the Ben E. King classic, on The Late Show with David Letterman, prompted several U.S. media outlets to refresh readers’ memories of the singer, who was over 50 at the time. That live version was included on a greatest hits album released the same year. She was also involved in a high-profile legal dispute with rapper Nicki Minaj over the unauthorized sampling of Baby Can I Hold You in the song Sorry; in 2021, a judge ordered Minaj to pay Chapman $450,000 in damages. In 2023, country singer Luke Combs recorded a cover of Fast Car that topped the country charts, making Chapman the first Black woman to ever lead the ranking as a songwriter — and soon after, to win a Country Music Association award.

Chapman’s social activism didn’t end with the Mandela tribute concert. She participated in Amnesty International’s 50th anniversary event in 1998 in Paris, performed at benefit concerts for Cambodia and Tibet (in the latter singing a duet with Luciano Pavarotti in 2000), and took part in several events supporting the fight against AIDS. Still, she resists the “activist” label. “It’s a way to raise awareness and contribute, but I’m not one: I’m a musician. That’s my role in the world.”

Little is known about her private life, apart from what writer Alice Walker — 20 years her senior — revealed about a supposed romantic relationship between the two in the mid-1990s. It could be said that Chapman’s music is bigger than her; even at the height of her fame, she avoided capitalizing on her identity as a woman, a Black artist, and someone seen as sexually ambiguous to become a symbol for minorities.

“Making music is my job and also my passion,” she clarifies. “I’ve never had much interest in the spotlight. I’m an artist, and that’s the role I prefer to play publicly.”

An artist who, however, has been leaning toward taking a step back in recent years. By way of explanation, she refers to it simply as “a break.” She adds: “I continue to write songs, play, rehearse… I’m still involved in all the creative aspects of making music, but I just haven’t tried to go into the studio or tour in quite some time.” What she does do is garden, go for walks, spend the day with her family and her two dogs, read… “I read all the time, all kinds of books, mostly nonfiction,” she says.

Modest by nature, she’s never lived like a rock star. She didn’t splurge on luxury cars or mansions. “When I was starting out, I just hoped to make enough money to take care of myself and my family, and I did. So, for me, those are the rewards in a material or financial sense: having a certain amount of security. Coming from a working-class background, having needed government assistance at times, that was the most important thing. After my parents’ divorce, my mother raised me on her own, so you have a history; your desires are narrowed down to making ends meet, and I consider that an achievement in my case.”

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