Can We Love Coachella And Still Ask Hard Questions About It? Asking For Us

The set opened with a cave painting-style video; a wild, free woman who loses her voice to the pressure of assimilation, then finds it again and becomes a goddess. By the time Carolina Giraldo from Medellín, Colombia, walked out onto the Coachella main stage in a gold bodysuit with an all-female mariachi band behind her, the crowd already understood what kind of night this was going to be. What followed was an hour and a half of Latin music built not as a greatest hits run but as an argument for Colombian culture, for femininity, for Latinidad in full, for the genres that have existed long before this festival decided to centre them. Becky G. Wisin. Sombreros vueltiaos in the crowd. Latin American and Caribbean flags waving across the polo grounds. A shallow pool sequence that will go into the Coachella canon alongside Beyoncé’s infamous ‘Everybody Mad’ dance break. And then, near the end, Karol G switched to English, deliberately, and pointedly said the thing that she was told not to.

The crowd erupted, people were crying, the clips ran everywhere by the next morning, and they should have. This was one of the best headlining sets this festival has produced in years, by an artist at the absolute peak of her powers, and the weight of it, 27 years long, was real. We want to be clear about that before we go anywhere else, because the anywhere else matters more if you start from the right place.

While Karol G was onstage, a local activist organisation called United Youth We Stand was holding a protest outside the festival grounds in Indio. Their statement was simple: Coachella Valley is more than a music festival. It's built by the immigrant community who work from sunrise to sunset; landscaping, farming, housekeeping, construction, street vendors. The Coachella Valley is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the United States, and its workforce is majority Latino, majority immigrant. The dates, the citrus, the strawberries that line the highway you drive in on, that's the valley's economy before the wristbands arrive and long after they leave. The people who build the stages, prep the grounds, and make the infrastructure of a festival that generates over $120 million per edition possible do not then get to stay for the show. General admission alone starts at $600 before fees.

So the moment Karol G addressed her Latinos who have been struggling in this country — the people the Trump administration has been targeting with ICE enforcement that has, at this point, resulted in multiple fatalities and hundreds of detainees missing from the online database — those people were, in very many cases, on the other side of the fence. The headliner saw them, but the ticket price didn't.

This is the part that costs something to sit with, and we think it's worth sitting with it properly rather than scrolling past it. Coachella is owned by Philip Anschutz, a Republican mega-donor whose foundation has directed over a million dollars to organisations including the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council. These are organisations that have actively worked against the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, and that operate in direct ideological opposition to the politics Karol G put on the main stage on Sunday night. The wristband revenue flows to a man whose political giving works against the community the headliner was speaking for. That's not a rumour, and it's not ancient history; it's the ownership structure of the festival.

Before the show, Karol G was cautioned about the dangers of saying "ICE out", with implied complications around her visa status. She told Playboy she didn't want to say it as a hollow gesture. She wanted it to mean something; she got on the stage and made it mean something. But the revenue from the night went in part to the infrastructure that enables the politics she was speaking against.

There is no clean answer here, and we want to be honest about that rather than tidy it up into a moral lesson.

Because the joy was real; we watched it live and we felt it across the globe. A little girl on her parents' shoulders, flags out, screaming, that image doesn't become less true because of who owns the polo grounds. Karol G is one of the greatest performers alive right now, and Sunday night was proof of it. The art was extraordinary, and the moment was historic, and the speech she gave, against advice, in her second language, on the biggest stage of her career, was an act of genuine courage. Following the money doesn't undo any of that. It just means we're watching with our eyes open.

The artists who show up for us deserve our support, even when the infrastructure around them doesn't. Especially then, actually. Karol G standing on that stage and saying what she said — knowing the visa implications, knowing the ownership structure, knowing the criticism she'd get for not going far enough from one side and too far from the other — that is the work. That is how culture shifts. Not by refusing to engage with imperfect systems, but by putting artists who care about their communities at the centre of those systems until the systems have no choice but to reflect it back.

The idealist position — don't buy the ticket, don't fund the machine, burn the whole thing down and rebuild — is a position we understand, and it's not wrong, exactly. But it's also a position that asks the most from the people who already have the least, and tends to be loudest from people who've never had to calculate the cost of opting out. Structural change is slow, and it is unglamorous, and it requires people inside the room as much as outside it. Karol G was inside the room, United Youth We Stand was outside it; both of those things were necessary on Sunday night. There is no such thing as a perfect activist, and the moment you make perfection the standard is the moment you've already lost the thread.