We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful The Bella Locas. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with The Bella Locas below.

Hi The Bella Locas , thanks for joining us today. Do you wish you had started sooner?

All of us started singing and performing at a young age, separately of course, so finding each other kind of felt like a perfect match. We all share a love for performing and at first we wanted to form a band as a joke, but it quickly became real as we take our creative and artistic endeavors really seriously. It’s overwhelming how much support we’ve received from the local community and our friends, abundance mindset am I right? It’s really important at this point in our journey that we create healthy boundaries around our work to preserve longevity. We’re all so young and it’s so easy to fall into the trap of exerting more than you can give, so a big part of our practice is leaning on each other for support and going back to our main purpose, creating authentic experiences.
That said, I wouldn’t change anything about the timing of it all, we’re at this really liberating stage of our lives to explore who we are and defining that for ourselves. We don’t feel desperate for opportunities we just allow them to flow into our lives freely and that paired with our hard work is paying off.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Okay, so The Bella Locas consists of four core members. Alexis is a queer, Asian-American singer-song write and performer. They sort of do it all, acting, dancing, they are getting a BFA in Musical Theatre if that tells you anything about them. Demondra is a black, queer woman who drinks a lot of coffee and cooks the best mac and cheese you’ll literally ever try in your life. She loves to create, as another singer-songwriter, performer in the band. She also solidifies our bands harmonies, she’s got a goddess for angelic harmonies. We absolutely couldn’t live without her.
Espi is our hidden Latina talent and support system. She’s our bestie and creative leader, we keep her around for her vibes and her honesty. Susy’s a Latinx, queer immigrant and the fourth, member. A singer-songwriter, third vocalist, she loves to write films that never gets produced. She loves to dance and choreograph, direct. She’s pursuing a Theatre major. She’s the soprano belting queen goddess lilac.

We’ve mostly performed covers at local bars and restaurants, as well as a couple house shows. Our music is ever changing, we joke about our genre being sort of radical indie, jazz, spoken word, pop punk. We really just write shit that comes up and out and usually it’s really good. Sometimes it’s not, and that’s okay too. We’re currently working on our first EP and have a couple songs recorded.

Our main goal is to transport people into this really magical, surreal realm when we perform. We want them to feel empowered to create as well, to live in the moment, to hug one another. It’s really important to us that our audience see themselves as a Bella Loca. If you’ve seen us, you’re one of us.

Hopefully our platform can grow and we are able to reach larger audiences and spread radical change and acceptance into the world. Sharing our stories is pivotal in that. A big part of our activism is so be true to ourselves and exist freely in a society built against us. We hope people feel encouraged to do the same.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

A huge lesson we unlearned in our formation as a band is to honor each other’s boundaries. It’s not enough if just one of us to agree to a project, all of us have to support each other in each opportunity, and sometimes that looks like turning down projects for the well-being of our band. Performing is only part of the journey. Our friendship is the most valuable part of our band dynamic. Everything else is a product of that.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

When starting out, we didn’t expect to be met with doors in our face but we also didn’t anticipate the amount of potential our local community recognized in us so early in our career. Our first gig was an all women led show and really started the ripple effect of opportunities we were offered. It was just show after show for a few months following our debut. The rush that performing gives us is addictive and we’re so grateful for our communities willingness to listen to what we have to say as artists, on the stage and in the studio. It’s an energetic release, it’s therapy, it’s a form of self expression, anyway you get the gist. We’re really just very lucky to be best friends jamming it out and we just hope you’re along for the loca ride!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/thebellalocas?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/bella_locas?s=21&t=x1V2znxXbQiGSlm3sQksyQ
• Other: tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTd35Lkj9/

Image Credits
Sam Wong, Kat Mai