The Immigration Story About Camila Cabello’s Parents Is Astonishing

Honestly speaking, we don’t know that much about singer 21-year-old Camila Cabello. We know she’s a Cuban immigrant, we know she’s a vocal advocate of DREAMers. We know that she left her girl group Fifth Harmony. We know she’s on tour with Taylor Swift, and we know she’s an incredible performer, but other than that we don’t know the whys.

In a new interview with Rolling Stone, not only is it an incredible accomplishment for her and us — a Latina on the cover? Come on, it’s huge! But it’s also a revealing look at the singer, her family’s story, and her amazing rise to the top. For example, it was just revealed that Cabello’s song “Havana” is the most streamed song in the history of Spotify.

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In the interview, we learn that her success is truly a family affair.

We learn that instead of celebrating her 15th birthday with a quinceañera, she wanted to be on the X Factor — a music contest show. In 2012, “she asked to be taken to audition for the producers of the show, and mom, dad, kid sister and grandma loaded into the family minivan for the 12-hour ride from Miami to North Carolina.”

The story also reveals one of the most astonishing things about Cabello’s family that we had never heard before. As we said before, we knew that she’s an immigrant from Cuba, who came to the U.S. when she was five. But we had no idea that her dad is Mexican, that her mother was an “architect in Cuba but worked at Marshalls in the U.S., using a fake address from an affluent neighborhood so her daughter could attend a top-notch public school an hour and a half away from where they lived.”

Furthermore, “more than a year after Cabello immigrated, her Mexican father swam the Rio Grande to join his family (he finally got his green card in 2016); he earned money by washing cars at a mall.”

That my friends is what you call dedication and a perseverance to do what you must in order to provide for your children.

We also learned that Cabello suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder.

“OCD is weird. I laugh about it now,” Cabello told Cosmopolitan UK.  “Everybody has different ways of handling stress. For me, if I get really stressed thinking about something, I’ll start to have the same thought over and over again, and no matter how many times I get to the resolution, I feel like something bad is about to happen if I don’t keep thinking about it.”