YEИDRY on Embracing Every Version of Herself Through ‘Como Agua’ (Interview)

For much of her life, Yendry has been asked to explain where she belongs. Born in Santo Domingo, raised in Turin, Italy, and now based in Los Angeles, the singer-songwriter has long navigated the space between cultures, identities, and versions of herself—often finding that she doesn’t quite fit into any one label. In the Dominican Republic, she’s told she doesn’t have a Dominican accent. In Italy, people tell her she doesn’t look Italian. And in Los Angeles, she doesn’t quite fit in either. Musically, she’s also struggled to define herself within a single genre.

But with her long-awaited debut solo album, Como Agua, Yendry no longer wants to force herself into a box. The album, out September 18, is a deeply personal exploration of migration, identity, healing, and self-discovery—born out of a period of burnout that forced her to confront parts of herself she had spent years avoiding. Across its three emotional pillars—the remedy, the ritual, and the mirror—Yendry examines her relationship to her roots, her family, her ambitions, and the expectations she’s carried.

The album’s title offers perhaps the clearest metaphor for where Yendry finds herself now. For her, water isn’t simply a symbol of her Caribbean roots—it’s become a way of understanding what it means to move through the world as an immigrant.

“The way water exists in different forms—when I realized it, it blew my mind,” she tells HipLatina. “Water molds the rocks. It really paves its own path. And I think I felt the same way when I migrated again for the second time in my life (from Italy to LA), for a personal choice as an adult. That’s why I wanted to call this album Como Agua because I feel like now I’m flowing and that’s a universal immigrant experience.”

For Yendry, that realization didn’t happen overnight. If anything, much of her life has been defined by the need to constantly explain herself—to other people, and at times, even to herself.

“I struggle so much to define myself, and I think my job requires me to do that a lot,” she says. “Not just musically, but when I meet people, and they ask me, ‘What kind of music do you make?’ I’m like, ‘Oh, I don’t know how to classify that.’ Or, ‘ What kind of genre of music do you have? I have no idea, man. Or, “Where are you really from, because you don’t look Italian?” It’s been part of my life having to explain myself, and this happens everywhere.”

For years, that inability to fit neatly into a category created pressure to define herself more precisely. But today, Yendry says, she no longer feels that urgency.

“I think that will always be part of my life, but at the same time I think that’s what brought me to dive deeply into who I am, where I come from, what am I? In the past, I felt way more pressure to label myself,” she says. “But now I don’t care anymore. I don’t care about doing it … and once you know who you are, you don’t care too much about how people label you.”

That freedom, however, hasn’t erased the loneliness that comes with belonging to multiple places. In previous interviews, Yendry has spoken about the isolation of never feeling completely at home anywhere. Now she’s sharing how creating Como Agua allowed her to explore that feeling further.

“I think I know now that two things can exist—can coexist. I do know I belong to these places more deeply, but I still feel the loneliness of not belonging completely to a place, or not being able to stay in one place,” she says. “I’m always going to go back to Italy, always going to go back to the art. But because there are these people there, like my mom, who will take me back there at some point in my life, but at the same time I won’t be able to stay there.”

Instead of trying to eliminate that feeling, Yendry has learned to let those contradictions coexist. The work of understanding herself began during a period when she was running on very little fuel.

“I was coming from a burnout, overworking myself, and not getting what I aspired to, and from the outside, everyone thought I was okay,” she says. “I was not sure how to dig deeper into who I am, into my roots, into my art, into why I never felt like I belonged to Italy, but at the same time I love it. My relationship with my dad—there were so many things that just came out, and I think naturally when I started going to therapy, when I started learning how to put boundaries, taking care of myself in a new city, in LA, all this stuff came up because I was already working on myself.”

The album became an opportunity for Yendry to ask herself those deeper questions—but it also forced her to reconsider a mindset she’d carried throughout most of her life.

“I lived my whole life in survival,” she admits. “I had to stop and think, ‘Oh, this is what I really want.’ So, okay, I’m going to operate differently now.”

For Yendry, operating differently meant making room for desires that didn’t necessarily conform to the timeline or path others expected. That tension comes through especially in “Mala Mia,” a track about letting go of external expectations that can get louder as women get older.

“I really had to let go of those external expectations, like okay, I’m getting older, but at some point, I’m gonna have to stabilize and have a family. You know the normal cycle of life that people expect you to have, you know?”

Those expectations also shaped how people viewed her artistic ambitions, including her decision to make music in Spanish.

“Why don’t you sing in Italian and start from here?” she says was a question a lot of her loved ones asked when she was starting her music career. “But I needed to be true to myself. And stay true to myself and sing in the language that felt best and most natural for me, and that was Spanish. I had to let go of the weight of these expectations that were put on me by external entities, and I also had to trust my ideas and trust my gut.”

Trusting her gut ultimately meant making a decision that could look risky from the outside: starting over—not just in a new country, but in her career approach.

“My gut told me to start again. Start my career again from scratch, and I did. And leave Italy,” she says. “I didn’t really love that guy that I was with, so I didn’t want to stay comfortable there because I would end up being miserable if I were still in Italy, yearning for what could have been.”

That willingness to choose uncertainty—leaving someone she knew loved her and a country that raised her—became part of the album’s larger story. But she admits it wasn’t always easy to recognize she was making progress, especially when so many circumstances outside her control delayed the album’s release.

“People from the outside are always going to think it took me four years to make the album. The album was made in a few months, and it’s been ready for two years,” she says. “For a year and a half it’s been ready. But in the meantime, I had a toxic manager, and I had to heal my vocal cords because I was completely burned out.”

On top of all that, she says she also had to wait through a series of logistical obstacles, including immigration paperwork, production availability, contracts, and label decisions.

“I had to wait six months for the visa,” she says. “I had to wait six months for this executive producer to be available. I had to wait for the contract to be in place, and for the label to decide that, yes, they were on board. It’s so much.”

If there’s one lesson Yendry says she took from Como Agua, it may be the importance of trusting her own creative instincts.

“I think I didn’t know how to trust my own ideas,” she shares. “Before, I always felt like I wasn’t enough, or that I didn’t know enough. I always felt like someone else who has been in this industry for longer might know way more than me.”

Making the album required her to challenge that instinct to defer to people she believed knew more than she did. Instead, she began asking herself what felt true.

“And then I think with this album, something changed,” she says. “I switched, and I was like, ‘Oh, actually no one will know better than me how I fell and how I want to write things and how I want to present things because these are songs that I’m going to have to sing for the rest of my life.'”

That newfound trust extended far beyond the music itself. Yendry even took a hands-on approach with the album’s visual identity, directing the cover shoot herself and paying a photographer out of pocket after deciding that none of the existing imagery felt right. The process has also helped heal her relationship with self-doubt. Every small decision she had to make with the album, from the cover art to the songwriting, forced her to trust her own ideas.

All of these tensions—identity, migration, loneliness, ambition, expectations, self-doubt, and the desire to trust herself—eventually assemble in the album’s title.

“I think it became my manifesto when I started. After the burnout, when I started healing, it became my manifesto in a way that I want to flow through life,” Yendry says.

She also recognizes that, in that metaphor, flowing doesn’t necessarily mean life has become easier. It simply means she’s changed the way she moves through it.

“Yes, I feel like things are coming to me,” she says. “Not just because I’ve been working so hard, because in the past I worked hard too. But I feel like now I do it with a different grounding. Now I know who I am. I know what I like. I know what I don’t want. I know my boundaries. I know the people I don’t want in my life. It feels great to be honest. It feels amazing, and things flow that way. It doesn’t mean it’s easier, but it’s way more satisfying.”

That may ultimately be what Como Agua represents for Yendry: not having to arrive at a definitive answer about who she is, but becoming comfortable with the fact that she can keep changing at any point.

For someone who has spent years trying to understand where she belonged, the most radical part of Yendry’s evolution is that she no longer believes she has to settle on one answer. She can be a proud Dominicana. She can also be Italian. She can belong to multiple places while still carrying the loneliness of not fully belonging to any of them. She can make music that refuses to be boxed into one genre. She can change her mind about what she wants. She can start over and leave what no longer serves her. She can choose to relocate again. New York is a city she’s had her eye on. Still, all those versions of herself are part of the same story. And, like water, she can keep moving.

This feature is part of our 2026 Latina Heritage Month series, Latina Maxxing.