La Voz de Galicia – May 3, 2026 →
It’s curious, because even though I’ve spent my whole life navigating between social classes, I still can’t seem to understand them. I come from a family like so many others: a self-employed father, a stay-at-home mother, three sisters sharing a room, clothes that — with a few alterations — were passed down from sister to sister, a vegetable garden that fed the whole family until my father died (he was the one who drove the car), always a second-hand car, furniture repaired over and over until it finally gave way under the weight of the years…
Thanks to my mother’s intuition, and to the social grace she insisted we learn, I managed to adapt to more or less every reality life put in front of me — from the years when fame wouldn’t let me leave the house in peace, to the years when, because of my work with Yo-Yo Ma, I found myself at the World Economic Forum in Davos or at the White House in Washington, D.C. And although I’m glad I didn’t lose my mind along the way, I have to admit that nowadays — when my social life is nonexistent and my public profile is rather low-key — is when I’m most aware of the level of disconnection between the wealthiest classes and the rest of society. I’m not even sure what class I belong to myself; I’d like to believe it’s the same one my parents belonged to, even if my circumstances are better than theirs were.
Morally, and with pride, I will never leave the class I come from, because by spending years moving through the privilege of others, I came to realize that no matter how my professional life turns out, I would never want to belong to that other class, the one I’m not even sure I have a name for, the one that, despite living all around us, seems unaware of how difficult life is for most people. The one that, living with its back turned to reality, already rules the world.
