What started as a subtle act of protest has become national news.
Three days after singer and social media personality Nezza performed a Spanish version of the national anthem at Dodger Stadium — despite being asked by a team employee to sing it in English — the performer further addressed the situation Tuesday in an interview with CNN.
“With everything that’s been happening, I just felt like I needed to stand with my people and show them that I’m with them,” Nezza (whose full name is Vanessa Hernández) said on CNN’s “The Lead.” “I wanted to represent them that day.”
Read more: Nezza says she sang national anthem in Spanish at Dodger Stadium against team’s wishes
Nezza’s performance of the Spanish anthem — a version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” commissioned by the U.S. State Department in 1945 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt — became a viral story after she posted a video on TikTok of an unidentified Dodgers employee telling her beforehand that “we are going to do the song in English today, so I’m not sure if that wasn’t relayed.”
Nezza proceeded to sing the Spanish version anyway; doing so on the same day thousands gathered downtown to protest President Trump and recent ICE raids around Los Angeles in the last two weeks.
In email communications with the team leading up to her performance, Nezza said she asked if she could sing the anthem in both English and Spanish, but was told no because she would have only a 90-second window for her performance.
Still, she said she arrived at the stadium “fully thinking that I was welcome [to sing in Spanish], because nobody told me in that email thread, ‘No, you can’t.’”
“Had they told me you can’t have any Spanish in there,” she added, “I would have respectfully declined and not shown up on Saturday.”
Instead, Nezza performed the anthem in Spanish prior to the Dodgers-Giants game, before posting two videos on TikTok explaining the situation that quickly went viral.
Read more: Nezza sang the national anthem in Spanish. In doing so, she shed light on a forgotten Latina trailblazer
On Sunday, a Dodgers official told The Times in a statement that she would be welcome back at the stadium.
In Tuesday’s CNN interview, Nezza said she was “very shocked” to learn she was welcome back at the ballpark, noting that “30 seconds after my performance, we actually received a call that said, ‘Don’t ever call us again. Don’t ever email us again. The rest of your clients are never welcome here again.’ So for me, that kind of feels like a ban.”
The Dodgers, however, reaffirmed to CNN that there were “no hard feelings” resulting from the situation. And a team spokesperson confirmed to The Times this week that, “She is certainly welcome back at the stadium. She is not banned from the stadium.”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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