Bus-Stop Benches Before Colombian Music Fame

Alzate is a Colombian popular-music singer, best known for the song Maldita Traición, and today he is recognised both in Colombia and abroad. In a September 2024 interview on The Juanpis Live Show, reported by Blu Radio's La Kalle, he looked back on the years before that recognition, when he was working in California as an undocumented migrant.

His priority then was to save as much as possible. He held up to three jobs and worked around eighteen hours a day. To keep his costs close to zero he paid no rent, which meant he slept for a few hours at a time on a bench at a bus stop. He washed in public restrooms and spent very little on food. He said that at times he ate packaged food thrown away by upscale restaurants, noting that buying a meal there would have cost him the equivalent of three days of work. When police asked what he was doing on the bench, he told them he was depressed, and he also told his mother that he was eating better than ever.

The article gives few details about his life before this period and does not give exact dates. It describes the road to his success as one full of sacrifices and difficulties.

Those years, he said, were also the beginning of his career. At one point he lost everything again, but he says he does not miss that time and values what it taught him. Summing it up in his own words, he said he learned to survive on the street.

The song that made him known in his country and abroad grew out of that same determination.