Back visiting her mother in Oaxaca she began to realise that many of the small pueblos in the Oaxacan highlands had become virtual ghost

Back visiting her mother in Oaxaca, she began to realise that many of the small pueblos in the Oaxacan highlands had become virtual ghost towns. All of the young people had headed north, searching for work across the Rio Grande.One day, an Indian man came to her mother’s auto-parts shop, asking Lila to translate some US government documents. His son had perished trying to cross the border, and he wanted to know how he died. Becoming an oracle of death suddenly gave Downs a new sense of responsibility – to tell the outside world about her people’s rich heritage as well as their present peril. “I realised then”, she says, “that something was happening there. And I knew it was my job to tell the story.”To see Downs perform live is to understand that statement more fully, for Downs doesn’t just sing her songs; she becomes their subject.

When she performs “La Ni?(“The Girl”), a doleful ballad about an assembly-line worker at one of the hundreds of maquiladora factories that dot the US-Mexican border, she exudes a physical sense of aching muscles, and an emotional sense of broken dreams.Singing “La Martiniana”, a jazzy remake of a Zapotec Indian waltz, she becomes a spirit mourned, begging her surviving girl not to weep over her grave: “No me llores no; porque si llores yo peno. En cambio si t? cantas, mi vida, yo siempre vivo, yo nunca muero.” (“Don’t cry for me, because if you cry, I’ll haunt you. But if you sing to me, my life, I will always live and never die.”) For Downs, death not only drew her back to making music; it informs her performance of it, too. “Singing means more than just singing to my mother’s people,” she says. “It’s a metaphor for life, and the belief in life.”One of her most well-known performances was at the 1999 World Festival of Sacred Music in Los Angeles, a concert organised by the Dalai Lama to support multiculturalism. Downs was the only festival participant to receive a standing ovation from the audience, aside, of course, from the Tibetan holy man himself. “That was really something,” she says now, laughing.By all accounts, there will be many more such moments to come.

La Linea is currently hitting music stores around the planet, thanks to a deal Downs signed with Narada, the world-music arm of Virgin Records, which distributes other global music labels such as Peter Gabriel’s Real World and David Byrne’s Luaka Bop. Downs has also just filmed a cameo performance in the upcoming Miramax production, starring Salma Hayek, that’s based on the life of Frida Khalo, the iconic Mexican painter that some say Downs resembles.In August, she begins a mini-tour that will take her back and forth across the 2,000-mile frontier that inspired her album. For Lila Downs, crossing and recrossing that line is what helped her to discover herself – as well as her musical mission.”I love the border,” says Downs. “I mean, there, I really feel at home.”‘La Linea’ is out on Narada. It’s difficult, listening to the accumulation of worry, self-disgust and hedonistic declarations of mea culpa on Paper Scissors Stone, not to take Cerys Matthews’s recent highly publicised retreat to rehab with at least a pinch of salt. What a coincidence that she should be seeking Priory-style treatment mere days before releasing an album featuring lyrics such as: “The queen of clubs drinks in pubs on her days off, over/ Swills down dregs, drags on duck-arsed cigarettes”; not to mention a track called “Is Everybody Here on Drugs?”, doubtless devised to evince an affirmative audience response at live shows. Of course, it could just be a case of her art mirroring her life, though Cerys’s boozing is, on this showing, the least of the band’s problems.