Willie Colon unified us. His politics divided us.
Remembering Willie Colón means holding space for both the genius and the harm.
When my father died, I found myself replaying “Todo Tiene Su Final,” the Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe classic about the inevitability of endings. The song suddenly felt literal a meditation on mortality, on the certainty that every life, no matter how vibrant, eventually stops. Now Colón himself has reached that same finality. His death closes the life of one of the most influential figures in Latin music history. But it also opens a necessary conversation. Because understanding Willie Colón requires more than celebrating his musical genius; it requires examining the full arc of his life including the politics, rhetoric, and controversies that complicated his legacy in his later years.
Long before politics complicated his public image, Willie Colón was a trailblazer. He entered the music industry as a teenager, masteri
ng the trombone and signing with Fania Records at just fifteen, helping build the sonic foundation of modern salsa. But his influence went beyond rhythm and arrangement he was documenting real lives inside his community. During the AIDS crisis, when fear and ignorance were claiming thousands of lives, Colón released El Gran Varón, a story about a gender-nonconforming son rejected by his father and later dying from a mysterious illness widely understood to be AIDS. The song was both warning and witness. It reflected the harsh reality that LGBTQ people faced rejection from their families and communities, sometimes living and dying without acceptance, while also exposing the stigma that made that suffering possible. Even then, Colón’s work embodied contradiction: empathy and judgment, visibility and limitation, compassion and cultural discomfort existing in the same space.
Colón’s engagement with public life was never limited to music. For decades, he moved comfortably inside mainstream Democratic politics, serving as a special assistant and spokesperson for New York City Mayor David Dinkins in the early 1990s and later running for Congress himself. He sought public office again in 2001 in the race for New York City Public Advocate and spent more than a decade working with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration as a liaison to Latino media and entertainment organizations. In 2008, he publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. These roles reflected a figure who saw himself not only as an artist but as a civic leader within Latino America someone operating within institutions rather than against them. That history makes the political posture of his later years even more striking, revealing not a man who was always on the margins, but one whose trajectory shifted in ways that many longtime admirers struggled to understand.
But the Willie Colón many people encountered in the last decade felt far removed from the civic figure who once operated inside Democratic administrations. Over time, he became an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump and increasingly aligned himself with MAGA politics, using his Facebook page as a platform for commentary that many followers experienced as xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and at times openly hostile toward Black communities. He didn’t retreat from the backlash he often engaged directly, arguing with fans who challenged him, doubling down rather than softening his positions. For admirers who had grown up with his music rooted in Afro-Caribbean collaboration, migration, and cultural exchange the contrast was jarring. The man who had once helped soundtrack stories of marginalized people now appeared, to some, to be echoing rhetoric that marginalized others. That dissonance is not incidental to his legacy; it is part of it.
In Puerto Rican culture, when someone passes, it’s common to hear the same refrain: era una buena persona they were a good person. It’s a way of honoring the dead, of softening grief with kindness. But real lives are rarely that simple, and Willie Colón’s certainly wasn’t. He was brilliant, influential, generous in his artistry, and deeply consequential to Latin music and culture. He was also, at times, divisive, frustrating, and capable of rhetoric that hurt the very communities his music once uplifted. Both truths exist at the same time. We don’t honor his legacy by ignoring the contradictions; we honor it by confronting them. Because people are not monuments they are human beings, shaped by growth, limitation, conviction, and contradiction. Willie Colón lived a full life: the good, the bad, and the uncomfortable. And if we are willing to see him clearly, without myth or erasure, we might also learn to see each other that way too.
Well said👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
I wonder if PTSD or disappointment with not being voted into office somehow scarred him. Hopefully - in time, someone will speak with the family and document how the change came about. In my family, alcohism is a co-occurring issue.