Jorge Drexler: Movimiento (2017)

“We are parents, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of immigrants” says Jorge Drexler in this song from his 2017 album Salvavidas de Hielo, opening a window to his lived experience: His father was born in Germany, and came with his family to Bolivia and then Uruguay escaping Nazism. Drexler’s birth and growth place is the latter, although life led him to Spain, where he built both his artistic career and his family, becoming a fundamental figure in contemporary Spanish-spoken popular music. The trajectories of his life and his personal history sieve through the lyrics of his repertoire. In a more evocative phrase of Movimiento, he states: “What I dream of is more mine than what I touch”. 

Ever on the move

Movimiento is a manifesto with a simple message: Every person’s “authentic” belonging, the only thing to call one’s own—if anything at all—is being on the move. Drexler says: “We are a species in transit / we don’t have belongings / we have baggage”. To do so, the song constructs mental images that transport one back to the beginning of time and beyond, into the interstellar origins of human matter, proposing a Heimatwhose space is transection. The author recalls pre-glacial human migrations, moving through unbreachable geographies and physical frontiers long before the idea of nations existed. The human essence is to search, to carry, to transform. The first compasses of the song are something like a deep breath, still, suspended, giving place shortly after to a dynamic musical piece. 

Trajectories and circularities 

The videoclip that accompanied the release of the song establishes two narratives, two ways of understanding movement. In the first one, linear, open and scenic, the Sierra Tarahumara in Mexico is the space through which ultramarathon champion Lorena Ramírez runs distances in her plastic sandals. The core subject of the lyrics is brought to present date, representing through Ramírez’ run how we still “carry our wars with us, our lullabies, our path made of verses, of migrations, of famines”. Landscapes are central in the understanding of peoples’ Heimat(en). They can only be understood, nevertheless, by moving through them. 

In a parallel shot—an interior—we see Drexler walking through a circular library (Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España, Madrid, Spain), circumambulating among rows of books under an imposing concrete-beamed roof as he sings the lyrics. The succession of takes, between exterior and interior, insinuates an analogy between the vast landscape of Tarahumara and the library, its stories, memory, knowledge. Drexler says: “And that’s how it has always been [migrations], since before time”. He points to the bookshelves of the library, perhaps proposing this space as a repository of all the human experiences provoked by migrations, or the act of giving sense to the world. In turn, the landscape of the Sierra makes us think of the act of moving through the world. Giving sense to the world and moving through the world become similar activities, both structural in recognizing one’s Heimat(en), much like Heidegger proposed through his concept of dwelling. 

Being on the move then becomes the space where one belongs, constituted through looking further, finding some place new, digging deeper in the landscape to make the library thicker, although at the end of it one always finds the beginning once again. Movimiento ends in an affirmation of the cyclical, vital essence of moving to find Heimaten: “It’s the same with songs, birds, alphabets: If you want something to die / Keep it still.” 

Heidelberg, February 2026
Diego Jaimes-Niño, TP B02