Cabello, Camila << kuh BAY oh, kuh MEE luh >> (1997-…), is a Cuban American singer and songwriter. She creates pop music influenced by her Cuban and Mexican heritage. Cabello rose to fame singing with the all-woman pop group Fifth Harmony. As a solo artist, she writes and performs her own songs, often addressing the immigrant experience in the United States.
Karla Camila Cabello Estrabao was born on March 3, 1997, in Havana, Cuba. Her mother was a Cuban architect, and her father was a Mexican worker. Cabello and her mother traveled back and forth between Cuba and Mexico before settling in Miami, Florida. Her father later immigrated to the United States to join them.
In 2012, Cabello auditioned for the television reality music competition program “The X Factor” in Greensboro, North Carolina, and was listed as an alternate. She asked for another audition and then made it to the next round, which took the form of a pre-season boot camp (intensive training session). At the boot camp in Miami, the show’s producers grouped her with four other singers who had competed on the show—Ally Brooke, Dinah Jane, Lauren Jauregui, and Normani. Later in the season, the five women formed Fifth Harmony. The group placed third on “The X Factor,” later securing recording contracts with the show’s creator—the British record executive Simon Cowell—and Epic Records.
Fifth Harmony released its first EP, Better Together, in 2013 and its first album, Reflection, in 2015. EP stands for extended play, a type of musical recording that includes several songs but is not considered a full-length album. Fifth Harmony’s single “All in My Head (Flex),” featuring the American rapper Fetty Wap, was voted the song of the summer at the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards. Outside the group, Cabello began working with such other artists as the Canadian singer and songwriter Shawn Mendes and the American rapper Machine Gun Kelly. In 2016, Fifth Harmony announced via Twitter (now called X) that Cabello was no longer in the group.
Cabello’s first single as a solo artist, “Havana,” featuring the American rapper Young Thug, was released in 2017. The single held the number-one spot on Billboard magazine’s “US Pop Singles” chart for seven weeks. Cabello released her first solo album, Camila, in 2018. It reached number one on the “Billboard 200” chart. Her second studio album, Romance, was released in 2019.
Cabello won MTV’s video of the year award in 2018 for “Havana” and in 2019 for “Señorita,” a song she performed with Mendes. She made her motion-picture acting debut in the musical Cinderella (2021). In 2022, Cabello was a coach on the singing-competition television show “The Voice.”
