Alina Vargas — born in Santo Domingo, daughter of the merengue bandleader Wilfrido Vargas — is a Dominican singer, actress and model who has worked between the Dominican Republic, Colombia and the wider Latin entertainment circuit since the 2000s.

Learning the trade

Before she joined her father’s orchestra, Wilfrido sent her to sing in hotels — the Hispaniola, the Lina, the Jaragua, the Francés — to build her craft alongside formal voice and dance training. In 1998, at the Hotel Francés in the Zona Colonial, she sang in a duet with Silvio Mora, then at the start of his own career. She went on to record «Que se mueran los feos» and «Ay hombe» with Wilfrido Vargas’s band, and later spent a stretch as one of five singers in a relaunched lineup of Las Chicas del Can, until she left to start a solo project in August 2011.

Colombia

Vargas spent seven years based in Colombia, where she fronted her own orchestra made up of Colombian, Dominican and Cuban musicians, and appeared on Milka - La Más Dura’s «Se acaban las mujeres buenas», written by Urdí Ventura and filmed partly in Colombia and partly in Santo Domingo. On a 2011 promotional swing back through the Dominican Republic she said she wanted her own project, done without her father’s shadow over it, even if she still asked his opinion on her work.

Film and modelling

She played «la Sanky» in «Sanky Panky II», a role that brought her a Premios Soberano nomination for Actress of the Year in 2014, and appeared in «Éxito por intercambio» and the American independent film «Sugar». In 2019 she paused her music to take the lead in «Scammer», directed by Pedro Urrutia. She trained as a model at John Casablanca and Tod Models and has walked runways in Spain for the designer Ariel Cedeño.

As a solo artist

Her solo singles include «Quítame ese hombre», in a merengue arrangement, and «Libre» (2014), a video directed by Adrian Pucheu built around imagery from «Game of Thrones». In 2016 she spoke out publicly against a decision to bar the singer Yolandita from a scheduled appearance, calling the incident an embarrassment to Dominican entertainment.

Legacy

Vargas has spent her career moving between music, film and modelling rather than settling into one of them, carrying her father’s name into rooms he never worked in — Colombian dance halls, Dominican film sets, European runways — while insisting, publicly and more than once, on being judged apart from it.