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Linda Viera Caballero, better known as India and La Princesa de la Salsa ("The Princess of Salsa"), is a singer of salsa and house music. She has been nominated for both Grammy and Latin Grammy awards.
Viera was born in Río Piedras, San Juan. Both her parents moved to New York City soon after her birth, settling in the South Bronx area of the city. Initially, they lived with Viera's grandmother, a woman who served as an important influence on Viera's life. Viera began singing as a young girl, even taking opera training for a brief time. Her stage name, La India, was given to her by her grandmother because of her dark features and long, straight, black hair. La India describes herself as a feminist, having witnessed domestic violence from her father.
In 1985, when Caballero was 16 years old, she joined the Latin freestyle group TKA, a fact not widely known. Credited as "Linda," she appeared in the group photo on the back cover of TKA's second single, "Come Get My Love." She left shortly thereafter.
Caballero signed a record contract with Reprise/Warner Bros. Records, which planned to market her as the Latin version of Madonna. India's debut album was titled Breaking Night. Three singles were released (“Dancing on the Fire,” “Right from the Start,” and “The Lover Who Rocks You All Night”), which all became big hits in the dance clubs. She also added her vocals to the Jellybean-produced single "Mirage". After recording the album, Caballero decided that she didn't want to take that route in her career. She decided to switch to salsa because she believed that she needed to "cross over to [her] people."
An important event took place when she accompanied her husband "Little" Louie Vega to a studio session. Salsa bandleader Eddie Palmieri happened to visit the studio, and was impressed with Caballero when he heard her singing. In 1992, Palmieri produced Caballero's first Spanish-language salsa album Llego La India via Eddie Palmieri (The India has Arrived via Eddie Palmieri), which was acclaimed as one of the best salsa albums of the year. From then on, Caballero became known to all as La India. India received a Lo Nuestro Award nomination in 1993 for Best Female Performer, Tropical/Salsa.
In 1994 La India, together with Louie Vega, recorded the house-music single "Love and Happiness (Yemaya y Ochún)," which paid tribute to Santería (a syncretic religion based in the Caribbean). This up-beat track was played heavily in dance clubs internationally. Sergio George produced La India's 1994 album Dicen Que Soy, a 2× gold-certified Billboard hit that added to her legend in the Latin-American music realm. The album also included her cover of Cuba’s Adalberto Alvarez Y Su Son’s hit song "Vivir Lo Nuestro," featuring a duet with Marc Anthony. Later this same year, Combinación Perfecta was released.
In 1996, La India worked with Tito Puente on Jazzin, an English-language album of swing classics with a Latin twist, on RMM Records. That same year she contributed the song "Banderas" to the album titled Voces Unidas (United Voices), a multi-artist tribute to the 1996 Summer Olympics. She also released India: Mega Mix that same year before divorcing Vega. La India sang a duet titled "La Voz de la Experiencia" (The Voice of Experience) with Celia Cruz, the late Queen of Salsa. It was then that Cruz gave Caballero her longer name: La India, the Princess of Salsa.
Masters at Work is the house-garage production and remix team of "Little" Louie Vega and Kenny "Dope" Gonzalez. They first worked together using the name, which had been given to them by mutual friend Todd Terry (who recorded several tracks under that name during the 1980s), in 1990. Vega is also the cousin of Eric Vega, a popular event creator and promoter in New York City.
Luis Fernando Vega, better known as "Little" Louie Vega, is an American musician of Puerto Rican ancestry. He is one half of the Masters At Work musical production team. He was born to a musician family, as his father, Luis Vager, was a jazz saxophonist, and his uncle was singer Héctor Lavoe of the Fania All-Stars, and he started his DJ career spinning records at the age of 13.
By 1985, Louie who is cousin to Eric Vega, popular event creator and promoter in New York City began playing house and block parties in his local Bronx neighborhood of New York, as well as engineering and mixing. (Erasure's The Two Ring Circus features his earliest dabblings in the studio.) His first nightclub residency was at the Devil's Nest, in the Bronx, and later he moved to Roseland, Studio 54 and the Palladium in Manhattan. During the 1990s, Vega was playing at one of the most influential nightclubs for house music, The Sound Factory Bar. By the mid 1990s, the Masters At Work team had Vega spending less time behind the turntables and more time in the studio as part of the team's remixers.
The duo also produced music together under the names MAW, KenLou, Sole Fusion, Hardrive, and Nuyorican Soul.