https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81977112

Juan Gabriel was a babe. Fierce, magnetic, and utterly himself. Watching the limited series Juan Gabriel: I Must, I Can, I Will reminded me why his presence hit like a tidal wave every time he stepped on a stage. The docuseries stitches together rare footage and intimate voices to show the duality between the mythic performer and the private man, and it landed right in the center of the things I think about most as a writer: permission, pain, and the alchemy that turns both into art.

On stage he transformed. He gave himself full permission to be who he wanted to be and then left every ounce of that self on the floorboards. The series leans into that duality, pulling from personal archives, home videos, and interviews to show how the public and private Juan Gabriel collided and fed each other. It is a four-part Netflix docuseries that premiered on October 30, 2025, and its focus on genius, sacrifice, and the split life of a global icon grounds what many of us always felt in our bones watching him perform.

What also comes through is the hurt he carried. The series details a childhood marked by absence and institutions, and a lifelong hunger for love that never quite arrived in the form he needed. Reporting around the release underscores the brutality of his youth and how early trauma shaped the man and the music that followed.

You can feel the ache most when the story turns toward his mother. I do not believe she loved him the way he loved her. I do not write that to accuse. I write it because generational wounds are not solved by pretending they never happened. Coverage around the doc points to a complicated relationship with his mother, Victoria Valadez, and a patchwork of caretaking that did not protect him from loneliness. That absence echoes in the songs so many of us cried to.

Here is where I get opinionated. Society failed her too. We still treat motherhood as a default setting rather than a choice with enormous weight. Women are rarely given social permission to say I cannot do this or I am not ready without punishment. When that permission is denied, children often pay the price. The series and reporting do not excuse anyone. They contextualize. They show a woman shaped by poverty, expectations, patriarchy, and a culture that rarely offers grace when motherhood does not fit. They show a son who turned the ache into a cathedral that millions visited through his work.

That is the conundrum sitting in my throat after the final credits. If she had not had him, if life had not bent in exactly these unfair ways, would the world have known the uncontested phenomenon who redefined Latin music and dragged pop into high culture spaces like Bellas Artes in 1990. That concert did not just crown a star. It split a cultural atom, collapsing class and taste boundaries in real time.

The series also traces the betrayals, the political proximity, the tabloid wounds, and the family circle that loved and protected and sometimes complicated his story. That network matters because it shows how impossible it is to separate the artist from the web that made him, fought him, and carried him.

What I keep returning to is the way performance became therapy. Not the cute kind. The raw kind. When he sang “Querida,” it was not just a love song. It was prayer. Confession. A reclamation of self in front of witnesses who needed the same permission slip. The series’ premise is simple and devastating. It reveals a man who gave everything to his audience because under the lights was where he could be whole. That is what people came to feel. That is why his concerts played like revivals.

As a writer, I understand that survival strategy. I write to drag the unspeakable into the light. In The Ordinary Bruja, Marisol learns that silence is its own monster. She also learns that love does not always come in the package you begged for. Watching Juan Gabriel in this series reminded me that art can be revolt and self-worship at the same time. He did not wait for permission to exist. He performed his existence into reality and invited us to do the same.

There is another thread here that matters. The series makes clear how personal archives and never-before-seen materials complicate the simple narratives some people prefer. The man fans called El Divo de Juárez wrote more than 1,500 songs and sold out arenas across decades. None of that cancels the loneliness. All of it explains the scale of his reach. The NPR segment on the doc uses a phrase I love. It says the series “stitches together” his own recordings to tell the story only he could tell. That feels exactly right. He left the fabric. We are only now seeing the pattern.

So yes. Juan Gabriel was a babe. He was fierce. He taught me that transformation is possible when you risk being seen. He taught me that flamboyance can be a survival tool. He taught me that the tenderest people can still build cathedrals out of sound. I hope he learned what he needed to learn in this lifetime. I hope his mother did too. I am grateful to have been alive at the same time as this man who turned abandonment into belonging and invited the rest of us to come home to ourselves.

If you watch one thing this week, make it Juan Gabriel: I Must, I Can, I Will. Then tell me what it stirred up for you. Tell me where you recognized yourself. Tell me which song cracked you open and why.