Christina Mac grew up in Pico Rivera, on one of the old horse properties where the backyards still end in corrals. Her mother's family has kept horses there for four generations. Her mother spoke Spanish, her father spoke English, and at every carne asada somebody ended up singing.
Sundays belonged to Iglesia Nueva Esperanza, a small church down the street, where she joined the worship team at fourteen and learned to lead a room in two languages.
Her father, Daniel Mac, was a Coast Guard rescue swimmer out of the Los Angeles and Long Beach station. He was her best friend, the one who drove her to every horse show and learned to ride just to keep up with her mother's family. When Christina was sixteen, he died on a rescue off the coast. The family has never said more about it in public than that, and neither does she.
The song that carried her through that year was "Amazing Grace," sung in Spanish the way her grandmother sang it at the kitchen table on nights when nobody could sleep. Her uncles brought out their guitars and a violin, and the old hymn slowly turned into an arrangement the whole family still sings in the backyard.
Today she works as a veterinary technician at a large-animal clinic, and on Saturdays she teaches young girls to ride through the local 4-H. She tells them what her father told her: sit tall and look where you want to go.
Her cousin filmed her singing at a family carne asada, with the horses in the corral behind her and her grandparents at the table, and posted it. The video spread for weeks, and a label called. Her first single, "Rescue Swimmer," is about a God who swims out after you, and she sings it in English and in Spanish.
"It's my name and it was his. Every time somebody says it, he's in the room."
She could have used her mother's surname or a stage name. She kept Mac. Christina sings for the families of people who serve, for girls in the saddle, and for a faith that sounds as true in Spanish as it does in English.
