On a road trip from Monterrey to Linares, the weekend before Thursday 21st September 2023, my friends played a song titled ‘Flores Amarillas’ in the car. I assumed a song about yellow flowers by a Mexican singer might be about marigolds, which are a common sight on Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead). They’re traditionally placed on ofrendas (altars) to welcome in the souls of the passed.
Wrong!
Often, I’ll assume something about Mexican culture, quickly find out the truth, and discover that the reality is far more exciting or entertaining than my assumption. In this special case, everybody was just as confused as me at first, and figuring out what was going on took me a whole week. The outcome is a nice little testament to the power of memes. It involves three things: a song, a TikTok trend, and a tradition.
1. A song
‘Flores Amarillas’, the song my friends played in the car, is one of the breakout tunes from ‘Floricienta’, an Argentine telenovela (a format of TV soap operas which are mightily popular in Latin America) that aired in Argentina from 2004 to 2005.
Disney Channel quickly picked it up and aired it across the rest of Latin America, which is how all my friends came to watch it when they were on the precipice of adolescence.
The song, sung by the show’s main character, Florencia (a portmanteau of ‘Flor’ — Spanish for ‘flower’ — and ‘Cenicienta’ — that’s the name for Cinderella in Spanish), is about waiting to receive yellow flowers as a sign of true love.
As you’ll see on this Google Trends chart, online searches for the song all but died for more than a decade, until…
2. A TikTok trend
…August 2022, when a TikTok account named @gutii2000, which regularly posts nostalgic music videos from the 90s and 2000s, uploaded the ‘Flores Amarillas’ video with the lyrics overlaid.
Tens of thousands of TikTok users started using the song in their videos, often sharing Florencia’s romantic longing to receive yellow flowers from a lover.
A month later, it was…
3. A tradition
…September 21st — in Argentina, which is in the southern hemisphere, that’s the start of spring. It’s a tradition to celebrate the turn of the seasons by gifting your loved ones flowers (but not necessarily yellow ones).
Naturally, the TikTok trend and the tradition merged, and people were buying their partners yellow flowers en masse.
Six months after that, in March 2023, it was time for México (and the rest of the northern hemisphere) to kick off spring, and the Flores Amarillas trend had a small peak in México’s corner of TikTok, but nothing too noteworthy.
The big peak came another six months later, in the weeks leading up to September 21st 2023.
Everything comes together
The day after we got back from the road trip, I was very healthily scrolling down TikTok at 2am when a video of an ant carrying a yellow flower popped up, soundtracked by ‘Flores Amarillas’. I hearted it.
The algorithm opened the floodgates, and I started seeing video after video featuring the song. People dancing along to it. Pugs dressed as yellow flowers. Yellow Pikmin. And so on.
I asked Kass what the deal was, and she told me about the Floricienta show, and how the song was having a resurgence on TikTok. I asked whether giving yellow flowers was a thing before the show, and she didn’t really know.
I posed the same question to a few friends who’ve been around the sun a few more times than Kass and I, and they generally couldn’t recall September 21st being a day for giving flowers.
So, basically, what’s happened is: two countries divided by hemispheres and seasonal cycles but united by nostalgia for an early-2000s teen soap opera resulted in México adopting an Argentine tradition at completely the wrong time of year.
I love this shit.
Relationships everywhere were thrust into chaos by one person expecting yellow flowers as if it were a centuries-entrenched tradition, and the other person wondering what special occasion they’d forgotten about.
I was walking through a mall on Friday 22nd September, and all the usual teen couples you see flocking to the cinema on the weekend to get their braces entangled in the back row were carrying bouquets of nondescript yellow flowers.
EnviaFlores, México’s biggest flower delivery company, managed to scrap together a campaign just in time, offering 12% off on 21st September with the code ‘AMARILLAS’.
Watching a millennial anthem rise from the dead and spark a springtime pseudo-tradition at the start of autumn has been a joy. Will it become a true tradition for years to come? Time will tell.