After forming on the 2012 season of The X Factor, Fifth Harmony enjoyed widespread success with international tours, devoted fans, and high-charting albums. In 2016, “Work from Home” hit No. 4 on the Hot 100, the first time a girl group reached the top 5 in a decade, per Billboard.
But all that success came at a cost. Dinah told BuzzFeed, “Coming from a girl group, we’re all super ethnic; we range from all over. The audience always perceived that I was Latina or Latina/Black.”
“So, I was told from people from above to kind of tuck a piece of myself away, being Polynesian, because we come from such a small demographic. They were probably thinking there’s not much of a market of selling me in that lane.”
The 27-year-old recalled the difficulty in “staying true” to herself. “After all the glitz and glamor, I’m coming home. Home to me is living with my 25 family members, and what I’m consuming here at home is the reality of my Polynesian [life]. We’re all big on family, big on God. It was putting me in the middle of picking and choosing who I was, this Hannah Montana effect.”
It wasn’t until she changed management in 2020 that Dinah said she could dive into herself fully. Her most recent album, Juice County: Volume 1, highlights her Polynesian identity and incorporates instruments and sounds from her culture. The music video for “Ocean Song” feels like a love letter to Pacific Islander women and highlights “the natural beauty to us, our hair, our color, our body shape.”
“Now that I’m an independent artist, I can champion myself and say, ‘I’m proud of you for taking the reins,’ because I didn’t have that type of control when I was under a label. So now I’m here, having the most fun I’ve ever had in my career because I’m able to make my people proud,” Dinah concluded.
