Listen on Suno Bésame mucho is a bolero written and composed in 1940 by the Mexican composer Consuelo Velázquez (female, Mexico, 1916–2005). That a woman voiced romantic desire in the first person was rare at the time and is often noted in scholarship as an early visualization of female emotional subjectivity.

At the same time, the lyrics focus on urgency — “kiss me a lot, as if tonight were the last.” Desire is expressed, but the power to decide the future is handed to the other person. The speaker offers love from a position of possible abandonment, limiting self-determination. The ideal of loving fully before loss also reflects a romantic norm in which women absorb emotional labor and self-sacrifice. The song endures because it holds both liberation and constraint at once.