Gabrielle Ulubay

How Women Took Back Latin Music:  Meet the Latinas reclaiming a genre on a global scale.

If you look at the most popular Latin American artists right now, you’ll find an impressive number of women. Over the past few years, artists like Kali Uchis, Rosalia, and Anitta have been dominating the charts to an extent that many of their male contemporaries can only dream of.

But this hasn’t always been the case.

“For years, women had been conspicuously absent from the musical spotlight, seemingly relegated to an invisible corner,” writes music journalist Leila Cobo in her oral history of Latin music, Decoding Despacito. She explains that in 2015, only Shakira made it to the top fifty on Billboard’s annual Hot Latin Songs chart—and for a collaboration with a man, no less. In 2016, not a single woman charted at all.

Just two years later, however, 17 female-led songs made the chart, including hits by Anitta, Natti Natasha, Karol G, and Becky G. Today, those same artists, along with other stars like Rosalia and Kali Uchis, have been topping charts and selling out venues all over the world. So, what changed? 

Women in the Latin music industry have been fighting a decades-long war to gain respect. Today’s female Latin artists enjoy more recognition due to a combination of diasporic solidarity, social change, and plain old profit.

The “Triple Oppression”

As in most industries, female musicians have faced more obstacles to success than their male counterparts. In Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls, music journalist Lisa Robinson writes that throughout her lengthy career in women’s journalism, “women were dismissed. Women didn’t really count in this world.”

When it comes to contemporary Latin music specifically, Alfredo Nieves Moreno writes in his essay “A Man Lives Here” that in most contemporary Latin music of the early 1990s, “the participation of women [was] circumscribed to dancing and fulfilling male desire.”

Take, for instance, Glorimar Montalvo Castro (AKA Glory), best known for her backup vocals on hit songs like Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina” and Don Omar’s “Dale Don Dale.” In “(Wrapped in Foil): Glory at Twelve Words a Minute,” Félix Jiménez uses Glory as a case study for women in Reggaetón in the 1990s and early 2000s. He argues that although Glory “might well be the woman who ‘single-voicedly’ provided the glue to a musical movement,” her role was to “solidify the subservient female character.” Although Glory helped launch her male colleagues’ careers, she faded into obscurity, reduced to a legacy as a nameless “vocalization of perennial arousal.” Indeed, her collaborators rarely mention her today—in Cobo’s oral history of “Gasolina,” Daddy Yankee and his producer fail to mention Glory or her iconic hook even once. 

But Glory wasn’t the only victim of a patriarchal music industry. Rapper Ivy Queen enjoyed fame within Latin America but didn’t receive renown beyond the region or diaspora. She certainly wasn’t topping American charts the way Kali Uchis and Rosalia do now. Furthermore, Moreno writes that Ivy Queen, like Glory, also posited herself in many songs as a “prize or trophy that men exhibit, dominate, and manipulate.” Women’s participation in the genre, he concludes, was dependent on their acquiescence to a system that demeaned and over-sexualized them. 

How, then, can we explain the success of artists like Shakira, Anitta, and Selena, who’ve been icons for decades?

“Most artists gain notoriety as they align themselves more with whiteness,” argues Grammy Award-winning musician and Professor of Latino and Chicano Studies Martha Gonzalez. She adds that, in order to be successful in the American market, artists are encouraged to embrace Latin stereotypes, quipping, “So long as we’re shaking our asses and dancing and falling into that paradigm, we’re legible.” Otherwise, she says, Latin artists must align themselves with whiteness to be successful.

For example, Shakira only broke into the U.S. mainstream because of her 2001 single “Whenever, Wherever,” which was translated into English specifically to target American audiences, according to Decoding Despacito. She also died her dark hair blonde and straightened her curls.

Anitta, meanwhile, attests, “At the beginning of my career, I had less control over my artistry. People would try to control my sound, my look, the music.” She says she had to prove herself for years in order to be taken as seriously as she is today. 

Finally, Selena made music that, in the words of former EMI Music Latin President José Behar, was distinctly Mexican-American and “would never have worked in Mexico” itself. She was also pushed into particular Latina mold, discouraged from straying outside Tejano music and instructed to learn Spanish even though she was raised in a primarily monolingual English household. 

In order to achieve even a sliver of notoriety, Latina artists have had to lean into stereotypes, embrace whiteness, and otherwise dilute their authenticity. Meanwhile, male acts like Daddy Yankee, Calle 13, and Don Omar found worldwide fame while making experimental, label-defying work. Gonzalez calls this double standard a “triple oppression” against Latinas—one that’s racial, gendered, and linguistic. 

Selling Solidarity?

Perhaps the simplest explanation for the rise of Latinas in American mainstream music is a demographic shift. Gonzalez points out that the mass migration of Latinos to the United States, Canada, and Europe has increased the demand in these places for authentic Latin music, regardless of the artists’ gender. “We are all over the world now because we’re running from war, or we’re economic refugees, or those sorts of things,” she says. “People want to listen to their own music.”

Award-winning singer Natti Natasha agrees that Latinos tend to stand behind other Latinos. She admits, “We support each other very much, especially when we see one another striving and conquering new places using our own language and our own essence.”

And social media has made it easier than ever for the Latin diaspora to connect and for Latina artists to promote themselves. Natti Natasha reflects that in the days of Ivy Queen and Glory, “we just had radio stations and TV. Now, we have so much more reach through social media. Other cultures can discover our music without even knowing the language.” Meanwhile, Gonzalez adds that social media has helped shift the artistic content of Latin artists. Now that Latinas can promote their own music on social media, they can “make moves in their own careers in a way that represents meaningful change.”

But the flip side of that coin? 

“It’s really about the money,” Gonzalez deadpans. “Representation has increased because music executives have realized that there’s money to be made. And if you follow the paper trail, it all leads back to white males.” She calls out the fact that artists—especially female artists of color—make considerably less after producers and executives have been paid their share. She adds that the proliferation of Latina artists masks an underbelly of racism, in which only Latinos who are “safe for white people to consume” are welcome. She brings the fact that white songwriters often write music labelled as “traditional Mexican,” and that the resulting rhythms are often more American than they are Latin. 

In the case of successful dark-skinned Latinos such as Kali Uchis, she feels that this, too, is a money grab. “As an Afro-Latina, she can speak to both African Americans and Latin audiences,” she explains. “She’s bilingual. She’s a great artist, but also a great money-making individual.” 

The bottom line? Executives may be welcoming more Latinas into the fold not because they’ve eradicated prejudice within their ranks, but because they see a business opportunity—one that has become increasingly obvious in the age of mass migration and social media. 

How “Everything Influences Everything”

Gonzalez says that in a world where white men still “still profit off of Black and Brown bodies” and where Black and indigenous Latino artists are still largely excluded from the entertainment industry, it’s important to remember that “visibility is not a real measure for success.” She wants a future in which all artists–including women of color– have more agency over their art and the revenue it generates. However, she admits that representation still holds meaning.

“Seeing yourself in an artist is really important,” she says. “Not just seeing another woman like you but also hearing something that resonates with you”—whether that’s a cultural rhythm or a lyric that hits home. In seeing a Latina represented on stage or in a music video, young Latinas are able to envision themselves achieving similar success. 

“Everything influences everything,” Natti Natasha insists. “All that has happened recently—us speaking up for our rights—is definitely reflected in our music and what we say, and it impacts the girls and women who listen to our songs.” 

Indeed, the rise of widely successful Latina musicians coincides with cultural movements like #MeToo, the 2018 Chilean feminist protests, and Puerto Rico’s 2019 “Ricky Renuncia” protests. Meanwhile, in 2018, Natti Natasha and Becky G ruffled feathers when they released “Sin Pijama” because, in the words of Natti, the song depicted “two women being empowered together and talking about our sexuality.” 

Now, it’s a hit. But decades ago, such a song could have been career suicide. 

Upon releasing her unapologetically sexual solo album in 2005, Glory was ridiculed and banned all over Latin America. In a 2006 interview, Ivy Queen distanced herself from Glory’s sexual public persona, commenting that if she “wants to project herself with those lyrics, that’s her problem.” 

Glory’s public shaming epitomized her era’s far-from-sex-positive culture, whereas Natti Natasha and Becky G’s support for one another reinforces our current cultural landscape in which slut shaming is a cardinal feminist sin.

What’s Yet to Be Done

If you ask Martha Gonzalez, the music industry still isn’t an optimal environment for Latinas. “I don’t think that the industry has changed,” she admits. “I think it’s gotten more savvy about the kind of Latinidad it brings in. It’s still really whitewashed—even the artists that are from Mexico tend to be really white or white-friendly.” 

Becky G adds that, while progress has been made and “the obstacles that once seemed like unbreakable walls are being overcome with increasing ease,” she and her fellow artists “owe the next generation commitment and dedication so they can enjoy a more equitable industry.”

Anitta, on the other hand, hopes for a world where Latin music isn’t forced into a limiting, stereotypical box. In particular, she’s working to bring Brazilian funk mainstream, which would usher in a litany of Black, Brown, and Portuguese-speaking Latinas, all of whom have been grossly underrepresented in music.

The battle for gender equality in Latin music isn’t over—but that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate its achievements. In this renaissance of Latin music, more women than ever before are taking over the airwaves and selling out stadiums. The rise of diasporic and native artists alike bodes well for the future of representation, and male artists like Bad Bunny have often gone on record praising their female contemporaries and standing up for women’s rights at large. 

Still, it’s important to remember the female artists who set the stage for this era: Shakira, Selena, Ivy Queen, Glory, and others braved an industry that sought to reduce them to sex objects and, in the words of Becky G, “paved the way” for the today’s artists. Becky calls herself “indebted” to these trailblazers and has high hopes for making the future a more diverse, equitable place.

“Our greatest legacy is not going to be the records we set,” she says, “but the ceilings we break.”