Given “the precept of freedom of speech,” Bonilla mentioned town couldn’t outwardly ban these musical performances — but it surely may dissuade them by imposing a hefty wonderful between 674,000 and 1.2 million pesos, or roughly $38,918 to $69,290. That cash, the mayor added, can be directed to a girls’s shelter and a girls’s institute in Chihuahua that has applications geared toward lowering gender-based violence.
“We will’t permit this, and we can also’t permit [violence] to turn out to be normalized,” Bonilla mentioned.
The transfer — coming as Latin music more and more dominates streaming platforms — was sparked by what Bonilla known as a “pandemic” of violence towards girls in a metropolis the place “7 of each 10” 911 calls contain instances of home violence, notably towards girls. In Mexico, a rustic enveloped in a deepening disaster of violence, a median of 11 femicide instances, or intentional killings with gender-related motives, are dedicated every day, based on information launched by the nation’s nationwide statistics company in 2022. In Latin America, girls face one of many highest charges of sexual assault, with information displaying that greater than half of all girls have suffered some type of home violence.
It’s not the primary time reggaeton, a style that sprang up many years in the past from predominantly Afro-Latino communities in Panama and Puerto Rico, has been accused of being entrenched with machismo, sexism and violence.
In 1995, when the mix of verbal wizardry and grooving beat was nonetheless in its nascent stage, cops in San Juan raided document shops and confiscated a whole bunch of reggaeton CDs as a result of the lyrics have been decried as obscene. Some seven years later, a Puerto Rican senator unsuccessfully tried to ban the style, claiming it was violent and degrading towards girls. And in 2014, anti-reggaeton advertisements in Colombia tried to indicate how songs made girls intercourse objects by combining ugly images with a collection of lyrics, all working below the marketing campaign slogan “Usa la razón, que la música no degrade tu condición,” or “Use cause, don’t let music degrade your situation.”
By means of all of it, although, reggaeton and concrete Latin music has emerged as a worldwide phenomenon — from the times of the ever-playing “Gasolina” to now, when Unhealthy Bunny has been Spotify’s most-streamed artist for the previous three years in a row. In response to a 2023 midyear report by Luminate, an leisure information supplier, the worldwide music trade surpassed 1 trillion streams and went up 30.8 % in contrast with final 12 months, one thing pushed largely by the recognition that Spanish-language music has gained amongst American listeners, the corporate mentioned.
Jason Ruiz, an affiliate professor of American research on the College of Notre Dame, drew parallels between the trajectory of reggaeton with that of hip-hop and rap, genres that have been additionally decried as violent of their early phases however which have seen a change following the rise of feminine and queer artists inside them.
“Like each good artwork kind, reggaeton goes to develop and evolve,” Ruiz mentioned.
“To me, all of that is proof that reggaeton is a thriving artwork kind, as a result of actual, true artwork kinds have at all times impressed pushback,” he added.
There are already whiffs of that taking place inside reggaeton, Ruiz mentioned. In its second wave, feminine artists like Natti Natasha, Becky G and Karol G are making strides. On the similar time, Unhealthy Bunny has denounced misogyny and spoken out towards Puerto Rico’s downside with gender-based violence. After being named prime Latin artist of the 12 months on the 2020 Billboard Music Awards, he devoted his award “to all the ladies all over the world, particularly Latin girls and Puerto Rican girls.”
“Cease sexist violence, cease violence towards girls,” Unhealthy Bunny mentioned in Spanish. “Let’s educate proper now, within the current, to have a greater future.”
Even fellow reggaeton artist Arcángel attributed Unhealthy Bunny’s anti-machismo stance to his rising stardom: “Machismo is out of favor. Consider me — that complete idea of you being the alpha of every little thing, that’s out of favor. What’s in is letting your girl prepared the ground,” he mentioned in an interview final 12 months.
Nonetheless, analysis has proven that misogyny continues to pervade the style. In a 2018 examine, researchers from the College of Chile discovered that over 80 % of the reggaeton songs they analyzed contained references to violence towards girls, with 59 songs accounting for 568 mentions. The researchers famous, nevertheless, that content material about sexual and bodily violence had fallen between 2004 and 2017, at the same time as symbolic and psychological violence rose in that time-frame.
Although Ruiz mentioned the lyrics have been problematic, Chihuahua’s transfer to wonderful artists who play the songs is a “bandage measure that doesn’t get on the root of misogyny and the deeper causes of femicide in Mexico.” Plus, he added, “it truly is a foul signal for our society when the federal government begins limiting artists.”
“It’s an empty risk,” he mentioned. “On the finish of the day, stuff like this nearly by no means works — it’s form of just like the ’80s film ‘Footloose’ once they tried to ban dancing and it completely backfired.”
