Given “the principle of freedom of speech,” Bonilla said the city couldn’t outwardly ban those musical performances — but it could dissuade them by imposing a hefty fine between 674,000 and 1.2 million pesos, or approximately $38,918 to $69,290. That money, the mayor added, would be directed to a women’s shelter and a women’s institute in Chihuahua that has programs aimed at reducing gender-based violence.
“We can’t allow this, and we also can’t allow [violence] to become normalized,” Bonilla said.
The move — coming as Latin music increasingly dominates streaming platforms — was sparked by what Bonilla called a “pandemic” of violence against women in a city where “7 of every 10” 911 calls involve cases of domestic violence, particularly against women. In Mexico, a country enveloped in a deepening crisis of violence, an average of 11 femicide cases, or intentional killings with gender-related motives, are committed each day, according to data released by the country’s national statistics agency in 2022. In Latin America, women face one of the highest rates of sexual assault, with data showing that more than half of all women have suffered some form of domestic violence.
It’s not the first time reggaeton, a genre that sprang up decades ago 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 combination of verbal wizardry and grooving beat was still in its nascent stage, police officers in San Juan raided record stores and confiscated hundreds of reggaeton CDs because the lyrics were decried as obscene. Some seven years later, a Puerto Rican senator unsuccessfully tried to ban the genre, claiming it was violent and degrading toward women. And in 2014, anti-reggaeton ads in Colombia attempted to show how songs made women sex objects by combining gruesome photos with a selection of lyrics, all running under the campaign slogan “Usa la razón, que la música no degrade tu condición,” or “Use reason, don’t let music degrade your condition.”
Through it all, though, reggaeton and urban Latin music has emerged as a global phenomenon — from the days of the ever-playing “Gasolina” to now, when Bad Bunny has been Spotify’s most-streamed artist for the past three years in a row. According to a 2023 midyear report by Luminate, an entertainment data provider, the global music industry surpassed 1 trillion streams and went up 30.8 percent compared with last year, something driven in large part by the popularity that Spanish-language music has gained among American listeners, the company said.
Jason Ruiz, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame, drew parallels between the trajectory of reggaeton with that of hip-hop and rap, genres that were also decried as violent in their early stages but that have seen a transformation following the rise of female and queer artists within them.
“Like every good art form, reggaeton is going to grow and evolve,” Ruiz said.
“To me, all of this is evidence that reggaeton is a thriving art form, because real, true art forms have always inspired pushback,” he added.
There are already whiffs of that happening within reggaeton, Ruiz said. In its second wave, female artists like Natti Natasha, Becky G and Karol G are making strides. At the same time, Bad Bunny has denounced misogyny and spoken out against Puerto Rico’s problem with gender-based violence. After being named top Latin artist of the year at the 2020 Billboard Music Awards, he dedicated his award “to all the women around the world, especially Latin women and Puerto Rican women.”
“Stop sexist violence, stop violence against women,” Bad Bunny said in Spanish. “Let’s educate right now, in the present, to have a better future.”
Even fellow reggaeton artist Arcángel attributed Bad Bunny’s anti-machismo stance to his rising stardom: “Machismo is out of style. Believe me — that whole concept of you being the alpha of everything, that is out of style. What’s in is letting your woman lead the way,” he said in an interview last year.
Still, research has shown that misogyny continues to pervade the genre. In a 2018 study, researchers from the University of Chile found that over 80 percent of the reggaeton songs they analyzed contained references to violence against women, with 59 songs accounting for 568 mentions. The researchers noted, however, that content about sexual and physical violence had fallen between 2004 and 2017, even as symbolic and psychological violence rose in that time frame.
Though Ruiz said the lyrics were problematic, Chihuahua’s move to fine artists who play the songs is a “bandage measure that does not get at the root of misogyny and the deeper causes of femicide in Mexico.” Plus, he added, “it really is a bad sign for our society when the government starts restricting artists.”
“It’s an empty threat,” he said. “At the end of the day, stuff like this almost never works — it’s kind of like the ’80s movie ‘Footloose’ when they tried to ban dancing and it totally backfired.”
