Villano Antillano is Them’s 2023 Now Awards honoree in Music. The Now Awards honor 12 LGBTQ+ people who represent the cutting edge of queer culture today; read more here.
Villano Antillano has rebellion in her blood. “I come from a very hard, strong line of women that do not fuck around,” she tells me over Zoom from her San Juan apartment, her deep brown eyes glimmering as the sun shines on her plants, her stripper pole, and the pink mug in her hand. “I am a mischievous little rebellious bitch, because that is exactly what is in my genetic code.”
The 28-year-old certainly couldn’t have taken Latin rap by storm without shattering a few norms in the process. Since her first viral anti-homophobia tiraera (diss track) “Pato Hasta La Muerte” in 2018, La Villana has impressed with her prolific verses, earning praise from the genre’s most famous artists, and claiming her own seat at the table of El Movimiento, a Spanish-language music scene historically dominated by cisgender heterosexual men. Between a heavily streamed collaboration with famed producer Bizarrap and a nod from Bad Bunny himself, she is undeniably one of Latin music’s fastest rising stars.
Often referred to as the first prominent trans woman in Latin rap, Antillano has indeed played a direct role in knocking down doors for queer artists in her genre. But she says her success didn’t happen in a vacuum; rather, she sees it as a collective victory. The Puerto Rico-born MC sits at the helm of a growing sub-movement within El Movimiento of queer and trans artists who are breaking into genres like Reggaeton, Dembow, Latin Rap, and R&B en Español. She may be the first trans woman in Latin Rap to gain global recognition, but she’ll be damned if she’s the last.
“There are so many trans and queer people — people outside of the umbrella of cis-heteronormativity — who exist and are doing un trabajo cabron,” she says. “It’s just we’re constantly overlooked, regardless.”
That collective strength is something La Villana is hoping to showcase on her forthcoming European and U.S. tours for her first full-length studio album, La Sustancia X. She’s ready to announce herself as a singular superstar, and she deserves her moment in the spotlight, but she’ll also be traveling with a gaggle of trans acompañamientos in tow.
“I feel like a safe space travels with me because it’s the people that are with me that make the space safe for me,” she says. “If I’m traveling with my people, no matter where I am, it’s going to be safer, whether I am alone or whether I am with 15 of my closest friends who would fight for me and I would fight for her. There’s this sense of camaraderie and loyalty that I haven’t run into anywhere else.”
Villana Santiago Pacheco built her chosen family out of necessity. She describes her childhood in Bayamón, a suburb of San Juan that’s “still very much metro,” as a time “filled with beauty and horror.” Surrounded by her parents, four sisters, and plenty of cousins, she came from a big family that could be an “immense source of joy,” and also an “immense source of pain.” Overall, she considers her adolescence a happy time, but growing up as a trans girl in a world that doesn’t equip parents with the tools to be supportive was challenging.
“I feel like it was mi primera escuelita — that's what I like to call it — because the first people that I had to learn how to stand up to were my family,” Antillano tells me.
The neighborhood recognized her queerness before she did. From getting into fights with kids to other parents fretting over how feminine she was, a young Villana experienced an ostracization she didn’t fully understand at first. But for all the pushback she faced, Antillano says she also received unspoken acts of love. Her abuelas gave her the space to exist as she was, allowing her to play with dolls, do her sisters’ hair, and just be herself.
“Whether they knew it or not, I feel like that’s solidarity,” she says. “That was them letting me have a childhood, regardless of all these other things that were going to come into play later on, when you reach your teens and all these other things start mattering. But there’s a point where you’re just a kid regardless of gender.”
The older she got, however, the more her family worried over how their daughter would be treated by the outside world, and the more pressure they put on her to blend in. For Antillano, school became a way to cope with the trauma. She locked herself in her room for hours of the day to study, with the hopes of earning a scholarship to a state-side university far away from her island, where she could safely embrace herself.
“All I did was think of school and not focus on all these other questions and things that I was feeling,” Antillano says. “I thought I was going to be able to get as far away from here as possible.”
But when it became obvious that, even with scholarships, leaving Puerto Rico wasn’t a financially viable option, she decided to stop hiding. At 17, when she came out as queer — though not yet as trans — Villana was kicked out of her parents’ house with nowhere to go.
Antillano and her family have since reconciled and have a closer relationship than ever. Looking back, she attributes much of her parents’ actions to fear rather than hatred.
She likes to explain it with an allegory: First as a curious child and now as an adult, collecting fish has always given Antillano a sense of calm. There’s something about the sound of the bubbles and practice of cleaning their enclosures that soothes her. When she was 12, she released a school of iridescent guppies into the pond near her house. When she came back to retrieve them a few days later, her beautiful fish were nowhere to be found. While they could technically survive in the water, their colorful scales had made them easy targets.
“‘All of the fish in this pond are dirt-colored because they can camouflage better in the sediment of the river,’” she recalls someone explaining to her years later. “‘The fish that you released here — even though they were the same — they couldn't do that because they were so colorful.’"
“I guess my parents sort of expected me to do that,” Antillano continues. “They were trying to have me be a little bit more toned down, so I wouldn't stand out so much and that I would survive, because ultimately it's life-or-death here and everywhere for us.”
But Antillano couldn’t hide her scales. After getting kicked out, she went to a local university as far as she possibly could from Bayamón: Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in Santurce. The rapper ultimately found herself in Rio Piedras, a district of San Juan neighboring Santurce where she spent most of her time in college. Without parental supervision, she studied gender theory, met other queer people, and began experimenting with music.
Though Antillano had grown up surrounded by music in her household, she had never been encouraged to pursue or formally study it. Playing around with programs on a mini laptop she won in a raffle, Antillano began to find her musical voice by producing her first tracks in her bedroom, like her 2019 project Tiranía. She had always written as a form of catharsis, but putting her words to beats and melodies helped her express the pain she was going through in her early years as she grew to understand her gender.
“The initial projects that I did — for instance Tiranía — I was very mal,” she says. “I was going through a lot. I was trying to make things work with the instructional manual that had been given to me. After that, I realized that none of that was going to take me anywhere.”
While the queer segment of El Movimiento is currently gaining momentum, the current wave of out and proud queer and trans musicians in PR was more muted back then. Antillano dropped Tiranía the same year that the genre’s first openly gay rapper Kevin Fret was murdered in Santurce. Filled with low, gravelly beats and melancholy lyrics, the collection of four songs grappled with the realities of being queer in la brega, a Puerto Rican term used to refer to the struggle against systemic injustice. People were hungry for music that spoke to their experiences, and Antillano put herself on the map as an unapologetic queer rapper, earning her an initial following. She doesn’t feel that Tiranía is representative of who she is today, but she keeps it online for the queer people who still resonate with it.
“It very much is representative of me as a human and as a queer person who was going through the ropes of all the trauma,” she tells Them. “The only reason it's still up there or out there es por eso, because there are a lot of people who connect with it, and I wouldn’t want to take that away from queer people that find something in it.”
At the beginning of 2020, Antillano’s star was rising. With a loyal following and growing spotlight, she was also coming to terms with her gender. She had been using sex work as a means of exploring her feminity and experimenting with her presentation for clients, sparking realizations in the process.
Sitting in her car with a friend whom she considers a mother and a sister all at once, Antillano broke down and came out as trans on the spot. She stresses that it was her community — her acompañamientos — who stood by her and helped guide her through it all.
“I would lie if I said that I did it alone, and I can handle everything,” she tells me. “We need spaces to be vulnerable, and I’m glad that I have found that within my own community and my chosen family.”
As the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the world and lockdowns went into place, she knew she was going to transition, even if that meant losing everything she had fought for. After successfully breaking into Puerto Rico’s rap scene, she feared coming out as trans would erase it all in an instant. But rather than undoing her success, Antillano’s truth helped her unlock an even broader following.
“I come out as a trans woman, and it was the exact opposite,” she says. “I was scared of losing everything and I gained everything. That’s a big lesson, and I think it's muy poderoso that the minute that I started living in my truth, I had access to an immense amount of strength and magic that I didn’t have access to before because I was denying that to myself.”
The way she experienced the world transformed after starting hormone therapy. From taste to sound, Antillano says her five senses felt heightened like never before, which only took her music to the next level. Antillano left behind the gloomy sound of Tiranía in exchange for upbeat bops like “Pájara,” an anthem reclaiming anti-queer slurs as a form of empowerment, and “KLK,” a rhythmic song about sensuality and hot, horny nights.
“I feel like I was able to access music differently. I wasn’t able to understand myself as a musician until I understood myself as a woman,” Antillano says. “If the way that I perceived the world shifted, then that means that all the data that I was incoming to me was being received differently. So I started making music differently and it was really good.”
La Villana wasn’t the only one who noticed the changes. While she had an existing following, coming out catapulted her into being a known personality in Puerto Rico, both for her music and for being “a hot transsexual in the metro area,” as she puts it. Antillano learned to use the hypersexualization and public condemnation she faced as a trans woman on the island as her weapon.
“It’s a juxtaposition or contradiction of being super publicly hated, but super secretly very desired,” she says. “It’s very hard, and being super sexualized can make your development process very confusing, but market-wise, sex sells. So I grabbed that sword and I was like, ‘Well, this is my weapon and I’m going to wield it.’”
As the buzz around her grew stronger, notable musicians and producers began to take notice.
Antillano doesn’t need anyone to tell her she’s muy cabrona. But a shout out from Bad Bunny certainly doesn’t hurt. While she seldom talks about the time she met el bunny, she tells me it was one of the biggest moments in her career.
“It was very crazy to have the world’s number one artist — who is a Puerto Rican person — say, ‘Truly, I love what you do,’” she recalls. “That was the pivotal moment, I was like, wait, ‘You fuck with a doll?’ I kind of grabbed a bit of that power and I was like, ‘Wait a minute, I am that bitch. I’ve been that bitch.’”
From then on, La Villana made all the right connections with all the right people to launch herself into super stardom. Soon after meeting Bad Bunny, el conejo connected her with Bizarrap and they released their collaboration in June 2022, earning upwards of 207 million views. The track showcased Antillano at her finest: her lyricism, her stage presence, and her humor. Even the most avowed transphobe would have to concede La Villana’s undeniable talents as a wordsmith.
Six months later, she released her first full-length studio album, La Sustancia X, which saw global critical acclaim. The Spanish rap album, built on Caribbean percussion, pulls inspiration from a mix of genres, including rock, trap, reggaeton, and pop. La Sustancia X is an act of queer love through and through, from “Poli,” an upbeat song about polyamory, to “Mujer,” the crowning anthem of the album against trans femicide in Puerto Rico.
Yet, even as she’s perhaps the most visible trans woman in El Movimiento, Antillano stresses the precarious nature of her position in her genre and the music industry at large. She’s been able to create her own success and gain access to certain tools, but there is still massive pushback against her presence in Latin music.
“I have come into some roadblocks that are just there, period, because of the person that I am and because of the fact that I am such a revolutionary symbol,” Antillano says. “All of these cis male artists, who are very close, aren’t going to collaborate with a trans woman. There are very few. We can count them on one hand.”
Like her stage name suggests, Antillano stands as a heroine to queer people in the Antilles and beyond, and a villain to transphobes everywhere. Despite the hurdles that remain, she stands proud in the work she’s done and the album that she’s made, not just for herself but for queer and trans people worldwide.
“It will stand the test of time because it’s something super cabrón that we as queer people did, and I say ‘we’ because I think this album is representative of so many identities and so many people who accompanied me along the way. It isn’t just my story,” she says. “There is something for the entire world here.”
Photographer: German Vazquez
Stylist: Vladimir Alvira
Makeup artist: Giovannie Berdecia
Hairstylist: Jann Carlos Figueroa
Production: Worldjunkies
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