A Central American FemCEE
Rebeca Lane (Rebeca Eunice Vargas Tamayac) is a Guatemalan poet, sociologist, and rapper who sings about different political and social topics related to the country and the region. Lane self-identifies as a mestiza, an anarchist, a feminist (communal feminism), and an LGBTQ activist.
Lane collaborates with other artists and stakeholders for political causes. For example, she created “Somos guerreras” (“We are women warriors”) to deliver workshops to girls on the rights over their bodies. While her songs are a way of civilian and political participation, her involvement in these subjects goes beyond the stage as she also participates in community workshops and academic spaces.
Lane is an example of a counter-hegemonic cultural production that responds against the culture commodified by the music industry. According to the Rutgers students’ newspaper, “[h]ow to finance one’s own political power is the banner of her fight, for a homeland’s territory and resources, and most importantly, its name”. Here, it is important to mention that her music has a limited audience and, thus, is not a primary interest for the profit-driven music industry.
During her performances, Lane takes the time to speak out against structural violence and opression form her political perspective as a feminist and anarchist. These decisions, according to research, narrow her audience and, thus, have repercussions in the number of fans and less profit. However, she continues to bring her anti-capitalist and decolonial perspective in her music, to advocate for social change.
In short, Rebeca’s songs depict the complexity of Latin American history and societies. Her lyrics have sparked the interest of researchers as poetry and as a form of essay. There are publications about Lane’s work in Spanish, Italian, English, and German.
Feminist Raptivism
Lane’s music is part of Latin American (LatAm) feminist rap, which is explicitly transnational. In LatAm feminist hip hop black and indigenous subjects take the floor to defy colonial discourses. Thus, black and lesbian Latin American rappers have demonstrated what decolonial and antiracist feminist theory has pointed out, that we cannot talk about “being a woman” in a universal way. Feminist hip hop counterattacks the invisibilization of women and LGTBQ+ people in hip hop culture and, particularly, in expressions like gangster rap that depicts women as objects and LGTBQ+ people as undesirable.
Rebeca Lane’s rap is a feminist discourse that centers on the representation of the body: its powerful linguistic and visual discourse invites us to reflect. Her songs index different moments of Latin American feminism. Her music echoes the pioneers of anarcha–feminism in Argentina at the end of the XIX century in phrases such as “ni dios, ni patria, ni partido, ni marido” [no god, no patria, no party, no husband], as it also recovers the memory of recent history in Guatemala or the current situation of Women.
Another feminist component of her music is the ways in which it is produced and how it circulates to the audience. First, there is a collaboration with other feminist rappers that is commonly pointed out in the reviewed literature. For example, Somos Guerreras counterattacks the commercial Hip Hop that is characterized by the individualist focus and the competition between masculine rappers. In production, we find crowdfunding, self-production, and self-management. When it comes to circulation, their music does not work via popular media, but on Internet platforms.
To study Rebeca Lane’s production and her audience, it is important to bring to the attention that Hip Hop is not a music genre, but a movement and a component of a collective identity. The hip-hop movement can be understood as one of the updates of resistance against coloniality and racism with the performance created via its elements (graffiti, DJ, break, and rap) that include not only words but also other forms of creating meaning (e.g. images) that are part of social life. It started as a form of resistance against the violence suffered by Afro-descendant people and Hispanic communities in the US and has spread through “the peripheries” –including Latin America– and it has developed a particular relationship with each place. For that reason, to understand the relationship of Lane’s rap to this culture we need to consider the other elements of hip-hop in her discourse.
Reviewing the research on her music we find different aspects being studied, not only the lyrics. The literature mentions the power in her performance, the videos, the music, and the oral language and suggests it is important to consider the audience when possible: the music and the video are part of the performance of the artist-self. The research also hightlights how Lane’s video uses literary and historical references, working as proof of the importance of the visual work in Lane’s production, where the rapper includes references to social manifestations.
When it comes to the performance, the body and the visual a salient element is the poetic language that works to decolonize and liberate the body (especially of women and LGBTI people, and to heal the collective memory. There is also work about the body in Lane’s concerts, and when interviewed Lane expresses that her performances are planned as an energetic experience of three moments, from high energy to trauma, and then healing, as a communal experience.
These are the songs studied or mentioned in the academic literature reviewed for this project:
- Alma Mestiza
- Ni encerradas ni con miedos
- Somos guerreras (con Nakury y Audry Funk)
- Mujer lunar
- Intro (Escribir en crisis) [en Poesía Venenosa]
- Libre, atrevida y loca (feat Miss Bolivia & Ali Gua Gua)
- Bandera Negra
- Desnuda madrugada
- Natura
- Políticamente incorrecta
- Desaparecidxs
- Cumbia de la memoria
- Este cuerpo es mío
- Adicta a la poesía
- Reina y señora
- Ni una menos
- Soy Centroamérica
- Obsidiana
- Tzk’at
- Poesía Venenosa
- Mi cuerpo es mío
- Corazón Nómada
- Reina del caos
These are the publications reviewed for this section:
- Blanco Martínez, Miguel Ángel y Mendoza Téllez-Girón, Paola. (2019). Feminist Friendship as an Affective Engagement through the Arts: A Decolonial and Posthuman Becoming-with Rebeca Lane’s Alma Mestiza. disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory.
- Fernández Ulloa, Teresa. (2021a). Aprendiendo sobre empoderamiento, ecofeminismo, sororidad y feminismos literarios con el rap de Rebeca Lane. In Emma Gómez Nicolau, Maria Medina-Vicent & María José Gámez Fuentes (Eds.). Mujeres y resistencias en tiempos de manadas, pp. 123-144
- Fernández Ulloa, Teresa. (2021b). Capítulo 14 Música, palabra e imagen como medios de sanación, agencia y denuncia en el hiphop de Rebeca Lane. In Teresa Fernández Ulloa & Miguel Soler Gallo (Eds.). Las insoletes: desafío e insumisión femenina en las letras y el arte hispánico, pp.289-316. Berlin: Peter Lang
- Fernández-Ulloa, Teresa. (2021c). El yo comunitario, la memoria histórica y la violencia contra las mujeres en el rap de Rebeca Lane. En Saneleuterio, E.; Fuentes del Río, M. (eds.), Femenino singular, Salamanca: Ediciones Univesidad de Salamanca.
- Gondouin, Sandra. (2017). Rebeca Lane: «libre, atrevida y loca», la liberación del cuerpo por una rapera feminista de Guatemala. Amerika.
- Gondouin, Sandra. (2019). La rappeuse guatémaltèque Rebeca Lane entre paroles et images: transtextualité et intermédialité dans la «Cumbia de la memoria». Crisol 7: Les écritures palimpsestuelles: le texte et ses liens.
- Kaltmeier, Olaf y Raussert, Wilfried. (eds.) (2019). Introduction. Sonic politics: music and the narration of the social in the Americas from the 1960s to the present. In Sonic Politics. Music and Social Movements in the Americas. New York: Routledge
- Kolenz, Kristen A. (2021). A Central American Mestiza Consciousness: Rebeca Lane, Interruptive Choreography, and Rehearsing Change in the Borderlands. Feminist Formations 33(3), 71-94
- Levy, Jordan. (2019, April 10). Guatemalan poet Reca Lane discusses artistry, activism. University Wire; Carlsbad. New Jersey: Rutgers University
- Nenadovic, Ana. (2019). Performing Feminism, Autobiography, and Testimony. Feminist Rap in Latin America. Promptus 5, pp.95-114. Retrieved from
- Segas, Lise. (2018). Rappeuses féministes latino-américaines: «raptivisme» et féminisme choral. La Découverte 96, pp.83-92
- Silva, Ariana Mara da & Rosa, Laila. (2017a). Raperas Sudacas e Espaco Urbano: A interseccionalidade, o rap e a cidade. Anais Eletronicos do Encontro Internacional do Grupo de Estudos Multidisciplinares em Arquiteturas E Urbanismos do Sul – maloca 1(1).
- Silva, Ariana Mara da & Rosa, Laila. (2017b). Reflexoes feministas e o rap das lésbicas negras latino-americanas. Seminário Internacional Fazendo Género 11 & 13th Women’s Worlds Congress (Anais Electronicos).
- Tribouley, Alice. (2019). L’affirmation des rappeuses féministes en Américque-latine (de 2010 a nos jours). Unpublished dissertation [Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurés].
Silvia Rivera Alfaro has created the research and the website. The text and drawings are under the license of Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.
The video is copyright of Rebeca Lane. The Creative Commons license does not apply to the video and images from the video. They are used on this website with the artist’s permission.