—I want to participate in this space and sing rap.
—Do you want the space? So let's go out, have a date.
The rapper Yezli Mic (San Rafael Cedros, El Salvador, 26 years old) reproduces with this conversation the harassment she has suffered recurrently with concert organizers of hip hop in his country. “El Salvador is super-machista and that machismo is transferred to the culture of the hip hopdominated by men” explains the artist, activist and feminist during an interview in Barcelona, within the framework of the project Cities Defenders of Human Rights, organized in several Catalan municipalities at the end of last year. “The fact of being a woman and wanting to be an artist forces me to work twice as hard, because they tell me that if I rap it is because I am going to look for a boyfriend,” protests the singer, a member of the group hip hop HHFemms, one of the few female rap groups in El Salvador.
Because “being a woman in El Salvador”, the country with the third highest femicide rate in Latin America, according to the UN, “it is a daily survival.” “You have to stay constantly alert, ask yourself what could happen to you if you dress that way, if someone will touch you or harass you; They take your life just because you are a woman,” she continues. And she once again reproduces conversations that reflect the collusion of society with violence against women: “They tell you, even your own family, that if something happened to you it is, for example, because of the way you were dressed.”
Rap, which Yezli Mic approached in 2011 out of “pure curiosity, because he heard it in the streets,” is the tool he has found to combat this “machismo,” which permeates “every corner of the country,” including cultural spaces. from which she has been “excluded” so many times for being a woman. The performer and her companions sing against the violence suffered by girls and women, against “the obligation to be a mother imposed on raped minors” or against the prohibition of abortion in any case. “We want to raise awareness, make a different rap, with a message, that deals with the issues that are happening to us,” she adds. But her music, she warns, “is not for everyone.” “Not everyone wants to listen to women complaining, women talking about those who have disappeared or those who have been violated… They often call us feminazis,” she warns.
His lyrics were not always like this. She began singing about love and heartbreak. “In El Salvador they teach us from a young age to normalize violence,” she remembers bitterly. At the age of 16, she found herself immersed in a toxic relationship with a 29-year-old rapper who used violence against her. “For me it was normal because I had seen how my mother had been violated in the past, but when we left him and he started blackmailing me by telling me that without him I wouldn't do anything in the world of rap, I got up the courage and started changing my lyrics, to demand a space in the hip hop and to say that no one lays a hand on us women,” she says.
Abortion, in a country that has the most restrictive legislation against the interruption of pregnancy in America, is precisely the theme of many of his songs. Yezli Mic especially likes Who is going to stop us?, which is dedicated to Beatriz, the woman who was prohibited from having an abortion by El Salvador despite the unviability of the fetus and the risk that continuing the pregnancy posed for the mother's life. Her case went around the world after reaching the Inter-American Court of Human Rights last year, which has not yet issued any ruling on the matter. “Talking about abortion is something very complicated in El Salvador because no one wants to hear about women murdering their babies, because that is what they make us believe abortion is,” she criticizes.
Rapper chase
The effort to continue is “enormous.” “Unfortunately, being an artist and activist does not generate enough income to live on,” Yezli Mic regrets. “I have worked as a waitress and I would ask permission, or I would escape, to go sing or attend feminist demonstrations,” she says. Now, together with her cousin, she sells “smoothies, hamburgers or cakes” on the street, a job in which she is her own boss and that allows her to do what she likes most.
However, pursuing your dream in El Salvador can have serious consequences. Yezli Mic denounces the persecution that rappers have suffered under the Government of Nayib Bukele and the emergency regime that it has imposed to fight against the gangs and that has led to the entry into prison of more than 70,000 people, including the boyfriend of the rapper This policy has given Bukele great popularity: next Sunday, if the polls do not fail, he will be re-elected president of El Salvador with an overwhelming majority. But Yezli Mic disagrees: “Being poor and young and even dressing in shorts makes you a suspect,” he says through tears. His partner, also a rapper, has been in prison for more than a year and a half without trial and without being able to visit him. “They relate rap to gangs,” says the artist, a complaint that musical groups in El Salvador have also made.
“He is not a gang member, but one night the soldiers went to look for him at his house and took him away,” he says. A month earlier, other soldiers had beaten him in his presence. “They hit him, burned his fingers and face with lighters and told him that they were going to go look for him another day, but we didn't believe it,” he laments. And he highlights the latent racism: “Notice that I was going with him and they left me aside, probably because he is very Salvadoran, very dark-skinned, and I have blue eyes,” he gets angry. “They only hit him,” she reiterates.
—We have sung about this situation in Cry of freedom.
—And are you going to continue doing it?
—We would like to, but these songs scare us. There are many people in prisons.
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