Diamanté Anthony Blackmon, better known as DJ Gordo, does not like the expression “the American dream.” He says his team uses it to describe his long and successful career as a DJ, rapper and producer, but he’s just not a fan of the phrase. Of course: he is aware that if his family had not emigrated from Nicaragua to the United States, he would never have topped the Billboard producers list nor would he have been named the best Hispanic DJ by DJ Mag. “I wouldn’t have had the same opportunities there,” she says, adding that she has fulfilled “100%” of his dreams thanks to that decision his family made in the seventies.
Blackmon receives EL PAÍS in his hotel room in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan hours before taking the stage at the Brooklyn Mirage, where he gathered 12,000 people on May 30 and 31. He is wearing a black sweatshirt, nothing extravagant, and makes it clear that he is tired, but happy. He has arrived in New York after having spent three months on tour in Latin America, passing through 15 countries. It was his first tour across the continent as DJ Gordo. Until two years ago, Blackmon was actually DJ Carnage, his previous stage name under which, between 2012 and 2022, he established himself as one of the pioneers of the genres. EDM, trap and bass during the dance music boom (dance music) United States. Now, as Gordo, Blackmon seeks to reconnect with his Latin roots, fusing them with sounds of house and techno.
Since Gordo was born, Blackmon has worked with Latin artists like Feid on the song Men and womenThe Alpha in The Most Chingón or Maluma in Partner. At the end of May he launched Cafecito, a collaboration with the Argentine Nicki Nicole and the Panamanian Sech. “I have something with Eladio Carrión too, but it will come out after the album,” Blackmon advances, referring to his first album as Fatscheduled for release early this summer.
Between Nicaragua, Guatemala and the United States
Although of Nicaraguan origins, Blackmon feels equally linked to three countries: Nicaragua, where his family is originally from; United States, where he was born and later established himself as an artist and producer; and Guatemala, where he grew up. His maternal grandmother — whom he has on several occasions described as his heroine — emigrated from Managua during the Sandinista Revolution. She took her six children, including Blackmon’s mother, with her to the US-Mexico border. They crossed to McAllen, Texas, where they were detained, like so many other thousands of Latin American migrants.
“They separated them and put them in cages. My grandmother was separated from her children for 12 hours. Imagine, my youngest aunt, who would have been 2 or 4 years old at the time, was separated from her mother for half a day,” says Blackmon. “That’s why when the same thing was happening at the border a few years ago, when they were separating children from their families, she hit me very closely because they did it to my mother too. “She was only separated from her family for 12 hours, while these other children spent months in cages,” he adds.
Blackmon is referring to the “zero tolerance” policy established in 2018 during the Donald Trump administration, under which any immigrant who crossed the US border was prosecuted as a criminal and therefore separated from their children. In total, more than 3,000 minors were separated from their families under this directive. In April 2019, Blackmon—then still known as DJ Carnage—released the music video for Letting People Go, a song inspired by and dedicated to the thousands of families separated at the US border. The video narrates the odyssey of a family that emigrates from Nicaragua to the United States, where they are detained in McAllen, like her own family.
“My family wanted a better life. They received asylum in the United States, but they had nothing,” says the DJ. They were in Miami for a while, but eventually ended up in Maryland, where Blackmon was born. When he was two years old, his mother decided to go to Guatemala, where other relatives lived and where Blackmon ended up spending much of his childhood, before returning to the United States at the age of 10. “I grew up in a lot of poverty, in Guatemala, Nicaragua and the rest of Central America. The region has always been ignored, they have had the worst,” he says. Regarding the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo in Nicaragua, where part of his family still lives, he prefers not to comment.
“It’s a little complicated down there, the issues of politics and corruption, but they are beautiful countries, Guatemala and Nicaragua,” he says. “Do you know how many times I have met people who ask me where I am from and when I tell them that I am from Nicaragua, they tell me that they don’t know where it is? I stay in shockHow do you not know where Nicaragua is? I tell them it’s in Central America and they say ‘where?’ People really don’t know. “It’s very, very strange.”
Being Latino and black in a majority white industry
After a decade as Carnage and now as Gordo, Blackmon continues to make a place for himself in a largely white and English-speaking industry, being a Latino and black man. When he began his career in the United States, he says that “there were almost no Hispanic DJs” and “very few were black.” “It’s interesting because the music house and techno They come from black people. It comes from the gay community, from minorities. But at the same time it is an industry run by predominantly white people at all levels. And the most famous DJs are white. “We know that this classism, this racism, exists in our communities and in our culture.”
“You would think that as long as your music is good and you bring good energy, everything would be fine. But it’s not as easy as it seems. The world is not like that,” she points out. How did she persevere? “I didn’t worry about it. I didn’t try to fit in. I built my own community, my own world. I just did my thing,” she says.
Beyond having collaborated with artists from the Latin urban genre, Blackmon has also worked with great figures of hip hop and Anglo-Saxon rap such as Drake, for whom he produced several songs on two of his latest albums, Honestly, Nevermind (2022) and For All The Dogs (2023). In the latter, Gordo worked on the song Gently, the third collaboration between the Canadian rapper and the Puerto Rican reggaeton artist Bad Bunny. In addition, it is rumored that this summer Drake will release new music with Gordo, although the DJ did not want to confirm or deny anything. “We’re going to have to see what he’s going to do, he’s a crazy guy,” he says of the five-time Grammy winner.
Blackmon is now based in Hawaii, but remains connected and committed to both Guatemala and Nicaragua. In fact, in the last decade, it has opened two primary schools in the region: one in Nicaragua, which opened its doors in 2015, and another in Guatemala, operational since last year. Blackmon says that he did it because in his childhood and later during his travels through the region, he witnessed the shortcomings in the local education systems. “It’s a topic that touches me closely,” he says and adds: “My family tells me that before I left Guatemala, when I was little and was going to return to live in the United States, I told them ‘I will come back and bring food for everyone.’ ”. One way or another, he has kept that promise.
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