While reggaetón sees a surge in popularity in the age of Bad Bunny, it is more than a genre of music for Latin Americans and people with Latin roots, like Daniel Yanes Alvarenga.

“It’s become… just a way to exist and feel in touch with my cultures,” said Yanes Alvarenga, a McMaster graduate student who researches the genre.

However, back in the 90s, the genre faced bans and censorship for its proximity to Blackness.

In his research, Yanes Alvarenga looks at how reggaetón originated with Black artists in the Caribbean and how those roots are present today.

The name of his research, “Sin Sazón no hay Batería ni Reggaetón,” translates to “without seasoning there’s no drums nor reggaetón.” It refers to lyrics popularized by Bad Bunny in his song El Apagón where he says, in Spanish, “now everyone wants to be Latino, but they’re lacking seasoning, drums and reggaetón.”

The line, however, was first said by Tego Calderón, a Black Puerto Rican reggaetón artist popular in the early 2000s, in his song Métele Sazón with the word “sazón” referring to style or flow.

Yanes Alvarenga was born and raised in Hamilton, his parents are Guatemalan and Salvadorean. Growing up in Canada, reggaetón brought him closer to his roots.

“Reggaetón for me was everything growing up, that’s how I learned how to talk,” he said.

In a time when Bad Bunny is one of the biggest artists in the world, it’s important for people to know not only the Black roots of reggaetón but the Black artists who continue to contribute to the genre, Yanes Alvarenga said.

His research was presented earlier this week at a Black History Month event at McMaster University, called Black Latin America & Afro-Latinx Worlds: A Student Research & Creative Showcase, that aimed to highlight student research.

Jamaican, Panamanian roots and Reggae en Español

Reggaetón started in the late 80s, said Yanes Alvarenga, when Black Panamanians with Jamaican roots translated dance hall and reggae songs like Dem Bow by Shabba Ranks from Patois into Spanish.

Black Panamanian artists like El General and Nando Boom were translating those songs and giving them different sounds and lyrics in what became known as Reggae en Español (Reggae in Spanish).

Their music, which contained a lot of talk of resistance and lived experiences of their marginalization, resonated with many Afro-Puerto Ricans.

“It wasn’t all struggle,” said Yanes Alvarenga. “A lot of Reggae en Español was joyful and [about] being resistant.”

Those roots carry on to today, Yanes Alvarenga added, with many of the beats of the reggaetón popular today sampling dance hall tracks from Jamaica.

The whitewashing of reggaetón

DJs in Puerto Rico later started creating mixes with long snippets from different songs and sounds, according to the research.

“Reggae en Español became this underground music, where mainly Afro-Puerto Rican singers, rappers, or raperos, would sing over these beats, give their own lyrics to them,” said Yanes Alvarenga.

Those lyrics talked about lived experiences, and specifically in neighbourhoods called caserios, government-sanctioned houses that, according to Yanes Alvarenga, were over-surveilled.

As the sound went more mainstream, it became what is now known as reggaetón.

At one point, he said, the underground music was banned in Puerto Rico, but the influence of the music had already spread.

Efforts by the Puerto Rican government to “clean up” reggaetón with what they framed as anti-crime and anti-pornography movements led to artists like Daddy Yankee to come in and turn the genre from “Black music” to “Latin American” music, said Yanes Alvarenga.

Daddy Yankee, with a more “marketable face” and that mixed white Latino look that many associate now with the whole region, took the world by storm with Gasolina from his third studio album, “Barrio Fino,” he said.

While Black reggaetón artists like Don Omar and Calderón, who sang about Afro-Latinidad and being Black in Puerto Rico, also saw great success in the genre, they were never able to attain the same popularity.

Today, Bad Bunny is known and celebrated for his lyrics criticizing gentrification in Puerto Rico and celebrating the island’s culture, without much acknowledgement of those resistance lyrics coming from Black artists who were silenced 30 years ago, said Yanes Alvarenga.

Afro-Latinos have been talking about the history

Nydia Simone, a U.S.-based Afro-Latina storyteller, actress and founder of Blactina Media — which aims to amplifying Afro-Latinx and Afro-Caribbean stories and narratives — said it’s good to see people are bringing more attention to the origins of reggaetón.

“I think it’s great, it’s surprising, too, that non-Black people are even paying attention to this, that people actually care,” she said.

However, Simone said it is also important to remember Black Latinos like her have been talking about the topic for a long time.

She was born in the U.S. to African-American and Afro-Panamanian parents and said she grew up proudly steeped in those two cultures.

Simone has used her social media platforms on Instagram and TikTok, as well as writing and other forms of storytelling, to talk about the whitewashing in reggaetón, discussing artists like J Balvin, a white Colombian artist who, in 2021, accepted an award for Afro-Latino Artist of the Year at the African Entertainment Awards USA.

“I also talk about the whitewashing of bomba, salsa, Afro-Latin jazz, everything, everything, it’s all been sanitized,” she said.

“Black people are still suffering, we’re still suffering from cultural threat, theft, and when we have these conversations, [we are] shunned and attacked by non-Black Latinos. But when the white community and when the non-Black community speaks about anything as it relates to Afro-Latinidad, they are celebrated,” she said.

Simone said the whitewashing of reggaetón and other genres is built upon the theft of Black intellectual property and aesthetics by non-Black artists and said there’s a need, now more than ever, for economic reparations and ownership for Black artists, who have contributed in many ways to what is now know as “Latino culture.”

White artists need to find their own ways of acknowledging Black artists’ influence in the work they do today, she said, but in the meantime, Black artists can’t stay silent.

“There’s a quote [by Zora Neale Hurston] that says, ‘if you are silent, they will kill you and say you liked it,’ … so I think it’s important to speak out and say, ‘I don’t like what’s going on right now,’ like, ‘I have an issue with it,’ and it makes it harder to whitewash,” said Simone.