In Madrid’s downtown area, a classical manor with a salmon-colored façade and marbled walls from the 19th century looms large. At the base of its 40-foot pediment, a sign reads: “Real Academia Española” (“Royal Spanish Academy”). This institution dictates the formal rules of the Spanish language, including the acceptance and regulation of new words. In 2019, the academy’s members gathered here and settled on a spelling and pronunciation of a certain term for an updated digital edition of the dictionary: reguetón. The academy’s acknowledgement of this new word was a milestone, revealing how reggaeton had become an undeniable part of the Spanish cultural landscape.
Today, you can hear the genre on every corner: on a stroll near the crowded beaches of Costa Brava; at bars in the Basque Country as you sip on a cheap local blend of Coke and wine; even on the radio inside an Uber in Seville. There are more local reggaeton artists than ever, including the pop-reggaeton singer Lola Índigo; the rapper Quevedo, who mixes his rapid-fire flow with melodic reggaeton vocals; and experimentalists like Rosalía, Bad Gyal, and Ms Nina. Many local Spanish artists have been bending reggaeton to their own tastes, infusing local folk traditions with blasts of perreo. According to the Spanish music industry association PROMUSICAE, these artists dominated the nation’s top 50 songs chart in 2021, edging out every English-language performer except for the Weeknd and Lil Nas X.
Born at a sonic crossroads of Panama, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the U.S., reggaeton partially emerged from countries that were once colonies of Spain. For many years, it was a source of racial and moral panic across Spanish-speaking Latin America—a genre born in Black and working-class neighborhoods that became a scapegoat for crime and sexism as it exploded across the region. Decades later, reggaeton is a global superpower in the music industry. According to the RIAA, the Latin music market generated $886 million in revenue in 2021, compared to $178 million in 2016. Reggaeton has powered much of that growth.
The genre’s continuous rise in Spain has raised urgent questions about cultural ownership, colonialism, and race as a result of centuries-old social hierarchies between Europe and Latin America. While some fans and industry stakeholders consider this phenomenon a valuable cultural exchange and a natural outcome of the genre’s global ascent, reggaeton’s rise in Spain has also frustrated many Black and brown Latin Americans, especially Caribbean ones. The issue is layered: There is concern about Spanish artists profiting off the music of Afro-diasporic cultures once colonized by Spain, sometimes even eclipsing the visibility of those who founded the movement. Moreover, Spaniards and Latinos are often conflated in the public imagination. Latinidad is an ethnic identity category, not a racial one—two realities that erase significant differences and structural inequalities around skin color, educational access, and class. Meanwhile, other industry executives and cultural commentators hail reggaeton’s takeover in Spain as a sign of globalization’s advantages.
“Years ago, reggaeton was not accepted in Spain and now everyone listens to it,” says the underground artist La Zowi. Born Zoe Jeanneau Canto in France, she was raised in Spain and grew up immersed in reggaeton and rap. She adopted her stage name when she jumped into the booth in the mid-2010s, rising from the Spanish trap scene. Today, she makes low-slung rap tracks and rhymes over buoyant reggaeton beats. In a video of a recent Boiler Room performance recorded in Granada, where she’s based, the crowd shouts along to her trippy trap number “Filet Mignon.” Later, she drops her dembow-infused hit “Ping Pong,” a track packed with perreo catchphrases like “azótame” (“whip me”). The whole affair exemplifies how Spanish artists have embraced reggaeton as part of the country’s youth culture.
“I’m well aware that reggaeton is Latin music and we’re not Latino, but as a Spanish person, when I make reggaeton music, it is not the same as a Puerto Rican making it,” says La Zowi. On tracks like the 2021 Bea Pelea collab “Mi Mejor Amiga,” which mixes rhythms derived from reggaeton and hip-hop, the singer appeals to both her musical ambitions and trends in the industry. A reggaeton fan from an early age, La Zowi reveals that embracing the genre is partially an industry maneuver. “I love to make trap, but if I made only trap, I’d be restricting my reach only to a Spanish audience,” La Zowi explains. “On the other hand, I love how reggaeton fulfills my persona, and it’s quite interesting from a commercial perspective. I think the reggaeton we used to listen to 20 years ago has nothing to do with reggaeton today.”
The genre’s journey across the Atlantic started at the beginning of the 2000s. “There was this club in Madrid called La Havana; the owner was Dominican and they used to play bachata all night long,” recalls Víctor Sánchez, a Colombian journalist and music promoter based in Madrid. In the ’90s, he was covering crime in Colombia, but fled his country shortly after receiving threatening letters from local militias; he eventually settled down in the Spanish capital in 2000. “In 2004, I was working for a local newspaper called El Latino, and I covered bachata concerts at this very club, La Havana,” he says. “But bachata started to lose its power when Latino kids started to come to the club with CDs filled with reggaeton tracks by artists like Don Omar and Daddy Yankee.”
The kids at La Havana were a sign of something bigger. At the time, Spain experienced the highest immigration rate in its history, according to a 2006 report from the country’s National Institute of Statistics. Between 2004 and 2006, more than 2 million people found a new home in the country, and Latin Americans comprised the majority of them. Like Sánchez, many were fleeing deep social and financial crises across the region. It’s not by chance that Ms Nina and Nathy Peluso, two key figures in Spanish music today, have Argentine roots; in the early ’00s, the South American country experienced a severe economic depression that forced many residents to leave.
Reggaeton’s Spanish popularity got another boost from record executive Ricardo Campoy, whose label Vale Music had a history of releasing compilations of easy-listening pop before he gave the Caribbean sound a shot. In 2004, a couple months after Daddy Yankee dropped “Gasolina”—the song that introduced reggaeton to many listeners outside Puerto Rico—Vale Music released El Disco del Reggaeton. The album featured what are now all-time classics, like Don Omar’s “Dile” and Lorna’s “Papi Chulo… Te Traigo El Mmmm.” Within a couple of months, the double CD became a best-seller in Spain—a landmark that eventually led to four other reggaeton compilations from the label.
“When I was a child, I remember the oldest girls from my rollerskating club were into reggaeton—my oldest cousin too,” recalls Marina Arias Salvado, a 26-year-old PhD candidate in musicology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her doctoral research covers the reggaeton phenomenon in Spain, from music industry power to the rise of new identities. In addition to the Latino-centered nightlife spaces that began popping up in Spanish cities in the early 2000s, cell phone ringtones and soundtracks to television shows like the Spanish Big Brother were also important platforms for reggaeton’s emergence in Spain, according to Arias Salvado’s research.
Those years also witnessed the rise of Spain’s first locally bred reggaetoneros. In Barcelona, an impromptu group consisting of both Spanish and Latino members gathered under the moniker JMP and released “Tu Gatita,” a perfect example of the classic 2000s reggaeton sound. Off the coast of Spain, twin sisters Gara and Loida H founded the duo K-Narias—a play on words referencing the Canary Islands, the siblings’ home and one of the first hotbeds for reggaeton in the country. In their 2005 hit “No Te Vistas Que No Vas,” Andalusian piano influences and dramatic horns from southern Spain sneak into the reggaeton beat, a first in the kind of experiments that would set the tone for Spanish reggaeton decades later. “They were the Rosalía of their time,” says Arias Salvado. The duo entered the “Latin market” from the get-go—an imprecise term encompassing dozens of distinct genres and an umbrella category referring to people born in countries that were once colonies ruled by the Spanish and Portuguese kingdoms. Eventually, K-Narias toured the U.S. and recorded their first album in Puerto Rico.
Arias Salvado says that today, Spanish artists must rely on genres perceived as authentically Latin American if they want international recognition, an industry expectation that has existed since Julio Iglesias, whose ventures into Latin pop helped him become one of the most commercially successful Spanish singers in the world. “Now, the [most popular] Latin music is reggaeton,” Arias Salvado says. “But in Spain, in our generation, we don’t see reggaeton as something from abroad.” She mentions Rosalía’s last album, Motomami, which borrows lyrics from Daddy Yankee and Wisin on the track “Saoko” and interpolates a dembow riddim in “Chicken Teriyaki,” “Bizcochito,” and several other songs. Arias Salvado explains that Rosalía was born and raised in a country where reggaeton is huge, and the same goes for C. Tangana.
Tangana, a former underground rapper and now major Spanish star, garnered fame outside of his home country precisely because he began to explore these styles. On his genre-hopping multi-platinum 2021 album El Madrileño, he collaged several elements from Cuban, Brazilian, Dominican, and Mexican culture and blended them with Spanish references, a fusion that raised his profile significantly after previous albums of more straightforward hip-hop.
“At first, hip-hop artists refused to accept reggaeton in Spain,” says Arias. The two worlds eventually came to terms with each other in the mid-2010s with the boom of trap music in the country. Crews like PXXR GVNG, who even had beef with Tangana, represented the first generation in Spain to grow up with reggaeton and rap as opposed to old-school rappers—whose initial hostility to reggaeton arose from a number of reasons. One contributing factor may be a longstanding prejudice against the genre from the most affluent sectors of Spanish society. “This prejudice is the result of a stereotype that some Spanish people have attributed to Latino immigrants and Spanish kids with Latino backgrounds,” Arias Salvado explains.
According to Arias Salvado, Spain’s middle and upper class commonly associated reggaeton with youth violence in Latino gangs, and the reality shows it soundtracked were often seen as trash TV. For them, reggaeton’s sexual lyrics were a threat to the younger generations. “This leads to a certain idea about who listens to this kind of music, a stigma pointed towards low-income classes,” she says.
Throughout the years, however, reggaeton snuck into the social lives of privileged Spanish youth, a result of the undeniable growth of artists such as Daddy Yankee and Bad Bunny and the genre’s incursion into the pop mainstream. From posh parties on Madrid’s horse-racing track to influencer Maria Pombo’s Instagram-driven SuaveFest, the popularity of reggaeton in the country’s wealthiest circles has helped hold its place at the top of the charts—further complicating Spanish reggaeton’s relationship to the genre’s Caribbean roots.
According to Nina Vázquez, a Puerto Rican educator and historian of reggaeton who is a member of the Hasta ‘Bajo Project, there is a fine line between building fruitful connections with reggaeton as a European artist and blurring its history. Vázquez says that when Rosalía won the Best Latin category at the MTV VMAs in 2019, she could have been more precise about the genre’s roots. “I love Rosalía…but she could have said, ‘Thank you for this, but this isn’t my culture,’” says Vázquez. In the actual speech, Rosalía stated, “I’m so happy to be here, representing where I come from and representing my culture.” Vázquez says it is important not to forget that “reggaeton is a racialized genre.”
A Spanish culture journalist and one of the first to cover reggaeton in his country, Víctor Lenore agrees that those colonial dynamics exist, but feels they are a relic of the past. “Initially, there were questions about colonialism towards Spanish artists making reggaeton,” he explains. “Rosalía doesn't have this kind of ‘Latino accent’ when she speaks, but she does have it when she sings,” he adds. “However, I believe today she gives back what she takes. She works with several Latino artists that are unknown in Spain. It’s like she gives back what she borrows by making these artists visible. There’s appropriation, but this is compensated for since they show respect to the artists that inspire them.” In a 2021 interview for The New York Times, Rosalía addressed the critiques, noting that reggaeton “has been a part of [her] experience” since she was 13 years old. “I cannot think of making music in a right or wrong way,” she said. “For me, creativity is not about that—it’s not about proper or not proper, correct or incorrect. It’s beyond that. Does it sound free or does it not sound free?” She added, “As long as you do it with respect—and with love—I think it always makes sense.”
In spite of these well-meaning intentions, many cultural critics feel that Rosalía’s commitment to recognition for these artists is spotty; she has collaborated with dembow star Tokischa and bachata titan Romeo Santos in the past, but other love letters to Caribbean genres, like the bachata slow-burner “La Fama,” opt instead for pop guests like the Weeknd. As the writer Jennifer Mota noted in a 2021 interview, the issue is not just about Rosalía; it is a structural one. The music industry doesn’t often grant the same kind of commercial acclaim to the Black Latino artists who created the culture in the first place; instead, artists like Rosalía garner much of the praise.
As accents, beats, and dance moves travel across the Atlantic and through streaming services, regardless of distance, social divides, and racial tensions, reggaeton seems unstoppable. For the Puerto Rican educator Nina Vázquez and the PhD candidate Marina Arias Salvado, there are two roads ahead. Vázquez points to a concern that goes beyond Spanish borders. “I believe reggaeton is going to be the next hip-hop. Everybody listens to it, everybody wants to be part of it, but this can lead to whitewashing,” she reflects. Meanwhile, Arias Salvado points to the influence of flamenco vocals and guitar in some Spanish reggaeton as an example of how the country’s artists are bringing their own culture to the music rather than simply mimicking sounds rooted in Latin America. One thing is clear: From Spain’s northern grasslands to the Strait of Gibraltar, crossing Madrid’s Metro or hanging out on a Barcelona beach, no matter the direction, Spanish music will follow the reggaeton beat.
