Villano Antillano Knows Her Magic

A gentle blanket of clouds covers the sky in Piñones, Puerto Rico, and after Villano Antillano excuses herself to take a phone call, I ask if everything is OK. “Ay no,” she says with a resigned half-smile. “But I can’t solve this.”

The day before, in a San Juan bar around the corner from a bus stop where a family of chickens pecked at the ground, Villana — as her fans know her — carefully studied the images on the camera in full glam as a team fussed over her hair, fixed her clothes, and powdered her face. But today she’s laid-back in minimal makeup and a scarf on her hair. Though she doesn’t say what was troubling her on that phone call, it’s safe to say she’s always wrestling with the kind of everyday problems that come with life on an island subjected to colonial status. A faded poster of Afro-Puerto Rican luminary Arturo Schomburg hangs on the wall of the cultural center by the boardwalk, where we’ve stopped to catch the views of the bay, a breeze ruffling the palm trees and making the crushing heat wave almost pleasant to be in. “Puerto Rico is a really difficult country,” she says. “A thousand things. But it’s also very magical.”

Not that she’s dealing with the same difficulties as she used to, exactly. The 28-year-old rapper has had a whirlwind couple of years, her already meteoric rise shooting up into the cosmos a year ago, when she slayed her session with Bizarrap, an Argentine producer with a keen eye for new talent whose BZRP Music Sessions has grown into a global phenomenon. Villana’s cutting rhymes and her immaculate flow over Biza’s trap and electro-house track garnered more than 200 million YouTube views and a life-changing amount of attention — including from many people whose imagination did not have room for a Puerto Rican trans girl out-rapping most of the men taking home all the money and the accolades in El Movimiento right now.

A month after that freestyle came out, Villana was Bad Bunny’s special guest at the sold-out San Juan kickoff to his record-breaking Un Verano Sin Ti tour. “Bro, I like Villano’s lyrics a lot,” the superstar says. “I’ve been listening to Villano for a long time.” He remembers listening to her music before his 2020 truck-top concert in New York: “I was telling the guys, like, ‘This goes so hard.’ ”

This afternoon, in the ocean breeze, Villana is just as brazen as she was in Bizarrap’s studio — smart, quick-witted, her brain working a mile a minute and going off on multiple tangents, only to tie it all together into eloquent observations about life in Puerto Rico. A question about what fuels her might lead her to the island’s colonial status, to the defunding of its education system, to anger about the ways she has been misunderstood, to empathy and compassion for those who have done so. An iguana swims by, stopping her in her tracks, and she points to make sure I see it. “She’s chilling,” Villana remarks, and just as quickly she is back on her train of thought. She offers some sharp analysis about the role Christianity has played in the onslaught of legislation seeking to dehumanize trans people, and laments the way Puerto Rico feels like a theocracy in a flimsy disguise. “Jesus would have been with me, though,” she adds. 

She has less clarity when I ask about her day-to-day — when she’s not off globe-trotting for her career, that is. She starts these sentences without finishing, and can’t quite figure out her answer until she lands on a realization: Her life is a wild ride now, but in a sense, it always has been. “It never was routine, because really I didn’t have a stable life in Puerto Rico before all this,” she says. “It was survival, and figuring it out how you could, and … ” She trails off. “But I did see my friends every day.” 

She lights up when she talks about her friends. “It’s crazy, but I haven’t felt even a fourth as loved, accompanied, and appreciated in my totality by a partner or a man or whatever as I have by the truly genuine and unconditional love my friends give me,” she says. “Literally.” To Villana, this is the greatest gift of being trans: friendships with women who have made her feel less alone. Meeting other girls who had also felt her pain — who had also been thrown out of their homes at a young age, who also had to figure out a way to survive in a world that teaches you you’re an ungodly creature. “Maybe we met 10 years ago, but I know we’ve been chasing each other for lifetimes,” she says. “The connection we feel with each other, the things we’ve been through together, how we have prioritized each others’ safety and survival … it speaks for itself.”

These friends are more like sisters to her — a loving addition to the five sisters she grew up with. “We were the problem kids,” Villana recalls with delight. She’s guarded when it comes to her family, having gone out of her way to keep them out of the spotlight. But despite herself, as the afternoon lingers with the sound of roosters in the distance and the ocean waves, she shares tidbits here and there about all the ways they have shaped her. Her dad, an advocate of Puerto Rican independence and listener of jazz and salsa; her mom, a Nineties girl who played Missy Elliott and taught her about cleaning the house to Olga Tañón. (“Like any Puerto Rican who respects themselves,” Villana says.) She says she got a degree to avoid disappointing her mom, despite her own tepid feelings about university. And a mischievous smile appears on her face when she talks about the sister who was a relentless companion in all of Villana’s rebellions, who was down bad for reggaeton pioneer Hector El Father in the rapturous early days of the genre.

Witnessing the golden age of reggaeton — the complete euphoria on the island around the breakthrough of a genre that has since proven itself globally appealing, commercially successful, and culturally persistent for more than 20 years — is an experience that Villana treasures. She recalls that time wistfully, naming a string of legendary acts who got their start in the early 2000s: Tego Calderón, Don Omar, Daddy Yankee, Wisin y Yandel, Jowell y Randy, Ivy Queen — a bunch of kids with rough lives and a dream who became superstars, some of whom continue to fill up arenas around the world to this day. “Truthfully, I am so grateful to have been there when these classics came out,” she says. She breaks out into the opening lines of a quintessential 2006 Hector El Father track about phone sex as an alternative to a real-life liaison with a girl who cannot escape her parents’ disapproving watch. “You feel me?!” she says, laughing with delight. “I hold those memories really close to my heart.” 

That golden-era reggaeton sound is one she tapped into for La Sustancia X, her debut album, released last December. A master class in resistance, wit, and flow, the album — co-produced by Villana herself — also plays with grunge guitars and trap beats while experimenting with sci-fi aesthetics. “We imagine ourselves in those worlds a lot,” she says. At some point, she says, she noticed that all of her queer and trans friends were into the same anime. She realized that science fiction could serve as a way to imagine worlds in which their existence is easier, less questionable, more permissible. 

The album art for La Sustancia X riffs on the classic sci-fi anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, conjuring up futuristic queer utopias. “Personally, I project myself a lot into that space, because sometimes they make you feel like [being trans] is science fiction,” she jokes. In these worlds of her creation, Villana is making the future as she imagines it, playing with possibilities. “I do it as if it’s already happened,” she says, “because in some ways I’ve made that happen [for myself]. I’ve had moments where, through heavy dissociation and a focus on my most immediate inner circle, I’ve managed to feel wholeness. Like, I know happiness, too.”

Her lyrics, which juxtapose unapologetic hedonism and total feminist revolution, force the listener to reckon with her in her total humanity — an upending of the dominant narratives about trans people. And whether she is rapping about the power of pleasure, as she does in “Hedonismo” (“Todo los caminos llevan al lesbianismo/El amor, el sexo, hedonismo/Es poder para mí es lo mismo/Es una trampa es un espejismo”), or casually dropping feminist analysis of the institution of marriage, as she does in “Yo Tengo Un Novio” (“Vida de casado conmigo, quiere tener/Pa’ oficializarlo, quiere ponerlo en papel/En la trampa, el matrimonio/A mí me quiere someter”), she is, most importantly to her, feeling. 

“For me, feelings are gasoline,” she tells me, talking about her passionate and impulsive emotional landscape. “Like, if I’m not feeling anything, what am I doing?”

It’s time to head to Santurce for a hit of caffeine now, and as we walk through the cultural center past a group of people in a circle of chairs, an older gentleman wearing a straw hat smiles and asks her to do a song. He’d been watching her for a while, looking out the window at Villana, a huge grin on his face the whole time. She doesn’t stop, but she does turn her head, her waist-length red-and-black-striped hair whipping behind her. She gives him a coy smile. “I didn’t come to sing today.”

DESPITE THE CLEAR and purposeful political stances in her music — whether it is including audio of protesters saying the names of women who were murdered in Puerto Rico’s femicide crisis in “Mujer,” or her description of “Cáscara de Coco” as a song about a future where feminism triumphs — Villana is hesitant to describe herself as an activist. Activism, she tells me, is loaded with a weight she doesn’t currently feel capable of carrying, and frankly, at least in her music, she does not want to. She did her time protesting on the streets, swallowing pepper spray, getting beaten, and running from Puerto Rico’s notoriously brutal police force, and she needs to be done with that now. 

“I want to make music about fucking around, because I feel that people like me deserve to be able to fuck around and not think,” she says. But it’s not quite that simple. “If you would have asked me six months ago, I would have told you that I deserve to make music like everyone else,” she continues, describing the ways that cis men can simply hop on a track because it has a great beat, with no other purpose than having fun and sounding good. “Even though I deeply long for that, it’s not my reality.”

So much of Villana’s story, I gather — just like the story of her beloved isla del encanto — is about constant, unrelenting fear, and the ways to survive, even make magic, within that. Her family was afraid of her studying art, so after trying it for one semester, she switched, eventually getting a degree in international relations. Members of her family were the first to place hurdles in her life as a trans girl — “Don’t stand that way, don’t speak that way” — but Villana knows that their worst behavior always stemmed from the fear of what happens to women like her in Puerto Rico, and that they have always adored her. She is afraid of sharing too much about her family. “I get really scared,” she admits.

Villana, like many people who have had to fight for dignity and survival, has had to have an iron grip on her life. “I’ve always been in control, since I managed to snatch it, you feel me?” she says. “Once I took it in my hands, I haven’t let it go, and there hasn’t been anyone who will say no to me.” 

Whether it is in life or in her artistic choices, Villana has dealt with a set of circumstances designed to take as much agency away from her as possible, and yet she has consistently found a way. Just as trans women find ways to survive in a world hellbent on killing them, just as Puerto Ricans have managed to make the soundtrack to nightlife scenes across the globe for generations when having electricity on any given day isn’t exactly guaranteed, there is powerful magic here for those who can find a way to harness it, and Villana has been perfecting all her spells. Villana is worried, yes. And life has taught her to be afraid of so much. But she has gotten to a place in life where she knows a thing or two about her power.

“Regardless of what they say, the records sell,” she says. “And the spots fill up. And the places are gonna be filled with the girls and the gays.”