Puerto Rican rapper Villano Antillano has opened up about why she felt she “had to leave” her home island as her career began expanding internationally.
Speaking with Rolling Stone en Español, Villano revealed that she left Puerto Rico two and a half years ago, describing the island as “extremely conservative, machista, and deeply misogynistic” and saying she felt she had reached a ceiling in her career there.
“I realized that if I wanted to provide more for my friends, if I wanted to use this platform that being an internationally renowned artist or having a certain level of notoriety has given me, if I wanted access to this other life, I had to sacrifice certain things — and one of those was leaving Puerto Rico,” she said.
Villano added that she had experienced what she described as “quite pronounced persecution,” particularly when she was highly visible in the public eye. “I didn’t want to keep dealing with that,” she said. “So I chose to leave.”
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Elsewhere in the interview, Villano spoke candidly about the transmisogyny she has faced and the experience of being a trans woman at a moment when her identity has become increasingly politicized.
Her comments arrive shortly after the release of her new album, Ante el Umbral del Peligro No Siento Temor, on August 28th.
Villano has emerged as one of Puerto Rico’s most prominent queer voices in urbano since breaking through internationally with her 2022 Bizarrap session. She became the first trans and nonbinary artist to enter Spotify’s Global Top 50 and currently draws more than 6 million monthly listeners on the platform.