Reggaeton

Panama City, mid-1980s. Three Afro-Panamanian friends, all descendants of West Indian canal workers, start translating Jamaican dancehall songs into Spanish and performing them at neighborhood soundsystem parties, the bass rattling through concrete-block walls. A young artist named Renato makes the first reggae en español hits, selling cassettes to commuters on tricked-out buses called diablos rojos, painted in wild colors, speakers mounted everywhere, bumping music through the streets. This is proto-reggaeton: Spanish-language dancehall before anyone thought to call it that, circulating hand to hand in a city where Jamaican and Latin cultures collided daily.

By the mid-1980s, the sound migrates north. El General arrives in Brooklyn and finds a dancehall scene already booming, linking up with Jamaican producers who start recording and promoting Panamanian artists. Around the same time, a Spanish-language hip-hop revolution takes shape as mixtapes fly back and forth between New York and Puerto Rico, led by the pioneering rapper Vico C.