Mexican rapper Nina Dioz makes her U.S. debut
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Camilo Smith reports on the U.S. debut of Niña Dioz from the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas.
Friday night, as rapper Niña Dioz was making her U.S. debut at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, she slammed her microphone down midsong and started yelling expletives at the sound engineer from the stage, telling the crowd, ‘This place doesn’t want me to give you the show you deserve.’ She had been asking for the bass to be turned up, to no avail. Niña Dioz, 23, is Mexico’s answer to Grammy-nominated powerhouse M.I.A. or the diminutive rapper Lady Sovereign, and like those multiculti acts, she’s used her innate grit and fire to carve out a spot in the largely male-dominated world of hip-hop in her native country. Now she plans to bring Mexican hip-hop to the rest of the world.She’s perhaps an unlikely candidate to do so. Standing 5 feet 6, with shoulder-length blond hair and blue eyes, Niña Dioz doesn’t fit conventional notions of what a Mexican rap star might look like. The 23-year-old, whose given name is Carla Reyna, says that she’s become accustomed to questions about her gender or skin color. Click on the link to read the full report.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City