Puerto Rican Artist Villano Antillano Predicts the Anti-Trans Era Is About to End and Announces New Album - EXCLUSIVE

Puerto Rican urban music artist Villano Antillano believes the current wave of anti-trans hostility is violent, loud, and dangerous. She also believes it is running out of time.

The Puerto Rican urban artist spoke to this reporter during the Billboard Latin Women in Music event in Miami, where she discussed the political climate facing trans people, the energy of women-centered spaces, and the new album she has just finished after nearly two years of work.

"Yes, very unfortunately," Villano said when asked whether she has felt a change in Puerto Rico and internationally amid rising anti-trans rhetoric. "There is an escalation of violence that is seen and felt in the whole world."

Villano, one of the most visible trans women in Latin urban music, said her own success has given her some distance from the daily aggression many trans people still face. But she made clear that the threat is not theoretical.

"Thank God, as I say, I stay away from the ugly and the basic," she said. "I am not in those circles, so it is not like those people have access to me. I really am a very happy and successful person, and I am pursuing the things I want to do."

Then she added the line that turned the answer from defiance into warning.

"Maybe I have the privilege that I am a little more removed now," she said. "But my friends feel it every day."

Born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, Villano Antillano rose from the island's queer underground to become one of the most important new voices in Spanish-language rap. Her breakthrough came in 2022 with Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 51, her collaboration with Argentine producer Bizarrap, which pushed her into the global Latin music conversation.

Spotify named her a RADAR artist in 2022, describing her as one of Latin rap's first transgender artists and noting that she had been featured on more than 40 Spotify playlists, including Viva Latino. The platform also highlighted her presence on multiple Top 50 lists as her audience expanded beyond Puerto Rico.

Her debut album, La Sustancia X, released in 2022, further established her as an artist who could move between trap, reggaeton, pop and harder sounds without softening the edge of her message. Pitchfork praised the project for turning transformation and queer identity into power, while critics across the Latin music world identified her as part of a new wave challenging the male-dominated codes of reggaeton and Latin trap.

Looking back at the Bizarrap session, Villano said she did not know before it happened that it would take her to that level. But once it began, she understood the scale of the moment.

"While it was happening, I was conscious of everything that was going on," she said. "And I am very grateful."

At Billboard Latin Women in Music, Villano said the atmosphere itself felt different because the night centered women.

"We are among women, and I feel that sisterhood always kind of percolates," she said. "When we are at events that highlight women, there is always harmony, always a good vibe."

Later, she gave the Unstoppable award to her fellow Puerto Rican artist Young Miko, who she introduced as her "little sister" and praised as an artist who "decided to break the rules," adding that her "success isn't luck; her success is vision, it's hard work, it's not asking for permission."

That sense of community matters in an industry where trans women, queer artists and gender nonconforming performers have often had to fight for space. Villano's visibility has become part of her artistic language, but she has never allowed it to flatten her into only a symbol. She is a rapper, a performer, a provocateur, and an author of her own mythology.

Now she is preparing her next chapter.

"Today I finished an album that comes out this year," Villano said. She gave its title as Ante el umbral del peligro no siento temor, which translates roughly to "At the Threshold of Danger, I Feel No Fear." "I am very excited. I was locked in for like two years finishing it, and I am very excited to release it to the world."

The title sounds almost like a manifesto for the moment she is describing. Villano is not denying the danger around trans people. She is naming it, then refusing to surrender to it.

Asked what she would say to young people hearing hostile rhetoric about trans communities, she answered without hesitation.

"We know that we are beings of light," Villano said. "There is nothing wrong with us."

She urged trans people to protect one another while also insisting that the backlash is not permanent.

"These are dark times. We have to take care of each other," she said. "But this is going to end, because I really feel like this is the last of it. They are using their last bullets. They are going crazy to see what sticks, and we are not going to fall."

For Villano Antillano, the answer to transphobia is not silence. It is music, visibility, humor, glamour and survival. It is a new album arriving after years of work. It is a stage where women are celebrated. It is the certainty that darkness is not the same as permanence.