By: Heather Gies

TeleSUR spoke with Guatemalan hip hop artist, Rebeca Lane, about her music as a tool in the struggle for women’s empowerment.

Rebeca Lane is a feminist rapper, poet, artist and activist based in Guatemala City whose art and resistance as a woman and an anarchist has been shaped by her country’s long and ongoing history of gender violence.

TeleSUR spoke with Lane while in Mexico as part of her Central American tour called Somos Guerreras, or We Are Warriors, about how her hip hop music is fighting for space for women’s issues in Central America and beyond and on how she is part of bringing women together to resist oppression and empower themselves.

Right now you are on the Somos Guerreras tour in Central America. What does Somos Guerreras mean for you as an artist and as a feminist?

Somos Guerreras is a process through which some artists from Central America have successfully linked up the art that we do with activism. And this involves processes of knowledge transmission, processes of spreading the work we are doing, holding discussions, going on television and radio programs, etcetera.

And it includes something really important for us which is events production, that is, creating spaces through which women in hip hop culture have a space to present the art that we make without being discriminated against or having less important spaces because of the fact that we’re women.

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