Rolling Stone: ‘Mujeres Del Movimiento’ Festival Broke Barriers

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On Friday night, a massive, sold-out crowd began flooding into United Palace, the gilded theater in Washington Heights that’s become a rite of passage for major Latin stars, Bad Bunny and El Alfa included. An enthusiastic audience, primarily made up of Dominican women, turned out for an unprecedented event: Mujeres Del Movimiento, a first-of-its-kind festival in New York, organized by women with an all-women line-up.

Even before the show began, the crowd quickly transformed into hype men and women, chanting, clapping in sync, and fervently waving their flags in the air. The energy got even more intense once a roster of women performers began taking the stage: Every performer, from the rising acts like GeezLy, Queen Parker, Chelsy, Yailin la Mas Viral, Leli Hernandez, and Lismar to las mamás of the Dominican music scene like La Insuperable, La Perversa, and MelyMel, gave it their all, and then some more. Fans recited their bars with full conviction, pounding their chest to nerve-hitting lyrics about heartache and liberation, and cheering on their friends as they gyrated and twerked in the middle of the aisles.

Most of the people there seemed to understand the gravity of the event. Mujeres Del Movimiento had been a long time in the making, starting out as a response to a lack of touring and live music opportunities for women in the Latin industry, something Diana Dotel, founder of More Than Words Live and More Than Words Agency, was seeing firsthand when she was working as a promoter, trying to get to see companies that they should invest in women. Over and over, she would constantly hear that women didn’t sell, and noticed a lack of major tours for women. She set out to prove everyone wrong.

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Initially, Dotel thought of putting together a lineup of female Latin artists in urban music. However, the pandemic hit in 2019, cutting her plans short. Once touring began to pick up again, Dotel noticed a different trend: Dominican sounds that had been gaining traction across the industry. “I saw the globalization of dembow and bachata and mambo,” she says. “But as I’m looking at the landscape, I didn’t see artists from the Dominican Republic growing or even monetizing and that didn’t sit well with me.” She turned her attention on women in dembow and rap, marrying the ideas and coming up with a unique festival that had never been done before in New York.

One of the people she tapped early on was journalist and Dominican culture historian Jennifer Mota, who served as the host for the event. (Editor’s note: Jennifer Mota has contributed to Rolling Stone.) As one of the most thorough documentarians of dembow, something she’s constantly observed is the way in which white and European artists frequently borrow sounds and aesthetics from Caribbean women without giving them their due. “Caribbean women are so undervalued,” she says. “Caribbean women are often the tastemakers, the trendsetters — they created so much for pop culture and sometimes, they’re being dehumanized.”

Dotel and Mota also saw how the festival was disregarded by both media outlets and even some music fans, particularly men. Few publications wrote about the event before it happened, and misinformation began spreading on social media, saying that the festival had been canceled. Elsewhere, others made fun of the event or criticized the line-up for not including names they wanted to see.” “People were like, ‘It’s a reach.’ I don’t think that they understood how impactful or important this event was or what it was going to be until like right before, when everyone was just like, ‘Holy shit, this is really happening,‘” says Mota.

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Katelina “Gata” Eccleston, a music historian and a descendant of Jamaican Panamanian, says she witnessed first hand how Mujeres Del Movimiento set a new bar for “what it means for the culture to actually come together.” “It proves that despite the exclusion — all of the trends these women start and continue to inspire until this day and beyond, resonate culturally. This concert achieved greatness,” she says. “This has the potential to be a major catalyst… This event proved in a multitude of ways that femme Dominican artists are well worth the investment and that naysayers should simply stop wasting the culture’s time.”

The show meant a lot to the artists involved as well. “It felt so good to be onstage, especially at such an important, sold-out event. To be one of the women who participated, I just feel grateful,” says La Perversa, one of the artists who made the crowd go wild.

La Insuperable was another star who took the stage and immediately pumped up the crowd with her high-octane sound. For her, being a part of the event was a chance to show everyone the scale of talent in the Dominican Republic. “This was an event created by a woman, for women, to represent and to let people see what we’re made of,” she says. “I felt amazing receiving that warmth and support from the audience and to see people getting loose was excellent.”

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At the festival, the excitement was so contagious that people there called up friends who couldn’t be at the show to give them the full experience through Facetime calls and video. Even the men who you could tell came out to accompany their girlfriends were smiling behind their phones as they recorded each performance, with several allies turning up to support the women on the line-up.

“For Dominican culture, everyone here is part of a historic moment!” Mota shouted from the stage at one point. The crowd roared, understanding they all played a role in something huge.