Amid all the turmoil of 2026, some may yearn to dial the culture back to 2016 — in all its rainbow-saturated, Rio de Janeiro Instagram-filtered glory.
Neoperreo, the Latin American genre born of that internet era, turns 10 this year. Artists built it as a reimagining of reggaeton music, by and for femmes and freaks: cis and trans women, as well as the frikis from Latin America’s punk and alt scenes, who never fit the mold. For them, this cutting-edge sound and the internet community around it offered a lifeline.
A decade after the term first circulated, neoperreo (as in, the new perreo) has exapanded from SoundCloud and DIY parties into a global network of artists, DJs and festivals.
The genre takes a distinctly techno-infused approach to the dembow rhythm, stripping reggaeton of any acoustic elements and assembling them anew on a laptop to sound colder and faster. With the bass hollowed out and Auto-Tune cranked up, the vocals take on a metallic sheen — as women spit risqué verses claiming their rightful place as subjects, as opposed to the sex objects that men would relegate them to.
Both released in 2016, two of the songs that defined the genre early on — Tomasa del Real’s “Bien y Mal” and Ms Nina’s “Tu Sicaria” — pair hooks you can perrear to with beats that sound like they were built in a bedroom, because they actually were.
Beyond its sound, the genre created worlds: digital networks where outsiders across the Americas and Europe found each other, and parties where queer, trans and friki Latines could show up exactly as they were.
As trans and Latine communities face mounting attacks on their rights and safety, those spaces, alongside the new ones they’ve inspired, keep carrying weight.
“It didn’t have a name yet, but it was born from this desire to experiment and create something new at its core,” says Elisa Espinoza, the 34-year-old Swiss Army knife of an artist known as DJ Lizz. Raised in the southern Chilean town of Hualpén, she traces that initial spark to her country’s history.
“Chile is a country [that experienced] a dictatorship, a country that always sought a kind of homogeneity — a sickness that hopefully we’d all think the same, look the same, act the same,” she says. “At that moment, everyone was trying to create something, to identify with [who] we really are. Out of that constant search comes experimentation, which goes hand in hand with sexual liberation, liberation from social class. That spoke to a revolutionary spirit.”
For Espinoza, that liberation meant reclaiming a femininity she had once feared, by drawing from drag culture and the ’80s vogue tradition. “I hypersexualized myself, I hyperfeminized myself, just like a drag queen — and that somehow empowered me even more,” she says, recalling men who yelled obscenities at her on the street or tried to grab her ass when she wore shorts.
“Men were the owners of women’s sexuality, and now we’re the owners of our sexuality,” she says.
From the other end of the country, artist Tomasa del Real, born Valeria Cisternas, began to approach music with a similar ethos in her hometown of Iquique, which sits on Chile’s northern coast. When both eventually moved to, and met in, Santiago, they realized that other artists from around the world were chasing the same idea.
“On the internet, people found freedom they didn’t find in their own country or city,” says Espinoza. “We were all united by the same search.”
From this virtual community came neoperreo’s signature sound: a hedonistic mix of reggaeton and Latin rhythms with industrial, electronic, funk and trap elements. “What came out was, for some people, a work of art; for other people, a monster,” says Espinoza.
As cisgender, straight women, the community they describe both includes and extends beyond their own identities. “It was the first time someone said, ‘No, this music I make, at least in Latin America, isn’t for men.’ It’s for women, and it’s for gays,” Espinoza says.
The term “neoperreo” came about almost by accident. On an episode of Red Bull Radio in 2016, Cisternas, now 39, says she tried to explain in her “basic English” that she wasn’t really sure the music she made should be called reggaeton at all. Reggaeton came from Puerto Rico, by way of reggae en español; her lyrics and rhythms were different, and the people collaborating with her came from electronica, not the island.
She didn’t want to appropriate a culture that wasn’t hers, so she reached for another way to describe it: not as the new reggaeton, but the new music you can perreo to. Twerking, she wanted to explain, a woman can do alone; but perreo takes two. “So I meant to say el nuevo perreo, but in English, I said neo — neoperreo,” she says.
And the name just stuck.
That same year, Cisternas and Espinoza started throwing parties in Santiago under the hashtag #NeoPerreo. They called in a crowd from society’s margins: a community “of DJs, dancers, strippers, tattoo artists, of the alternative world, the more gothic world, the misfits themselves,” says Cisternas.
At their first event, the line wrapped around the block.
“It was a really important moment for the history of reggaeton, because there were no spaces where someone gay could show up with [both] their metalhead friend and their crazy girlfriend to dance reggaeton. Those spaces didn’t exist; reggaeton was very marginal, completely removed from society. This brought us closer,” says Cisternas.
The scene also became a way to make money. “It gave work to a lot of us who didn’t have access to money that immediately; we created a lot of work for ourselves,” she says. “A lot of people built their careers at that moment too.”
Jorgelina Andrea del Valle Torres, the Argentine neoperreo artist known as Ms Nina, also remembers those first parties affectionately. “It widened the audience,” she says. “In the end, we created a community where everyone feels seen and safe.”
But neoperreo wasn’t always received so warmly. “People didn’t understand it because they weren’t used to it. They were used to basic reggaeton,” Torres says. “There was a scene in Spain too, with trap and reggaeton built on SoundCloud and turned-up Auto-Tune. [But it was] a new kind of music nobody else was making. Everybody kind of hated it. And now everybody’s doing it.”
Growing up in central Argentina, Torres always felt judged and bullied for being different; she’s spent the last 20 years in Alicante, Spain, where she says she finally feels free to explore her bisexuality. Still, the cumbia villera of her childhood — a heavily synthesized subgenre born in the outskirts of Buenos Aires in the late 1990s — runs through everything she makes.
Argentina, like Chile, was barely a generation out from a military dictatorship when it had partnered with Augusto Pinochet’s regime to hunt down dissidents. Music of the margins — which before neoperreo was punk rock and hip-hop — had been framed in opposition to polite society.
Although reggaeton originated in the streets, the genre hit its zenith in the mainstream this year, thanks to Bad Bunny’s historic Super Bowl halftime show and Karol G’s headlining set at Coachella. Yet Cisternas, despite having performed at Coachella herself in 2019, argues that neoperreo will never be mainstream in the same way.
“It’s too weird — and that’s fine,” she says. “The weirder, the better.”
For the often overlapping worlds of sex work and queer nightlife, the underground movement provided a natural shelter for those unsafe to be themselves in the mainstream, from the leading artists who candidly promote their music alongside erotic content on OnlyFans, to trans artists like Sasha Sathya, who discuss gendered violence and labor in their lyrics. And as governments in Argentina and the U.S. roll back protections for queer and trans people, the freedoms cultivated on the dance floor remain far from assured outside it.
“Above all, because of the trans laws, that’s where there’s still a long way to go,” she says. “It’s important that we keep going.”
Yet now, 10 years in, the movement’s heirs may not call themselves neoperreo at all.
On another late summer night in New York, under the red glow of the DJ booth and a canopy of globe string lights, the rooftop’s wooden floorboards dip beneath scores of platform heels. An outdoor thermometer clocks a temperature of 100 degrees as the sounds of Y2K-era reggaeton reverberate. There’s no shortage of snapbacks, piercings, baby bangs and baggy jorts.
For queer people who never had the canonical experience of grinding in their high school gym, a party called Trakata fills that primal need — and operates on the same queer, rebellious frequency as neoperreo.
At these incandescent parties, Trakata founder Tani Shimizu, a 26-year-old trans man, can be found entrenched on the dance floor, often perreando with one or more beautiful, curly-haired femmes. At a local Caribbean cafe, complete with pastel floral tiles, plastic-covered couches, and the trills of guitar from “Pa’ Que Retozen” echoing through maxed-out speakers, he explains how it all began.
When looking to fundraise for his top surgery last winter, the 26-year-old joined together with some friends from the trans collective Body Hack to throw a queer-friendly perreo party. Hosted at the Bush, a Brooklyn lesbian bar Shimizu had been infamously bartending at, the first event drew close to 600 attendees. “People were like, ‘Oh, my God, we’ve been dying for this,’” he says.
The turnout convinced Shimizu there was a market for the party, along with the chance to create paid work for himself and others. “I cared a lot about how this could be an opportunity for people to make money, myself included,” he says. “I believe in compensating people fairly, even my friends.”
Shimizu, a first-generation Peruvian from Los Angeles, admits he isn’t too familiar with the specifics of neoperreo. Though Ms Nina’s “Tu Sicaria” makes its way onto the playlist some nights, his resident DJs mostly stick to the classics at their parties, and that’s intentional.
Whereas artists back home innovate to push against the status quo, in predominantly white U.S. spaces — especially for queer Latines — the older reggaeton tracks feel more alt.
“Trans and queer people are often pigeonholed to this idea of being really alternative in sound,” he says. “There’s something arguably subversive about going, ‘No, it’s actually OK to honor culturally what we have always held onto’ — and what was principal in our identities, regardless of these other subversive or subaltern identities that we embody.”
While the sonic identity of the space roots itself in nostalgia and reconnection, Shimizu strives to balance novelty in the construction of the space, while reaffirming the desire for Trakata to reflect what has been historically true of queer gatherings.
“There’s this deeper desire and this deeper politic. It just so happens to take place in the context of a club on a Friday, or Saturday night, at these hours.”
Nearly a year into his transition, he reflects on a newfound enlightenment. “Transness has given me the liberty to not be so consumed with what I look like,” Shimizu says. “I’m not dwelling any longer, which is really freeing. [It] gives you a lot of mental space to focus on things that are more important.”
That freedom from the mirror is core to neoperreo’s mission: The pursuit of a dance floor where your body, and everyone else’s, are besides the point. Shimizu has built that into Trakata’s foundation. “I want people of all body types and existences,” he says.
Shimizu also wants to make it clear that Trakata isn’t for people who just want to look hot online. “It’s anyone who is interested in engaging with the cultural experience that we’re co-creating, and if you want to come to dance, and you want to stay off your damn phone.”
Trakata wasn’t created with neoperreo in mind; but with the same sweaty dance moves and the same people finding each other, it’s hard to tell where one stops and the other begins. Since Cisternas and Espinoza threw their first neoperreo party 10 years ago, their legacy has carried over to popular Boiler Room sets and underground queer sanctuaries in equal measure.
“[For] anyone who felt like a bit of a misfit, unwelcome in reggaeton,” says Cistnernas, “neoperreo is their home.”
This story was produced in partnership with the Trans Journalists Assn.
