It was a quiet summer evening in Washington Heights when suddenly an excited crowd gathered in front of a bodega on Juan Pablo Duarte Boulevard and 163 Street. Dembow blasted out of a couple of chucheros (giant custom speaker boxes installed in cars) as Dominican rapper Tokischa and American A$AP Rocky shot a new music video, attracting a growing group of onlookers-turned-partygoers. When Tokischa wrapped up her evening of twerking on a crosswalk signal pole and lip-syncing to their unreleased collab, she heard a young woman shouting her name.
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“I was literally getting in the car and I heard this girl,” Tokischa recalls in a Zoom call with Refinery29 Somos. “She came and passed me this shirt and said, ‘we’re a group of women and we’re fighting for the rights of women in the Dominican Republic.’”
That woman was Mami Chula Social Club founder Claudia Mendoza. She handed Tokischa a screen-printed shirt with three butterflies — an homage to the late feminist icons the Mirabal sisters and the Dominican women’s rights movement — and text that reads “un país pro-mujer, un paraíso para todxs,” which translates to “a pro-women country, a paradise for all.” The club had just debuted the shirts at the 42nd annual National Dominican Day Parade a week prior to amplify organizers' decades-long battle to amend the Dominican Republic’s total abortion ban and make abortion legal under three circumstances: when the life of the pregnant person is in danger, when the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest, or when the fetus has serious complications incompatible with life outside of the womb.
“I thought it was really, really cool how [Mendoza] carried her message and shared it with me. It piqued my interest and, after looking it up, it’s something that’s really important to me,” Tokischa says.
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"Tokischa’s unconventional approach to advocating for women’s bodily autonomy throughout her career has allowed her to defy the gender politics of respectability in the Dominican Republic."
zameena mejia
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The morning after the video shoot, she posted a photo of the shirt alongside a Dominican flag on her Instagram Story to her 3.3 million followers. Tokischa admits she’s still getting up to speed and educating herself on topics like the controversial abortion ban. Still, her support of the club’s broader movement to support Dominican women is a wink at the artist’s new commitment to support her communities back home. Now that she has wrapped up multiple world tours, the 28-year-old says she wants to be intentional about her impact on issues affecting Dominican women and queer communities.
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For the first time in a media interview, Tokischa disclosed to Somos that she’s working on a new foundation named Sol, in theme with the name of her new record label. Through the foundation, Tokischa plans to support different causes that hit home.
“I am starting to work on opening my own foundation and educating myself about women's rights. One of the organizations I want to support is Hogar Recrea in the D.R.,” she says, referring to a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing and treating people struggling with substance abuse. “I was an addict once. I have many friends and people around me who are still addicted. I’ve extended a helping hand to many people close to me. Now, my purpose is to lend a helping hand even further to reach even more people in need.”
In addition to Hogar Recrea, Tokischa also named two other Dominican organizations — Fundación Diversidad Dominicana, a nonprofit that supports Dominican LGBTQ folks, and Casas de Acogida FASE, which supports women who have recently undergone breast cancer surgery — as the initial organizations she plans to support through Sol and profits generated from merch sales.
Tokischa’s unconventional approach to advocating for women’s bodily autonomy throughout her career has allowed her to defy the gender politics of respectability in the Dominican Republic. Tokischa went from being an artist censored in her own country to an international dembow sensation inspiring millions of women across the world to embrace their sexuality and live by their own rules. Through lyrics like “ser perra está de moda,” she reclaims the derogatory use of “bitch” to proclaim that being a bitch — along with all sorts of traits and interests that women have been demonized for enjoying or partaking in — is in fashion.
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“For me, and I know it’s true for many women, being a ‘perra’ goes beyond the sexual. It is a state of mind, it is an energy, it is a power. Una mujer perra is a strong woman, a woman who fights, a woman who wins, a woman who doesn't give up, a woman who works hard for what she wants. She’s not simply just a sensual woman. It's a deep concept, and I feel super proud to carry that,” Tokischa says.
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"Being a ‘perra’ goes beyond the sexual. It is a state of mind, it is an energy, it is a power. Una mujer perra is a strong woman, a woman who fights, a woman who wins, a woman who doesn't give up, a woman who works hard for what she wants."
Tokischa
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Born Tokischa Altagracia Peralta Juárez, the rapper never set out to be a political artist. Yet Tokischa built her career on a foundation of notoriety as an Afro-Dominican woman rapping and singing unfiltered lyrics about sex, pleasure, drugs, queerness, poverty, and oppression, all while using the explicit sounds of her moans and sexually suggestive dance moves as an extension of her artistic style. Though she has angered a lot of Dominicans throughout her journey — on both conservative and progressive sides — she has never wanted to appeal to the status quo.
“When I started making music, I wasn’t thinking about anything else except for expressing myself honestly and yes, it became political,” Tokischa says. “Society criticizes you and says you're talking about something that you shouldn't be talking about so you must be against society, against morality, and against the system, but I feel that as a rebellious, clear, and honest person, you never say, ‘I'm saying this to upset society;’ it’s just how I feel.”
Even though many male dembowseros have been making explicit and crude urban music for decades, Tokischa has been met with threats of punitive measures on multiple occasions. “They have tried to silence me, to jail me, to take my support away from me,” Tokischa says.
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One prominent example includes when the Dominican Ministry of Education denounced her song “Desacato Escolar” for the music video’s sexualized portrayal of students. In another incident, she offended government and church authorities for a racy photoshoot she did in front of a religious altar, which she titled “Hoes also pray.”
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"I feel that as a rebellious, clear, and honest person, you never say, ‘I'm saying this to upset society;’ it’s just how I feel."
Tokischa
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She has since apologized to community members for any offense she may have caused, but she also acknowledges that her music not only reflects her personal life but also her courage to talk about issues and themes that marginalized communities, who have long been forced to live in the shadows, face.
“After my music came out when I didn't shut up, when I didn't bend to their will, when I continued being myself, other artists had no other choice but to follow my lead. Artists that make so-called ‘clean music,’ as they call it in D.R., folded, and began to make ‘dirty,’ explicit music,” Tokischa says. “Even though it was not authentic for them, that's what the public wanted because, with me, the public felt liberated. They became lit and they felt seen.”
Tokischa has dreamed of being a performer since she was a little girl. She was born and raised in Los Frailes, a working-class neighborhood in the capital of the Dominican Republic. While her mother left the island when she was 3 years old to work in New York and send home remittances, Tokischa grew up living among different relatives’ homes. Lacking stability in her life, Tokischa became a precocious teenager and found herself in trouble often, whether it was for not wanting to do chores, kissing friends, buying drugs, or having sex.
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"They have tried to silence me, to jail me, to take my support away from me."
Tokischa
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The second she got her first job at a FedEx call center, she moved out on her own. Tired of working there, she quit and became a sex worker upon a friend’s recommendation. Tokisha saw it as an opportunity for financial freedom and as a way to fund her creative pursuits like recording music and filming video shoots.
“I found a sugar daddy, and that's how I started to invest in my career, by working with him, or you could say, working him,” Tokischa says with a chuckle. “He didn’t support my career and said I wasn’t going to achieve anything. I had a vision, but I didn't have the means to fulfill that vision and I had very few people who believed in that vision.”
That changed in 2016 when she worked on a photography session with Raymi Miguel Paulus Torres and the two became partners in all things music and video production. In 2018, the two released her debut trap song “Pícala,” which marked the impetus of their ongoing journey and Tokischa’s break into the male-dominated genres of trap, dembow, and reggaeton.
“We got a lot of rejection at the beginning. When we tried to get an artist to collaborate with me or a producer to do a song for me, they usually said, ‘no, this is very explicit, we can't work with this,’” Tokischa shares. “Before, I used to knock on doors and they were closed on me, they told me no. Now great artists knock on my door and I say yes with a vision of making art, to express my message, my creativity, how I feel, my fantasies, and my life through art.”
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"Before, I used to knock on doors and they were closed on me, they told me no. Now great artists knock on my door and I say yes with a vision of making art, to express my message, my creativity, how I feel, my fantasies, and my life through art."
Tokischa
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Those artists include Madonna, Rosalía, J Balvin, Marshmallow, Villano Antillano, and Young Miko, all complementing Tokischa’s provocative lyricism and leaning into her sexual expression. Even Fefita La Grande, the most revered female merengue artist, made a cameo in Tokischa’s “Linda” music video, marking a brief yet notable crossover between two women who are pioneers in male-dominated Dominican music genres.
While Dominican media’s initial wave of vitriol against her has mostly passed, it’s still alive among many in the Dominican community. Earlier this year, Tokischa was invited to Capitol Hill by U.S. Congressman Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) for the annual Dominicans on the Hill conference, an intersectional event that uplifts Dominicans from different sectors. But within days there was already a protest planned to denounce her involvement with the event. It’s unclear if the protest even took place or if it was to blame for Tokischa’s absence at the event, but online users on X were quick to complain.
And yet, Tokischa shows no signs of letting the hate slow her down or silence who she is. As of this May, she was the most-streamed female Dominican artist on Spotify. This summer, the queer artist headlined multiple Pride festivals like LadyLand Festival and Barcelona Pride. She just signed a global publishing deal with Warner Chappell Music. She launched her own record label, SOL, with Warner Music Latina to release her own music and sign new artists. She was one of the first female Dominican artists to perform on NPR’s Tiny Desk. And she shut down and completely packed three streets in the middle of Santo Domingo for a free concert as part of the global Boiler Room series’ Dominican Republic debut.
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"Educating ourselves is so important, it’s what helps us understand the systems, each other, the world around us, and everything in our lives."
Tokischa
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Circling back to the saying on Mami Chula Social Club’s t-shirt, “un país pro-mujer, un paraíso para todxs,” Tokisha reflects on what holds the Dominican Republic back from this vision.
“What prevents us from being a paradise, what prevents us from being free, and what prevents us from happiness is the comfort of not knowing and saying I don’t know, I don’t understand, I can’t understand,” Tokisha shares. “Educating ourselves is so important, it’s what helps us understand the systems, each other, the world around us, and everything in our lives.”
Perhaps Tokischa’s helping us get one step closer to this inclusive paradise after all.
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