Gasolina: sound, power, and petro-masculinity in post-millennial Puerto Rico

In the following essay, I have opted to use Latine (pronounced la·′ti·ne)—rather than Latinx—as the gender-neutral and inclusive form of the word Latino/a. Spanish is a heavily gendered language that grammatically leans male; the form latine draws its grammatical rationale from the few nouns in Spanish that use the -e ending to indicate gender-neutrality such as estudiante (student) and asistente (assistant). Latine is the term promoted specifically by LGBTQIA+, feminist, and gender non-binary Spanish-speaking communities, and as a member of that community I believe that it is the form that best represents my spirit of inclusivity.

A ella le gusta la gasolina—she likes gasoline—was the hook that got everyone dancing in 2004; it’s what made reggaetón global and still manages to elicit an exuberant reaction in listeners today. The analysis that follows generates a critical framework for understanding Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina”—and its namesake commodity, gasoline—in a context that accounts for the intertwined narratives of gender, politics, ecology, economics, and sound as they relate to Puerto Rican and Latine identity more broadly. “Gasolina” has achieved an almost mythical status, and any discussion of reggaetón references the song in some way; in fact, in the 2009 eponymously named volume Reggaeton, the song is referenced 28 times, and appears in in almost every chapter.¹ Wayne Marshall deploys the track as a way to explore what he calls the “sonic-circuitry” that connects the track to musical practices of Caribbean and North American black communities.² In Ifeoma C. K. Nwankwo’s interview of artist Renato, he positions the song as a way to talk about how reggaetón—a genre he views as Panamanian in origin—was successfully commercialized in Puerto Rico.³ Similarly, Deborah Pacini Hernández highlights the close connection of Daddy Yankee with Dominican artists, while Jose Dávila credits the various remixes of “Gasolina” with helping to catapult other emergent genres in major Latine diasporic centers like New York and Miami.⁴ Félix Jiménez uses the song as a way to study the contribution of women singers to the genre’s many catchy one-line choruses, while Frances Negrón-Muntaner posits the track as an example of the trope of the female begging for male attention.⁵

In my contribution to the discourse about “Gasolina” I theorize what it means for a song about gasoline to go global at a time when that resource was a cause of major consumer anxiety, asking how are gasoline and coloniality entwined in the Puerto Rican context? How do the metaphors of gasoline, vehicles, and sound reify or question gender roles? What can a song—and its decades-long popularity—tell us about Puerto Rican and Latine identities at a time when BIPOC and immigrant populations are being targeted and used as political fodder? In what follows, I show that in the context of post-millennial Puerto Rico, gasoline is more than a culturally charged commodity, and “Gasolina” serves as a prism through which we can explore the answers to these questions, within a framework of sound and power, precisely because the song repurposes and deploys aesthetic and commercial practices that link mechanical technologies of mobility, hypermasculinity, and colonial economic policies.

Puerto Rico’s status as an Unincorporated Territory of the United States or “Freely Associated State” (Estado Libre Asociado) positions it as an ideal locus for an analysis of power relations that can hardly be characterized as post-colonial. The US Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (also known as the Jones Act) is a particularly prescient example of the ways that Puerto Rico’s political status affects the economic well-being of all its inhabitants. The Jones Act (still enforced) requires that all imports and exports to and from the archipelago of Puerto Rico must pass through a port on the US mainland; further, they must be carried on US ships that are owned and crewed by US citizens.⁶ This colonial idiosyncrasy results in higher prices for most consumer goods on the archipelago, including petroleum and gasoline.

Puerto Rico’s complicated relationship with petroleum and gasoline can be traced to Luis Muñoz Marín—the archipelago’s first democratically elected governor—and his administration’s Operation Bootstrap (Operación Manos a la Obra), which sought to industrialize Puerto Rico in the late 1940s. One of the projects that emerged from Operation Bootstrap was the Commonwealth Oil Refining Company (CORCO). Construction on the oil refinery in the Peñuelas/Guayanilla region started in 1954, and operations began in 1956. By the 1970s the refinery produced 80% of the petroleum products consumed in Puerto Rico.⁷ The bulk of the petroleum refined at CORCO came from Venezuela, and because the Oil Embargo of the 1970s made crude oil so costly, CORCO began facing a series of yearly profit losses that culminated in its closure in 1982. The closure of CORCO was devastating for the archipelago’s economy not only because it made gasoline prices soar, but also because the corporation had sustained upward of 25,000 jobs in the region, all of which were lost and caused unemployment numbers to spike. After the collapse of CORCO, Puerto Rico began receiving most of its oil from the Hovensa Oil Refinery on the nearby island of St. Croix (another US territory) until that refinery was shut down in 2012.⁸

The price of gasoline in Puerto Rico had remained quite stable at the beginning of the new millennium, starting just slightly above one dollar and fifty cents per gallon in 2000 and decreasing to an average low of one dollar and thirty-nine cents by the end of 2003. In 2004, however, the average price of a gallon of gasoline started to climb, reaching an average high of one dollar and ninety-two cents by May of that year (Fig. 1). The high price of fuel became a source of alarm for Puerto Rican consumers, a topic that began dominating the news cycle and public discourse: gasoline was on everyone’s mind. In June of 2004 the group Movement of Puerto Rican Consumers (Movimiento Puertorriqueño de Consumidores) called for a day of action against all gasoline purchases; this call to action reduced the sale of gasoline in the archipelago by an estimated 20% in one day.⁹ Although the call to action was characterized by gasoline retailers and producers as a fringe effort by an internet group and was dismissed as inconsequential, the data shows that prices began to decline for the rest of 2004 after that effort.¹⁰ In September 2005, however, when the price of gasoline went above $2.50 per gallon, the fever-pitched consumer panic that started setting in was reflected in constant news headlines. This sudden spike in price affected consumers in multiple ways; not only was the price of filling up the tank more expensive, but so was the price of electricity: a utility that is almost exclusively oil-generated in the archipelago.¹¹

Described as an abusive assault to the archipelago’s consumer, gasoline prices began taking a toll on the majority of Puerto Rican households, which depend primarily on their vehicles to get to work.¹² Paradoxically, as the price of fuel was climbing, new car sales in the archipelago increased 7.7% in the first half of 2005, adding car payments to the already fragile domestic economy and increasing the demand for fuel.¹³ A September 2005 article published by the newspaper Primera Hora, whose headline read “Ya no nos gusta la gasolina…[We No Longer Like Gasoline],” laments the skyrocketing prices of gasoline while directly referencing the timely chorus of Daddy Yankee’s popular song released less than a year before (Fig. 2).

Indeed, gasoline prices had become so worrisome that the government’s Department of Consumer Affairs (Departamento de Asuntos del Consumidor, or DACO) began investigating the sharp rise in prices. Consumers, who became frustrated with what they characterized as a lot of talk and little action, even proposed that the government nationalize the sale of fuel to control the price.¹⁴ Spiraling prices and consumer outcry prompted the president of the Association of Gasoline Retailers (Asociación de Detallistas de Gasolina) of Puerto Rico to bring a lawsuit at the Department of Justice of Puerto Rico, which launched an investigation to determine if companies like Shell, Best Petroleum, Gulf, and Peerless colluded to set high prices and increase profit margins.¹⁵ The Federal Trade Commission launched its own investigation into those companies at the end of September 2005.¹⁶

While DACO did what it could to protect customers from price gouging, it could not protect consumers from environmental impacts on the price of gas; two major hurricanes impacted areas of high petroleum production in 2005: Katrina and Rita. In early September 2005, Shell and Texaco, the two major gasoline retailers in Puerto Rico, attributed the rising fuel costs to Hurricane Katrina’s impact on the Gulf Coast; they used this reasoning to justify their high prices and defend their profit margins, which were increasingly under scrutiny.¹⁷ In September 2005, Hurricane Rita—one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes ever recorded in the gulf region—was forecast to make landfall somewhere between Louisiana and Texas, a region with the largest concentration of oil refineries in the United States. The forecast caused prices to soar even higher, prompting consumers in Puerto Rico to search for the best-priced gasoline and to stock up ahead of the hurricane’s impacts.¹⁸

In the search for cheaper gasoline prices, the government of Puerto Rico began exploring partnerships with other nations from which it could obtain oil.¹⁹ The search for cheaper gasoline spilled into the political arena in 2005 when Venezuela’s then-president Hugo Chávez refused to sell gasoline to Puerto Rico at a lower cost thus dashing any hope of Puerto Rico joining Petrocaribe—an oil production/consumption alliance between Venezuela and Caribbean states. Puerto Rico’s political position as an unincorporated territory of the United States did not allow direct negotiations with Venezuela since Chávez was only interested in negotiating with “sovereign nations.”²⁰ This perceived political dig—based on the political reality of the archipelago—caused the governor of Puerto Rico, Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, to retort that he was no longer interested in negotiating with Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. unless such an arrangement directly translated to cheaper prices for Puerto Rican consumers and not just profits for Chávez’s government.²¹

This charged geopolitical and economic situation is the backdrop for the creation and reception of Daddy Yankee’s Gasolina and serves as the framework for understanding the ways in which a song with a catchy hook about a love of gasoline captured the attention of the listening consumer. While the literal translation of “Gasolina”’s chorus is “she loves gasoline,” the symbolic and metaphoric meaning, as understood by Puerto Ricans and other Caribbean listeners, is more accurately interpreted as “she loves speed.” The phrase “darle gasolina”(give it gas) or “meterle gasolina,” (put some gas in it) akin to the Mexican “dale gas,” all convey the idea of increasing speed. This nuance is vital, as it enriches the interpretation from a simple desire for gasoline consumption to a metaphor for a love of speed and fast-paced excitement. As I will demonstrate in my analysis, Daddy Yankee’s use of gasoline-related imagery for a song about sex is a deliberate choice, since in the song’s context, gasolina also serves as a metaphor for male virility and semen. This dual interpretation enriches our understanding of how the song resonates on both literal and symbolic levels, and it invites critical questions about the sexualization of consumer frustration, the economic and political impotence of consumers in the face of mounting costs, and the sonic reification of gender roles through their projection onto the sphere of commercial goods.

In his work theorizing the “coloniality of power,” Aníbal Quijano points to two elements that are essential to understanding power in the Latin American colonial experience: the cooptation of capital and the control of its production, and the creation of identity categories (especially race and gender) that ensured and justified the colonizer’s superiority.²² My analysis will demonstrate that “Gasolina” generated its cultural meaning from practices that are deeply rooted in the coloniality of power, especially as it relates to the control and production of capital (gasoline) and issues of identity (gender); these practices, centuries in the making, still impact the archipelago’s population in a very tangible way and are better understood within their historical context.

Gender identity—especially masculinity—has been deeply impacted by colonial practices in Puerto Rico throughout the last 500 years. When the first European colonizers encountered the Arawak/Taíno inhabitants of the archipelago in the fifteenth century, their matriarchal social structure was deemed an unacceptable gender dynamic within the imported European framework.²³ Similarly, when North American troops arrived in Puerto Rico in 1898, the body of the Puerto Rican man became an example of what Michel Foucault theorized as “an object and target of power.”²⁴ The Puerto Rican body became a target for projecting imperialist ideas of masculinity, and a site for gendering practices that would turn the “docile” colonial body into an experiment of North American ideals of manhood.²⁵ At the turn of the twentieth century, Puerto Ricans—and their bodies—found themselves the subject of unprecedented global exposure, as North American journalists and photographers captured and sold images of the newly colonized populations “saved” from their primitive existence under Spanish rule by North American progress.²⁶ It is not a stretch to say that the relationship between global (social) media and portrayals of gender that still plagues Puerto Rican identity to this day has its roots in early twentieth-century American propaganda. Puerto Rican masculinity—and its perceived inferiority as a result of colonial power—thus became dependent on finding ways to perform maleness through embodied practices that shaped appearance, and through capitalist practices that displayed success and achievement through material consumption.²⁷

To understand how “Gasolina” metaphorizes the connection between sound, the masculinization of power, and gas-powered vehicles, it is crucial to place the emergence of the song within the commercial practices that circulated in Puerto Rican media leading up to its release.²⁸ The petroleum and mobility industries have linked these concepts through careful (and often subliminal) marketing that aestheticizes and sexualizes consumption while gendering modes of transport to create an affective attachment to motor vehicles.²⁹

The gendering of transport vehicles and the linking of masculine emotions to engine power, risk, and sex was already visible in Spanish-language car commercials in the nineties and early 2000s; one such example is a Toyota 4Runner commercial aired in Puerto Rico throughout 1999. The commercial depicts a bride arriving at a police station accompanied by her mother. Here she hands a photo of the seemingly missing groom to an investigator in an interrogation room who, as soon as he touches the photo, sees a vision of the Toyota sport utility vehicle (SUV) presumably being driven by the groom through difficult terrain. He then tells the bride what he sees—“he’s in a 4Runner”—which prompts the bride to look at her mother and declare “we’ve lost him” (lo perdimos). The commercial ends with the groom driving away while a wedding ring is discarded on the road.³⁰ The connotation is, of course, that the groom has chosen to run off with his new machine-turned-lover (the Toyota 4Runner) and jilted his bride: highlighting the seductiveness of the open road and the power of an SUV over the groom’s emotions. In another commercial spot from 2001, a man in an old Toyota vehicle drops off his apparent wife. He then notices a woman getting behind the wheel of a new Toyota Echo next to him; she gestures for him to follow her. They each drive along a scenic road, meanwhile the woman in the other car seductively starts removing her clothes. When they both arrive at the beach, she undresses to reveal a bikini, leaves her car, and runs toward the water. The man jumps out of his car and seems to run after her, but as the camera pans out, we see that he is getting into her new car and driving off. The commercial’s tag line is then seductively whispered by a woman’s voice: “Echo: the attraction is strong (Echo: la atracción es fuerte).”³¹ The lyrics of the song that the commercial is set to—“She Drives Me Crazy” released in 1988 by Fine Young Cannibals—textually link women [she] and vehicle [drives me crazy], further strengthening the trope of car-as-female and object of desire. Another short commercial for the Suzuki Baleno model shows a car drive up to a lookout spot typical of those frequented by lovers who want to have a private moment. To set the mood, the male driver pulls a compact disk from his pocket, seductively inserts it into the car’s compact disk player and, while the love song blares “sweet baby I’ve got feelings for you,” he turns and embraces the empty car seat next to him. Here again, the commercial uses the machine turned object of desire to suggest that a car is better than a lover. In this last case, the commercial is intrinsically linked to Puerto Rican identity and locality by the sound of the coquí frog at the beginning of the commercial: a sound that any Puerto Rican would recognize and identify with, either on the archipelago or abroad.³²

What these commercials, aired in Puerto Rico between 1999 and 2002, have in common is their appeal to the male consumer by making vehicles into foils for a female partner, sexualizing and aestheticizing the driving experience, and promoting the male-machine connection while belittling the value of a female partner. The early 2000s saw a surge in car sales in the archipelago, and commercials such as these—which deployed affective attachment and tired tropes of gender—had an important part in reaching the Puerto Rican male consumer.³³

The soundscape of car culture—combustion, explosions, purring engines, metallic vibrations, toxic exhaust, and the gasoline that powers it all—is deeply linked to ideas of performance, power, and masculinity: activities that are also unequivocally connected to destructive environmental practices. The concept of “petro-masculinity,” coined in 2018 by Cara Daggett to describe conservative men whose “privileged subjectivities are oil-soaked and coal-dusted” and who, studies show, “appear to be among the most vociferous climate deniers, as well as leading fossil fuel proponents in the West,” provides a useful framework for further analysis of the impact of a record-breaking song about love for gasoline precisely because of the ways it links masculinity, fossil fuels, power, and environmental pollution.³⁴ The economic situation in Puerto Rico at the time of “Gasolina”’s release also demonstrates the friction between an aestheticized positive affective view of the pleasures of cars and petroleum consumption with the very different economic reality of gasoline prices on the archipelago.

With a sonic motif reminiscent of a sputtering engine vacillating between tonal centers a semitone apart, this phrase repeated four times at the beginning of the song functions as a metaphor for the turning over of the engine to start the machine/car (prenda lo’ motore’). The starter mechanism is a forceful application of energy in the form of “mambo,” a reference that harkens back to the dance phenomenon that swept across New York ballrooms in the 1950s, and which has historically been racially marked and cast as a “primitive”—and therefore sexually-charged—dance linked to the Afro-Caribbean diasporas.³⁵ In Puerto Rico, the verb zumbar conveys both a forceful action and the act of throwing something or someone. In this context, the use of the imperative form—zúmbale mambo (throw/force mambo on it)—commands the listener to ignite the female [gata] engine with mambo as the spark. Here, the engine symbolizes both the initiation and liberation of sexual energy, as well as the object of desire itself. The sexual tension is heightened by the syncopated start of the lyrical phrase, which sonically amps up the anticipation for the drop of the beat, a drop that coincides with the first appearance of the dembow rhythm and is the signal that the engine is purring.

The first stanza of the song presents the listener with the object of desire: the sexualized reliable machine (no te me vas a quitar) whose motor needs starting through the insertion of mambo [i.e. dembow/reggaetón]. This combustion-engine-turned-female is identified as both “mamita” (mommy/babe) and “gata” (female cat/pussy): a feminized machine whose main attribute is that it allows herself to be driven or to go with the flow [Lo que me gusta es que tú te dejas llevar].

Here, the text positions the engine as both the object of desire and a subordinate element, whose power and direction are dependent on the driver. This subordination and loss of agency is what is understood in the sociology of car culture as a “passenger princess,” theorized as “an attractive woman in the passenger seat as a type of ornamental accoutrement, with her function understood to be a foil to the driver’s dominance.”³⁷ The dominance and control of the driver—read as man or masculine figure—is premised on his ability to provide the engine/woman with the namesake of the song and the subject of the song’s catchy record-breaking chorus: gasolina (gasoline).

In the paremiology of Puerto Rican popular refrains (refranes), “le gusta la gasolina (they like gasoline)” is a common saying; to “like gasoline” indicates an eagerness to be on the go, because in Puerto Rico being on the go is often dependent on fossil fuels. The allure of gasoline consumption in Puerto Rico stems from the lack of alternative modes of transport or mass transit options. Here gasoline is marked, and the tagline of a refrain, precisely because it is vital and precious to the daily life and mobility of the average Puerto Rican: gasoline is the lifeblood that keeps the good times rolling. To “like gasoline” is closely linked with an eagerness to have a good time—to party, to let loose; in this context it is also a euphemism for dancing, sex, and semen. Everyone in Puerto Rico knows what it means to like gasolina.

In this chorus heard around the world, Daddy Yankee uses a technique that is embedded in many musical styles of Puerto Rico (and the Caribbean): call and response. To use call and response in the song is a brilliant way to sonically reach out to the listener who, once they learn the refrain, will feel left out if they don’t respond to the call; in the psychology of group behavior, it is precisely that “FOMO” (fear of missing out) that makes this chorus so catchy. By participating in the chorus’s call and response we are also participating in a gendered performance because the call itself is made to an unspecific ella (she), who functions as the object of desire in the universe of the song. By responding “dame más gasolina” (gimmie more gasoline) in the first person, we assume the feminine role that has been created for the listener/respondent in the cosmology of the song’s lyrics. Further, the responder is also assuming the submissive role of the lexical framework, a power dynamic that has been put in place from the beginning of the song, where the dominant/passive dichotomy is projected onto the driver/passenger trope. “Dame más gasolina” is also a demand—a request for the life-imbuing fluid—and as such, the outcome is inherently dependent on someone or something else with the power to grant it. This interpellation of the listener as the “passenger princess” further invites us to consider the process through which mobility and fossil fuels in “Gasolina”’s lyrics function as an arena for dynamics of power in the Puerto Rican context. Every Puerto Rican knows what it is to be submissive: the socio-cultural and economic structure of the archipelago exists within a framework of subservience to a higher power—the colonizer. The Puerto Rican diaspora also experiences struggles unique to living in the nation that colonizes their home country, such as racialization, marginalization, and being treated as second-class citizens.³⁸

While the first stanza of the song addresses the object of desire directly (tú / you), the second stanza addresses the listener/audience and describes the attributes of the object of desire. Taking up the ella of the chorus, the second stanza explains exactly what it means to like gasolina. Gasoline makes it possible for her to rev up her turbines (turbinas) and go out indiscriminately because anywhere she goes, she is glammed up and ready to slay. In this line of text, the listener also experiences the reversal of the dominant/submissive roles assigned in the beginning of the song: she looks so good that she slays and dominates him (me asesina). Here musical genre (reggaetón) is positioned as the catalyst—perhaps even the refinery—that sublimates gasoline into adrenaline, blurring the distinction between sexually charged body and sexualized machine.

Lastly, the final stanza reads as an ode to women who like gasoline (i.e., who love to party); the “aquí” (here) of this sexualized body machine is the racetrack turned dancefloor, which becomes a site for celebrating diversity (todos los colores /of all stripes) and the cunning of those women who never stop having a good time (no apagan los motores). Daddy Yankee’s lyrics create a universe in which women are likened to transportation machines through the metaphors he deploys in the text. These metaphors become even more explicit in the visual narrative of the track’s accompanying music video, which unequivocally links cars and female sexuality through the lens of the male gaze—a connection that forms the focus of my analysis in the section that follows.

The images presented in “Gasolina”’s music video, and the metaphors deployed in its text, are emblematic of the kind of gender stereotypes that are plentiful in popular music; the texts and images associated with popular music typically create a framework in which women (or, rather, anyone who is not identifiable as cis and male) are portrayed as inferior. Any gender identity other than male is often trivialized and marginalized in the cosmology of the musical narrative and presented primarily as the object of the masculine gaze (and ear).³⁹ Spanish rap and reggaetón throughout the early 2000s, like many other music genres, were primarily male-centered and, although some progress has been made in recent years, reggaetón has only begun to diversify its proponents and messaging. In fact, just as “Gasolina” was dominating the airwaves in 2005, the black woman-centered magazine Essence launched a campaign to raise awareness and combat sexism in rap music.⁴⁰ In Puerto Rico, the concern over sexism and exploitation of women in the music industry mainly centered on the topics of reggaetón/rap’s portrayal of women in lyrics and videos, in the perreo (doggy-style) dance that often accompanied the music, and on the issue of morality.⁴¹

As I have analyzed above, the [imaginary] woman in Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina” is reduced to an object whose only power over the male singer/author/viewer/driver is that of her sexuality. This trivialization and marginalization of personhood based on gender is clearly present in both the text and the video. In the early 2000s, the women of reggaetón were primarily assigned the roles of dancers, extras, or merely backup singers. One exception to this is the career and success of Ivy Queen who, with the released of her first studio album in 1997, became a pioneer female reggaetón artist and who continues to represent and inspire not only women in the industry but also make visible other marginalized groups, such as the LGBTQIA+ community. Female representation was, as Ronald Weitzer and Charis E. Kubrin note in their in-depth analysis of misogyny in rap music, influenced by three important factors: the music industry itself, societal ideas about gender, and the environment where the artists and producers grew up.⁴² In Puerto Rico reggaetón was mainly created in metropolitan public housing projects (caseríos) where, although single-parent, women-led households were prevalent, women were nonetheless cast as promiscuous and morally dangerous.⁴³ Daddy Yankee’s catchy chorus itself serves as a prime example of the sidelining of women in reggaetón, with Glorimar Montalvo Castro, known as Glory La Gata Gangster (Glory, The Gangster Kitty), delivering the iconic female voice that responds with “dame más gasolina.” Despite her voice becoming one of the most recognizable in the industry through this refrain, she was not credited on Yankee’s album. Glorimar was also featured prominently on the music video (again without credit) as one of the dancers whose face and disembodied parts fill the screen throughout the song. This kind of intentional sidelining is particularly poignant in the face of her sonic front lining, and speaks to the kind of subjective denial placed on women in reggaetón. It effectively transforms her into what Félix Jiménez describes as “a flesh-made machine, a turn-of-the-century automated ‘yes-girl.’”⁴⁴ Jiménez’s analysis further underscores another way in which the genre constructs a female-machine hybrid. Glorimar herself released a full-length album in 2005, but she hasn’t reached the level of national or international recognition as that of Ivy Queen enjoys, and much less that of Daddy Yankee.

In early August of 2004, just a few months before the release of his album Barrio Fino (Fancy Hood) Daddy Yankee traveled to the Dominican Republic to film a music video for the track “Gasolina.”⁴⁵ The filming took place in two locations within Santo Domingo: the Zona Colonial and the Las Américas International Racetrack. The choice to film at a racetrack is plainly obvious—this is after all a song the meaning of which, as we have seen, is heavily reliant on car and gasoline imagery. In what follows I will analyze how this imagery enhances the songs meaning for the audience/listener/viewer.⁴⁶

What Daddy Yankee’s video for “Gasolina” and the examples of car commercials described above have in common is that, while all the signs of masculinized mobility are visible in the music video, the actual sounds emitted by these elements are erased and sublimated into music. The elimination of the typical combustive soundscape and its replacement with curated sounds of Daddy Yankee’s track (or any other music for that matter) further serves to index musical genre—reggaetón—with that of masculinity, while aestheticizing practices that are environmentally harmful. That aestheticization heavily relies on the interplay of sound and image. The first image that appears on the screen is a motorcycle burning rubber with an opening sound that can be described as engine starter, the main rhythmic beats of the introduction are punctuated with the chorus “oh!” which are accompanied on the screen with fleeting images of disembodied parts of various women—faces, butts, breasts. This burnout image recurs throughout the video and functions as a visual way to heighten anticipation, the wheel spinning in place and the smoke visually communicates a hypermasculine form of potential [sexual] energy that is transferred to the female subject in this song via the lyrics; as the wheels spin, we hear Daddy Yankee command an unidentified subject to inject mambo into the female-coded machine—the feline and pussy (gata)—as a way of starting her engine (Fig. 3).⁴⁷ This mantra—zúmbale mambo pa que mi gata prenda los motores—is the sexual foreplay between the male driver and his female machine communicated through racetrack-related imagery: we see a male figure get in the driver seat, put on his helmet, and initiate a series of switches to start the engine (Fig. 4). The mechanized foreplay sonically communicated by the rising tension of the music achieves the desired effect of arousal, as we hear a chorus of men shout “¡duro! [hard!]” just before the beat drops. This sonic erection causes the dembow beat to drop and becomes a response repeated after every line of the stanza, visually synchronized in the video to a sexualized clip of a woman standing among the smoke of burning rubber in the racetrack. This interweaving of sex, gasoline, and machines forms the foundation of the music video, with these elements repeatedly recombined to continually reinforce the dynamics of the gender binary, the sexualization of machinery, and the glorification of gasoline as its raison d’être.

The music video adds an additional minute of music and visuals that are not part of the track as it appears on the record or in the single. Daddy Yankee uses the additional minute of music and footage as an opportunity to cast himself as the king of reggaetón. The music video’s final minute—an abbreviated version of King Daddy, the second track of Barrio Fino—instantly shifts the sonic landscape by playing on timbral tropes of royalty and history. In that brief second, the transition evokes imagery of kingship through the sound of a bowed bass instrument and a harpsichord, effectively transforming the mood entirely. This combination of instruments often found at the beginning of opera recitatives and many musical compositions from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, followed by the blaring of a horn, signals that what is to follow is different: it is the royal introduction of the self-proclaimed King of Reggaetón. It is fitting that this new portion of music and video was filmed in the Zona Colonial—one of the first cities built by the Spanish Crown in the Americas in the early sixteenth century—as he looks to portray himself as the King of Reggaetón and prove his dominance in the genre. Furthermore, choosing to film in the working-class areas of the Zona Colonial references Daddy Yankee’s upbringing in the caseríos (public housing projects), which inspired the album’s title. This choice also serves to establish the authenticity that Barrio Fino (Fine Hood) requires at the brink of Daddy Yankee’s international stardom.

This video coda presents a thematic change from one of car culture and sexualized female bodies to one of governmental authority, which seems oddly out of place and disconnected. The first image we see is that of a line of military police in full armor shielded against Daddy Yankee. This clear dichotomy of power might be explained in two ways. (Fig. 5). The first is the clear allusion to the adversity encountered by Daddy Yankee and artists like him who grew up in public housing projects in Puerto Rico. These public housing projects were (and are) the sites of constant police raids in the late 90s and early 2000s as a result of the Mano Dura contra el crimen (Iron Fist against crime) initiative deployed by the government of Pedro Roselló.⁴⁸ Mano Dura also included a very strong connection between sound and power because government officials argued that genres like reggaetón and underground music were immoral and pornographic; part of the mano dura policy involved police raids on record stores around the archipelago to confiscate “underground” records which were primarily reggaetón music. Artists like Daddy Yankee and his predecessors found themselves caught up in a government frenzy that equated certain musical genres with immorality, corruption, and ties to crime and drugs—declaring them threats that needed to be eradicated. The second explanation for the imagery in the video coda is the rivalry that often exists between reggaetón artists, a genre in which artists vie for notoriety and fame by one-upping each other sonically and socially; the image of Daddy Yankee standing alone facing a row of fully armed military police is a metaphor for his battle against all odds to climb to the top of musical stardom and become the king of reggaetón.

The visual and sonic ecology generated by the music video for the “Gasolina” interweaves multiple layers of power dynamics within the reggaetón industry and broader societal structure. The sexism exemplified by the objectification (and simultaneous sidelining) of women, reflects deep-seated patriarchal norms in the music industry. The choice of filming locations, from the historical Zona Colonial to the racetrack, juxtaposes colonial and contemporary expressions of power, while the curated soundscape emphasizes masculinized mobility. The imagery of kingship in the video coda asserts Daddy Yankee’s dominance in the genre, while the depiction of police crackdowns symbolizes both the criminalization of reggaetón and the artists’ resistance. The interconnected themes in this section underscore the significance of deploying discourses of power as a theoretical framework to demonstrate how reggaetón not only mirrors existing power structures but might also challenge and redefine them for the listener and viewer.

Daddy Yankee’s album Barrio Fino was released on July 13, 2004, and the track “Gasolina” was released as a single in October of the same year. The music video for the single debuted on MTV’s popular show Total Request Live (TRL) in November, with an appearance on the show by Daddy Yankee himself. Although Puerto Ricans as one of the largest Latine groups in the U.S. afforded Daddy Yankee a Latine audience outside of the archipelago—his appearance on MTV was crucial for marketing himself and the album to a broader Latine audience in the US and the globe.⁴⁹ In fact, starting in 2005 “Gasolina” quickly climbed to the top of the charts; the single reached a peak position of #1 in the weekly charts in Mexico and Venezuela—the latter is particularly poignant considering that, as seen above, Venezuela provided the bulk of Puerto Rico’s gasoline.⁵⁰ “Gasolina”’s rise to the top of the charts in other countries was significantly more unexpected; for example, the single reached #2 in the charts of Denmark, Greece, and Italy, it peaked at #3 in the UK Hip-hop and R&B charts, and was in the top 10 in Norway (#4), Ireland (#5), Switzerland (#5), Germany (#7), Scotland (#8), Austria (#9) and the Czech Republic (#9). In the US’s Billboard charts, it reached a top position of #10 in its “US Hot Rap Songs,” and #11 in both the “US Rhythmic” and “US Hot Latin Songs” charts.⁵¹

A year after its release, “Gasolina” became the first reggaetón track to be nominated to the Latin Grammy Awards for Record of the Year.⁵² All this attention was not only crucial for making “Gasolina” one of the top Latin songs in 2005 but, more generally, introduced the globe to the genre of reggaetón and the contagious dembow rhythm that was its hallmark. Soon, a genre that had been rather niche, persecuted by the Puerto Rican authorities, and characterized by a majority as immoral, became a source of pride for many Latines in the US. An article published by The New York Times titled “Mad Hot Reggaeton (sic)” sought to explain to a wider audience why this genre was taking over the airwaves and heard thumping in clubs throughout the United States. The genre, defined in the article as “the hip-hop sung in Spanish and some English that is laced with Caribbean rhythms and has fanned out from Puerto Rico,” was characterized by the author as taking over the airwaves and nightclubs of Los Angeles.⁵³ As the city with one of the largest Latine populations in the United States, Los Angeles was the ideal place for the contact between a diverse Hispanic and Latine audience and the genre of reggaetón. The increasing association of young Latines and the genre led to its being claimed as a source of identity, a process that sociologist William G. Roy describes as,

In the last eighteen years reggaetón has become one of the most popular Latine music genres, its dembow rhythm a ubiquitous and instantly recognizable sonic marker. In 2018 “Gasolina” was ranked #38 in Rolling Stone’s “50 Greatest Latin Pop Songs” and in 2020 Barrio Fino was included in its list of “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.”⁵⁵ Perhaps one of the more significant accolades received by the track was its selection by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry in April 2023, a designation that recognizes sonic works for their cultural and aesthetic significance. “Gasolina” is the first—and only—reggaetón track to be included in the National Registry, facts that were highlighted in the Twitter (now X) announcement by the Library of Congress, an announcement that also included a sound clip of the song’s catchy chorus (Fig. 6).⁵⁶ This recognition, particularly by hegemonic institutions like the Library of Congress, is significant because it signals a broader shift in the perception of Puerto Rican music both in the archipelago and the US.

Petra R. Rivera-Rideau and Wayne Marshall both highlight that reggaetón’s origins in black music, developed within Afro-Puerto Rican and working-class communities, resulted in markedly different receptions in the archipelago and the U.S., each shaped by deep-seated racial and class stereotypes, and economic factors. Emerging from the underground music scene of Puerto Rico, reggaetón was initially defined by its ties to Afro-Puerto Rican traditions, hip-hop, and Jamaican dancehall. This blend, which Marshall aptly describes as its “cultural and sonic circuitry,” showcases a rich network of influences that stretch beyond Latin America to the African diaspora.⁵⁷ It is precisely reggaetón’s roots in black communities and working-class neighborhoods (caseríos) that sparked controversy and moral panic on the archipelago, with government officials frequently criticizing and censoring the genre for its explicit lyrics and perceived promotion of promiscuity and violence.⁵⁸ In reality, these lyrics were less about endorsing such behaviors and more about voicing the harsh realities of colorism, systemic disenfranchisement, poverty, violence, and gender discrimination experienced by these communities due to governmental policies and the enduring legacies of colonialism.⁵⁹ Furthermore, the real challenge reggaetón posed was its disruption of the dominant discourse on Puerto Rican racial and economic equality, and more importantly, the genre’s ability to bring attention to these issues outside the confines of the caseríos.⁶⁰

Reggaetón’s reception in the United States has been shaped by its integration with hip-hop culture, which, despite facing similar racial and class struggles, had already established itself as a commercial powerhouse. This commercial viability helped reggaetón gain airtime in the U.S., but it did not initially ensure universal appeal across all Latine communities. Deborah Pacini Hernández has demonstrated that in late 1990s and early 2000s New York, younger Puerto Ricans initially identified more with the hip-hop culture they had grown up with in the U.S. than with Spanish-language reggaetón.⁶¹ Similarly, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera’s research on queer non-Caribbean Latine populations in Arizona reveals that they often dismissed the genre, characterizing it as “chusma” (riffraff) music.⁶² Despite resistance among some Latines in the U.S., the genre was seen by music executives and radio station managers as a gateway into a growing, relatively untapped demographic termed “hurbans” (Hispanic and urban): a marketing strategy that linked reggaetón to a broader Latino audience in the U.S., emphasizing its urban, working-class roots while both challenging and reinforcing racial boundaries.⁶³ In the U.S., Daddy Yankee was racialized as not-quite-black-but-distinctly-Latine, a categorization that mirrors broader racial dynamics, the genre’s Afro-Caribbean roots, and the wider appeal this identity offered to the music industry.⁶⁴

Despite reggaetón’s complicated reception history on the archipelago and the U.S., it is clear that “Gasolina” had a pivotal role in the genre’s mass appeal: “If it weren’t for ‘Gasolina,’ the mainstream wouldn’t have heard about reggaeton (sic).”⁶⁵ For many millennial Latines on the archipelago and the U.S. who grew up being taught that reggaetón was an underground and immoral music genre, the dramatic shift in perception over the past two decades signifies more than just recognition; this evolution reflects the genre’s undeniable appeal, resilience, and its power to challenge and reshape longstanding racial, class, and cultural stereotypes. The mainstream embrace of reggaetón also underscores a new broader acknowledgment of the rich, diverse, and influential contributions of Afro-Latine music, affirming their place at the forefront of contemporary music and culture worldwide. “Latinos are coming up.…We have something to share” was how Jessica Escoto described the phenomenon of reggaetón in the United States in the 2005 New York Times article; her words almost 20 years ago are still ringing true today for a new generation of Latines.⁶⁶

My analysis has highlighted the entanglement of Daddy Yankee’s 2004 track “Gasolina” with politics, coloniality, gender identity, and consumer trends in post-millennial Puerto Rico. By analyzing media coverage in local newspapers and official government data, I have shown that the song was conceived and released at a time of extreme volatility in the gasoline market, a connection that was not lost on consumers and listeners alike. Lyrical and visual analysis has highlighted the way in which the song capitalized on long-standing tropes of gender dynamics on the archipelago to construct an image of Puerto Rican maleness that linked gasoline, consumerism, mobility, and sound/noise with ideas of economic and sexual success. Further, the success of the reggaetón track at the time of its release—and its continued popularity over the last two decades—shows the ways in which media, sound, and genre are deployed to represent Puerto Rican (and Latine) identity globally in the face of unrelenting political opposition and censorship.

“Gasolina” also highlights the ways in which Puerto Ricans are still plagued by problems at the intersection of coloniality, sound, and fossil fuels. Anyone who has been to Puerto Rico in the last six years has likely noticed one of the archipelago’s more prevalent sonic markers; I am not talking of the Puerto Rican parrot (Amazona vittata), which is making a comeback from the brink of extinction, the iconic coquí which takes over the soundscape at the sign of precipitation, or even the ever-increasingly global sound of reggaetón blasting from car stereos. No, the soundscape of contemporary Puerto Rico is dominated by a new and necessary sound: the sound of gasoline-powered generators. The sound of generators has become ubiquitous in the aftermath of Hurricane María (2017), they are the sonic symbol of the culmination of centuries of colonialism, underinvestment, and of contemporary Puerto Rico’s reliance on a precious-yet-locally-unattainable commodity: gasoline. To me, the sound of the generator signifies—as it perhaps does to every Puerto Rican consciously or unconsciously—the very nexus of sound and power (literally and metaphorically).

As Puerto Ricans work toward a more equitable and sustainable future, we are reminded that “Gasolina” has remained a powerful sonic marker of Puerto Ricanness precisely because the issues it brings to the fore are still of great consequence in the archipelago. In the context of contemporary Puerto Rico “dame más gasolina (gimmie more gasoline)” is more an outcry of necessity than an expression of exuberant joy. “Gasolina” became—and has remained—a powerful sonic source of identity because it challenges us to explore its ever-changing meanings in the cultural cosmology of Puerto Ricans around the globe. As the track gains archival recognition and renewed popularity nearly twenty years after its release, it invites a fresh reflection on what it means to be Puerto Rican and Latine, how we connect with each other and our environment, and how sound and music continually respond to political power.