This Woman’s Work: A Listening Session is a special issue of Aster(ix) journal edited by music journalists Carina del Valle Schorske and Danielle Amir Jackson. This anthology investigates women’s work behind the scenes in hip hop and reggaeton: the busy hive of journalists, photographers, publicists, songwriters, stylists, and dancers who sustain these urban cultures before and beyond superstardom.
This Woman’s Work functions as an archive of unseen labor, from the Puerto Rican and Dominican critics who first wrote about “underground” in alternative publications like Claridad and Latin Beat to the anonymous crews whose hooks set the tone for Harlem “litefeet.” In these pages, an intergenerational group of writers influenced by this legacy listen for the lower frequencies in the genres we think we know and love, responding with their own in-depth interviews, reported features, industry critiques, poetry, and personal essays. Where would the party be without us? To quote a Queens MC, “the girl get them girls and the girls get it poppin.’” This anthology’s lineup of heavy-hitters includes Harmony Holiday, Isabelia Herrera, and Kristina Kay Robinson. Below, we share an excerpt of the anthology’s conversation between Carina del Valle Schorske and poet and longtime music freelancer, editor, and fact-checker Sheila Maldonado that traces Maldonado’s career and musical formation.
I first met Sheila Maldonado in 2015, at a retreat for the Latinx poetry collective CantoMundo. I had just moved uptown, not far from where my mother grew up, to start a PhD at Columbia, and by then Sheila had made Washington Heights her home for a good long time, though she was quick to tell me she was born in Brooklyn, raised in “Koni Ailan,” and that her family was Honduran, not Nuyorican. Both of us had a cynical streak, disidentifying with the category Latinx poet even as we earnestly sought communion inside such spaces and continued down affirmative action’s yellow brick road towards… what? The culture industry’s emerald city was cracking up, or maybe we were just starting to see the man behind the curtain. At that point, Sheila had been factchecking, editing, and writing for magazines like The Village Voice, Latina, and Blaze for almost twenty years. The dream of my own byline still hovered on the horizon, so I was starstruck even by her disillusion — which most often took the merciful form of an observant, critical, and self-questioning sense of humor.
Maybe “starstruck” isn’t the right word, since Sheila and I share an interest in the non-stars, “all underground all unnoticed / my order private,” to cop one of her many coppable lines. She’s broken bread with Phife Dawg’s mother (the poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor); her friend Macarena Hernández was the reporter who called bullshit on Jayson Blair’s fabrications at The New York Times; she always knows when Tony Touch is planning a pop-up. Together we stan the Spanish Harlem writer Frank Lima, whose reputation suffered from coming up too early for the Nuyorican Movement: “how many aspirins will we take to reach the surface of truth?” But there’s star power here, too, among constellations still unmapped by existing mythologies. Sheila herself has undeniable charisma, whether she’s declaiming at the Poetry Project podium, clearing space on the dance floor, or turning the peanut gallery into a craft class in cultural criticism.
“I am so jealous of how poor you are,” writes Sheila Maldonado in that’s what you get, “your particular stilo pobre,” ventriloquizing not just imagined bourgeois haters but perhaps, as I read it again now, the entire media empire that came to colonize the working class art forms of hip hop and reggaeton. As a native New Yorker, Sheila had direct contact with some of the scenes that reached me only after they’d been monetized, sanitized, and edited for clarity. She knows that not everybody got to cash out, that many cashouts led to crashouts, and that every so-called Golden Age — of hip hop, magazines, even her beloved Maya — is built on human sacrifice.She counts the bodies, her own among them. By refusing the easy consolation of imagining herself as her ancestors’ wildest dreams, Sheila makes space to connect with other forms of inheritance, the way hauling sheets to the urban laundromat isn’t as far from “the washerwoman by a river / scraping rags on a board” as we might wish, or to establish less expected solidarities, as when she runs into a Guatemalan friend from her Quaker school days on line to see Björk spin dance records in Brooklyn. In this crosscultural crucible, in this capital of capitalism, “All we have is our devotion / how we earn our spots / on the floor / identify / who is from a silence / and explode.”
For this conversation, I caught up with my friend at her apartment, which we sometimes call Café Sheila for its ziggurat of tea boxes, generous selection of snacks, and Spanish resistance to rush: at Café Sheila, one conversation always leads to several more, or to a listening session or boogie break, or perhaps to a hunt through her extensive library for a small press chapbook published in 1998. After all, Café Sheila is also an archive housing many boxes fat with magazine clippings, photographs, drafts, and other memorabilia from her long career in print.
This is not the romanticized archive, record of heroes and triumphs, nor is it a strictly personal stash of receipts ready for the rapturous day when every score gets settled. This is, quite simply, material: someone was smart enough to keep it, so it could be sampled. Reviewing a copy of Urban Latino with Bobbito García headlining — Sheila’s (and Bobbito’s) first cover story — I realize she’s kept a paper trail of the Nuyorican generation between my mother and me, filling in the story of the city we traded for my childhood in California. Not for me, I know, but I can’t help feeling like we were destined to convene uptown, to spend some time among the scraps, cutting and pasting between identity and experience.
Carina del Valle Schorske: How would you describe your musical formation?
Sheila Maldonado: My parents had vinyl, a lot of Latin pop: salsa, merengue, boleros, ranchera, maybe some cumbia. Honduras didn’t have a national music that they were playing. I just found some pictures from Honduran Independence Day parties in New York, and I asked my mama, “What were you dancing to in 1980?” It was Honduran bands playing the music of other Latin people. A lot of romantic shit.
CDVS: I’m never that convinced by nationalist claims on these genres, but I understand what you’re saying: Honduras wasn’t producing a genre that was pan-Latino.
SM: Yeah, until punta. Punta is Garífuna music, but it was popularized, of course, by whiter Honduran bands. In the early ’90s, “Sopa de Caracol” was an explosive song, a global hit. As a little kid, I was all pop, so Michael Jackson, Menudo, and an occasional rap album. I remember we had “White Lines” on vinyl. My brother loved “Bonita Applebum” and would play it over and over in high school.
CDVS: So you were into hip hop early on?
SM: Not really until college. In high school I was a big classic rock person, because of my brother. He got into it in Honduras. They loved Led Zeppelin there, Beatles, Rolling Stones. So I was an ’80s hippie in plaid dresses going to Quaker private school. I was in a program called Oliver that sent kids of color to prep schools. When I went to college, listening to Native Tongues was not a leap. They could be called hip hop hippies—though everybody was supposed to be about the streets. They were definitely Afrocentric. Tribe’s second albumcame out freshman year and I memorized it back to front, so that people made fun of me like: “Why do you only talk to us in Low End Theory?”
CDVS: Do you think that was a part of your birth as a poet?
SM: I credit my father with the poetry love always. He was a declamador in high school in Honduras. In junior high I continued the family tradition, reciting Spanish poetry for some contests. Hip hop was also pure memorization, and I was easy with it. I remember taking a Shakespeare class right when Biggie came out. To me those things functioned the same. They were classic monologues that you could recite. You’re defining yourself. You create a really clear role, and I loved stepping into that.
My high school and college years coincided with the reemergence of the Nuyorican Poets Café. I even started a college thesis that I never finished about the Nuyorican’s connection to hip hop. I think it consumed me in college because I was away from the city. I needed to be a New Yorker—that was my identity—and I needed to be a hip hop New Yorker. I was and I wasn’t. I started wearing gold hoops that I’d always had because my father worked in jewelry. He got me a name plate, probably set the stones in it. I had everything, but in high school I was wearing silver and turquoise, like a hippie would. When I got into hip hop aesthetics I thought, “All I have to do is go home and put it on.” I had access.
Emmanuel Abreu for Aster(ix) Journal
CDVS: What was your introduction to journalism?
SM: In high school I got involved in this citywide newspaper called New Youth Connections. I wrote about Honduras, an opinion thing about abortion, a review of Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits. Lots of people came out of there—Edwidge Danticat, for example, and Mohamad Bazzi, this Lebanese reporter who used to work for Newsday. I knew Mohamad did this internship at The Village Voice so after I graduated I followed his lead. Everyone worth talking to read the Voice in the ’90s, so working there was a big deal. At first the internship was unpaid, then I got a “Minority Writing Fellowship.” But even then it was just like $100 plus train fare. I was living at home in Coney.
CDVS: What was the work like?
SM: First, I was an intern for Wayne Barrett, the Trump biographer who tore him apart way back when. He was a crazy white dude, a literal fighter. There were fistfights at the Voice. People were fucking brilliant and had a lot to say: it was called the Voice for a reason; they let writers sound the way they really sounded. After interning for Wayne I interned for Ed Morales, another staffer. Ed connected me to my first big published story as a writer, which was about the police killing of this Puerto Rican kid named Anibal Carrasquillo, Jr. I remember meeting this guy “Panama,” Vicente Alba, who was a very well-known activist. Anibal’s mom and a few other moms formed a group called Parents Against Police Brutality, and I went down to the protests to cover them.
CDVS: Plaza de Mayo, New York edition?
SM: Basically.
CDVS: Were there a lot of people of color at the Voice at the time?
SM: I could count them on two hands, but they were cool as hell. There was another intern named Max Padilla who was Mexican, gay, from L.A.; later he went to Out magazine. I met a few longtime friends, Black women from the city like Janene Outlaw, a Harlem native who was the photo editor there. Also Kweli Wright, from Staten Island, who was the assistant to the editor. Marcus Reeves from Jersey, who wrote a book on politics and hip hop several years later. The Voice had a real strong group of Black writers that defined it through the ’90s: Greg Tate, Joan Morgan, Colson Whitehead. Quite a few wound up at Vibe. I really got to know them when I started fact-checking. That’s when I started to make money at The Village Voice—about $12/hour, which was a lot for 1996.
CDVS: How did that start?
SM: One day this woman Natasha Stovall just came into the cubicles like, “Who wants to fact-check today?” And that was the beginning of a thirty-year career. Natasha trained me. Back then we didn’t have the internet: it was LexisNexis, reporters’ accordion files, and telephone calls. We went through people’s notes. We begged for backup. The interwebs eventually made life somewhat easier—before it killed us. Over the years I noticed that a lot of fact-checkers were people of color. We didn’t really trust white people, so we were good at that job. I really would question every little thing a writer had to say. I was like, “That was not the distance between Robert Downey Jr.’s house and the prison where he was doing time. Stop lying.”
CDVS: When did you start working for Latina Magazine?
SM: The first issue of Latina came out in 1996 and I actually wrote about the launch party for the Voice. I came on in the second issue. Ed Morales put me on because he had an article in there about green card marriages. I still have a copy in my archives.
CDVS: Nuyorican supremacy. You know I TA’d for Ed Morales, right? His “Latin Music & Identity” course at Columbia?
SM: I mean, that tracks. Nuyoricans were overlooked by the world, but not among Latinos. As a Central American, I was quite aware of how un-overlooked you motherfuckers were to each other.
CDVS: You must’ve been like, “it’s a little loud, the way you’re complaining about being overlooked!”
SM: We could do that forever. Because then, in the context of Honduras, what would the Garífuna say? You know?
CDVS: Definitely. But that doesn’t mean the differences shouldn’t get articulated. What was the environment like at Latina, and what did you do?
SM: The parent company was Essence, and the first editor was cruel with a red pen. Taught me to never be that way. I came in as a fact-checker—they called it Research Editor—and then I became an Associate Editor in charge of some features. I had a salary: about $25,000 per year. There was this older playwright, Dolores Prida, who had an advice column—I’d read her work in college in a Latina literature class. It was a bilingual magazine, and the woman who handled the Spanish translations was Consuelo Corretjer, daughter of the iconic Puerto Rican poet Juan Antonio Corretjer. It was an honor to work with those women.
CDVS: Wow. And Juan Antonio Corretjer used to edit Pueblos Hispanos, one of New York City’s most important Spanish language newspapers. The poets Julia de Burgos and Marigloria Palma worked there as reporters and copyeditors. Did you get to do much writing at Latina?
SM: It was a start-up, so I got to try everything: factchecking, editing, writing. I did a “Papi Chulo” on Benjamin Bratt. A few features. One was about a Salvadoran girl adopted by white people in Ohio: she was told her birth family was killed in the war in the ’80s, but she believed they were still alive, and they were. She got to find and meet them again. I also interviewed Christy Turlington for the cover. Her mother was from a wealthy family in El Salvador, and we went there for the interview. It was fascinating and strange, because I have family there that I don’t know well. There was a war between El Salvador and Honduras when my mother was a young woman: a sad, hidden history that no one else cares about. I talked about it with Christy and she was like, “Maybe the magazine should be interviewing you instead.” And I said, “Yes, maybe they should.”
CDVS: You weren’t that happy at Latina, were you?
SM: Maybe it was me, maybe it was them, but it was never quite a fit. I’m realizing that I’m worried, with this interview, that I’m a very peripheral person, in the end.
CDVS: Well, that’s part of what’s interesting, because you’ve been watching from a critical distance for a long time. I think every position in the ecosystem allows for different kinds of insights. Plus, you’ve always had a historian’s spirit.
SM: You children and your context! But thank you. I’ve stayed in writing every which way, for forty years. I have all these files, but there’s also so much anger and bitterness. I’ve always felt on the outside, especially as a Honduran. My people are from an unrecognized de facto colony, and that fucked up status has everything to do with my perspective. Bitterness might be a colonial feeling. But I don’t think it should be erased.
CDVS: I don’t think so either.
SM: Latina was all new territory: probably the first national publication for Latinas. It attracted various cases of identity crisis, including mine. The founder was a Mexican American woman adopted by white people who didn’t see herself anywhere, and her biography drove the selling of the magazine. But it’s dangerous to sell your life story, make it a business plan. That’s a concern I still have with writing by people of color—or rather, how it’s marketed.
CDVS: How would you describe the magazine’s point of view, in terms of content?
SM: The magazine was based in New York—a Caribbean city—but the publisher was Mexican from Texas. We were trying to aim for the larger audience, which in the United States is definitely Mexican. But when I was there the covers were majority Puerto Rican. That’s why it mattered when J.Lo played Mexican in her first two major movies: Mi Familia and then Selena. Selena was a million-dollar role, the first for a Latina, and the beginning of the J.Lo industrial complex. Selena wasn’t fun to me because her family was completely involved in that issue of the magazine. The movie promoted her father’s narrative, cutesy and simplified. Behind the scenes we were all very critical, but later as I moved through Condé Nast and Hearst, I saw how common it was for writers to lean on press releases for their articles, and how much the commercial magazines depended on advertising. Latina was just the site of my first disillusionment.
CDVS: What were you into at the time? Still hip hop?
SM: My cassettes and CDs were mostly hip hop. When I came back to New York in ’95 I was hanging out with my boyfriend and his DJ brother, who did some Native Tongues shows. They were into jungle, drum & bass. We were smoking all the time and going to spots like The Cooler on 14th Street. Roni Size was breaking out. This was still a golden era for hip hop hippies—what they called Backpacker stuff at that time like Mos Def. Then there was D’Angelo and Erykah Badu and that whole Brooklyn Moon scene. We partied on the off days, a random Tuesday or Sunday. One of our favorites was on B and 2nd: “Save the Robots.” A guy got stabbed there. They played mostly house. We took towels and little bottles of baby powder to the dance floor. I wasn’t the best dancer but weed and beer made me better, being surrounded by the best dancers made me better. It was a completely different from the world Latina sold, very specifically New York. Selena didn’t feel so relevant to me.
CDVS: Were you doing any music journalism, either at Latina or The Village Voice?
SM: At Latina I did a blurb about Hurricane G’s only album. I wrote more about music for Urban Latino, an independent magazine based in Queens. Itwas way more of a match for me—a New York magazine, very Caribbean, though the founders were Colombian, Caribbean too, like Honduras, just not the islands. I wrote a lot of cover profiles for Urban. My first was an interview with Bobbito García, the Nuyorican DJ who had a column at Vibe. He shared the cover with Idalis, freestyle singer and MTV VJ. Later I did a cover story on Tony Touch, who was photographed alongside other Latinos in hip hop: DJ Enuff, Angie Martinez, Cuban Linx. I also interviewed John Leguizamo for a cover. I don’t think Latina was happy about that.
CDVS: So all of this stuff was concurrent with Latina?
SM: Mostly. I wrote for Urban Latino until about 2000. They were independent, which was cool, but also unpredictable. They didn’t have dates on the magazines, no real schedule. They came out maybe every two months. I remember they messed up my name in the byline of a cover story. After a while they took longer to pay me and I had to harass them for my checks. They did connect me to my next job, though—an editor from Urban became the EIC of LatinGirl, which was like Latina Seventeen. I worked there so briefly as Senior Editor. The highlight was my interview with Maxwell. We talked about God.
Emmanuel Abreu for Aster(ix) Journal
When Biggie and Tupac died they almost took the whole industry with them. It was like walking into a burning building. Soon after, I jumped over to Blaze, thanks to Janene from the Voice who was Blaze’s photo editor. Blaze was a Vibe spin-off, where I was also Senior Editor. Biggie and Tupac died just a couple of years earlier and they almost took the whole hip hop industry with them. It was like walking into a burning building. We featured a lot of newer rappers: Juvenile, Eve, Ja Rule. By then I was listening to Björk and all kinds of electronica, like trip hop, and Tricky in the UK. To be honest it was a chaotic time: Y2K was the next apocalypse, supposedly, and Blaze drove me crazy with late night work. I never got overtime. I didn’t want to stop liking music, but I was getting disenchanted working behind the scenes. I decided it was better to go freelance.
CDVS: What was freelancing like back then?
SM: By the end of 1999, I was mostly fact-checking, sometimes editing, rarely writing. I worked for Rolling Stone and Essence and little websites when the internet was just beginning to threaten magazines. I was at a place called Dgolpe, an encyclopedic website like AllMusic but Latin. I wrote little blurbs about Maná and Gilberto Gil. In 2000 I went to Vanity Fair, where I worked till 2002: they paid me like $26/hour. For freelance writers it was $2/word. They let me go in the aftermath of 9/11, but by then I was in grad school for poetry at CCNY and started teaching in public schools.
CDVS: It’s crazy, the industry has contracted so much. You’re talking about almost thirty years ago, and the rates are literally lower now than they were then. Sometimes I think about the fact that journalism started collapsing as an industry right when those affirmative action programs became more robust and started opening up viable professional channels for young people of color in the media, the arts. There was that little boom in the ’90s, and now what? Affirmative action is illegal.
SM: It always happens that way. CUNY was free until the 1970s when students of color became the majority. We are watching it fall apart in real time, the worst-case scenarios unfolding.
CDVS: Did you leave magazines behind for financial reasons?
SM: Not exactly. Factcheckers could get paid well, but we were also scapegoats, and definitely expendable. As freelancers we weren’t on the masthead; our names didn’t appear in print. I worked with great heads of research: Derryale Barnes at Essence and Pat Singer at Vanity Fair. Pat said something once like: “if a fact-checker does their job, you won’t see them.” One part of me liked that idea, but I also remember feeling like a ghost, like I was floating through those offices, haunting and being haunted.
CDVS: Do you still fact-check?
SM: The last big job I had was for T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2023. I did a major feature about street food in Mexico, on my own at home tracking hours in a Google doc. I was calling street vendors in Mexico City on WhatsApp, having midnight conversations about what spice they put on the corn. Each fact is a wormhole. The Times hasn’t hired me since, maybe because it was so many hours.
CDVS: They have the money, but they’re not spending it in the right places. The spice on the corn matters — as the kids say, we’re losing recipes! That’s one reason I wanted to have this conversation with you. You keep track. I know you like to call your home archive “hoarding” but I can’t endorse that. Where do you think that impulse comes from?
SM: I think it’s because I know I’m not part of a typical experience: an “other” even among Latinos, an anomaly, a weirdo, someone who flies below the radar. I’ve always said I’m my own case study. So no one is going to document me like I do. I wish I had a place for the overlooked past: piecing it together here might help.
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