The New Yorker: The Criminalization of Venezuelan Street Culture

On the morning of April 23, 2024, Claudio David Balcane González, a twenty-six-year-old musician from the state of Aragua, in Venezuela, arrived at the Texas border. In the previous three months, he had travelled through nine countries, before securing an appointment with officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security through CBP One, an initiative of the Biden Administration to create a more orderly system for asylum claims. Border Patrol held him at the station until midnight, asking about his background and his many tattoos, which include a rose, a clock, a crown, and two guns. Eventually, he was released with a future immigration-court date. Balcane went to meet a friend in San Antonio and posted a picture with him on Instagram, with the caption “If you can dream of it, you can make it happen.”

Balcane, who performs as Davicito59, began making music at thirteen and spent years busking on buses around Maracay, the capital of Aragua. He started out as a rapper, but his focus has since shifted to dembow, a genre that originated in the Dominican Republic and has become explosively popular among Venezuelans in the U.S. A month after Balcane entered the country, he released a song called “Yo me voy por el Darién,” which describes the perils of crossing the jungle that separates Colombia from Panama—jaguars, soldiers, criminals—and the hopes that kept him going. “We ate rice with vulture meat but held our heads high,” Balcane sings. “We had left home with a mission: to make it big.” He called it “el nuevo himno de los caminantes”—the new hymn of the walkers—and it quickly gained a following on social media. Balcane was soon collaborating with more established musicians, including John Theis, a pioneer of Venezuelan dembow in the U.S. At a concert in Detroit, Theis teased Balcane onstage. “This dude is here signing baseball caps!” he said. “You weren’t signing caps in el Darién.”

Balcane’s real breakthrough came in February, when he teamed up with Junior Caldera, a popular dembow singer in Venezuela, and Luxor, a fellow-immigrant and a relative newcomer to the scene. The track, called “Donaltron,” is set to a hypnotic, frenzied beat, with lyrics that criticize the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown and plead with the President to show mercy. “I promise you I won’t smoke—I won’t drink more beer,” Balcane sings. “Well, only a little, that can’t hurt!” The video, clips of which have been viewed millions of times on TikTok and Instagram, shows the musician facing off with a dancer in a rubber Trump mask at locations around Chicago, including the city’s Trump Tower. “Just give me a couple of months to score an American girl,” Balcane sings. “I’ll give you a few cachapas in return.”

The song received mixed reactions online. Most listeners seemed to find it funny and refreshing, but others, including many Venezuelans, responded with disdain. “Those of us who behave make no noise, so they think we don’t exist,” one commenter wrote. “Those who misbehave, a small fraction, make a lot of noise and the rest of us get fucked.” Other posters were even more aggressive: “Please deport him to a remote island.” Someone else added, “Guantanamo.” Many of the commenters tagged Trump, ICE, C.B.P., and D.H.S.

Two months after “Donaltron” was released, Balcane was intercepted by federal agents while leaving his apartment in Chicago. He was thrown to the ground and handcuffed; an agent kneeled on the back of his neck. When he protested, saying that he was an artist not a criminal, an agent told him, “We know perfectly well who you are. That’s why we are here.” (A senior D.H.S. official said, “Any accusations that an unusual amount of force was used are false.”)

Balcane was taken to an ICE facility in the city, where agents accused him of belonging to Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that the Trump Administration has designated as a terrorist organization and claims is invading the United States. The agents provided no evidence other than Balcane’s tattoos, which they said were affiliated with the group. While searching his phone, they played the video of “Donaltron.” “How funny that he is singing against deportation and is about to be deported himself,” one agent remarked.

Balcane relayed his story from a detention center in Wisconsin, where he awaits a hearing on May 29th. Santa Rita, where he grew up, is a dangerous area on the outskirts of Maracay, but people close to the musician deny that he is affiliated with Tren de Aragua; he has no known criminal record in the U.S. or in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, or Peru, where he previously lived. Balcane has stated that he fled Venezuela after receiving threats for songs that were critical of the country’s President, Nicolás Maduro. In 2016, he was waiting at a bus station when two men attacked him, hitting him on the head with the butt of a gun. “My music has always been a way to express my reality and my nation’s struggles,” he wrote in a declaration. “It addressed democratic erosion, economic collapse, and the violence used to silence dissident voices.”

The “Alien Enemy Validation Guide,” which became public through a court filing in March, lists elements thought to indicate affiliation with Tren de Aragua and assigns a point value to each. Suspects scoring eight points and above can become “validated” members. In addition to traditional criteria like criminal history, the guide instructs officers to check for “symbolism.” This includes tattoos that denote loyalty to the gang (four points); insignia, logos, notations, drawings, or dress that show allegiance to it (another four); and social-media posts that include its symbols (two more). A set of accompanying documents note that members of the gang may have tattoos ranging from the Michael Jordan logo to an AK-47. A list of additional identifiers includes donning “high-end urban street wear,” merch from U.S. sports teams with Venezuelan players, Jordan sneakers, and Chicago Bulls jerseys.

On social media, Balcane regularly wears sports attire and designer replicas, and proudly displays his tattoos. (Roses, clocks, crowns, and guns are all cited in the D.H.S. documents.) His songs sometimes make references to drugs and weapons—a line might mention prepping coke or carrying a Glock. But, as an artist who has worked with Balcane, whom I’ll call Carlos, put it, “You listen to his lyrics and fifty per cent are drawn from his reality and the other fifty are commonplace in rap. A rapper might say, ‘My bars are an atomic bomb and your ear is Hiroshima.’ That doesn’t mean he’s about to drop an atomic bomb.”

“Cuidadito,” a collaboration between Balcane, Theis, and Brayita58, a dembowsero from the state of Carabobo, which borders Aragua, shows a group of migrants in streetwear, including Bulls merch, crowding into a Chicago subway car. Several have visible tattoos. The musicians’ style perfectly matches the description of alleged Tren de Aragua members in government documents. In this context, the song’s chorus—“Watch out, I’m from Venezuela, we’re the new kids in town”—which intends to signal the arrival of the dembowseros in the U.S. Latino music scene, seems to confirm the government’s worst fears.

One of the central characters of the Venezuelan imagination, and therefore of dembow, is the malandro. Loosely translated as “thug,” it describes both actual criminals and the style, behavior, and dialect of young men from poor neighborhoods. Much like the use of “thug” in American rap music, dembowseros have reclaimed malandro and its traditional signifiers, transforming an epithet into a term of art. In Theis and Caldera’s song “Malandrito,” it’s the bad boy all the girls want; in Balcane’s “Bur d’ Malandro,” it’s the guy who acts all tough but will get crushed in a rap battle.

Musicians might role-play as malandros, but that’s not always clear to audiences. Theis, who has ink all over his body—the whites of his eyes are tattooed blue—is used to being pigeonholed as gangsta. Early in his career, he leaned into the caricature, which got him more views on social media. “I would use street expressions like ¡Mano! ¿Qué lo que? and words like beta and boleta,” he told me. “But a group of people didn’t accept me because of my low-life speech.” To reach a wider audience, he switched to more standard Spanish and started sharing his personal life online. “People might listen to ‘Malandrito’ and think badly of me,” he said. “But they can then go to my social media and see who I really am—a guy who is always talking about his family.”

A producer on “Donaltron” had approached Theis to collaborate on the track. Theis refused, even though he knew it would be a hit. As an immigrant, he felt that he didn’t have the standing to comment on U.S. politics. His mother had warned him, “Don’t mess with that stuff.”

Caldera, who appears on “Donaltron” with Balcane, was unable to travel to Miami for a concert in late April, reportedly because his visa was cancelled. Since then, rumors of a “list” of targets have circulated among artists in their orbit. A producer in the dembow scene, whom I’ll call Daniel, thought that what happened to Caldera was “too much of a coincidence.” He shut down his studio for a few weeks and has sought to put distance between his brand and Venezuelan dembow. Carlos has asked Venezuelan collaborators to remove his credits from work that was already slated for release. “A lot of people tell me I’m being stupid; others tell me I’m being smart,” he said. “All I know is I have a mom and a dad back home who need me to send a hundred dollars each week, and if I don’t do that there’s no medicine.”

Venezuelan street culture was born out of structural violence and profound inequality. “Being a young man from a popular sector meant you had a high chance of being killed by the police with impunity,” the sociologist Verónica Zubillaga told me. State violence was justified through a dehumanizing discourse that held that, if you were poor you were a malandro, and if you were a malandro you deserved to die. “Rap and dembow are cultural tools that allow these men to reclaim their agency and position themselves as emissaries,” she said, “inverting stigmatization to come out on top.” In Venezuelan culture, that transformation is often achieved through comedy. “Humor provides both incisive critique and therapeutic expression,” Zubillaga said. “It’s the way us Venezuelans turn our many tragedies on their heads—by laughing.”

Unsurprisingly, dembow has become a touchstone for young people who fled violence in their home country and are struggling to gain a foothold in a new one. Last year, a studio in Chicago hosted a weeklong campamento de dembow where participants could record songs and shoot videos for free. Around fifty people showed up. Daniel recalled once hosting two recent arrivals at his studio because there wasn’t enough room in city shelters. “Their eyes lit up,” he told me. “I’ll never forget that one of them went into the bathroom with the three things he owned, washed in the sink, dressed up, and put on his chains before coming out to record.”

Luxor, the original writer of “Donaltron,” told me that the idea for the song had come to him after several days without finding work. “My cousin and I fell into a depressive hole,” he said. “We were running out of money. We had to pay rent.” He wrote the first verses in three hours and spent fifteen days refining them for a TikTok video, in which his cousin dances frantically by his side. The project provided them a much-needed release and catapulted Luxor to online stardom. Since Balcane’s detention, however, he has shied away from explicit political commentary. He is focussed on making a living and freeing his cousin, who was recently swept up in an ICE raid.

It is a cruel irony that Venezuelans who came to the United States to escape an authoritarian regime have instead become the target of antiterrorism measures. “I feel like I’m dealing with the Venezuelan government,” Daniel told me. “But with the capacity of the U.S. government.” Carlos was even more mournful: “It feels very strange to have spent so much time running for freedom and now feel like we’re imprisoned here.” Michelle Brané, who leads the nonprofit Together and Free, has overseen the cases of a hundred and thirty Venezuelans deported to El Salvador, most of them through the Alien Enemies Act. Ultimately, she said, it doesn’t matter whether Balcane was detained because of his art. “Whether it’s true or not, in some ways, is no longer relevant,” Brané told me. “The fact that they are afraid there is a list and authorities are going after people means we may already be under a fascist government.”

The Supreme Court has yet to rule on the legality of deportations under the act, but it has made it clear that detainees must be given adequate notice and an opportunity to defend themselves. In the meantime, Balcane has somehow managed to maintain his humor and lyricism. He’s working on new songs, though it’s hard to compose without a beat and in a cell that can hold up to two dozen people. When his friends call, he talks about music—who released what, which video has the most views. In a clip posted to his social media, he shows off his “Gucci,” a pair of orange prison slides on which he’s written the luxury brand’s logo with a marker. He tells his followers, “Pa’ que ustedes vean que no nos dejamos morir con nada”—so that you see that nothing can kill us. Or, rather, that even in death we have style. ♦