mexico us border

The youngest of six children, four sisters and two brothers, Santos was raised by a suddenly single woman who struggled to maintain a family in the tough Los Angeles County city of Compton. The older brother “headed for the streets and I followed,” is how Santos describes his youthful years. “(Gang life) is what we saw. That’s what we did. There comes a point when you have to change your life, and that is what I did,” says a survivor who is now approaching the early stages of middle age.

In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s deadliest city, where the drug war has been exacerbated by a well-documented (and still unsolved) wave of violence directed against women, a growing number of young people are using music as a platform to raise their voice against the culture of violence, fear and apparent impunity enjoyed by the drug cartels and those shadowy criminals responsible for the wave of femicides.