It’s rush hour in Bogotá, and the city’s rapid-transport system is tightly packed with commuters when, on one bus, the thump of a hip-hop beat reverberates from a boombox, and a young girl starts rapping into a microphone.
Passengers crane to watch the performance, and – above the groaning of brakes and tattoo of car horns – she spits out an intricately rhyming piece about exile and hope.
Gabriela Brito was just seven when she performed her first rap song, six months after she and her family had fled the economic and political crisis in their native Venezuela and settled in the Colombian capital.
Lela, 12, sings her track, Time Machine, in Bogotá. Below, Lela sits on a sofa inside the club.
Her father, Jesús Alberto Sanz, would spend the days performing on the city’s buses in exchange for tips. Gabriela would join him from time to time, but on that day – tired of her role as a spectator – she insisted on joining in.
Taking the microphone from her father, she recited one of his pieces, which she already knew by heart. It was called Calendar.
“This morning I looked at the calendar / And I realized that a year had passed / Since I left my home for a dream / And a better future / Leaving behind my life and my friends / And knowing that they will not be with in my adventures.”
Lela, 12, cuts banana leaves while her father, ‘Jase’, 30, minces pork in the living room of their rented apartment in Soacha city. Those tasks are for the purpose of cooking hallacas, a Venezuelan dish that the family sells as another way to support themselves.
Gabriel Brito, 14, operates a DJ system in the living room of his family’s apartment in Soacha.
Now aged 12, Gabriela is better known as Lela MC, and is already establishing herself as a major presence on the city’s burgeoning hip-hop scene.
“If I’m successful, the first thing I’ll do is buy a house for my family,” she says. It was a promise she made to her mother Hayleen soon after they reached Colombia, when the family was evicted from their apartment for failing to pay the rent.
Despite its vast oil reserves, Venezuela is mired in economic and political turmoil, with rampant shortages in staple foods and basic medicines. Violence, insecurity and a severe lack of basic food and medicine have driven more than 7 million of the country’s people to flee their homeland.
Colombia has taken in more Venezuelan migrants than any other in the world: over 2.48 million – of whom more than 600,400 are children.
Gabriel Brito, 14, and his sister, Lela, 12, plays football in a street of Soacha.
Lela, 12, plays football with friends in a street of Soacha, one the most poor sectors around Bogotá.
But opportunities are scarce in the neighbouring country, which has struggled with high unemployment and the bitter aftershocks of decades of conflict.
After living in seven different homes in five years, Lela now lives with her parents and older brother Gabriel in Soacha, one of the poorest suburbs of Bogotá.
The family’s meagre income comes from the tips Sanz makes rapping on the buses, and Hayleen’s sales of Venezuelan food. But despite the setbacks, the young mother says the family cannot afford to lose hope.
‘Jase’, 30, sings a rap track inside a Transmilenio bus in Bogotá. This is his way of bringing money home since he arrived as a migrant from Caracas, Venezuela.
Gabriel Brito, 14, Lela, 12, and ‘Jase’, 30, talk with another rap singer in a Transmilenio station in Bogotá.
“If you can’t take one day of victory and then 20 defeats, you shouldn’t emigrate. It’s not for the weak,” she says.
Hayleen and Jesus Alberto initially crossed the border by themselves, leaving Lela and her younger brothers Gabriel and Nicole with Hayleen’s mother, Teresa.
Teresa Tabares, Lela’s grandmother who died after the explosion in her house in Cacaras, Venezuela, in 2017
But one morning in September 2017, the family was hit by disaster: as Teresa was preparing breakfast, a spark from a faulty fan caused the stove’s gas cylinder to explode, and starting a fire which burned down the house.
Teresa was killed; Gabriel threw himself on top of his sister, shielding her from the flames but suffering second and third degree burns across his body. Lela suffered minor injuries on her arm.
Lela Brito with her brother Gabriel.
Venezuela’s healthcare system was once one of the best in Latin America, but it has been brought to its knees by the country’s economic collapse: hospitals report a dire shortage of medical supplies and drugs, while tens of thousands doctors and nurses have joined the country’s exodus and fled abroad.
So Hayleen rushed back to Caracas to take her children to Bogotá for treatment. Lela remembers little of the journey – she was only seven, and still didn’t understand why she had to leave home. But years later, her father’s compositions helped her understand her family’s exile.
“I didn’t understand when I was little, but that song – Calendar – helped me feel what it meant to be a migrant,” she says.
Days after she started to rap on the bus with Jesus Alberto, she started to write her first lyrics, using two of his backing tracks. She called the tune Angel in honour of her grandmother.
“Her song was a mixture of rap and reggae, with lots of emotion. That was the moment when I realized that Lela would have a future in music,” says Sanz.
Lela MC no longer raps on public transport (“It’s not good to force my voice in spaces other than rehearsals or proper performances,” she explains) but she has performed at Bogotá’s Hip Hop In the Park festival (one of Latin America’s largest rap festivals), and videos of her performances have gone viral around the world. (Sanz admits that his proudest moment was when one clip was shared by Vico C, the Brooklyn-born MC credited as a founding father of hip-hop in Spanish.)
Lela kisses her sister Dayleen Sanz, four, in her room, in Soacha city.
Despite her success, life for the family of exiles is still not easy: Gabriela juggles school and homework with regular concerts at hip-hop clubs across the city. And even if she seems mature beyond her years – perhaps because of her experiences of migration – she is in no rush to grow up. As she raps in her latest single Do Re Mi: “I’m not going to speak like an adult to seem more cool / I don’t want to be like your favourite singer / Dressed up, full of money, but not ready.”
Lela is more aware than anyone that her career has just begun. The first pages of her calendar tell her that five years have passed since she left Venezuela; and the last ones remind her that there are still dreams to be fulfilled.
Lela holds the hand of her father, ‘Jase’, on a street in northern Bogotá.
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