The Puerto Rican underground (marquesina tapes)

How reggaeton was actually built: not in studios with budgets but on cassettes sold hand to hand out of San Juan's public-housing caserío parties and carport marquesina dances through the early and mid 1990s. Producers looped the Jamaican-descended dembow pattern, rappers voiced over it in Spanish, and the tapes circulated outside every commercial and broadcast channel -- to the point that in 1995 Puerto Rican authorities raided record shops and confiscated stock in a public morality campaign against the music. The censorship did what censorship usually does to a street music, and the format went national soon after.