La Baby, born Deyanira Vargas, is a Dominican dembow singer from Consuelo, a sugar town in San Pedro de Macorís. She sings, raps and writes her own material, which in dembow is three things and not one.

Freestyle first

She was freestyling by the age of ten, in a place where that is a street skill before it is a career, and she got good enough at it early that people around her noticed.

Consuelo matters to the sound. It is an eastern batey town, the kind of place the country’s dance music keeps drawing from and rarely credits, and the accent and the phrasing come from there.

Siente el Ki

The record that opened the door came in 2020, cut with La Tukiti, and it moved fast enough that La Perversa asked to join it. The remix that resulted put the three of them on one track — three women on a dembow record at a moment when the genre was still being written about as a male thing.

She has kept collaborating since. Nadie Tiene Que Saber, with Dímelo Tyrone and Mapa Negro, carries her name in the writing credits as well as the performance.

Niña Traviesa

The EP she is working towards is called Niña Traviesa, with Angel Dior, Luis Brown and Huan 62 among the guests.

What separates her from most of the singers arriving with her is the writing. Dembow is a producer’s genre and the voice on top of it is often interchangeable; somebody who brings her own words to the session is holding a different position in the room.