Messiah — Benito Emmanuel García, born in Santiago de los Caballeros on 8 June 1990 and raised in Harlem, New York — is a Dominican rapper, singer and songwriter, and one of the pioneers of Latin trap. He was among the first to join reggaeton and trap and to rap as easily in Spanish as in English, laying down a model for the boom the genre went through in the mid-2010s.

Harlem

His family took him to New York when he was two. He grew up between the hip-hop of the streets of Upper Manhattan and the romantic Latin music his parents played at home, and he wrote his first song at eleven. As a teenager he made his name in freestyle battles.

«Tali & Messiah»

His first project was a reggaeton duo with Tali Goya, started when both were young teenagers. «Tali & Messiah» released an EP on the label «La Reina Records», and «Mi dimensión» went into rotation on «Mun2», «MTV Tr3s» and «Music Choice». In 2010 the two went their separate ways.

The remix king

On his own, Messiah first spread his music by handing it out in clubs and hair salons, and then by the internet, where his Spanish-language versions of songs by Drake, Future and later Cardi B earned him the nickname of king of the Latin remixes. His «Tu protagonista» grew into a remix with Nicky Jam, J Balvin and Zion & Lennox, and over the following years he recorded with Farruko, Bad Bunny, Daddy Yankee and Ozuna, as well as with Dominican artists such as Shelow Shaq, on «Soy de la calle», and Jhoni The Voice.

Albums and campaigns

His first album, «Made in Europe», made with DJ 40, came out digitally in July 2016, and that year he was the voice of national advertising campaigns for Gatorade and Sean John. He became the first Latin rapper from New York to fill the club Stage 48. When Billboard gathered the genre’s leading names in 2017 to tell the history of Latin trap, Messiah was among them, with Ozuna, Bad Bunny, De La Ghetto and Farruko. His second album, «B.E.N.I.T.O.», followed in 2018, the same year he joined the remix of Andy Mineo’s «You Can’t Stop Me». By 2025 his catalogue ran to more than eighty singles.

Legacy

Messiah is one of the New York Dominicans credited with helping launch Latin trap, and his bilingual, bicultural approach — trap from the city, sung for listeners who share neither its streets nor its language — anticipated the path that the genre’s biggest stars would later follow.