But in “Je suis chez moi,” or “I am at home,” Black M talks about the mixed feelings he has about the country where he was born after his parents migrated to Paris from Guinea, a West African country.

“France is beautiful,” he sings. “But she looks down on me like the Eiffel Tower.”

In the same song, Black M challenges the racist stereotype of immigrants abusing the welfare system by singing: “My parents did not bring me into the world to get financial aid.”

Black M uses his lyrics as well as his fashion to demonstrate his social activism.

In another video, where he raps about police violence against immigrants, Black M wears a shirt reading “Justice for Adama: Without justice, you will never have peace.”

Adama Traoré was a Black French man who died in police custody in 2016 on his 24th birthday. His death sparked numerous anti-racist protests across France.

Born in the Dominican Republic in 1977, Arianna Puello moved to Spain when she was 8 years old and remembers listening to hip-hop music as she grew up in Salt, a small town nearly 4,000 miles away from rap’s birthplace in the Bronx.

“I used to listen to rap with my brother who did beat-boxing and my cousin who had contacts in New York and they gave him the vinyls,” she said in an interview. “But I wasn’t active. It was in Salt where I saw the rap groups that were there, the graffiti, break groups. … The whole hip-hop movement of the moment, the parties, the jams.”

Puello recalls telling herself: “This is my movement, and I want to be part of it.”

She recorded her first song in 1993, and her 2008 hit “Juana Kalamidad” reached No. 6 on the Spanish music chart.

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