Avelino Junior Figueroa Rodríguez, who records as Lápiz Conciente, is a Dominican rapper, songwriter and label owner. He is treated as one of the founders of Dominican hip hop, and more biographies in this record point to him than to any other artist of his generation, which is a fair measure of how much of the scene runs through him.

Los Mina

He was born in 1983 in Los Mina, on the eastern side of Santo Domingo. He heard the Puerto Rican rapper Vico C at ten years old, in 1993, and that is where the rapper comes from; he has been working since 1997. The name is his grandmother’s: it comes from the way she said it, which is also why he has always written Conciente without the s.

Ráfaga de Plomo

He began putting music out through YouTube in 2008, among it Las Menores, and released the mixtape Ráfaga de Plomo the following year. That was the route available at the time — the Dominican radio of the period had little room for rap, and the platform was where the audience already was.

Capea el Dough

In 2011 he recorded Capea el Dough with Toxic Crow. The record became the piece the Dominican press reaches for when it needs to point at what hip hop sounds like in this country, and it kept working: in 2022 more than twenty-eight Dominican urban artists cut a new version of it together.

Yo Soy Papá and Yo No Te Quiero Perder followed, and the audience for them was larger than anything Dominican rap had reached before.

Si No Te Quisiera

In 2014 he appeared on Si No Te Quisiera alongside the Spanish producer Juan Magán and the Mexican singer Belinda, and the record earned him a gold certification. It also placed a Dominican rapper inside a commercial Latin pop release, which was not a route that had been open to the genre before.

Latidos and Cicatrices

Latidos arrived in 2016, with Natti Natasha among its guests along with Vico C, Belinda, J Álvarez and Musicólogo El Libro. He signed to Sony Music Latin the same year and made Cicatrices for the label, bringing in Negro HP, Magic Juan, Nacho, Leslie Grace and the Cuban rapper El B.

The battle

In 2020 he went into a rap battle against Mozart La Para. It produced three singles — El Descanso Eterno, Tú No Tá and 9 Días — and it was followed as an event rather than as a novelty, which says something about where the genre had arrived. In 2022 he appeared on Culpable, on Romeo Santos’s Fórmula, Vol. 3.

The standing

Premios Juventud nominated him as urban artist of the year in 2013. He won two Latin Music Italian Awards in 2016, and in 2017 Papa, recorded with Vico C, took him to a Latin Grammy nomination for best urban song — the man who had made him want to rap, on the record that got him there.

In 2023 Rolling Stone en Español placed him forty-eighth on its list of the fifty greatest figures in the history of Spanish-language rap, which is the highest position any Dominican holds on it.