Poeta Callejero, born Geraldo Gabriel Santana, is a Dominican rapper and songwriter from San Juan de la Maguana. He is from the Mesopotamia neighbourhood of a town in the deep south-west, which is not where the Dominican urban industry lives.

The water

In 1998 Hurricane Georges crossed the island and the dam above San Juan came over. He was nine. His own label puts it plainly: he went from having what he needed to having nothing.

That is where the songs came from. The first records he made — 16 de Mayo among them — take the flood and what followed it as their subject, which is an unusual thing for a teenage rapper to be writing about, and it is why a 2009 newspaper piece introduced him as a survivor before it introduced him as a performer.

Bonita Bonita

Hagan Sus Diligencias came out in 2014 on Machete Music and carried Un Loco Como Yo, Historia de Amor, Baby You, Esperando Por Ti, Contigo Aprendí, and Bonita Bonita. The last of those became the song people know him by. 10 Mujeres belongs to the same run.

He has kept it working since — a jazz version of his own, a catalogue deal with Vulcano Music, and in 2025 a single called VIH, which does what the early records did and puts a hard subject in a dance track.

He has also shared bills and arguments with the rest of the field; El Mayor Clásico names him.

The first AI record on a Billboard Latin chart

In January 2026 an AI-assisted reworking of Bonita Bonita, credited to the project 4AMTapes, entered Billboard’s Hot Latin Pop Songs. Billboard reported it as the first known AI-assisted song to reach any of its Latin charts.

So the record that crossed that particular line was not a new composition and not a synthetic voice invented for the purpose. It was a twelve-year-old Dominican song, written by a man from San Juan de la Maguana about a place most people outside the country could not find, run through a machine and sent back out.

His own reaction, posted the week it happened, was six words long: a moped last week, Billboard now.