Roja was 16 when she had her hip-hop epiphany. “I was already rapping,” says Roja, the MC from Quito, Ecuador, whose real name is Mariela Salgado. “I was part of a Quito crew, Zantalianza, where I’d always felt included. I’d been writing poetry since I was 13, so when I found hip-hop, it felt perfect.” But as she watched the improvisation battles unfold, it dawned on her that there wasn’t a single woman involved.

“I started to register some of the rhymes they were trading: insults based on having sex with the opponent’s mother, sister, aunt; or calling each other by the names of women’s sexual organs. It was bizarre: they were managing to totally objectify women, and at the same time make us invisible.” Roja, now 28, is one half of the female hip-hop duo Rima Roja en Venus. “When you start out as a rap freestyler, the first thing that happens is they try to shut you up,” she says.

Guatemala City rapper Rebeca Lane has a similar experience of the Latin American hip-hop scene. In her 2012 song “Bandera Negra” (“Black Flag”) she takes a swipe at Latino MCs who use misogynist and homophobic language to insult one another, or who make puerile boasts about their huevos (eggs, meaning balls): “I’ve got a million eggs in each ovary. That doesn’t make me any more of a woman, or you less of a man,” raps Lane. “The level of gender violence in freestyle rhyming battles, and in mainstream rap, can be horrific,” she adds.

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Lane and Roja are part of a new generation of Latin American female MCs whose lyrics touch on some of the issues facing the region’s women – and celebrate the resilience and sheer huevos it takes to exist as a woman at all. The issues in question include a deep-rooted lack of equality; inadequate access to healthcare, sex education, contraception and abortion; human trafficking; domestic and public violence, rape and femicide. In Brazil, 15 women are killed each day, according to President Dilma Rousseff. In Argentina, the death in May of Chiara Páez, a pregnant 14-year-old murdered by her boyfriend, allegedly with the help of his mother and stepfather, sparked a nationwide protest movement, #NiUnaMenos (“not one less”), in which thousands took to the streets.

United we stand: the women in the 2013, all-Ecuadorian version of the hip-hop collective, Somos Mujeres Somos Hip-Hop.

“We all come from a very machista culture,” says the Mexican MC Audry Funk, who together with Roja and Lane is part of the all-female, trans-Latin-American collective Somos Mujeres Somos Hip-Hop (We Are Women, We Are Hip-Hop). Funk, already a member of a women’s hip-hop collective in Mexico, Mujeres Trabajando (Women At Work), met Roja in 2013, when they both performed at a concert held in New York by the Brooklyn hip-hop-and-tattoo crew, Har’d Life Ink. Later that year, when Roja organised the first Somos Mujeres Somos Hip-Hop festival in Quito, along with Venus Castillo, the other half of Rima Roja en Venus, they invited Funk to come and take part.

Since then, the collective has expanded to include women from 10 different countries, and, in April, released a mixtape “Latinoamérica Unida”, on Soundcloud. The compilation’s 12 tracks pulse with attitude and skill, in styles ranging from the melodic beauty of Chile’s Dania Neko to the harsh, guttural flow of the Colombian MC Jana. “Kutipakuy”, a song by Peru’s Sipas Crew, a trio of MCs from Portada de Manchay I, Lima, is one of the most arresting tracks, with Quechua words peppering lyrics underpinned by a hypnotic charango beat.

Following in the footsteps of pioneers like Argentina’s Actitud María Marta, a socially conscious hip-hop group formed in the 90s, this emerging generation of female MCs is less interested in fame and fortune than it is in empowerment, collaboration and education. “I’m not aspiring to be a rap star,” says Roja. Although there’s no shortage of highly commercialised versions of the genre in Latin America, says Lane, there’s also an underground hip-hop scene and it’s thriving.

Take Guatemala, she says, still one of the most violent countries in the world, despite the 1996 peace agreements that ended the country’s 36-year, genocidal civil war. Lane’s aunt disappeared in 1981, one of 200,000 Guatemalans killed during almost four decades of bloodshed. “We’ve had peace accords in Guatemala,” says Lane, “but we’ve never had any peace, or justice.” The hip-hop scene, she says, has played a healing role for some of the postwar generation: “It gives young people ways of organising beyond armed conflict, beyond military or gang violence.” Hip-hop itself was born in a similar atmosphere, Lane notes, “in the Bronx in the 1970s, once the gang wars had subsided.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rebeca Lane from Guatemala City: ‘Hip-hop gives young people ways of organising beyond armed conflict, beyond military or gang violence.’ Photograph: Paula Morales

For the women in Somos Mujeres Somos Hip-Hop, music also offers a chance to link up beyond borders. The collective’s members are from Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. For the mixtape’s final track, the rousing “Latinoamérica Unida”, each MC or group has contributed an eight-bar segment; and the accompanying music video, made of clips filmed individually and then spliced together, creates a snapshot of a scene that spans much of the Americas. In a skatepark in Quito, pink-haired MC Venus spits rhymes, turning her head to show a jaguar tattooed over one ear. Late-afternoon sun streaks across a rooftop in Puebla, Mexico, as Audry Funk picks up the beat; and in downtown Caracas, Anarkia Ruiz climbs a statue of Simón Bolívar to perform her part.

The group is working on plans for a second festival, to be held in Quito in early 2016. For the accompanying mixtape, the women are working in long-distance collaborations this time, in duos formed by names drawn at random from a hat. The method underlines the need for women to collaborate in pursuit of a common cause, says Audry Funk. “We’re not interested in excluding people,” she says. “We have to be able to work together – to leave our comfort zones and focus on our common ground, and also on our common problems.”

And there are plenty of those. Femicide reaches frightening levels in Latin America, which contains half of the 25 countries with the highest rates internationally. In a chilling reminder of the fear of sexual violence with which women and girls coexist daily, on 27 May, four Brazilian girls from the state of Piauí climbed a picturesque hill to take a few selfies, and were brutally attacked by a fugitive criminal and four teenage boys. The young friends, aged 15 to 17, were raped, then bound, thrown into a canyon and left for dead. Meanwhile in Paraguay, a 10-year-old rape victim, now eight months pregnant at 11, has been denied an abortion despite her mother’s pleas.

Perhaps surprisingly, despite their many shared values and concerns, there is a lack of unanimity within Somos Mujeres Somos Hip-Hop on the subject of abortion. While Audry Funk, like Rebeca Lane, is in favour of the right to abortion – “It’s an aberration for a woman not to have autonomy over her own body” – Roja is unequivocally against it, in all cases except for rape. Education, including on contraception, she says, is the answer. But in the absence of access to effective sex education, in situations compounded by poverty, gender inequality and violence, must women and girls simply pay the price with unwanted pregnancies? “As women, we’re all responsible for the choices we make,” says Roja. “I’ll always embrace the right to life, but everyone has the liberty to think and say what they believe.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Two of a kind: rap duo Rima Roja en Venus. Photograph: Daniel Cruz

It’s not the only instance in which the collective accommodates diverse views. Rebeca Lane identifies as a lesbian, a feminist, and a “trans-anarchist rapper”, but few of the other women in Somos Mujeres, she says, identify overtly as feminists. There’s a stigma associated with the term, she says, that’s particularly powerful in Latin America: “Women are wary of using the word ‘feminist’,” she says. “There’s a perception that it’s all about man-hating – that it’s about lesbians, witches and locas [crazy women].”

Funk and Roja both moved to the USA a year ago – to New York and New Jersey, respectively. The experience of living so far from home, says Roja, has been tough: “I miss my family a lot. It’s been hard to adjust to being so far away.” But professionally, she says, it has given her new avenues to explore. “In Quito, we play shows almost every weekend.” The New York Latino hip-hop scene is much smaller than Quito’s scene, and the slower pace has given her a chance to step back and take a breath.

For Funk, who lives in the Bronx with her husband, also a hip-hop MC, coming to live so close to the genre’s legendary source after more than a decade in hip-hop was an unforgettable experience. “It’s been fascinating,” she says. “I’ve met some incredible people in New York.” She talks animatedly about the classic graffiti she has seen and hip-hop meet-ups she has been to; and yet once she started to understand the current scene, she says, she found herself feeling disappointed.

“US hip-hop seems to have lost the social role it once had,” says Funk. “But I heard something the other day that made me laugh out loud,” she says. “‘Hip-hop isn’t dead – it’s just been learning Spanish’.”