Ms. Pombo wrote poetry as a way to combat crippling depression. Her friends told her to convert her poetry into rap songs nearly a year ago. “Converting poetry into rap has helped bring me peace,” she said. She now goes by the stage name Eriz, inspired by the Greek goddess Eris.

She was 19 the first time she rapped at a party of a friend. There were almost 30 men and only two women in the room. She remembers hiding her face with her phone so that she could correctly recite the words. When she looked up she saw that no men in the room were paying attention to her performance.

“I knew at that moment that it wouldn’t be easy for me to be a rapper,” she said. “I had to find a way to be strong because that was how it was going to be for the rest of my career.”

While her older brother fully supported her decision to become a rapper, the rest of her family did not. “They thought rap only glorified drugs or and violence, which is how most people in Oaxaca tend to think,” Ms. Pombo said.

Her family eventually changed their minds when they realized that instead of violence, she was rapping about the struggle of being a single mother and about romance.