Many artists went home with new awards after this year’s 67th annual Grammy ‘s on Feb. 2nd, 2025. At the ceremony, winning the Best Latin Pop Album was Shakira with her most recent album called Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran, which directly translates over to “women no longer cry.” This album largely follows the theme of Shakira’s raw emotions after being cheated on and her scandalous breakup with football player, Gerard Piqué, the father of her children. Shakira details her struggles processing what had happened, and how it eventually turned her into a more fierce and confident individual, as well as the strength she found as a newly single mother. Despite the hardships she faced, Shakira used this experience in her life to fuel her career and convey an important message to her very wide audience — women can overcome any adversity and empower one another.
Spanish hip hop, more commonly known as reggaeton, is a largely male-dominated field, with historically few opportunities for female recording artists. Its history of gender imbalance was analyzed by Dr. Stacy Smith at USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. She examined the top 150 songs from the Billboard Hot Latin Songs Chart, and found that only six percent of artists were female in 2015. Despite how this rate rose to 13 percent in 2017, this remains a very small percentage. Taking this into account, Shakira first started producing music at the age of 13 when she signed a deal with Sony Music, releasing her first album in 1991. This marks the start of her career 26 years prior to the 2015 study, illustrating a very large lack of women producing reggaeton music.
Her rise to fame is deeply inspiring as Shakira began to combat the gender imbalance from such a young age. Over the 30 years in which she has produced music, the theme of her songs have largely revolved around female empowerment. Many of her most famous songs like “She Wolf,” “Las de la Intuición,” which translates to the ones of intuition, and “Hips Don’t Lie” have largely shaped her career and further promoted the message that she hopes reaches women through her music.
With her album, Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran, Shakira manages to take such an unfortunate circumstance in her life, foster growth, and teach a lesson to others. She was anything but embarrassed to share her story, which is largely admirable. Shakira became a voice for many women that face similar challenges and struggles in their love lifes. She collaborated with many famous artists in both the Latin and English speaking world such as Cardi B, Bizzarap, Karol G, Rauw Alejandro, and even more to further promote her message and reach all audiences. Shakira opened up and said, “Making this body of work has been an alchemical process. While writing each song I was rebuilding myself.”
Not only through the songs, but the album cover depicts her crying diamonds in which she said, “While singing them, my tears transformed into diamonds, and my vulnerability into strength.”
Shakira channeled her emotions into her work providing listeners with such a realistic perspective of her healing. She showed women around the world that they shouldn’t be afraid to express themselves and talk about difficult topics which are usually kept quiet. Her ability to funnel it into such work was inspiring, and later highly decorated.