Choco Orta: “It’s time for us to take our place without asking for permission”

Photos by Ana María Abruña Reyes “The establishment told me:—Negra, do you want to be a singer? We will allow it in a corner, there, dark, next to there, where no one sees you.—But I want to [be] the light,” she replied after fifteen years.—Not in the light.—In the light I will stop!" That way, Choco Orta described his beginnings in music as a woman, black and lesbian. The salsa with almost 40 years of career became the first woman to enter the …