‘Can’t Eat Clout’: How La Doña Is Using Her Music to Bridge Generations and Make Change
Cecilia Cassandra Peña-Govea first became La Doña when she was studying at UC Santa Cruz. She would use “La Doña” as a playful nickname to describe her bossy and maternal attitude among her housemates and pretty soon, it followed her back to San Francisco’s Latinx corridor, where she had been playing with her family band since she was seven.
She had already been exposed to the professional musician’s lifestyle and decided it wasn’t for her, feeling burnout by the time she was a teenager. She definitely didn’t want to be a solo act, hustling for gigs and having to promote herself. Yet in San Francisco’s Mission District, she kept feeling the pull toward becoming La Doña, a bilingual “Frisco queen,” who shifts seamlessly between singing about love’s varied stripes and writing scathing anti-gentrification anthems. She’s even known for dropping bars when she moves into “hyphy maravilla” mode, a name she uses to refer to her hyper-fast style of rapping.
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La Doña’s first music videos racked up hundreds of thousands of YouTube hits, setting a promising foundation that extended beyond her hyperlocal appeal. Then she released her Algo Nuevo EP on March 12, 2020, just days after California declared a State of Emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Suddenly, the future looked uncertain for everyone. There was no way for her to tour or continue building on the momentum she’d been gaining.
But during the pandemic slowdown, La Doña decided to reject defeatist ideas. Instead, she reaffirmed that she was going to continue on her musical journey and make a social impact. “When nothing is static, it’s a task to make everything consistent and cohesive,” she says.
La Doña is what some might call radical, but she’s deeply familiar in the Bay Area’s creative and political change-making scene: an anti-racist, feminist abolitionist, raised in a “culmination of love,” as she describes it to Rolling Stone. She says that the Bay Area raised her, “blessing me with understanding of self, of community, and that unwavering moral compass that tells you what you should be doing, what’s going to benefit your people, and how to go about it.”
As the music industry picked up after the pandemic, La Doña signed to a label and management. They eventually parted ways. It became clear to her that she didn’t want to be a pop star or a neoperreo reggaetón sex icon. La Doña’s goals were different: She wants to orchestrate change through her music. Her approach is cross-generational, often swapping lyrics to traditional songs and playing original songs in traditional forms. She can play music that abuelitos and abuelitas recognize, and then subvert them into sounds that she can use to emcee a house party. It’s not just mixing genres, but bridging generations.
“None of those directions that people had been pushing me towards had resonated with me or my experience, or my community,” she explains.
La Doña’s vision has paid off. She’s shown her versatility, playing regional Mexican music one minute and rapping in Spanish and English the next, getting an invite to play at Lollapalooza last year. But in 2023, some challenges threatened her momentum again: She slipped on a deck at the iconic San Francisco queer bar and community space, El Rio, breaking her rib early in the year. In addition to that, she dealt with a break-up, plus the return to being an independent artist. The non-stop work pushed her into another period of introspection about what she wanted out of music.
“I’m working my ass off — for what? So I can be $100,000 in debt to a label?” asks La Doña. “I started realizing that I was going to be the one to make all my dreams come true.”
That’s come with scoring tons of local high honors, including having her songs played at San Francisco Giants games. On Aug. 11, she’s playing San Francisco’s major festival, Outside Lands, which will be held at Golden Gate Park. It’s another benchmark for her in the Bay Area , performing on the same stage as Kendrick Lamar, Janelle Monáe, and J.I.D.
“Outside Lands is a huge step for me,” La Doña says. “If I can interpret the way I was raised with culture, in solidarity, allyship — if I can communicate these ideologies through my music and through my performance, and reach a broader audience, that’s awesome. But first, it needs to be felt and understood and appreciated by people that come from the same places I do.”
Outside Lands offers an opportunity for her to reach new audiences and speak directly to her people all at once, and it’s also a chance for her to prepare for the release of her upcoming EP Can’t Eat Clout, which she announced on Thursday. The whole project was inspired by the tough, guiding question typically recounted by industry elders: “Who’s actually there for you when the house lights turn off?” Everything she’s learned answering that question brought her to this new music.
The four-track EP will be out on Sept. 15 through Text Me Records. The first single, “Paloma No Vuelve Amar,” is out now with La Doña drawing from the cultural images of a dove, which holds several meanings in Latin culture. “Loser Girl” was originally conceived as a hip-hop diss track, but appears on the EP like a souldies recording. It wouldn’t be La Doña without a hyphy nod, so she taps rapper Tia Nomore – another emerging Bay Area creative powerhouse, who stars in the upcoming A24 film Earth Mama – for the final track, “Show Me How You Livin.” There, La Doña shows how her sound moves listeners through various multicultural party rooms, playing different styles in one succinct package. The project coincides with a live sessions follow-up, featuring tracks from the EP that she directed with a 13-piece band.
But despite everything happening in her career, La Doña is committed to only rising up in the music game if she can hold it down for her people — whether it’s handling Oakland’s Town Business or fighting to keep the radical spirit of San Francisco’s streets alive.
“If you’re attracted to my project because of the versatility and because of the authenticity, then maybe you should observe and respect the community that I come from,” La Doña says. “But that’s not popular when you say that to label executives.”
With accolades adding up, La Doña is starting to see a clearer picture. When notable brands reposted or engaged with her, management and labels took note, but when she shared what was important to her, like her work teaching elementary and middle school kids music, those industry types met her with silence. She’s especially committed to her work as an artist-educator-activist: She’s one of the ’23-’24 California Creative Corps fellows. This secures her ability to be an independent artist next year. Plus, teaching humbles and grounds her.
“I couldn’t leave them. I have to do this work,” she says of her students. “[They] don’t give a fuck how many YouTube views I have, that I am playing Outside Lands.”
Just after this interview ended, former President Barack Obama included La Doña’s single from last year, “Penas con Pan” on his 2023 summer playlist. It almost seemed like a bizarre coincidence, especially after La Doña talked about her own disinterest in the double-edged sword that comes with public clout.
Reached for comment on the phone later, La Doña was taken aback. “I was confused and surprised. I was in this really heavy meeting about trauma-informed practices, and my homie was like, ‘LOL Obama listens to La Doña,’” she says, wondering how Obama heard the track. (Maybe it was the visuals where she experiments with mushrooms.) ”I’m not super into the nation-state and how it’s organized,” she shares plainly.
She’s not focused on what public figures are listening to her music. Instead, she wants people to connect with her message and take away one thing: “Wherever you’re at, take on the responsibility of always listening to yourself first and being exactly who you are no matter who is observing you or looking at you or asking for something else.”
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