Erika L. Dos Santos Ramos (Madrid, 1997), known artistically as Erika Dos Santos and Erika2Santos, is a Spanishrapper.[1][2] She has been called a "pioneer" of women's freestyle and battle rap in Spain.[3][4]
Erika Dos Santos was born in Madrid in 1997, into a family originally from Cape Verde.[2] She lives in the San Cristóbal neighbourhood of Madrid.[1] In 2016, Dos Santos gave the talk Cosas que hacer antes de morir at a TEDxYouth conference in Madrid.[5] That same year, she won second prize in the Sanse Urbano festival, behind fellow rapper Alberto Robledo Bustos.[6] In 2018, she participated in the Spanish edition of the X Factor television programme, obtaining four "yeses" for her performance and in which she was compared to Trinidadian rapper Nicki Minaj.[7][8]
Dos Santos has participated four times in the Red Bull Batalla de Gallos.[7] In 2017 she became the first woman to make it through the competition, reaching what at the time was called "The Last Man" (Spanish: El último hombre).[2] This led the competition to change the name of the event to "The Last Chance" (Spanish: La última oportunidad), a name that has been maintained in subsequent editions.[2] In 2019, she was a semi-finalist in the Batalla de Gallos.[7] She was one of the first two women to make it through to the semi-final, along with fellow rapper Sara Socas.[9][10]
Erika Dos Santos (left) and Sara Socas (right) performing together.
She has also developed social projects that use rap as a form of social intervention.[3][11] In 2018, she and Sara Socas gave workshops for teenagers at risk of social exclusion in high schools in the Community of Madrid.[9] She has also promoted the Cypher School project to promote tolerance through rap, poetry and freestyle in La Parcería.[2][12]
