I Am Ro

Jennifer Robles is a recognizable figure in her South San Francisco neighborhood: navy-blue bandana folded over her forehead, tattoo of the Golden Gate Bridge scrawled across her right forearm, pants baggy enough to hide her slight, 5'3" frame. She answers her cell phone with the sharpness and urgency of a numbers runner, spitting her habitual greeting three times in a row: "What's the deal, what's the deal, what's the deal?"

"Typical San Francisco-reared gangstress" might be your first impression of JenRO, until you see the random collection of objects scattered around her bedroom: a furry zebra-striped bedspread, a Gay Pride calendar with dates scribbled in permanent marker, a desk cluttered with cologne, amps, lava lamps, empty Pueblo Viejo bottles, CDs from Jen's favorite artists in rap, merengue, and reggaeton. Most noticeable of all, though, are the baby-blue walls covered with images of the standard-bearers of West Coast gangsta rap: Equipto, Snoop Dogg, Playa Rae, Tupac, San Quinn, Messy Marv, Killa Tay, and – larger than all of them – her name spray-painted in black graffiti letters.

It's not unusual for a 21-year-old newbie MC to situate herself in a pantheon of big names. What's striking about JenRO, though, is her inclination to mix the different sides of her personality, making the seemingly disparate worlds she inhabits – queer, Latina, gangsta – all of a piece. On her debut album, "The Revelation," which dropped on the label La Movida in September, she spits lyrics about everything from street hustles to hooking up with fly girls. Watching her take the stage in settings as far removed from each other as San Francisco Pride and San Quentin prison – where Jen has performed with the nonprofit anti-gang organization United Playaz – you wonder how easy it is for a queer female artist to embrace the contradictions of her sexuality and her gangsta consciousness, and express them in a genre whose penchant for misogynistic and homophobic lyrics seems like a prohibition against women in general, and queer women in particular. But JenRO enjoys pushing the limits of the medium, and she looks at the labels others might use to describe her with a blend of ambivalence and disregard. Ultimately, she insists, "I choose to say who I really am." And if her honesty means she can't front like a mack daddy, she's not worried – she's got plenty more to say.

How did you get interested in hip hop?

In eighth grade, I used to hang out with a friend after school and we'd talk shit about people – the way eighth-graders do – and put it into rhyme. So my first raps were mostly cracks about people I knew; I wrote them down and recorded them on a cassette player. The first [time] I actually performed was at summer camp – I was supposed to do a skit about preserving the redwood forest. Instead, I rapped about raccoons getting it on in my bunk bed, to the tune of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice." The counselor picked me up and dragged me offstage.

Rappers like Busta Rhymes and Juvenile were really popular when I was in high school, and it seemed like everyone around me listened to hip hop. We used to form cipher circles anyplace we were hanging out – basements, garages, playgrounds. I even used to panhandle on Market Street, where I made about $13 an hour rhyming and playing beats on a little drum pad. But the main hangout for rappers was at the top of the stairs that led up from the school auditorium. When I first got to high school, I always saw guys rapping there during lunch, and I wanted to join them. I tried to get my best friend to go with me, but she said that hanging out with dudes was too boring, and that I was wasting my time. Eventually, I just came up to them by myself, and started spitting my own lyrics. Whenever I joined the circle, someone would start rapping about how he was annoyed that a girl joined the cipher. So I would come back at them harder, and rap about how I didn't care what they thought. I sucked at first, but as I started practicing more at poetry slams and talent shows outside of school, I eventually got better, and in the end, they always gave me props for being a girl and having the nerve to join.