Chartbreaker is Billboard's monthly series highlighting an artist's first-ever Billboard chart appearance. This month, our Chartbreaker is Guaynaa, who scored his first Hot Latin Songs entry in March with "ReBoTa," later boosting the track to a No. 28 peak in August following the release of a star-studded remix.
Jean Carlos Santiago, the Puerto Rican artist better known as Guaynaa, has spent the last year embracing newfound virality with his explosive reggaeton hit “ReBoTa,” which climbed to No. 35 on the Hot Latin Songs chart in April and has collected over 300 million views on YouTube. The track puts a spotlight on the artist’s gravelly baritone and irreverent lyricism, and it’s ricocheted wildly throughout the Internet, making him a household name in the urbano scene.
But before he became Guaynaa, Santiago had a few other ideas about what he wanted to be. There was his stint as a baseball player when he was a high school student; then, he moved to Boston, in a serious bid to make it as a professional jockey. Later, he got a job at a chemical plant in Puerto Rico and started working toward a chemical engineering degree. And while he calls each experience “rewarding” today, there was something that kept pulling him back toward music, a passion that he says has been part of his DNA since he was a kid.