Yva Las Vegas was born in Venezuela in 1963. They recount their early childhood memories of playing folk music on the cuatro and singing boleros with their mother. Yva moved to the US as a teenager to attend boarding school but never finished and eventually found their way to Seattle where they created a music project called Sweet 75 with Nirvana’s Chris Novoselic. Moving to NYC felt like home with the cacophony of street music, people of color, feminist punk houses, and open mic nights to experiment and play music. Yva speaks about gender violence by saying, “I can’t with the gender binary, it’s so constrictive and it’s not working anymore in the world that we live in. It gets in the way of everything, in the way of equality, it’s horrible for men, and lethal for women.”