Music has been the driving force in Diego Raya’s life for as long as the 35-year-old hip hop emcee can remember. After his family moved from Mexico to Moline when he was about 12, he started writing poetry. At Moline High School, he began making music — just as his favorite rapper, El Díablo, stopped.
“I was getting mad because he wasn’t making any new music,” Raya said, “so I started writing songs, imagining what his new album was going to sound like. One of the guys that I went to school with, he was making music, and he’s like, ‘You want to try recording something?’ I said, ‘Yeah!’ People liked that first song, so I kept making more and more.”
Adopting the stage name Blue Malboro, he began mining his memories for lyrical material. One of his more popular songs, “Cuando Niño,” tells the story of being a kid in Salvatierra, Guanajuato and dreaming of being a soccer star.
“There were no cell phones. The television didn’t have a lot of channels like nowadays, and obviously there were no computers or video games. I used to play in streets that were muddy, playing in the rain with my friends, and I wrote about that. The rain had a really particular smell, a really good smell.”
“I also remembered eating as a family,” he continued, “and how my grandma would make homemade beans and hot sauce and chocolate. From my house, I was able to see this big mountain that was kind of blue, and it blended in with the sky. So, ‘Cuando Niño’ was about how I viewed the world back in the day, and how it was different from now. A lot of people loved that song because they said it took them back in time to their childhood, and they identified with it.”
Raya kept making music while holding down assorted jobs gardening and on the railroad. In 2021, his brother encouraged him to audition for a West Coast TV talent show that opened new doors for the aspiring rapper.
“When I was on Tengo Talento, Mucho Talento, I competed with one song that was about my mom, ‘Para Ti Mama.’ I had never been in competitions or anything, so I thought I was just gonna make it to the first round, and then I made it to the quarter finals. I needed a new song for that round, and one day I woke up at 4 or 5 in the morning and randomly remembered how I had a German Shepherd when I was a kid. One day, he just left and never came back.”
Once again, Raya transformed those lived experiences into a personal-but-universal song that advanced him further in the contest. He won the final round by writing and performing the first verse of a new song that he had just written, “Mi Herencia,” a kind of aural letter to his kids. It assured them that even after he dies, he will go on living inside their skin — every time they look in the mirror, they will also be looking at their father. He has since completed the second verse to the song, which will be included in an upcoming EP that will be out in the next few months. It’s yet another example of how Raya turns his life into art.
In the fall of 2025, the dual citizen appeared as a finalist on México Canta, representing both his hometown of Salvatierra and the Latino community of the Quad Cities. Bolstered by his experiences on Tengo Talento, Mucho Talento, Raya submitted a song that made the first big cut: 369 artists were selected out of 15,000 entries. The talent pool was then whittled down to 48 for México Canta’s televised semifinals, with 24 contestants from the United States and 24 from Mexico. More than 9 million people had tuned into the competition on public television in Mexico, according to The New York Times. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum commended Raya during her daily morning conference after a song that he wrote for the competition was among the nine selected for the finals.
“It was a good experience,” he said. “They sent me to Mexico City to record the semifinals, and it was the biggest stage I’ve ever seen. The production was a lot better than the first show I was on because the government was putting some good money into it. But when it came time for the final, we kind of had some issues because I just couldn’t take that much time off from my job to do it. My song competed, the one I did with my producer and best friend Juan Vasquez, but someone else performed it onstage for the finals.”
México Canta was designed as a competition for rising artists who eschew violence and promote positive messages, something that Raya can relate to.
“My early lyrics used to reflect who I used to hang out with, you know, guys who did bad things. But all that negative music just brought negative things back into my life. Soon after I changed up my lyrics to have more positivity, I started doing the TV shows, and that definitely changed my life. Also, by doing music, it’s a way that I can change somebody else’s life, too.”
“I used to hang out with gangs and did drugs and I’d get into trouble,” he elaborated. “Like, one time, some people tried to burn down our house, and that’s when my mom felt like she needed to do something about it. So, she told me that my grandpa was dying and we took a flight down to Mexico and then she put me in a rehab center. Oh yeah, that was the real turning point.”
While in rehab, Raya listened to other people tell their own stories during therapy sessions about committing murder, or being sexually abused, or growing up homeless. While sitting there, he had an epiphany and thought to himself, “What am I doing here?” His single mom had been busy working all the time to provide for him and his brother, but because he was a young man with no responsibilities, he took it all for granted. During that grueling month away from his family, Raya couldn’t find one good reason to be doing what he had been doing.
“My mom worked hard for me, and she gave me a good life,” he said. “The whole time I was in rehab, I was thinking about all the bad stuff I did to my mom and all the stuff she did for me. But I had never really told her that, so I was really scared when I was there because I couldn’t talk to her for a whole month. I just wanted to hear her voice and tell her, ‘I’m sorry.’ Because of her, I finally had the opportunity to be a different person, and I took it.”
Thinking about Raya’s other autobiographical songs, like “Mi Herencia,” I asked if he had ever considered delivering that message to his mother through music. After a thoughtful pause, Raya exclaimed, “You know what? You just gave me a really good idea!”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s November 2025 issue.
