Against the backdrop of a centuries-old stone church in the Mexican city of Oaxaca, the singer Vivir Quintana raised her deep, husky voice above the blare of trumpets, trombones and the booming pulse of a tuba.

Behind her stood a brass band of young Indigenous girls in embroidered white blouses and brightly colored skirts. Hat in hand and fist raised, Ms. Quintana sang a corrido, a traditional Mexican folk ballad usually used to recount tales of revolutionaries, outlaws, folk heroes, and more recently, drug traffickers.

Corridos are typically sung by men, about men. Ms. Quintana sang a corrido she wrote based on the true story of a woman who fought back when her abusive partner tried to gouge out her eyes with a knife.

“I used to think that what united us women was our pain. Now I have realized it is love and resistance,” Ms. Quintana told the crowd in October during a women’s conference in Oaxaca called Decididas, drawing a roar of applause. “We must keep defending ourselves!”

On Thursday, Ms. Quintana will take the stage at the Latin Grammy Awards in Las Vegas alongside the Colombian pop superstar Juanes, with whom she is nominated for song of the year for “Humano.” It is her second Latin Grammy nomination.

Her first was for an album she released in 2025 that includes 10 corridos recounting true stories of women who fought back against their attackers only to end up behind bars. She had sought out the women in prison and listened to their stories. Those conversations inspired the songs on the album “Cosas Que Sorprenden a la Audiencia” (“Things That Surprise the Audience”).

A voice discovered at 11

Born Viviana Montserrat Quintana Rodríguez, Ms. Quintana grew up in a small, dusty town called Francisco I. Madero in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, where traditional music was part of everyday life.

One song often played in her home, she recalled, the corrido “Rosita Alvírez,” makes light of the story of a young woman who refused to dance with a man who then shot her. It was only years later, after a devastating loss, that Ms. Quintana, 41, began to reconsider the stories those songs told, and whose stories they left out.

The daughter of rural schoolteachers, Ms. Quintana dreamed of becoming a chemist until a music teacher heard her sing at age 11. Her parents began taking her on hourlong bus rides to Torreón twice a week for lessons.

She later studied piano and opera at a conservatory in Saltillo, singing mariachi in local bars to make ends meet. After a falling-out with an instructor, she left music to follow her parents into teaching.

One of Ms. Quintana’s classmates and close friends in teachers’ college was Sandra Abilene Rivera Molina, who once asked Ms. Quintana to sing at the wedding she dreamed of having one day.

Instead, Ms. Quintana sang at her funeral.

Not a “love pact”

In March 2010, Ms. Rivera was abducted by a man who, she had told Ms. Quintana, had been harassing her at work. Three days later, the body of Ms. Rivera was found inside a car on a highway.

Ms. Quintana remembers the horror of seeing photographs of her friend’s bruised, lifeless body beside the body of her killer in a newspaper. The headline read: “Students Die After Love Pact.”

But there had been no love pact. Local media reports said investigators later determined that the man, who had been misidentified in the news reports as her partner, had strangled Ms. Rivera and then shot himself, leaving a note portraying them as lovers who died together.

The murder shattered Ms. Quintana, as did the media portrayal of it as a tragic romance, obscuring the violence that had taken her life. Night after night, one question consumed her: What if Sandra had killed her attacker instead? Would she still be alive?

“I became obsessed with the idea of self-defense and what would have happened if she had fought harder, and what happens to those who indeed survive and kill their attackers,” Ms. Quintana said in a recent interview.

The questions drove Ms. Quintana to spend a decade visiting prisons across Mexico and interviewing women jailed after defending themselves against their attackers. One case particularly affected her.

Yakiri Rubio was abducted in 2013 by two men on a Mexico City street and taken to a hotel, where one raped her, according to case files. During the assault, she seized her attacker’s knife, stabbed him to death and escaped.

Still covered in blood, Ms. Rubio went to the police, only to be arrested and imprisoned, charged with murder. Her case drew national attention after her father campaigned for her release.

Ms. Rubio was released on bail almost three months later after an appeals court reclassified the offense as “homicide involving excessive use of force in self-defense.” Eventually, she was acquitted of all charges, and a court recognized her actions as justified under the right to self-defense.

Ms. Quintana sought her out. They became friends, and with Ms. Rubio’s permission, she wrote “La Nochebuena Más Triste” (“The Saddest Christmas Eve”), a corrido told in Ms. Rubio’s voice.

“People are often shocked or surprised when women kill, and they are punished socially and cast as ‘murderous women’ and stigmatized, and I wanted to use my music to do something about it,” she said in a recent interview at a restaurant, before breaking out in song.

The anthem that went viral

By 2020, tens of thousands of women were protesting across Mexico against femicides, disappearances and widespread impunity for violence against women.

That March, ahead of International Women’s Day, the Chilean singer-songwriter Mon Laferte asked Ms. Quintana to compose a song for a women’s rally in Mexico City. She locked herself in her studio and nine hours later came out with “Canción Sin Miedo” (“Song Without Fear”), a searing indictment of violence against women and a call for action.

Within days, the song had gone viral on social media. It was shared millions of times and later adopted by feminist groups across Latin America and abroad, becoming a fixture at demonstrations against gender violence.

In 2024, videos circulated of feminist groups singing “Song Without Fear” outside a French courthouse in Avignon in tribute to Gisèle Pelicot during her landmark sexual assault trial.

“She didn’t sit down to write it as some rhetorical statement,” said Gabriela Rochín, Ms. Quintana’s longtime friend and editor of her autobiography. “It came from something deeply felt and lived, from the depths of her heart and soul, from her own experience of losing a friend.”

“It speaks powerfully to women’s strength, to refusing to let our guard down, to continuing the fight,” Ms. Rochín said.

A song to Mexico’s first woman president

In 2024, as Mexico prepared to elect its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum, Ms. Quintana released “Compañera Presidenta” (“Comrade President”), a song that was a celebration of female empowerment and a call to justice.

“May you sleep without owing justice / To the mothers who now wander in search / Of their daughters in clandestine graves,” the song goes. It then urges the next president: “Do not forget your eyes as a woman / Do not forget your voice as a woman / Do not forget your struggle as a woman.”

Ms. Quintana’s appeal, music industry executives say, lies not only in the causes she champions but also in the originality and emotional force of her songwriting.

“She has artistic qualities that are rarely found in a single artist, and she brings them together with extraordinary power and a style all her own,” said Alfredo Delgadillo, president of Universal Music Mexico. “She found a courageous way to sing not only about love, heartbreak, life, but also the social reality of this country that many of us recognize, but few dare to talk about.”

At a rehearsal in Oaxaca, Ms. Quintana gathered the band of Indigenous girls around her to explain the story behind “Dolerás” (“You’ll Hurt”), a song she wrote for the Netflix TV series and adaptation of Ángeles Mastretta’s novel “Mal de Amores” (“Lovesick”). It plays during a scene in which the female protagonist’s friend, also a woman, is murdered.

Drawing on the memory of her own murdered friend, Ms. Quintana urged the girls to play their music “with emotion and pain, to honor those who are no longer with us.”