Black-Brown Solidarity: Racial Politics in the New Gulf South

3. Subjectivities, Chopped and Screwed: Neoliberalism and Its Aftermath

chaPter three SUBjectivitieS, cHoPPed and Screwed: neoliBeraliSm and itS aftermatH in thiS chaPter i argue that neoliBeral shifts affecting the U.S. oil industry in the late twentieth century contributed to the kinds of hybrid subjectivities and increased expressions of black-brown solidarity that began to emerge in Houston-area communities. The shifts included an influx of more working-class African Americans and Latinos/as and the arrival of more immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean who helped diversify politics in communities like Baytown. When Baytown’s and Houston’s black and Latino/a populations surged after World War II, police brutality began to replace vigilante violence as the method through which the region’s history of rigid segregation was maintained . Only now, blacks and Latinos/as were being targeted and victimized more or less equally. The increasingly shared experience of expendability, in addition to demographic shifts that placed blacks and Latinos/as in closer proximity within more mixed neighborhoods across the Houston area, often resulted in greater potential for expressions of black-brown solidarity if not the emergence of a hybrid oppositional consciousness and subjectivity. These mutations, I argue, were evident across a diverse discursive terrain but primarily in the advent of hip-hop culture in the Houston area and in the formation of youth gangs in communities like Baytown. The title of this chapter is borrowed from D. J. Screw, a legendary mix-tape producer and sound engineer from Houston who is recognized as having invented the region’s distinct, slow-paced, mournful brand of gangsta-rap music during the 1990s, a style that musicologists have described as an extension of the region’s significance to the blues, soul, and gospel music genres. D. J. Screw perfected a style that is commonly known as “chopped and screwed,” a method in which records are slowed to half their normal speed (screwed) and cut and spliced (chopped) with other sounds and samples, altered, and neoliBeraliSm and itS aftermatH 115 remixed as a new, hybrid tune to highlight certain beats or phrases that accentuate a song’s originality beyond its original format.1 I borrow Screw’s chopped and screwed methodology to highlight the effects of time and space being compressed between black and Latino/a subjectivities in Houston-area neighborhoods. The ethnic and racial boundaries, both symbolic and concrete, that divided the two groups in previous decades were being chopped up by demographic changes, mostly a Latino/a population boom, resulting in the subjectivities of the two groups being screwed or fused together in the neighborhoods, schools, jails, and workplaces where they increasingly shared space and interactions. Baytown in a neoliBeral gloBal economy Many of the demographic shifts that took place in the Houston area from 1960 to 2002 were accelerated by a global economic crisis originating in the early 1970s. In 1960 Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela formed the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC) in response to U.S. President Eisenhower’s issuance of quotas on U.S. oil imports from the Persian Gulf and Venezuela. Their main goal was to increase the price of oil exported from their countries to curb the effect of U.S. quotas on their economies . OPEC issued a petroleum policy in 1968 that caused a sharp increase in global oil prices. Arab-Israeli tensions following the Six-Day War involving Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt in 1967 prompted OPEC’s Arab constituents to form a subsidiary group called the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) in 1973. The first action of OAPEC was to issue an embargo on all oil exports to Western Europe and the United States because of their support of Israel during the 1967 conflict. The non-Arab members of OPEC did not participate in the embargo. Nonetheless, the embargo sparked a rise in energy prices worldwide, making the cost of industrial production more expensive throughout the world but especially in more prosperous industrialized countries like the United States. Within ninety days of the OAPEC oil embargo, global crude oil prices quadrupled.2 The United States and other world economic powers sought ways to gain more access to labor, resources, and markets in spaces where labor was cheaper and environmental restrictions and commitments to social welfare were less rigid. U.S.-based oil companies searched the globe for better access to foreign oil reserves and were aided by U.S. military might. U.S. oil companies, many of them headquartered in the Houston area, gained...