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n 81 CHAPTER 4 Paísas, Compas, Inmigrantes: Mexicanidad in Hip-Hop This chapter seeks to address similar questions as the previous. Here, instead of a neo-indigenist Mexican diasporic youth identity, I examine what I call a Mexican national identity and an immigrant identity. Mexican-born youth who have spent most of their lives in the United States (the 1.5 generation) have concerns and issues that differ from the urban Chicano neo-indigenous youth or other U.S.-born youth of Mexican descent. While they have much in common with the Chicano segment of people of Mexican descent, their residency status, proximity to Mexican culture, and experiences with U.S. institutions such as education and immigration agencies add additional layers of difficulty to their lives. Thus, their rhetorics of resistance and their ethnic identities differ from the U.S.-born Mexican. I explore questions about whether the immigrant and Mexican national identities as presented in hip-hop are resistant identities that could contribute to a liberatory politics. Issues of power and domination relative to gender, sexuality, familia, and freedom are of particular concern. In addition, I argue from the anarchist viewpoint that a nationalist perspective that obscures class difference has limited utility for revolutionary working-class and anticolonial movements. Yet, the identity construction examined in this chapter provides insight into the 1.5 generation of U.S.-Mexican youth who 82 n Chapter 4 constitute an important segment of the U.S. and global working class. Thus, it is important to understand this identity and political orientation, and engage these youth in a critical dialogue with decolonial, feminist, and anarchist ideas. The Mexican National Identity About the “Godfather of Chicano Hip Hop,” Kid Frost, Perez-Torres writes (2006, 327) that his “construction of community highlights the mestizo qualities of a postrevolutionary Mexican nationalist discourse that has in so many ways shaped images of Chicano racial and cultural identities.” Groups like Kinto Sol (Milwaukee), Mexiclan (San Pedro, California), Chingo Bling (Houston), and Akwid (Los Angeles) show their connection to Mexico and a Mexican national identity in their lyrics, sounds, and imagery. As Perez-Torres explains regarding the work of Kid Frost, many of these Mexican@/Chican@ emcees express themselves through the lens of Mexican nationalism. This nationalism and its expression include references to iconic legends and historical figures, common cultural practices, struggles in the United States, and a Mexican masculinity. While each of these groups is firmly rooted in hip-hop culture and music, their hip-hop sensibility is informed in important ways by this postrevolutionary Mexican nationalist discourse and their Mexican identity —including, importantly, their status as immigrants or children of immigrants. Further, the music and lyrics of these emcees illustrate the polycultural nature of twenty-first-century Mexicanidad. Additionally, in the face of an increasing anti-immigrant attitude and political climate in the United States, the “border writing” of these groups provides “an alternative narrative” of the border, life in the United States, and the definition of “America.” Their work provides answers to the question posed by José David Saldívar in Border Matters (1997, 1): “How do undocumented and documented migrants in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands secure spaces of survival and selfrespect in light of the government’s doctrine of low-intensity conflict and in regions undergoing what social theorists call deindustrialization—the decline of traditional manufacturing?” They examine Mexican@ relationships with dominant institutions such as the police, the border patrol, schools, and workplaces, and present a critique of these institutions and strategies for overcoming Mexican@/ Chican@ oppression that relies on such common tropes as indigeneity, familia, and nationalism. All of this and more constitute the Mexican nationalist identity within Chican@/Mexican@ hip-hop. The work of these and similar artists challenge the monocultural logic and monolingual assumptions of the dominant ideal “America.” Akwid, Kinto Sol, Mexiclan, and Chingo Bling provide bilingual, bicultural, and Mexicanidad in Hip-Hop n 83 multilayered counter-narratives to the “American” mythos of assimilation, freedom, opportunity, and racial harmony. The Trope of La Familia Richard T. Rodriguez’s (2009) groundbreaking work on the trope of la familia in Chican@ cultural production provides a genealogy of how the idea of family has served Chican@ nationalist cultural politics, and how a conservative, heteronormative , patriarchal family ideal has marginalized and othered the sexual Others: women and gays and lesbians. One can understand the cultural nationalists’ turn towards family as a site of resistance since the colonized subjects’ family structures are...

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