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n 119 CHAPTER 5 Barrio Locos: Street Hop and Amerikan Identity The very existence of the Chican@/Mexican@ presents a challenge to “America.” Their existence means the United States has to deal with its colonial past. These descendants of Native American people were on this continent first. In order to understand their existence, one must understand conquest, the taming of the West, the Mexican-American War, and racism. To avoid this unpleasant reality, the Chican@/Mexican@ becomes forever foreign in the eyes of dominant group members. Making them foreign and not quite American allows the dominant discourse on the United States or “America” to be filled with ideals such as democracy, opportunity, and freedom. It allows for an understanding of America that excludes racial inequality and class warfare. But, the existence of the Chican@/Mexican@, especially the one who speaks out, causes a rethinking of “America” and “Mexican American” or Chicano/Chicana. Millions of Chican@s/Mexican@s were born in the United States, and as discussed in previous chapters, the lands currently occupied by the United States, especially the West and Southwest, are their ancestral homelands, and the homelands of many Native American peoples. Moreover, Chican@/Mexican@ culture and people have been integral to the development of the United States for centuries. Yet, they remain “foreign,” “illegal,” and “alien.” 120 n Chapter 5 In a situation of denial, denigration, and oppression, many of the most disenfranchised Chican@s/Mexican@s have adapted an older street-wise and resistant identity and have created a new “loco” identity. Cypress Hill, important figures in hip-hop, described the “loco” in their famous “Insane in the Brain” (1993). They rap: “Don’t you know I’m loco? / . . . . insane in the mem-brain / I’ve got no brain / I’m going insane.” The loco and Chicano street-hop emcees develop their identities from Chican@ and Mexican@ culture, hip-hop culture, interaction and exchange with black Americans, urban experience, and their relationship to the dominant U.S. culture and its mythologies of race, class, and nationalism. The following sections describe the unique identity, epistemology, and politics found in “street hop” music and culture. This includes a discussion of Chicano street-hop language, understanding of violence, values, politics, analysis of the capitalist class structure, war, race and racism, immigration and nativism, and resistance to barrioization. The “barrio loco” shines a light on power and politics in the United States, as well as contributing to our understanding of some of today’s Chican@ youth and young adults. The “sick” youth or loco reflects a resistant working-class subject often celebrated in Mexican@ and Chican@ culture. They make the same argument as anarchists who believe that under an authoritarian, racist, colonial, legal regime, one has a “right to rebel,” to say no to authority.1 In his paen to revolutionaries, “Outlaws,” Ricardo Flores Magón argues that “the true revolutionary is an outlaw par excellence” since the law stands as a barrier to revolutionary activity (Bufe and Verter 2005, 241–42). On the other hand, without class consciousness and committed community backing, violent rebellion often harms the very communities from which the rebels come. Before we examine the new outlaw identity, the “Sickside” loco, and his politics as presented in the lyrics of street-hop artists, we must discuss a framework for understanding their attitudes and analyses. This framework highlights the importance of capitalism, racism, and colonialism to Chicano street-hop expression. Colonialism, Ideology, and Resistance Chican@s and Mexican@s are a colonized population. As previously discussed, the ruling elites of U.S. society and the white settler population in the West and Southwest initiated a relationship of violence and suspicion with the Mexican population of Northern Mexico. The initial contact between the groups involved private and public murders of the indigenous and mestizo population of Mexico and the appropriation of native and Mexican@ land and resources. Mexicans became a laboring class for the wealthy, almost exclusively white settler population. This colonial process, begun in the seventeenth century in the United States, continues through laws favoring Street Hop and Amerikan Identity n 121 the dominant group, mob violence, exclusion through English monolingualism, labor laws, and agreements such as the Bracero Program, immigration laws, and international economic treaties such as NAFTA.2 Media and popular-culture depictions of Mexican@s’ and whites’ relationship to them reinforces the colonial relationship through “magnif[ying] colonized images of oppressed people.” Ball (2011, 32) describes this process as psychic violence or...

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