The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial Mestizaje

Foreword

n vii RUBÉN O. MARTINEZ Foreword Music has long been a part of rebellion and revolution in society, and it was part of both the American and the French Revolution. Years later, the spiritual songs of African Americans helped guide runaway slaves to the North, eluding pursuers and ultimately capture and a return to slave status. In the 1930s and ’40s, Woody Guthrie and other musicians sang about the lives of the less fortunate in society. A decade later the Beat Generation came into prominence and influenced the countercultures of the 1960s, when musicians took rock ’n’ roll music to anti-war protest movements and moved a new generation of young people. Who can forget, for example, the lyrics of the song Eve of Destruction written by nineteen-year-old P. F. Sloan? Then, in the 1970s, Gil Scott-Heron put his poetry to music and directly criticized the political regimes of the times and their repression of poor people. At the same time, Mexican Americans were growing restless and giving rise to el movimiento Chicano, the social movement in which Mexican Americans redefined themselves as Chicanos and struggled to address issues in civil and labor rights, education, and stolen ancestral lands. During the 1950s, before the Chicano Movement emerged, Lalo Guerrero, the legendary singer/songwriter who came to be known as the “Father of Chicano Music,” entertained audiences throughout the viii n Foreword Southwest, making Pachuco swing popular among Mexican Americans. With the rise of the Chicano Movement in the 1960s came songs of the movimiento, beginning with songs of the Farmworker Movement and the corridos of the land grant struggles in New Mexico. During the Chicano Movement Lalo Guerrero recorded songs in honor of Cesar Chavez, the labor leader of the nation’s farmworkers, and Rubén Salazar, the journalist killed by a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy on August 29, 1970. Salazar became the symbol of the struggle against police brutality in Los Angeles. Numerous other musical groups and ensembles were part of the Chicano Movement, including El Teatro Campesino, Los Alacranes Mojados, Los Reyes de Albuquerque, Los Alvarados, and La Rondalla Amerindia de Aztlán. It was a time when Chicano music was part of political and cultural change in the United States. During the same period, in Latin America the theology of liberation rose as a movement against poverty and injustice and was linked to “musica de protesta,” with numerous musicians responding to the tyranny of imperalism and the regimes of dictatorial puppets. Victor Jara, a Chilean artist and political activist, was among the artists who established la Nueva Canción Chilena, which promoted the revolution in popular music in Chile by combining left-wing activism with traditional folk music. Tortured and killed by Pinochet’s Junta, Jara became the martyr of the resistance to the rising neoliberal regime and the symbol of the struggles for justice and human rights in Latin America. In Mexico, the music of Oscar Chávez gave rise to la Nueva Trova and directly criticized political regimes and their policies. More recently we have learned of the music of Sixto Rodriguez, the critical poet-musician from Detroit whose folk-rock-rap music greatly influenced the anti-apartheid movement of young whites in South Africa in the 1970s. Today, the musical genre that gives voice to the societal concerns and critical views of young people is hip-hop. In this volume Pancho McFarland takes us through the various styles and themes of Chican@ hip-hop musicians who focus on critical issues within Chicano communities. He extends his thinking from his previous book, Chicano Rap: Gender and Violence in the Postindustrial Barrio, where he examined violence and misogyny in Chicano rap. As in that work, here he discusses the different contexts (cultural, political, historical, and economic—including economic restructuring and globalization) of Chican@ hip-hop and emphasizes its polycultural features and, in particular, its many critical themes. Important to these dimensions of Chican@ hip-hop are the generations of Mexican immigrants and the continuing evolving nature of Chicano identities. Ethnic group identities are multidimensional across time and space, and this is no less the case with Chicano identities. Additionally, ethnic identities vary in terms of level and scope, moving from the local level and the regional ethnic subgroup that subsume individuals to the broadest one, which is inclusive of several related ethnic subgroups and provides a sort of umbrella that Foreword n ix subsumes them all. The...