Black and Latino Hip Hop Alliances in the Age of State-sponsored Immigration Reform

Since 2009 an unprecedented number of black hip hop artists, well known, and obscure, have released tracks that call attention to the deteriorating conditions of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Calling upon imagery, ideas, and iconic sounds from the civil rights and black power movements as transmitted through Golden Age hip hop, contemporary black hip hop artists are using their art to promote interracial coalition building between blacks and Latinos and to raise awareness about the plight of undocumented communities in the United States. Latinos have participated in hip hop culture since its inception.¹ Though strongly grounded in black aesthetic imperatives and experiences, hip hop has absorbed sounds and technologies from many parts of the Americas, reflecting the urban diversity of the United States.² According to Robin D. G. Kelley, “Hip Hop’s hybridity reflected, in part, the increasingly international character of America’s inner cities resulting from immigration, demographic change, and new forms of information.”³

In addition to absorbing Latino influences, black hip hop culture has inspired vibrant underground and mass-mediated Latino hip hop scenes, particularly those originating in urban Chicano and Puerto Rican American communities.⁴ Since the 1980s Latino youth have found in hip hop a forum to discuss (and find pleasure in spite of) urban conditions similar to those encountered by black youth, structured by “deindustrialization, capital flight from the cities, fiscal malfeasance on the part of municipal governments, job loss, the drug epidemic and AIDS.”⁵ Despite the overlapping hip hop commitments and urban experiences of black and Latino youth, Latinos have not often been the subjects of extended reflections in the songs of black rappers.

In recent years, however, black hip hop artists have begun to respond to the increasingly vitriolic attacks, judicial and extrajudicial, that have been perpetrated against the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, more than half of whom are of Mexican descent. Of particular concern to these rappers are newly introduced state-sponsored immigration bills that require police to check the immigration status of people they encounter when they have probable cause to believe they are in the country without authorization, a practice that many activists believe will lead to increased racial profiling in all communities of color. Talents including Talib Kweli (Black Star), Chuck D (Public Enemy), and stic.man (Dead Prez) have called for comprehensive immigration reform and an end to the persecution of undocumented immigrants, particularly those of Latino descent. While each of these artists’ unique flows embeds a different perspective on both the challenges that confront undocumented immigrants and the points of connection between blacks and Latinos, what they share is a common reference point in the rediscovery of empowering discourses from the civil rights and black power movements as passed down through archival and reportorial sources, a savvy understanding of the ways media have shaped popular understandings of these movements, and a will to see beyond toxic mainstream representations of undocumented immigrants in order to imagine a more just democracy. Acutely aware of media-sanctioned, popular understandings of both civil rights and immigrant rights, these rappers join the many voices that vie to remember and memorialize social movement history so that it can exist as a resource for future generations.

This pro-immigrant music by black artists has not emerged in a vacuum but rather builds upon the black freedom struggle-inspired rhetoric of Golden Age hip hop artists, particularly that of Public Enemy. Public Enemy has long been hailed as exemplary in its efforts to recuperate the histories of black social movements, ideas, and activists in order to resist, in the words of Michael Eric Dyson,

the racial amnesia that threatens to relegate the achievements of the black past to the ash heap of dismemory. Such actions have brought a renewed sense of historical pride to young black minds that provides a solid base for racial self-esteem. Rap music has also focused renewed attention on black nationalist and black radical thought.⁶

Contemporary musicians, inspired by the memories of black agency and collective struggle transmitted...