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A SIFTING OF CENTURIES: AFRO-CHICANO INTERACTION 16 AND POPULAR MUSICAL CULTURE IN CALIFORNIA, 1960–2000 Gaye T. M. Johnson THIS ESSAY moves toward an understanding of the politics of Afro-Chicano culture in contemporary California. It builds from an assumption that the realms of culture, politics, and economy are inseparable.1 In this postindustrial moment, the deleterious effects of deindustrialization, the evisceration of the welfare state, and a massive in®ux of Asian and Latin American workers has created new urban identities for African American and Chicano populations. Egregious manipulations of immigration and labor laws in the interest of free trade have made collective action in the United States very dif¤cult to engage in, especially among black and Latino populations, who in California have suffered more from the effects of capital ®ight and the reorganization of work than any other groups. This essay offers a musical depiction of an historical pattern: for as long as they have occupied common living and working spaces, African American and Chicano working-class communities have had continuous interactions around civil rights struggles, union activism, and demographic changes. But there have been several obstacles to building community between these populations in Los Angeles. This may seem ironic when one considers the tremendous in®uence that Chicano and black musicians have had on each other’s musical cultures: to hear the manifestation of that interaction in musical form, one need only listen to the sounds of L.A. musicians Chuck Higgins, Richard Berry, and Ritchie Valens in the 1950s; in the 1960s and 70s, WAR, Los Lobos, and Cannibal and the Headhunters ; and presently Ozomatli, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Rage Against the Machine. Yet strong anecdotal evidence of the tensions between these groups exists.2 As we enter a third decade of MTV, music continues to play a vital role in people’s political awareness and cultural realities. Now it is informed not only by inter- and intracommunity politics and subjectivities, but also by translocal and transnational politics of economy and culture. Writing about cooperation and solidarity, then, means writing at the same time about rejection and mistrust (Douglas, 1986). Increased competition for scarce resources and the trap of racial chauvinism have too often positioned workers of different races in opposition to each other, a phenomenon that is as much about globalization as it is about the changing mean316 ing of all socio-racial identities in the current historical moment.3 Perhaps the occasional triumph of mistrust over the spirit of solidarity is a symptom of the lack of awareness of the historical links between these communities . This essay tells a story which builds on the past to understand the interlaced subject positions of African Americans and Chicanos in the present, as well as their common future amid the rapid mobility of culture, capital, and populations across the globe. I will broadly sketch a history of cultural and political interaction through the lens of music, from the 1960s to the present. Today, a successful interethnic movement for social change must work for equality in a language understood by its constituents : popular musical culture is often that language. My emphasis on popular music supports the contentions of ethnic studies scholars who see cultural production not only as an integral part of oppositional politics, but as an “important register” of social and political change (Lipsitz: 213). This is particularly important in California today : it has become a majority-minority state, that is, a state in which no racial or ethnic group represents over 50 percent of the total population. We continue to occupy center stage in national immigration policies and international politics, important since California’s 52-person delegation to the US Congress and its 54 Electoral College votes make the state a central player in determining the outcome of national politics.4 And we have led the nation in passing legislation that denies immigrants access to basic social services like education and medical treatment, eradicating af¤rmative action, and all but outlawing bilingual education. States such as Michigan, Texas, and Florida have endeavored to follow in the educational and immigration policy footsteps of California, demonstrating Chester Himes’s concise observation in the early 1960 that: “as the west coast goes, so the nation goes.”5 California legislative actions have carried within them overlapping and even contradictory distinctions about citizenship, ethnicity, border geography , and race. Because the state has been the terrain over which some of the most highly publicized debates have been fought...

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