“American Spaces, Mexican Flows: The Chicano Hip-Hop Movement in Los Angeles & Beyond”

Chicano hip-hop evolved in Los Angeles during the 1980s and ‘90s in the context of augmented immigration from Mexico and the local African American gangster rap scene. The new genre integrated Chicano subcultural elements such as gang aesthetics, prison art, indigenous signifiers, lowrider culture, ‘Spanglish’ slang, as well as Chicano rock, funk, and soul. The culturally connotated beats and rhymes evoked spaces that were significant to both artists and audiences, such as specific neighborhoods, penitentiaries, and Mexico. After a brief phase of great interest in the early 1990s, the music industry deemed Chicano hip-hop too gang related and not marketable to mainstream audiences. Artists were being dropped from labels, went independent, and became entrepreneurs – making their own way in the industry “as a movement”, as one rapper put it.
The paper explores this “Chicano hip-hop movement” and the various forms of movement it entails, such as migration flows from Mexico, grassroots distribution of music on immigrant markets and California state prisons, and concert tours in regions and states that are heavily populated by Mexican Americans. One example is the close relationship to lowriding – the culture of customizing cars and driving them slowly in public spaces – that made Chicano hip-hop “cruising music” alongside popular lowriding songs by WAR, Santana, and Malo. Sampling this “lowrider canon” on their beats, Chicano hip-hop artists continued a movement of Chicano music styles in the hip-hop era. The methodology triangulates ethnomusicology, “digital ethnography” (Pink et al. 2016), and critical source evaluation (music, music videos, cover art).