“Chicano Hip-Hop in Los Angeles: Evolution, Spaces, Dialogues”

Chicano hip-hop was created in Southern California during the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Los Angeles, the biggest Mexican metropolis outside of Mexico and “the gang capital of America” (Metcalf 2009), emerged as its epicenter. The DJ-producers and rappers of this new musical genre were overwhelmingly male, second-generation Mexican-Americans and Latinos who uniquely translated their culture into music: beats sampled African-American funk and soul, as well as Chicano rock, Latin jazz, and Mexican folk music. The Spanglish lyrics contained narratives about gang violence, police brutality and street life in the varrio (‘hood), and primarily catered to Mexican American and Latino audiences on the Westcoast and throughout the Southwest. What started as an expression of the artists’ cultural roots and the proclamation of brown pride through beats and rhymes was eventually dubbed “Chicano rap” by the music industry, ethnically labeling the artists and separating them from the wider hip-hop industry. The history of Chicano hip-hop must thus be considered in the context of the political climate of the 1980s and ‘90s, when Mexican Americans in California and several Southwestern states faced policies of anti-immigration, racial profiling and language discrimination. It also mirrors the impact of street gang culture on hip-hop, as many artists were gang affiliated and expressed gang aesthetics in their music. Alongside these “extreme local” (Forman 2002) identities, artists evoked spaces of cultural rooting such as Mexico and Aztlán, the mythical homeland of the Chicanos.
This presentation will give an overview about the early history of Chicano hip-hop focusing on the urban spaces it was created in and the dialogues with African American and Mexican (music) cultures that inform it. The methodology brings together oral history, “digital ethnography” (Pink et al 2016), critical source evaluation (music, music videos, cover art), and the analysis of newspapers and magazines.