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

Abstract

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,