Giving Form to Black and Brown: The Art and Politics of Solidarity

Abstract

Giving Form to Black and Brown: The Art and Politics of Solidarity Maurice Rafael Magaña (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Nipsey Hussle Mural by Danny Mateo, Hyde Park Los Angeles 2019. Photo Credit: Susy Chávez Herrera “It wouldn’t be the USA without Mexicans/if it’s time to team up shit let’s begin/Black love, Brown pride on the sets again.” YG & Nipsey Hussle, “FDT” In the historical moment following the Minneapolis Police lynching of George Floyd, talk of abolition is in the air (Kaba 2021). The conspiracy between law enforcement, immigration enforcement, border patrol, and the rhetoric of the “War on Terror” has been laid so bare with the repression and surveillance of protestors [End Page 23] by the homeland security state that even those privileged sectors of the population who had not felt its collective knee on their necks have been shaken out of their slumber (Polini 2020; Rambo 2020; Vladeck and Wittes 2020; Walia 2021). As the existing political establishment and the social institutions that reproduce it scramble to try and usurp, moderate, repress, criminalize, and otherwise destroy Black Lives Matter and the networked movements mobilizing against antiblack racism and state violence, organizers and activists refuse to limit their demands and visions to mere reforms (Speri et al. 2020). Moreover, politicians of all stripes and mainstream media distract from the matter at hand— antiblack state violence— by obsessing over looting. Robin D.G. Kelley takes on this tired sleight of hand in his provocative essay in the New York Times, “What Kind of Society Values Property Over Black Lives?” (Kelley 2020). The answer he points to is the kind “built on looting — the looting of Indigenous lands and African labor.” The moral clarity of today’s organizers who demand nothing less than abolition of the police state and its carceral logic has exposed both political parties’ inability to match the radical vision and humanity driving the historic Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 (Maldonado-Torres 2020). Artists, on the other hand, are masters of making such visionary futures seeable and knowable. Whether through visual art, music, or dance, artists reveal the contours, sounds, visions, choreographies, and ways of relating that might help usher in an abolitionist decolonial world. Political rhetoric is ill equipped to capture the interlinked struggles around Black Lives Matter, antifascism, immigrant and refugee rights, Native American sovereignty, QTBIPOC liberation, and allied causes. Critical scholars develop theoretical frameworks and analysis in an effort to capture the nuance of mutually constituted yet distinct modes of domination and struggle. The problem is making this knowledge seeable and knowable beyond the paywalls, jargon, and prerequisite readings. In my own academic work, I examine how young people experiment with novel ways of enacting more just and liberatory futures in the present, most often by combining social movement organizing and cultural production (Magaña 2020b; 2021). In my first book, Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico, I study how urban and migrant Indigenous youth in Oaxaca, Mexico weave deep family and community histories of organizing together with anarchist, autonomous, and decolonial politics (Magaña 2020b). Activists combine these influences with hip-hop and punk cultures to innovate new ways of doing politics, transforming urban space, and imagining new kinds of social relations. More recently, I have looked at how Black and Brown artists and activists co-produce a politics of solidarity that uproot the white supremacist logic of the existing racial and spatial order. This is a legacy that stretches back at least to the post-WWII era, when Black and Brown communities came together to carve out spaces of congregation, and joy through shared cultural expressions in cities like Houston, Los Angeles, Detroit, and New York City (Alvarez 2009; Johnson 2013; Kelley 1996; Márquez 2014; Steptoe 2015). [End Page 24] Multiracial formation and political solidarities take form in murals, find expression in hip-hop lyrics, and produce new visual poetics in music videos. In his 1996 song “To Live and Die in L.A.,” for example, 2Pac celebrated the potential of a Black and Brown solidarity politics, “Black love, Brown pride on the...