The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial MestizajePanchoMcFarland. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013.

Abstract

The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial Mestizaje Pancho McFarland. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013.Scholarship on hip hop music, culture(s), and identities has grown exponentially since the mid-1990s, facilitated by the rise of interdisciplinary studies at many colleges and universities, as well as by academics' renewed analysis of popular culture and consumption. College courses devoted to the critical examination of hip hop now exist at several institutions of higher learning throughout the United States, and academic conferences dedicated to the empirical research and theoretical understanding of hip hop have been established. Despite hip hop's multiethnic and multicultural origins in the South Bronx during the 1970s, however, mainstream American society has long perceived hip hop as a distinctly African-American product, stemming from the corporate music industry's commercialization and mass-marketing of rap (which comprises just one element of hip hop, its musical element) as an exclusively black form of artistic and cultural production. This misperception often results in essentialized allegations that Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, or others who perform, enjoy, or identify with hip hop are acting black.Since the early 2000s, a growing body of research examining Latinos' roles in the historical and contemporary development of hip hop has been produced. Notable titles include Juan Flores's From Bomba to Flip-Flop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (2000), Raquel Rivera's New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Tone (2003), Pancho McFarland's Chicano Rap: Gender and Violence in the Postindustrial Barrio (2008), the anthology Reggaeton (2009), and the public television documentary From Mambo to Hip Hop: A South Bronx Tale (2008). McFarland's latest work, The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millenial Mestizaje, makes a significant contribution to scholarship on Latinos within hip hop by expanding upon his previous book to further investigate the various, sometimes competing, versions and visions of Mexican/Chicano masculinity articulated by rappers of Mexican American heritage.McFarland notes in the early chapters of The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation that Mexican Americans are often characterized by the media, and even within the social sciences, in a monolithic and culturally homogenous manner. In reality, however, considerable physical, social, cultural, geographic, generational, and linguistic diversity exists among Mexican Americans, producing an array of social/cultural identities that are articulated and represented by Mexican-American rappers. McFarland devotes approximately one-half of his book to deconstructing the three most common social/ cultural masculine identities found within Chicano rap: the indigenous-minded Chicano who glorifies the pre-Columbian Amerindian heritage of the Mexicans' ancestry, the Mexican nationalist identity that expresses a strong degree of pride in the Mexican nation and in Mexican/Chicano ethnicity, and the inner-city street hopper whose identity primarily lies within lower-income US urban environments and who aims to rap against the societal inequalities (racism, classism, anti-immigrant and warmongering governmental policies, the pris on-industrial complex, etc.). These three basic archetypes among Mexican/ Chicano rappers are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and some degree of overlap often occurs. However, McFarland criticizes these three archetypes for producing lyrics and imagery that reinforce patriarchal constructions of gender and homophobic attitudes toward sexual minorities within the Mexican-American community. A self-described anarchist, he claims that a music genre as popular with youth as hip hop, which justifiably critiques racial and class inequalities but ultimately reifies gender and sexual inequalities, undercuts its ultimate objective of inspiring disenfranchised youth to press for meaningful social change. …