Black and Brown Get Down: Cultural Politics, Chicano Music, and Hip Hop in Racialized Los Angeles

Abstract

Los Angeles has long been racialized — inscribed by hierarchical racial categories supporting an oppressive social order and justified by Eurocentric supremacist ideologies — from the Spanish missions to the zoot suit riots (Omi and Winant, 1994).¹ By the early 1950s, the city’s two major racial minority groups were engaged in a culture war over its sanctioned sounds and official values, as their vibrant street styles and upstart dance music scenes became popular among white youths, and hence subversive to the segregationist status quo. This chapter sketches some of the cross-cultural currents and innovative, mestizo (mixed-race) music-making particular to Los Angeles, where original styles such as the 1940s pachuco boogie, the 1960s Chicano and surf rock, and the 1970s Laurel Canyon country rock blossomed, as did transplanted external styles. Rather than survey the city’s music scenes over time, I focus on three homegrown genres — Chicano punk, LA gangsta rap, and Chicano rap — and conclude that, while the black-brown cooperative connections of the war years and the post-war period had waned by the late 1970s, each group’s independent, grass-roots energy and critical, alternative aesthetic persisted into the twenty-first century through hip hop music, dance, and graffiti street art, and through Eastside rockabilly and punk rock scenes.