Mixed Race Studies

The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial Mestizaje

Michigan State University Press
2013-11-01
310 pages
6 in x 9 in
Paperback ISBN: 9781611860863
eBook ISBN: 9781609173753

Pancho McFarland, Associate Professor of Sociology
Chicago State University

The population of Mexican-origin peoples in the United States is a diverse one, as reflected by age, class, gender, sexuality, and religion. Far from antiquated concepts of mestizaje, recent scholarship has shown that Mexican@/Chican@ culture is a mixture of indigenous, African, and Spanish and other European peoples and cultures. No one reflects this rich blend of cultures better than Chican@ rappers, whose lyrics and iconography can help to deepen our understanding of what it means to be Chican@ or Mexican@ today. While some identify as Mexican mestizos, others identify as indigenous people or base their identities on their class and racial/ethnic makeup. No less significant is the intimate level of contact between Chican@s and black Americans. Via a firm theoretical foundation and a collection of vibrant essays, Pancho McFarland explores the language and ethos of Chican@/Mexican@ hip hop and sheds new light on three distinct identities reflected in the music: indigenous/Mexica, Mexican nationalist/immigrant, and street hopper. With particular attention to the intersection of black and Chicano cultures, the author places exciting recent developments in music forms within the context of progressive social change, social justice, identity, and a new transnational, polycultural America.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Ruben O. Martinez
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PART 1. SETTING THE THEORETICAL CONTEXT
  • Chapter 1. Quién es más macho? Quién es más Mexicano?: Chican@ and Mexicans Identities in Rap
  • Chapter 2. Barrio Logos: Tlie Sacred and Profane Word of Chicano Emcees
• PART 2. IDENTITIES OLD AND NEW
  • Chapter 3. Sonido Indígena: Mexica Hip-Hop and Masculine Identity
  • Chapter 4. Paísas, Compas, Inmigrantes: Mexicanidad in Hip-Hop
  • Chapter 5. Barrio Locos: Street Hop and Amerikan Identity
• PART 3. MEXICANIDAD, AFRICANIDAD
  • Chapter 6. Multiracial Macho: Kemo the Blaxican’s Hip-Hop Masculinity
  • Chapter 7. The Rap on Chicano/Mexicano and Black Masculinity: Gender and Cross-Cultural Exchange
  • Chapter 8. “Soy la Kalle”: Radio, Reggaetón, and Latin@ Identity
• PART 4. HIP-HOP AND JUSTICE
  • Chapter 9. Teaching Hip-Hop: A Pedagogy for Social Justice
  • Afterword. Hip-Hop and Freedom-Dreaming in the Mexican Diaspora
• Appendix. Music Sources
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX

Are Latinos “White”?

Jesus For Revolutionaries: A Blog About Race, Social Justice, and Christianity
2013-08-30

Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Hundreds of years of cultural politics underly the current debate over the proper racial categorization for Latinos.   For the greater part of U.S. history, Latinos argued for legal “whiteness” as a means of shielding itself from racial discrimination.  At the same time, up until the present day, many Latinos have consistently identified as “white” based upon the influence of colonial notions of race in Latin America.  Such identification with whiteness has the dual negative effect of disassociating the Latino community from the contemporary civil rights struggle in the United States, and perpetuating Latin American racist ideology.

Following the Mexican American War of 1848, Anglo American politicians struggled with how to incorporate more than 115,000 former Mexican citizens into United States society.  Many politicians argued vehemently, and publically, that they did not wish to confer the full rights of American citizenship upon the Mexican population which they viewed as an inferior cultural group.   The compromise, articulated in Article IX of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, was that Mexicans in the conquered territories could choose to become U.S. citizens, but that such citizenship would not take effect until an undetermined future date to be decided upon by Congress.  More than two decades after the signing of the treaty in 1848, the citizenship status of thousands of Mexicans remained ambiguous and unresolved.

Mexicans in California were finally declared to be American citizens in 1870 as part of the famous case of People v. De la Guerra.  Since U.S. citizenship at that time was reserved for those defined by the law as “white,” Mexicans at that moment gained not only citizenship, but also an implicit judicial declaration of whiteness.   Despite their legal whiteness, however, Mexicans, and other Latinos continued to experience explicit, and pervasive, racial discrimination in housing, education, and every other facet of American life…

Read the entire essay here.

Is George Zimmerman white, Latino or mixed race? Depends on who you ask.

The Seattle Globalist: Where Seattle Meets the World
2013-08-01

Leilani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington, Seattle

It’s been nearly two weeks since the George Zimmerman verdict was handed down, and the conversations in my Facebook feed have shifted from outrage and sorrow to more nuanced discussions of the state of race in the U.S.

Many of these conversations have focused on Zimmerman’s racial identity and, more recently, the identity of the lone “non-black” juror.

Zimmerman’s mixed ethnicity has stirred up conversation about how much his race “counts”: To what extent does he identify as Latino, and does it make a difference in how he saw himself and how he saw Trayvon Martin?…

Read the entire article here.

White-Race Problems: White Hispanic, White Black, Geraldo Rivera

Living Anthropologically: Anthropology – Understanding – Possibility
2013-07-25

Jason Antrosio, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York

A strange meme circulates, apparently fueled by Geraldo Rivera’s White Hispanic, Yellow Journalism. It goes like this: George Zimmerman is not really white, he’s Hispanic, and so the [liberal, race-baiting] Main Stream Media [MSM] invented “White Hispanic.” And if Zimmerman’s White Hispanic, does that make President Obama a White Black? Hahaha. #LiberalLogic Gotcha!

Rivera’s account is not completely inaccurate, it’s just a bit twisted and incorrect. First, the claim that “White Hispanic” is a completely made-up term for the Zimmerman trial should be news to the more than 26 million people who in 2010 marked in as White Hispanic on the US Census form–the categories for Hispanic yes/no and race are both separate and both mandatory, as they have been since at least the 1980 Census. Second, as of 2000, people like Obama could indeed check in as White Black on the US Census–however, understanding this issue means knowing about the traditional US framework of hypodescent. Finally, Rivera’s claim that the Hispanic immigrant experience is different from the Irish and Italian one–that Latinos will transform the US racial landscape–is intriguing but unsupported. If anything, the move seems to be toward a Hispanic White/Black bifurcation…

Read the entire article here.

Voice of the voiceless? Multiethnic student voices in critical approaches to race, pedagogy, literacy and agency

Linguistics and Education
Volume 24, Issue 3, September 2013
pages 348–360
DOI: 10.1016/j.linged.2013.03.005

Benji Chang, Adjunct Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Curriculum & Teaching
Teachers College, Columbia University, New York

In this article, the author utilizes critical and sociocultural approaches to race, language and culture to examine the intersectional experiences of a multiethnic and ‘mixed race’ cohort of students in an inner-city, working-class neighborhood between their elementary and high school years. This article examines the students’ experiences in a nine-year educational process focused on critical pedagogy, sociocultural learning, and community engagement in and out of classrooms. More specifically, the article looks at interview, participant observation, and narrative data with a Latina/o and Asian American male student, and an Asian American female student, and how they made sense of their experiences over time with regards to issues of race, pedagogy, literacy, and agency.

Highlights

• Critical race, ethnic studies, and sociocultural theory are used to examine K-12 student voices.
• Classroom teaching, parent engagement and community organizing are discussed.
• Asian American, multiethnic and ‘mixed race’ contexts help challenge race, culture and achievement paradigms.
• Student cultural, linguistic and literacy practices are built upon toward transformative outcomes.
• 9 years of data are used to inform more dynamic and sustainable approaches toward educational equity.

Read or purchase the article here.

Trayvon Martin and Making Whiteness Visible

TIME Magazine
2013-07-17

Eric Liu

If there’s one good thing to come out of the George Zimmerman verdict, it’s the acknowledgement of white privilege

If there is one hopeful note amid all the anguish and recrimination from the acquittal of George Zimmerman, it’s that growing numbers of white people have come to appreciate whiteness for what it is: an unearned set of privileges. And as a result of that dawning awareness, it’s become possible to imagine a day when that structure of privilege is dismantled — by white people.

Recall that immediately after the killing of Trayvon Martin, people of every race took to the Internet to declare “I am Trayvon Martin.” They wore hoodies. They proclaimed solidarity. That was a well-meaning and earnest attempt to express empathy, but it also obscured the core issue, which is that Martin died not because he was wearing a hoodie but because he was wearing a hoodie while black. Blackness was the fatal variable.

And so now, post verdict, a more realistic meme has taken root. On Tumblr and Facebook and elsewhere there is a new viral phenomenon: “We are not Trayvon Martin” (emphasis mine). Huge numbers of white Americans are posting testimonials and images to declare that it is precisely because they are not black that they have never had to confront the awful choices Martin faced when Zimmerman began to pursue him…

…Much has been made about the fact that Zimmerman is white and of Hispanic ethnicity, as if he therefore couldn’t possibly embody white privilege. This is a deep misreading of the dynamics of race and the media in America. As an Asian American, I am endlessly frustrated by how binary and black-and-white — literally and figuratively — the portrayal of race is in our country. Much of the time Asian Americans are an afterthought, or simply presumed foreign. But I assume that had I been the neighborhood watchman that day in Florida, I would have been understood in the media as the nonblack actor. Which is to say, for the limited purposes of this trial, I would have been granted “honorary white” status — whether or not I wanted it…

Read the entire article here.

Race Remixed? — Probationary Whites and a Racism Reality Check

Living Anthropologically: Anthropology – Understanding – Possibility
2011-30-28 (Updated July 2013)

Jason Antrosio, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York

This is an update to the original article, “Race Remixed?” from March 28, 2011.

Update July 2013: In the wake of Trayvon Martin and the George Zimmerman verdict, revisited this Race Remixed post from March 2011, one of my very first blog posts. Strangely, many people seem unaware that since at least the 1980 US Census there is a mandatory yes/no question on Hispanic origin as well as a separate and mandatory question about race. But if you want to get really depressed about how dumb and confused people are about racial assignments–and apparently have not read their own Census forms for 30 years or so–just do a little Twitter search on “White Hispanic…” My thanks to Chris Escalante for the tweet update and his Twitter campaign–over 26 million people identify on the US Census as White Hispanic.

Take a look at the 2010 US Census form (the Hispanic yes/no and separate race check-boxes are unchanged from 2000). And yes, while President Obama could have checked both white and black–this has been allowed since 2000–he chose to remain within the traditional U.S. framework of hypodescent. While such categories affirm that both race and ethnicity are social constructions, mocking and misunderstanding the social construction of race is still a huge boon for conservative politics.

The original post questioned the New York Times Race Remixed series, challenging the popular notions that race is becoming more fluid. I specifically looked at the Hispanic-White and Hispanic-Black census categories and a possibly bifurcating white/black identity within those labeled Hispanic. Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s notion of “probationary whites” (2003:151) anticipates recent commentary like Is George Zimmerman white or Hispanic? That depends–”The genius of white supremacy is in its elasticity: It can expand to include the not-quite-right, the off-whites, when necessary, and then otherize and eject us when convenient.”…

Read the entire article here.

Zimmerman, Whiteness and Latinos

ABC News/Univision
2013-07-18

Leticia Alvarado, Assistant Professor of American Studies
Brown University

Saturday night bore a particularly saturated darkness, tinged by the news of George Zimmerman’s acquittal of all charges in connection to the death of not-yet-man-not-quite-child Trayvon Martin. A range of single-word status updates overtook my various social media feeds before I’d had a chance to read any official (or unofficial) news source. I was not surprised, no, but so deeply saddened, angry, afraid.

There have been a number of moving and important pieces calling on us to contemplate how the result of the case was indeed an example of the law working as it was meant to in a country where black men are always considered suspect how it was in fact Trayvon Martin who ended up on trial, both the night he was pursued and shot and yet again in the theater of the courtroom. We have been challenged to think about the relationship between white supremacy and the law and in particular, given the composition of the jury, the historic complicity of white women with “white supremacist patriarchy.”

I must also implore us to use this as an opportunity to speak about the overvaluation of whiteness within the Latino community, over and against blackness, for Zimmerman (of mixed Peruvian and white descent) has shown us the extreme consequence of purchase into this value system…

…In the mainstream media Zimmerman has been variously referred to as white, Hispanic, and white Hispanic. While his surname seems to permit an easy identification with whiteness, Zimmerman is not a man who could pass. Within the black and white binary that often simplistically frames complicated race relations in the US, Zimmerman has nonetheless been squarely aligned with whiteness by virtue of acting in accordance with dominant social and legal strictures that render blackness a crime…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Gladys Zimmerman, Mother Of George Zimmerman, Says Her Family Is ‘Proudly Afro-Peruvian,’ But Do His Black Roots Matter In Trayvon Martin Case?

Latin Times
New York, New York
2013-07-15

David Iaconangelo

As protests mount against the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman, the question of how the public ought to see Zimmerman’s racial background continues to provoke. Many continue to view him as “white,” as he was described in initial reports. Others have turned to “white Hispanic.”  But in a September 2012 interview on Univision with Jorge Ramos, Zimmerman’s brother Robert spoke out against media characterizations of George as “white,” while George’s mother Gladys said she came from a family that was proud of its Afro-Peruvian roots…

…”In Peru we have a saying that goes, ‘If you don’t have the blood of the Incas, you’ve got the blood of the Mandingas,” which means that if you don’t have Indian blood, you’ve got black blood,” Gladys Zimmerman said on Univision. “In my family we proudly come from the Afro-Peruvian race. My sons know their uncles, they know their aunts, they know their roots and my roots are not white, my roots are Afro-Peruvian.  So they’ve been educated, not just at home as a family, at school.  My sons don’t look at color.”

According to Tanya Golash-Boza, a sociologist at the University of California and the author of “Yo Soy Negro: Blackness in Peru,” Gladys Zimmerman’s description of herself as “Afro-Peruvian” is somewhat unusual.

“The word ‘Afro-Peruvian’ is kind of a new concept in Peru,” she told the Latin Times. “The idea that some people are African-descendent, some people are indigenous-descendent, some people are Hispanic-descendent has some currency in Peru, but it hasn’t really reached down to the level of popular sentiment. Instead, people tend to be identified as black if they have visible African ancestry. If people can look at them and make a guess that their ancestors probably came from Africa—very curly hair, darker skin.”…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Chicks Chat with Professor Rudy Guevarra

Mixed Chicks Chat (Founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Episode: #261: Rudy Guevarra
When: Wednesday, 2012-06-20, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Assistant Professor, Asian Pacific American Studies, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Arizona State University, Tempe

[This is the final episode of Mixed Chicks Chat.]

Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. is an assistant professor of Asian Pacific American Studies at Arizona State University. He is the author of Filipinos in San Diego: Images of America Series, and coeditor of Transnational Crossroads: Remapping the Americas and the Pacific and Crossing Lines: Race and Mixed Race Across the Geohistorical Divide.

His new book, Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego, is a social-historical interpretation of two ethnic groups, one Mexican, the other Filipino, whose paths led both groups to San Diego, California. Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. traces the earliest interactions of both groups with Spanish colonialism to illustrate how these historical ties and cultural bonds laid the foundation for what would become close interethnic relationships and communities in twentieth-century California and the Pacific West Coast. Through racially restrictive covenants, both groups were confined to segregated living spaces along with African Americans, other Asian groups, and a few European immigrant clusters. Within these urban multiracial spaces, Mexicans and Filipinos coalesced to build a world of their own. Mexipino children, living simultaneously in two cultures, have forged a new identity for themselves and their lives are the lens through which these two communities are examined. Using archival sources, oral histories, newspapers, and personal collections and photographs, Guevarra defines the niche that this particular group carved out for itself.

Listen to the episode (00:33:22) here. Download the episode here.