The politics of Black and Brown solidarities: race, space, and hip-hop cultural production in Los Angeles

ABSTRACT

Conceptualizations of Latinidad range from those emphasizing ethnicity and whiteness to those questioning the category's utility for capturing the diversity of diasporas from dozens of countries. This article approaches Latinidad from relational formations of race framework, revealing the importance of the sociohistorical context in which Latinxs are racialized in relation to one another and other racialized groups. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with artists and activists in Los Angeles and analysis of hip-hop cultural productions, this research finds that Latinxs raised in “minority-majority” neighbourhoods have developed understandings of race and political solidarities that highlight brownness, which is often articulated as part of a “Black and Brown multiracial formation”. Such understandings of race and racialization challenge the dominant black/white racial binary, whitewashed notions of Latinidad, and ethnonationalisms. The counterscripts articulated through cultural production and activist narratives provide grassroots theorizations on race, belonging, and citizenship and shed light on multilevel processes of racialization.

KEYWORDS:

• Relational ethnic studies
• Latinidad
• hip-hop
• solidarity politics
• Black and Brown
• urban space

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Correction

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all of the people who shared their stories, dreams, pain, hope, and time with me in order to write this article. Many of their names do not appear in the final version of the article but they are still very much present in this work. Special thank you to Lucha, Jonathan Rosa, John Solomos and the editorial team at Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the anonymous reviewers whose feedback and critical insights helped make this piece stronger. I would also like to thank Diego Martínez-Lugo who provided valuable research assistance and expertise for this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2021.1976962)

Notes

1 Part of this article appeared in a much earlier form in the blog entry, “Giving Form to Black and Brown” published in 2020 in Dialogues: Blog of American Studies Journal.

2 Inglewood includes ten neighbourhoods to the south and southwest of Hyde Park and Crenshaw neighbourhoods.

3 I came to think of the counterscripts I analyze in this article through the lens of Gordon’s work thanks to Marquez’s book.

4 Herein lies the importance of placing brownness within the multiracial formation of Black and Brown. Some people racialized as brown align themselves with whiteness, embracing what Beltrán (2021) calls “multiracial Whiteness.” The theories of race and political solidarities I examine here explicitly reject such an embrace of Whiteness in favour of a more liberatory and radical reimagining of race and solidarity.

5 The use of “Hispanics” here is deliberate given that it is the ethno-racial category used by most government agencies, including in this case the category “Hispanic-American” used the LAPD.

6 “Hispanics” are over-represented by 2.1% and “Blacks” are slightly under-represented by 0.3% in the LAPD in relation to their percentage of city population. LAPD demographics from: http://assets.lapdonline.org/assets/pdf/pr91-sprge-6-22-2020.pdf

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible through support from the Institute of American Cultures and the Chicano Studies Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute of the University of Arizona.