In the Time of Sky-Rhyming

Book excerpt: Jonathan E. Calvillo explores the rise of Hip Hop on the West Coast and the integral role the Los Angeles Latine community had on the movement - and in turn, Hip Hop's impact on Latines as it became a space for community, expression, and coping with inequality. Building his narrative around interviews and oral histories, he explores how incoming migrants, local-born Latines, and other minoritized populations joined Black Americans in the 1980s to build early underground sites of Hip Hop innovation, contributing to the genre's global expansion. The book details how Hip Hop's deep impact on Latines was based in part on the inequality, marginalization, and injustice that many Latines of this era faced - themes which were addressed in the movement. Many creatives from Brown Los Angeles found their place in early underground expressions of Hip Hop, including in breaking, rhyming, DJing, and graffiti elements. During this period, Central American refugees were settling in the urban corridors of the region, young Chicanos were coming of age in the post-civil rights era, Caribbean migrants moved from East to West, South American immigrants were finding their place, and Latines were interacting with Black Americans and other minoritized populations such as ethnic Samoans, Filipinos, and Koreans. Through the lens of Los Angeles Hip Hop history, this project speaks to the migratory flows of urban Brown Los Angeles, the relations between Black Americans and Latines in Los Angeles, and the formation of the racialized subcultures emblematic of urban Los Angeles. In documenting this story, the book sidesteps a media-heavy, music-industry account of Hip Hop history. Instead, it privileges original oral histories and secondary accounts of dozens of artists, to present a grassroots oriented narrative of the intraethnic, interracial negotiations that fueled Latines' identification with and contributions to Hip Hop.