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I often come back to that interview where Fat Joe said all Latinxs are descendants of Africans and the backlash it brought. While I maintain Fat Joe needed more nuance in his analysis, his view was contextualized within a long history of Black/Afro-Latinx organizing/music in NYC.
As scholars (Juan Flores, Sonia Song-Ha Lee) have shown time and again and community members in their own quotidian reflections of the city have shared, in NYC Black/Puerto Rican folks often co-constructed Blackness/Latinidad with specific inflections.
There is a lineage of Black/Puerto Rican/Latinx music from jazz halls of Harlem to the Last Poets to Puerto Rican Poets Cafe to Apollo Theater to Jay Z, Fat Joe, and Cardi B.
The connection between Mos Def and Felipe Luciano was merely one of many.
The connection between Mos Def and Felipe Luciano was merely one of many.
My point is not that all Latinxs are descendants of Africans as Fat Joe stated. My point is that the conditions of possibility which allowed Fat Joe to make that claim as one of the foundational voices in hip-hop was shaped by decades of Black/Latinx auto-racialization in NYC.
The history of hip-hop often begins in the 80s/90s in the “East” and “West” Coast. But as the controversy with Fat Joe shows, hip-hop’s story began decades earlier as minoritized people established coalitions and asserted themselves in art and politics, all of which was regional.
P.S. I will also add that another important element to this story was the emergence of graffiti and tagging as a specific art form tied to music, politics, community, language, racialization. @justjess_PhD’s *Graffiti Grrlz* is instructive here. https://nyupress.org/9781479895939/graffiti-grrlz/
P.S.S. Since I accidentally entered the bibliography part of this thread with that last tweet, Juan Flores’ *From Bomba to Hip-Hop* continues to be foundational on this subject. *Salsa Rising* is also instructive. http://cup.columbia.edu/book/from-bomba-to-hip-hop/9780231110778
Sonia Song-Ha Lee’s book *Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement* is one I keep coming back to as I think about racialization in NYC. https://uncpress.org/book/9781469629803/building-a-latino-civil-rights-movement/
*The Afro-Latin@ Reader* continues to be a foundational text for me as well. It even includes the Luciano poem shared above and broader analysis of Race in NYC Latinidad.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-afro-latin-reader
https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-afro-latin-reader
Vanessa Valdés’ *Diasporic Blackness* was one of the books that years ago when it came out helped me think much more critically about Afro-Latinidad and racialization. I’m grateful for this text and the ways it pushed me to think more critically.
https://www.sunypress.edu/p-6382-diasporic-blackness.aspx
https://www.sunypress.edu/p-6382-diasporic-blackness.aspx
For those who never saw the Fat Joe interview and controversy here it is:
https://www.revolt.tv/platform/amp/2019/9/20/20875862/fat-joe-states-latinos-are-black
https://www.revolt.tv/platform/amp/2019/9/20/20875862/fat-joe-states-latinos-are-black
