I can’t marry myself to one idea or one form of doing politics or one form of understanding politics.
BOCAFLOJAI understand that there are moments they disassociate, but in the end they are things that go walking together practically all the time.
More Bocafloja Quotes
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What is MTV doing and what is the hegemonic culture industry promoting in gangsta rap? It is the glorification of violence for the sake of violence.
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The racial question, and thus class struggle, of course, I think they are processes which necessarily are intersecting all the time.
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Every day of my life I have been in situations, not just in Mexico, in the US too, in which I identified the form of operation as racism.
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Analyses that through musicality would be able to connect with people who don’t necessarily have the energy or wish in any exact moment to connect to well-read or critical analysis.
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I believe a lot in gangsta rap, I see in it a lot of positive things as it is. I believe it is only about doing politicization work. Revolutionary change will come from there, it won’t come from conscious rap.
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European militants recognize Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the Mexican militants followed their example and legitimated his work because the Europeans said, “Hey, Mumia Abu-Jamal is relevant in the US.
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The whites have the responsibility to put themselves at attention with the form they operate in with people of color and try to always lay out that pattern to connect with people and say, “I am conscious of my privileges and I am accounting for myself.”
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A lot of the exercise of embracing identity as a political affirmation is not just simply parked in the question of skin color or culture, but more it is a political affirmation with all these implications and more.
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The Latin American Left, the criollos, direct descendents of Spaniards, they don’t want to accept that they are the whites of Latin America.
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And those families for generations have maintained themselves in positions of power. Latin America founded itself on everyone being equal, but in reality we aren’t.
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The countries made themselves independent from Spain, but only changed owners, who stayed in positions of power were the criollos, the Spanish descendants who were the new administrators of power and wealth in the country.
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I believe that music offers us possibilities for analysis, at least in my case, more profound in many ways, but at the same time that profundity is an accessible profundity that has atemporal repercussions.
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Power, as it is, has a whole apparatus operating that goes about cutting down, closing doors, so that protests, exercises, platforms, and organizations, such as the Zapatistas, can’t grow further in the barrio.
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They have to add up all those processes and articulate those privileges to try to equalize the historical process.
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Like Syria, like other parts of the Middle East, including conscious Islamic-American rappers that are representing an international political agenda for the United States through cultures more affable for people of color in other parts of the world.
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If I stop today at a protest and I read a speech, it is a speech that remains in that moment, and whoever captures it does, and whoever doesn’t, doesn’t, and just keeps walking. It is very sterile, and it can seem even inaccessible and boring for a community.
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We should remember what a rapper like Tupac Shakur was doing, to a certain degree, who came from an experience of politicization very close to being a “Panther Baby”.
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There are situations in which a smile, a laugh, a greeting are racist exercises.
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They don’t want to talk about race. The discussion for them is based on class struggle, rich against poor, but doesn’t offer the possibility of a dialogue about racial questions.
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We have to remember that the experience of gangsta rap as such in its foundation is an anti-systemic experience primarily.
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I am conscious of how my body signifies in every space. In every place of the world our body has a different significance.
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I think that in the colonial imaginary of the average Mexican, in how it drives us, the economic dependence on the US, and in some cases cultural dependence, is quite palpable, very strong.
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This is a theme that makes uncomfortable a lot of people, and it obviously makes the Latin American Left uncomfortable.
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I would say it is one of the forms at the idea level, and through the work they have achieved, one of the most dignified historical examples that has happened in the history of the world.
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Racism operates in a lot of ways, and so I live it every day.
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I think in terms of the themes that I have worked on most is establishing questions of race in the context of Latin America.
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