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”.
BOCAFLOJAI think in terms of the themes that I have worked on most is establishing questions of race in the context of Latin America.
More Bocafloja Quotes
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I believe gangsta rap, as such, in its foundation is simply anti-systemic and transgressive.
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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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I can’t marry myself to one idea or one form of doing politics or one form of understanding politics.
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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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I believe the example of the Zapatistas is a very relevant historical example.
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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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MTV and the culture industry never are talking about community relevance, hood organization, they aren’t talking about ethical codes, they aren’t talking about forms of political organization, they don’t speak about codes inside the jails. What they talk about are superficial things.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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A white leftist Mexican activist isn’t the same in the media as the son of a farmer in Guerrero, they aren’t worth the same.
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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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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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In the same imaginary of the Latin American Left exists a racism, a racism that corresponds to processes of colonialism internal to almost all countries in Latin America.
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I understand that there are moments they disassociate, but in the end they are things that go walking together practically all the time.
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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 believe that also it should be stressed and made clear that our antagonistic position is not to say “I don’t like whites” for the simple fact of not liking white people.
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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 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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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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Racism operates in a lot of ways, and so I live it every day.
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On the aesthetic level, decolonized music presents itself as a direct antagonist to the traditional values promoted by the culture industry.
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