Family and nationalism are two terms that occupy a fundamental place in debates concerning gender and sexuality. In this essay I will join those debates as I elaborate on how these terms are interrelated and articulated in Chicano rap and hip-hop culture. 1 I aim to show how various strands of Chicano rap are rhetorically and ideologically linked to a genealogy of Chicano poetic consciousness stemming from the 1960s and 1970s that advocated cultural nationalism and la familia as potential keys for liberation. In the rap/hip-hop context I want to signal how this consciousness functions as an empowering political force for those who put it into practice in their everyday lives. Yet I want to emphasize the necessity of critiquing the inequalities that underscore its otherwise egalitarian potentialities. Sherley Anne Williams argues that “intellectuals have been slow to analyze and critique rap’s content. We have, by and large, refused to call that content, where appropriate, pathological, antisocial, and anti-community.” 2 Following her lead, it is imperative to ask: What does it mean that “the family” in Chicano rap discourse does not include women, gay men and lesbians, or even one’s own parents? What are the ramifications of seeing (all-male) gangs as family? How does cultural nationalism emerging from working-class contexts promote a sentiment of resistance that contests racial, political, and economic subordination? How do these nationalisms “rejoin” the nation-state around patriarchy? What do we make of exclusionary practices within the ranks of the Chicano hip-hop nation that stabilize oppressive masculinities? These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.