Beyond Labor: Mexicans As Migrant Creatives in NYC
Picture of some of the artist communities highlighted in the book.
I had been working at The Orchard Restaurant for a few months in the summer of 2010 before I would have a real conversation with Raul Hernández, then 29, the bartender from our sister restaurant two blocks away. Raul would walk over to The Orchard, an Italian Restaurant in the Lower East Side of New York City, to stock the bar at the smaller Apizz Restaurant, which lacked storage space. One night after work, I stopped by at the invite of the manager, Diego, a Mexican immigrant from Mexico City, for a drink and a bite. As Raul expertly prepared one of the restaurant’s signature cocktails and delivered a delicious prosciutto flatbread the conversation meandered into music.
“Do you like hip hop,” Raul asked?
“Sure,” I said. In reality, I did not.
Growing up Mexican American in upstate New York, hip hop was not part of my culture. And while the sounds of 1990s gangsta rap followed by the commercial rap of the 2000s played in the background, it was not a music that I identified with or sought out. Hip hop was masculine and black and did not relate to my experience, and reggaetón was machista and sexist and often made me uncomfortable as a young Latina. I preferred “Latin Alternative,” a genre whose very premise was non-conformity to a specific musical style or tradition, with a blend of rock, salsa, pop, electronica, cumbia and anything else (including rap), that resonated with my hyphenated existence. Nevertheless, I went along with the conversation as Raul revealed to me that he was an MC and member of the trio, Hispanos Causando Pániko. More than that, the conversation highlighted an articulate young man who was especially knowledgeable about hip hop’s past and present, as well as musical and technical aspects of the genre.
Figure 2: The author in her early writing years.
Figure 3: Raul “Meck” Hernández works on lyrics at Apizz Restaurant.
“Do you want to hear a song?” he asked after the last customers trickled out. As he played me a track, I found myself surprised by both the classic sound and style of golden-era New York rap as well as the lyrical and sonic rejection of reggaetón. It had never occurred to me that amidst the soundscapes of Caribbean Latinx and African American New York was an emerging Mexican migrant-conscious hip hop voice. What I heard was a Spanish language rap that wove together Spanglish chicanismos like “holmes” with a clear connection between a devotion to hip hop and national pride. Moreover, I was surprised that this professional, lyrically expressive, sonically tight song was produced by the man who had earlier served me a drink. Not because I looked down on restaurant work—that was a major part of my life for twelve years while I was an undergraduate, masters, and doctoral student to the extent that I even considered a career in hospitality. Rather, I realized that even as a Mexican American in New York City who worked with undocumented Mexicans every weekend, I had never thought about their creative aspirations. While the mainly white fellow managers, waiters, bartenders (in this way Apizz was notably different) and guests often asked me to my annoyance whether I was an aspiring “actor, dancer, or model,” the back of the house, largely staffed by black and brown immigrants, was never afforded this type of consideration.
“Do you want to hear a song?” he asked after the last customers trickled out. As he played me a track, I found myself surprised by both the classic sound and style of golden-era New York rap as well as the lyrical and sonic rejection of reggaetón. It had never occurred to me that amidst the soundscapes of Caribbean Latinx and African American New York was an emerging Mexican migrant-conscious hip hop voice. What I heard was a Spanish language rap that wove together Spanglish chicanismos like “holmes” with a clear connection between a devotion to hip hop and national pride. Moreover, I was surprised that this professional, lyrically expressive, sonically tight song was produced by the man who had earlier served me a drink. Not because I looked down on restaurant work – that was a major part of my life for twelve years while I was an undergraduate, masters, and doctoral student to the extent that I even considered a career in hospitality. Rather, I realized that even as a Mexican American in New York City who worked with undocumented Mexicans every weekend, I had never thought about their creative aspirations. While the mainly white fellow managers, waiters, bartenders (in this way Apizz was notably different) and guests often asked me to my annoyance whether I was an aspiring “actor, dancer, or model,” the back of the house, largely staffed by black and brown immigrants, was never afforded this type of consideration.
I never afforded them this type of consideration.
Figure 4: The author with Hispanos Causando Pániko after a performance at Fordham University in 2011.
Figure 5: Members of Hispanos Causando Paniko, (from left to right) Meck, Demente and Nemesis.
Over the next eight years, Raul would become a confidant, a collaborator, and the first person to be interviewed for this project in the Spring of 2011 – when I did not even know it was a project, but rather a class paper, that had nothing to do with the doctoral studies at Yale to which I had recently been accepted. Blending stories about the Mexican community in Queens, immigration issues and daily economic struggles in the city with straightforward beats that never overshadowed the lyrical narrative, the music spoke to me in a different way. Until Hispanos Causando Pániko, I never thought that hip hop could also be mine.
Raul, like the other young Mexican men and women who now breathe life into my forthcoming book, taught me so much, not just about hip hop, but about the ways in which Mexicans migrants are viewed and approached, even by liberal minded Mexican American scholars such as myself. They opened my eyes to a vibrant, young, Mexican, largely undocumented migrant community dedicated to creative expression in music and art, particularly the hip hop arts, as a critical part of their New York City experience. Their stories revealed the implications of these narrow perspectives on conceptions of creativity and Mexicanidad.
Figure 6: Sarck tattoos a customer.
A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture is about Mexican migrant creativity in New York City since 9/11, and how that creativity is produced, developed, and shared within the context of a system of racial capitalism that marginalizes Mexican migrants via an exploitative labor market, criminalizing immigration policy, and racialized systems of surveillance. Neverthless, despite its academic route, this book developed out of communidad. I never planned to write this book; rather while researching another project, I found refuge from an elite doctoral world in a proudly Mexican and welcoming creative one. As Raul introduced me to MCs, DJs, and grafiteros, I found myself being a regular attendee at Har’d Life Ink and later Buendia BK shows. I became a fan of this music which I found profoundly connected to my own poetic work and was a source of inspiration for my first collection of poetry, Coatlicue Eats the Apple. Likewise, when I or any of my friends wanted an original high-quality tattoo, it was Sarck or Pisket (artists introduced to me by Raul) to whom I turned. As my community of Mexican artists grew so did my knowledge of their networks and diverse projects. Still, although I wrote smaller articles and chapter length pieces “on the side,” the project did not formalize as a book project until years of engagement had passed.
Around summer 2014, I realized that the numerous interviews, observations, music and photographs I had gathered were in fact an important and unique archive. As I continued to spend time in these communities, at hip hop and art shows, in homes and places of business, I found myself both inspired by the creative output as well as the context from which these artistic communities have emerged. I came to acknowledge that these were stories that needed to be told and that I had the unique opportunity and responsibility to be that facilitator, especially as the first Mexican American to write on this topic. I say facilitator because as this project developed I came to see this book as an act of collaboration with the men and women who had become my friends. Significantly, because this project developed organically, its direction was also guided by that community apart from any academic or research interests.
Figure 7: The author with MC Audry Funk, who has since become a writing collaborator.
Figure 8: The author presenting her research at Fordham University in Fall 2018.
In A Mexican State of Mind you will find a version of global Mexicanidad that complicates dominant portrayals of rural workers or immigration statistics. Rather I present a vision of a Mexican community as young, edgy, creative actors for whom hip hop serves as a connection to both New York and their Mexican culture. Although the people I write about are quite distinct, they all speak to the significance of creativity in the communities they are making. Whether in service to a hemispheric feminist politics, an individual form of self-expression to cope with depression and substance abuse, or a community building form of economic liberation, these young men and women narrate a path that imagines a radical new world of Mexican migrant creativity and self-acceptance.
Melissa Castillo Planas is an assistant professor of English at Lehman College. She is editor of the anthology, ¡Manteca!: An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets (2017) and co-editor of La Verdad: An International Dialogue on Hip Hop Latinidades (2016).
All photos courtesy of author.