Warning: Strong Language on both tracks. Cover your ears if you're like that.



I wanted to include NWA in this but there was no official video. So I included the classic Muppets version instead.

2008-Winter

It is a Friday night and I’m driving with my girlfriend. We are heading to The Spot, which is a Mexican restaurant  called Villa Sombrero in Highland Park. We call it The Spot because it is our spot; it has the perfect margarita and good food, which is a rarity. The L.A. area Mexican restaurants seem to sacrifice one for the other. It’s either you have great drinks and lousy food or visa versa. We have our favorite waiter, Jesus from D.F., who is a character in his own right. I couldn’t even begin to explain him-- he is an experience and probably the best waiter I’ve ever known. Going there signals the start of our very short weekend. After the first sip of my margarita I am reminded that my workweek is over and I have the day off the next day. It doesn’t matter how broke I am or how inconvenient it is going there. The Spot gives us a sense of humanity. That we do not just exist to work and pay bills.

I make a left on to Cypress Ave. I see two police cars on opposite sides of the street, not even a block away from my house with their flashing lights on. I wonder if it was more fallout from an incident that happened on February 22nd, in which undercover police gunned down a twenty two year old. A few days before that, there was a hit on a thirty-six year-old veterano while he was holding his two-year old granddaughter, followed by the police, killing one of the hit men in nearby Glassell Park. All over the city there has been an increase of gang and gun related deaths. The most recent was last Thursday, a drive-by shooting and subsequent death of a twenty year old on Ave. 59 in Highland Park, not too far where we are going to eat. I hadn’t even reached the point where Cypress turns into Eagle Rock when I saw at least several more police cars.

Every person the police has pulled over looks the same. All are Latino, young, male and pelon with custom cars. Most of them don’t look the part of a gang member yet still they are pulled over. It is incredible how many police are out tonight. By the time we hit the restaurant I have seen more than fifteen units under a two-mile stretch. At a light I watch the young pelones bum out. It’s not so fun to go out on a Friday night after being humiliated by some cops.

1983-Summer

My first run-in with the cops was when I was fourteen. I was in a parking lot across the street from Del Amo Mall in Torrance after football practice, waiting for a ride home. I wasn’t used to taking the bus to the new school I was going to, several miles away from my home in Gardena. I kept boarding the wrong bus so finally I gave up and called my sister to pick me up. As I was waiting, I watched the cops make a u-turn across the street. I remember thinking that they probably got a call for a crime and were heading for it, but I was wrong. They pulled right in front of me, jumped out off the car and had me put my hands in the air. I dropped my backpack full of my sweaty clothes on the ground. The cops asked me why I was standing here as they frisked me. I told them that I was coming back from football practice and I was waiting for my sister to pick me up. I then asked what I was doing wrong, because I was just leaning against a brick wall waiting for my sister. They didn’t answer me. I watched as the passengers in the cars slowly passing me by gave their slow judgment. I was embarrassed and I was scared that that they were going to find something to bust me for, even though I had nothing on me to get busted with. In short, I felt like a criminal. After the frisking and looking through my backpack full of sweaty clothes, they let me go and said, “Stay away from the parking lot-- it looks like you’re checking out the cars,” and they left.
My fourteen-year-old brain was confused, “Checking out the cars?” I guess they thought I was going to break into one.  

When I got home I looked in the mirror and saw for the first time what they saw. I was nearly six feet, wearing a white t-shirt with my head shaved down to a number two guard and, I was dark. As dark as the dirt on the ground, as dark as the cochinto pan dulce that sat on the dinner table, as dark as all the criminals I’d seen on the news. Until then I felt like every other kid. But now I knew better. I knew that from now on I would have to be careful of what I said and what I did. I knew I just couldn't go anywhere. Others could get away with more but because of the way I look I couldn’t. I couldn’t stand on a corner, I couldn’t dress different, I couldn’t even check out cars in a parking lot. On that day the cops let me know how different I was, and I hated them for it. For the first time in my young life, I felt powerless.

Sunday’s episode of Fox’s television show King Of The Hill, entitled "Ladies And Gentrification," was nothing short of brilliant. In the episode, Peggy Hill is having problems selling a house to a hipster because none of the homes she has shown him are “real” enough for him. That is until Peggy agrees to meet Hank at his friend Enrique’s home in a Mexican neighborhood. Peggy brings her client along, as she is in the middle of showing the hipster homes to buy. Once the hipster sees the neighborhood, he wants to live there and Peggy closes a deal.

Soon Peggy is selling homes to other hipsters in Enrique’s Mexican neighborhood. The fruit stands and Goodwill are replaced by art galleries and trendy stores. Even Enrique’s favorite place to get fish tacos changes their menu, replacing the fried fish tacos with Salmon tacos. Soon Enrique has to move because he is being priced out of his own neighborhood.

There is a great scene in which Hank and Enrique are having fish tacos when a group of hipsters enter. They give Hank attitude because he’s neither a hipster nor a Mexican, calling him Gringo. The too cool hipsters say hello to Enrique,  to which he says to Hank, “They always act like they know me but I don’t know who they are!”

The episode touches upon many issues of gentrification that I thought were brilliant. One is that most hipsters want what they cannot have. While most poor people are trying to get out of a barrio, the hipsters want to get in, simply because they think it’s cool. Their adventures or ‘realness” are things that most people try to escape. Another thing is how they showed how hipsters love the realness of an ethic neighborhood but do very to little preserve the culture, often eliminating ethic businesses to bring in their own hipster culture. Then there was the hipsters that feel that they are “down” with the people simply because they live in the neighborhood, without actually getting to know their neighbors that were there before them. For the most part, many hipsters fraternized only among other hipsters from the same neighborhood.

My girlfriend got me back into listening to the group Control Machete. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about them for a long time. They were one of those groups that I was into in the late 90’s/early 2000's, then I somewhat forgot about them. It was the same with her. One of Control Machete’s songs came up on her computer and she was hooked all over again, and so was I. We started discussing the song "Danzon" from their Artilleria Pesada album. The song was collaboration with Ruben Albarran from Café Tacvba and members of The Buena Vista Social Club. We argued who sang the chorus to the song. She insisted it was Ruben but I thought it was Omara Portuonda. I was way off. Ruben’s voice is somewhat feminine so I just assumed, and you know what they say about assumption…

Control Machete was the first Mexican Hip-Hop group I’d ever heard that was a true hip-hop group. They didn’t play instruments and they didn’t try to mimic The Beastie Boys, like some of their counterparts. They didn’t flow in Spanglish like the groups in the hip-hoppers in the U.S. (Mellow Man Ace, Cypress Hill, Big Pun, Fat Joe, Of Mexican Descent) It was two MC’s, Pato and Fermin IV, and a DJ (Toy) They had obvious hip-hop influences mixed with the ones that came from growing up in Monterey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. Fermin had one of the roughest voices in rap music that sounded a little like the Don Ramon character from the Chavo Del Ocho T.V. show. Control Machete’s DJ, Toy Hernandez, dug up samples that the best beat makers in Hip-Hop would envy. They were proud of being Mexican but not in a super-nationalistic way. Lyrically, Pato and Fermin IV instilled their listeners with pride in their culture as a way to inspire and to speak against poverty, ignorance, and oppression that constantly plagued Mexico. They were too heavy for the Fresas, ( Mexican slang for hipster) who looked to Europe for all their cues, but for the kids growing up in the barrios that grew up listening to hip-hop, they were a breath of fresh air.