Close to the Edge (20 page)

I looked out onto the congregation of people, their silhouettes set against the glistening water of the bay. I saw young students in jeans and Bob Marley t-shirts, Aboriginal elders, young Muslim girls in headscarves, older Punjabi men with long kurtas and turbans, and small Vietnamese women with sun visors. Over the loudspeakers came the melodious sounds of a sitar, and then the reggae beat kicked in, with a bass descending in major thirds. “Thirty years ago in Mangalore, a young man sat looking at the shore. ‘I can see my future in a foreign land, but how to leave my native sands'?” I intoned in the Indian accent of my father. The rap-reggae song related my father's experiences as he landed in a hostile London of the 1960s, then made his way to Australia, confronting ignorance and stereotypes about Asians.

Waiata and Alec joined in, singing on the chorus: “Migrants come from overseas, them that live here Aborigines,” with the addition, “But we continue to fight, for land rights, to protect a sacred site, for migrant rights.” The song had my father confronting the racists in an effort to unite white, brown, and black: “My skin may be brown but I'm the same as you, I've the right to live in this land too.” As we sang the last chorus of the song, “You can't hide from the racist tide. You've got to stand up and fight,” the crowd cheered. Three of us on stage. Three-part harmony. Nunga, Niuean, and Indian.

I
n retrospect the song was idealistic in imagining that we could overcome the divisions between our different communities so easily. I was buoyed by the alliances and solidarities that we were able to build during the days of the antiracism campaigns. Those alliances were crucial in helping us to counter the racist backlash. But I had also seen the racism of Asians toward Aboriginal people, the distrust between white, black, and brown. Music alone couldn't unite us across lines of race and ethnicity; we needed more on-the-ground political work and consciousness raising.

The three of us began to ask questions. Was hip hop the answer to the political vacuum we faced? Could we continue to find common ground through the music? As we worked together, we confronted more deeply the differences between Pacific Islanders, Asians, and Aboriginals. Pauline Hanson was ranting about Asians and Islanders coming to Australia and taking “Aussie jobs.” In reality, Islanders and Asians were low-cost labor, who took the jobs that no one else wanted anyway. But Aboriginals were never even considered for those jobs. And as some immigrants climbed the social ladder to enjoy a middle-class existence, blackfullas were always left at the bottom. As Waiata said to us, “Islanders and Asians might be oppressed by racism, but they were not dispossessed from their land. Your family own their own land. You can hand it down from one generation to the next. You have the ability to assert your cultural identity, speak your native language. Maybe your mob come here for a Western lifestyle, money, and jobs. Nungas don't have the same luxury.”

L
ooking back at my experiences in three cities where hip hop had put down roots, it seemed to me that the forging of a global fellowship across lines of race, ethnicity, and nation was fleeting and short-lived. It happened in spaces where black, white, and immigrant lived, worked, and partied together. It happened when the political juncture brought us together to defend a common goal. And it happened on the stage and in the music. The global fellowship allowed a Cuban rapper from Alamar to imagine his small daily struggle as part of a bigger historical movement; it gave a Nunga from Adelaide the courage and language to speak her mind when confronted with silence. But when we left behind the protest march or concert stage, the cross-racial solidarities were harder to sustain.

As the antiracism movement ebbed, flowed, and finally waned, there wasn't enough to keep the music politically engaged. Hip hop moved from the house parties and street corners of the West Side to the inner-city clubs and music festivals. It was increasingly severed from its links with race and politics by academics, music labels, and promoters, disassociated from the idea of hip hop as a “black thing.” Aboriginal rappers like Wire MC, along with the Palestinian-born emcee NOMISe and female artists Maya Jupiter and Trey, worked hard to obtain recognition during this time.

As Australian hip hop went mainstream, clubs and festival organizers were less interested in message rap. A voice coach suggested that we rename our group “Alec and the Colored Girls” to appeal to a wider audience. After I left for Chicago, Alec and Waiata went to see a recording agent with a demo tape, and they were told, “No one's interested in that Public Enemy thing anymore.” The only alternative, they were advised by the agent, was to become like the Aboriginal pop singer Christine Anu, a feisty diva whose upbeat dance tunes were chart toppers.

Meanwhile, was there anywhere on the planet that hip hop was still fighting the power, or was that now a thing of the past? There was still one beacon of hope. Hugo Chavez, a former paratrooper, had been elected president of Venezuela in 1998 with large-scale popular support from the urban and rural poor; he promised a revolution in the spirit of the independence leader Simon Bolivar. The Chávez government was sponsoring gatherings and festivals of hip hop artists from around the world. If hip hoppers anywhere could lead a united movement for global change, I imagined that it was there.

CHAPTER 4

In the Mouth of the Wolf

T
he main highway from Maiquetia International Airport to the metropolitan area of Caracas passed through the vast shantytowns in the west of the city. By night the twinkling lights of the shanties appeared like a galaxy of stars nestled in the valleys and hills. It was January 2004 and I was making the first of many trips to Caracas. My taxi continued on to the middle-class suburb of Altamira, where the driver dropped me off at the Hotel Residencia Montserrat. I spent the night in a shabby room with leaky faucets that overlooked the Parque del Este. The next morning I looked out onto happy families reclining under the shady trees with their picnic baskets and designer clothes. Where were the barrio folk, the suffering multitudes who were the supporters of the Chávez government? Certainly not here in Altamira.

The next day I called Johnny, a contact from my sister, Deepa. “Wait right there—I'm coming to get you,” said Johnny. Next thing, a green Nova pulled up at the front of the hotel, Johnny in the front seat and his wheelchair in the back.

“Ocho cilindros,” said Johnny, grinning as he caught me admiring the car. “This car has eight cylinders.” Venezuela's major forays into auto assembly in past decades could still be seen in its citizens' pride in their cars. Johnny was a muscular, friendly Afro-Venezuelan man who had been left paraplegic after a car accident thirty years earlier. He pulled away from the curb. One hand was on the wheel, as the other reached under the seat for a bottle of Pampero Blanco rum, which he poured expertly into a plastic cup balanced between his legs while executing a left turn. He offered me the cup but I declined politely, so he drank it himself, leisurely, while driving.

Soon we had left behind the broad leafy streets of Altamira, with its secluded gardens and European-style cafes. Crossing over into the shantytowns was like entering another world—streets dense with vendors, bustling markets, improvised architecture, and the pulsing beat of reggaeton coming from transistor radios. The hills of the city were crowded with a jumble of ranchos, or precarious zinc-roofed houses with walls of carton or wood. Street kids in dirty rags sorted through piles of trash in abandoned lots.

The in-your-face poverty was at odds with the image Venezuela projected as an oil-rich nation. Even poor Caraquenos had once denied that Venezuela was a third-world country. But that was when times were better and there was enough money from petroleum to spread the wealth a bit. On February 18, 1983—otherwise known as Black Friday—a dramatic currency collapse because of falling oil prices sent the economy reeling. Desperate administrations embarked on austerity measures that shed the state of its public employees, drastically cut public spending, and deregulated prices. The result? Those living in poverty rose from 10 percent of the population in 1978 to a staggering 81 percent by 1998.
¹
Those at the bottom of the social scale—mostly the black, indigenous, and mixed-race Venezuelans who form the majority of the population—were hit hardest by the changes.

The social disjunctures and crisis in governance led to spiraling violence, crime, and urban tension. In 1999 the homicide rate in Venezuela had risen 20 percent from the previous year.
²
The homicide problem was worst in Caracas, where the number of deaths sometimes reached the hundred mark on weekends. Official statistics for 2000 reported 7,779 homicides in Venezuela that year.
³

Given the vicious cycles of poverty and violence in Venezuela, it wasn't surprising that the most popular genre among barrio youth was gangsta rap. Gangsta rap emerged in the late 1980s on the West Coast of the United States. Typically associated with artists such as NWA, Ice-T, and the Geto Boys, the genre blended storytelling and bawdy humor in its dramatization of the urban poverty and penitentiary culture of postindustrial Los Angeles. According to Eithne Quinn's booklength study of the genre, gangsta is deeply rooted in vernacular archetypes and tales taken from the black rural American South and is therefore a quintessentially African American form.
⁴
So how could we explain its strong appeal to barrio youth in Caracas who didn't even understand the lyrics? Did global audiences respond mainly to the rhythms of hip hop while missing the deep political and cultural symbols embedded in the music, as Imani Perry has argued?
⁵

And how were gangsta rappers in Caracas responding to the movement for revolutionary change that was sweeping the country? The early 1990s saw the growth of local popular movements in the barrios. These nonpartisan movements reached a peak in 1998 when the Polo Patriótico, an alliance led by Hugo Chávez Frias, won 120 of 131 seats in the National Constituent Assembly and came into power on promises to fight corruption, break away from the US-supported neoliberal agenda, and rewrite the constitution. Encouraged by Chávez's bold speeches, the lower classes increasingly began to assert themselves. While politics until now had been dominated by white politicians from an elite class, the barrio folk finally had someone who looked like them and spoke like them, who came up like they did and understood the indignities that they suffered. And, just as Chávez was making possible new kinds of voice and representation, so too, it seemed, was the music.

My travels up until now had shown me the transient nature of the global Hip Hop Nation. Black youth in Cuba could not easily map their struggles for racial equality onto the black liberation espoused by American rappers. The underground rappers in Chicago were more concerned about protecting their hard-earned space than expanding to embrace other cultures and genders. And even the multiracial hip hoppers in Sydney could not sustain their fellowship in the absence of an antiracist political movement. I was beginning to understand that hip hop was at its best when it responded to highly local conditions. But, without broader networks, the translation of the music into politics was hard to sustain. How would that be different in a place where social movements were newly energized and supported by a leader at the very top of the system? Would rappers really have a platform here to build more enduring global linkages?

Johnny took me to the popular parish of El Valle, to the apartment he shared with his
companera
, Yajaira. “She was in Altamira!” Johnny explained when we arrived home. “Poor thing,” shrieked Yajaira, amid tumbling cascades of laughter. “Don't you worry,
chica.
We've rescued you now. Welcome to the real world.”

J
ohnny and Yajaira lived in
bloques populares
, project-like I buildings constructed by the government for barrio residents. They insisted that I sleep on a small mattress on the floor in their spare room rather than go back to my hotel room in Altamira.

The housing complex where Johnny and Yajaira lived was known as Residencia José Felix Ríbas. It was constructed for victims of a flooding tragedy in the neighboring town of La Guaira that left more than ten thousand dead and 150,000 homeless soon after Chávez came to office in 1999. Former residents of La Guaira arrived in the city to remake their lives and homes in these rapidly erected housing blocks. After several years of living in the blocks, the residents still had no cooking gas. There were frequent problems with water leakage and plumbing. There was a lack of sanitation services that produced cockroaches and rats. And in four years the complex system of gang control and drug dealing that characterizes every major barrio in contemporary Caracas had evolved.

After a few weeks of staying in the popular housing blocks, I was aware that the only reason I could move freely in the sector was because the local drug dealers had seen me with Johnny. Johnny commanded respect in their eyes because of the energetic way he lived his life despite his disability. He was a community activist who worked with street children, and he had a special rapport with the drug dealers and street children of Ríbas. The drug dealers understood that I was in the barrio as Johnny's friend, and when I arrived home in the morning or night, they left me alone. The same went for Yajaira, who had moved from barrio Marín in San Agustín to live with Johnny in El Valle a few years earlier.

Unlike the gated communities, or
urbanizaciones
, in the east of Caracas, with doormen and guards outside the front of the complexes, and then several bolted gates leading to the apartments, the housing blocks had few security gates. In Ríbas there were two main gates—one in the north of the complex and one in the east. Each building also had its own gate that led onto an open patio. The eastern gate of the complex served no real purpose. It was surrounded by low and broken-down walls, which the younger residents easily jumped to get in and out. The northern gate was monitored by the dealers, who had their drug business in a small shack at the side of the gate. The outside and inside gates were never locked because only one resident per household had the gate keys. The security for the residents of Ríbas did not lie in the locks on the gates but rather in the gangs that controlled the territory and monitored who went in and out.

The streets, patios, and doorways of the barrio were alive with children playing baseball, girls with long painted finger-nails and tight shorts flirting with adolescent boys, and men playing dominoes or smoking. What underlay the relative sense of security were the arrangements between sets of competing gangs in the sector, who marked out their territory and delineated their responsibility for their area. There was even at times a sense of commitment to residents of the community. The gang leaders of Ríbas were generally on hand to assist Johnny up the ramp and through the gates, to help him push his car when it broke down, or to help Yajaira carry home her groceries.

I noticed many young men in wheelchairs—in the metro station, on the streets, and at the mall. Every time we passed one on the street, Yajaira would jokingly refer to them as “Johnny's colleagues.” I asked Yajaira why there were so many young men in wheelchairs, and she told me that it was because of the violence. Yajaira had been affected by this violence personally. Her youngest brother was left paraplegic after being caught in the crossfire of an intergang dispute in San Agustin the previous year.

Some nights, the streets erupted into open warfare between competing gangs. The large holes blown by a bazooka into the facade of the local shopping mall across the road were testament to the kinds of artillery found in the barrio. Most of the time the residents joked about these intergang exchanges. When the gunshots began, the residents pretended not to notice, and, if asked, they generally used the euphemism of
fuegos artificiales
, or firecrackers, to refer to the shooting. Sadly, these kinds of shootouts could happen even during the day. They could erupt out of nowhere, and innocent residents could get caught up in the middle of a situation and be hurt or killed. It was worse when the police became involved. The Metropolitan Police, known locally as the Metropolitana, were frequently bought off by gangs. But police often made incursions into the barrio, disrupting the relative equilibrium established by the gangs. A few times when we came home late we saw the security forces with their semiautomatics held to the backs of kids, pressing them up against the walls of the barrio buildings. “Just keep walking,” Johnny would say. “Don't give them eye contact.”

A
ella le gusta la gasolina, Da me mas gasolina, Como le encanta la gasolina, Da me mas gasolina.” The infectious, grinding reggaeton of Daddy Yankee played over and over on the
minitecas
—the portable DJ stands that lined the crosswalk from Ríbas to the El Valle metro stop. The
minitecas
were interspersed among individual stalls piled high with underwear, jeans, children's toys, electronics, and candy. Vendors sold papaya, pineapples, mangoes, green beans, yuca, and tomatoes, as well as pastries, doughnuts, and household cleaning products. From portable food carts came the scent of sweet corn and butter as vendors prepared
arepas
, small corn cakes with savory fillings;
cachapas
, thick corn pancakes stuffed with cheese; and sizzling fried plantains.

The music vendors displayed several rows of pirated CDs in small plastic casings with black-and-white photocopied cover sleeves. Each CD sold for 3,000 bolívares, about US$1.40. The vendors would purchase the latest CD releases—by Celia Cruz, Marc Anthony, and Shakira—along with blank CDs and plastic covers in bulk at the cavernous underground markets in the Plaza Diego Ibarra. The same CDs sold brand new in the middle-class shopping centers such as the Centro Sambil for 15,000 bolívares, or US$7.00. But their largest distribution was through these pirated copies, which accounted for about 75 percent of the total sales of a disc when it was released.

I asked at one of the stands if they had any local hip hop CDs. The vendor showed me a disc released in 2001,
Venezuela subterranea
(Venezuela Underground), a showcase of Venezuela's underground hip hop. He then pulled out two other CDs. One album,
La realidad mas real
(The reality more real), was by a group called Guerrilla Seca. Two young black men stood back to back, and an English label reading “Parental Advisory, Explicit Lyrics” was superimposed over the tip of one rapper's middle finger, raised in an obscene gesture. On the other disc,
Papidandeando
(Partying) by Vagos y Maleantes, there was a label in Spanish that read, “Pendiente activo, grado maloso” (Active attention, bad rating). Faced with the threat of a federal mandate, the US record industry had begun slapping labels warning parents about explicit lyrics on hard-core rap and other recordings in the mid-1980s. In Venezuela such labels were added by rappers themselves to give a stamp of authenticity. On the back cover of
Papidandeando
, the rappers appeared as elaborately decked-out hustlers, in pin-striped suits, gold chains, and dark sunglasses, with designer sneakers and expensive watches.