Focusing mainly on post WWII Los Angeles and the greater US Southwest, the goal of this project is to analyze the often tenuous relationship between Chicano/as and African Americans, focusing especially on the ways that Chicano/a culture has historically engaged with African American cultural expression, including zoot suit culture, jazz, and swing music, lowrider car culture, soul, R&B, and Motown. Most recently, hip hop culture has emerged as the most central site of black-brown cultural exchange. However, despite these various cultural affinities, Chicano/as have often remained much more reserved in their political affinity towards blacks and racial tension has frequently been high. With this in mind, this paper also seeks to analyze the ways that Victory Outreach church, an originally Los Angeles based, mostly Chicano/a Evangelical church with substantial African American membership, occasionally bridges this black-brown divide. Examining Victory Outreach academic literature and internet data, as well as ethnographic and interviews conducted at a particular Victory Outreach congregation in Denver, CO, I argue that hip hop culture, as the latest site in a long tradition of Chicano/a-African American cultural exchange, is a vital ingredient in fostering positive black-brown relationships at Victory Outreach. Unfortunately, “VO” often espouses an apolitical view towards solutions to community issues, relying on spiritual and individual solutions rather than political ones. Nevertheless, through their unique fusion of Chicano, African American, and hip hop cultures, they may still provide a model for mobilizing these cultural affinities in a way that can work towards the promotion of a more explicitly political, unified black-brown struggle for social, economic, and political change.
About the presenterWayne M Freeman
Wayne Freeman is an MA student in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received his BA in Anthropology from the University of California Riverside. His research interests include U.S. rhetorics of race, class, gender and sexuality, hegemony, Chican@ history and culture, masculinities, ethnography, the politics of basketball, and hip hop music and culture among other areas. Though originally from Southern California, he currently resides in Colorado with his wife and two children.