Photo: Kendrick Lamar @ Grosse Freiheit 36, Hamburg, by hds, Wikimedia Commons
How you answer that question in 1980s L.A. could be your last words if you answer it wrong.
I lived in Los Angeles for one year, and I was confronted with that question, by a guy and his friends, waving an unbroken bottle in my face.
I was foolishly, like an eastern/midwesterner, taking a walk in Glendale’s walkable streets in the evening, which had been pleasant up until that moment.
The Most High and the Ancestors were protecting me that day, and it ended well.
But lesson learned: Don’t be strolling around LA unless you know who’s turf you’re on.
“Where are you from?” is a challenge. If you cross into the wrong gang territory, knowingly or not, you get challenged to see if you are friend or foe.
LA gang culture was mostly Black or Hispanic/Mexican in those days. Much of the gang violence was between gangs of the same race. Crossing into gang turf of the “other” race made it even more complicated.
Where I lived just south of downtown Glendale, was mostly chill. Crime was low. Different ethnic groups got along. Even that confrontation I almost had (it would have been a beat-down, in the least, if they had chosen so), diffused when a couple of Black guys drove up in a pickup truck. The bottle-wielding Latino was friends with them and they drove off together. I was merely a temporary amusement.
As for me: LA lesson learned: Don’t go walking around, even on a pleasant summer evening in LA, unless you know who’s turf you’re on.
For a time, I also lived for a time in the San Fernando Valley. A few miles west of where I lived was a Mexican gang called the Canoga Park Alabama. They went on an anti-Black killing spree in the late 1980s, after I had left California. Some of their attacks were in Reseda, where I had lived before and had good times at the roller rink. (I still have the skates.)
When Kendrick Lamar says in “where you from?” and then “not where I’m from, we all indigenous,” he’s saying that us Black folks and Mexicans in these LA streets are indigenous. We all come from this same landmass.
Kendrick gives the opening on wacced out murals to a Mariachi singer, Deyra Barrera, who sings in Spanish.
The low-rider car culture is mostly Mexican-American, but it was a 1970s R&B group, War, and 1990s Black gangsta rap videos that popularized it outside of California. LA Rap, as in NWA, is the rap music that penetrated middle (White) America so deep that it can no longer be expelled.
If you’ve lived in Southern California, the Mexican visual style comes out in Black American Hip Hop. The Compton that NWA came straight out of was heavily Mexican even in the 1980s.
Kendrick knows this, and Mexican-Americans are clearly present in the video for Not Like Us, filmed at Compton City Hall in 2024.
Kendrick’s 2025 Superbowl half-time show has spawned a whole genre of dance, and sent shock waves through Middle America with its visual statement of Red, White, Blue, Black presence.
The Black and Brown alliance is a myth, for the moment, but our indigenous ancestors are calling us back together,
If we listen.
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