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The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial Mestizaje Pancho McFarland. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013.
Scholarship on hip hop music, culture(s), and identities has grown exponentially since the mid-1990s, facilitated by the rise of interdisciplinary studies at many colleges and universities, as well as by academics' renewed analysis of popular culture and consumption. College courses devoted to the critical examination of hip hop now exist at several institutions of higher learning throughout the United States, and academic conferences dedicated to the empirical research and theoretical understanding of hip hop have been established. Despite hip hop's multiethnic and multicultural origins in the South Bronx during the 1970s, however, mainstream American society has long perceived hip hop as a distinctly African-American product, stemming from the corporate music industry's commercialization and mass-marketing of rap (which comprises just one element of hip hop, its musical element) as an exclusively "black" form of artistic and cultural production. This misperception often results in essentialized allegations that Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, or others who perform, enjoy, or identify with hip hop are "acting black."
Since the early 2000s, a growing body of research examining Latinos' roles in the historical and contemporary development of hip hop has been produced. Notable titles include Juan Flores's From Bomba to Flip-Flop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (2000), Raquel Rivera's New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Tone (2003), Pancho McFarland's Chicano Rap: Gender and Violence in the Postindustrial Barrio (2008), the anthology Reggaeton (2009), and the public television documentary From Mambo to Hip Hop: A South Bronx Tale (2008). McFarland's...