If you’re anything like us (and pray to God you’re not), there’s more than a little bit of Hip Hop in your iPod. And even if your tastes veer towards Los Lonley Boys or Emmanuel, everyone has at least one Dr. Dre or Snoop Dogg album they listen to. So when these tracks come on do you, you know, recite the N word with the lyrics with the same zeal they do? What about referring to each other as “my nigga?” Plenty of shows and movies have explained how white people shouldn’t do it, but what about Latinos? Sure, African-Americans and Latinos have shared a struggle in America, but does that make it okay for Spanish speakers to co-opt the hateful word blacks have already done their best to diffuse and infuse in their patios? Well, it depends on who you ask (and really, how dark a Latino you are).

“It’s just a code of communication to us, a ‘hood word people throw around frequently,” says half-African-American, half-Dominican rapper AZ, who released his “rap thesis” on the subject, titled N.4.L. (Niggaz 4 Life), last month. “I guess people want to use it now for press and all that; I don’t understand what’s all the big fuss about.”

“It draws the racial differentiations into the Latino community, which I agree with,” says New York University Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, Juan Flores, who regularly teaches courses on Afro-Latino identity here and abroad. “It’s just an opportunity to check the power that Black Latinos reflect off each other and the Latino population.” In other words, Latino artists use the n-word as a reminder that they too have been oppressed and are products of the transatlantic slave trade.

Ok, so if you’re a pasty-white Chilean/Peruvian mix like your editor, nope. If you’re a blacktino (Fat Joe or darker), it’s okay. After going to school in the Bronx, we felt kind of emboldened to use it, especially after Big Pun (RIP) said it to us once after we talked to him at the Burger King on Fordham Road. But since we’re the products overly sensitive mothers and not the transatlantic slave trade, we’ll keep the word in our heads and not in mouths. Well, unless we’re driving and “California Love” comes on. Then we might be a little more audible with it.

The N-Word Is Flourishing Among Generation Hip-Hop Latinos [Village Voice]
Image [Village Voice]