Quoted: Reggaeton and Race

Excerpted by Latoya Peterson

In a January 2006 article published by the Village Voice, Jon Caramanica ended a largely celebratory piece on reggaeton with a somewhat sudden, cryptic remark: “Fuck a Slim Shady,” he quipped, “Hip-Hop’s race war begins here.” Caramanica thus suggests that the most prominent “racial” tensions around hip-hop are not between African Americans and whites (represented by prominent white rapper, Slim Shady, a.k.a. Eminem) but between African Americans and Latinos. Similarly, blogger Bryan Crawford’s tongue-in-cheek March 2006 post for XXL magazine’s website, “Ban Reggaeton: Fight the Real Enemy of Hip-Hop,” makes one wonder how exactly -snide and enigmatic remarks aside – the perceived rivalry between hip-hop and reggaeton is informed by extramusical tensions between African Americans and Latinos.

—From the introduction to Reggaeton, edited by Raquel Z. Rivera, Wayne Marshall, and Deborah Pacini Hernandez