The History of Miami Hip Hop by John Cordero

Author:John Cordero [Cordero, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Microcosm Publishing LLC
Published: 2023-02-22T07:31:38+00:00

As Crook says “Miami is a tourist town. Millions and millions of dollars come from people who don’t live here. They come here for a few days…they do not want graffiti all over the place. Shows that they don’t have control. I’ll tell you one thing: Miami will never tolerate graffiti.” That is, unless it’s in the specially designated Wynwood Art District, where Art Basel pink pants wearing connoisseurs and hipsters on monthly art walks can patronize food trucks and Snapchat filter to death.

Now a free man, DJ Raw reflects on the turnaround of his old stomping grounds: “After the McDuffie riots and the Cano riots (in 1980 and 1990) most of that turf was burnt down and destroyed by us.” He laments. “The mayor at that time came to see us and told us to stop burning down our own neighborhood, stop messing stuff up, and we did. But it was too late, we had ruined the neighborhood.”

Both of the civic disturbances were a result of police brutality against Miami inner city residents. A few days before Christmas 1979, Arthur McDuffie, a black resident of Liberty City, was beaten to death by four white Miami police officers after a high-speed chase. The ensuing manslaughter trial was moved to Tampa, and the four officers were acquitted in May 1980, leading to several days of rioting in Miami’s inner city. After the flames were doused, the final toll was eighteen dead and over $100 million in damages.

Nearly a decade later, Miami police officers once again went over the line, with fatal results. In December 1990, six white and Hispanic officers were acquitted on charges stemming from the beating that led to the death of Leonardo “Cano” Mercado, a street-level crack dealer in Wynwood. The ensuing rampage through Miami’s historically Puerto Rican neighborhood resulted in three million in damages.

Wynwood may have remained just another inner city ghetto if not for Tony Goldman and other developers who took a risk at the start of the new millennium. They invested in a neglected area where the authorities and others only saw drugs and crime. DJ Raw gives his viewpoint on gentrification: “I think that it’s a plus, that they (the developers) came back and gave the opportunity for Hip Hop and for the graffiti artists to be able to embed themselves into the neighborhood and still give it that touch of class that it needs to sustain itself.” But before them, he contributed to the artistic renaissance that brought galleries and nightclubs to formerly dope boy infested streets: “I paid most of the graffiti artists back at that time (mid-90’s) to tag up, to bring that in. To see it evolve into where it is today? That’s pretty amazing.”

While Mayor Alex Penelas (of refusing to assist the federal government in the Elian Gonzalez case fame) and the Metro-Dade Police Department were putting the squeeze on the underground in the late 90’s, the South Beach “rap industry” had mutated from its How Can I Be Down? experiment into a voracious monster swallowing everything in its path.

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