radical brown punx

All eyes on LA Raw Ponx! This kid named Austin just got in touch with me the other day. He's involved in "Silenzio Statico", a zine that documents what's going on in the South Central LA Latin/Chicano/a hardcore scene right now. Before he'd gotten in touch, my friend Candice highly encouraged me to check out Tuberculosis and I did and I thought they were hella cute and then I watched an episode of LA Raw Ponx video fanzine "Fronteras Desarmadas". They totally got it goin' on down there and I'm so jealous!

When I lived in the Bay Area circa 2005, I remember having conversations with other brown punks wondering if we could ever have our own scene the way women in punk did with riot girl. I know damn well there's a tendency to romanticize past happenings that you weren't around to see first hand. I know it's not like every time Bikini Kill played a show, someone rolled out a pink carpet for them to walk down and then all of these perfect riot girl bands opened for them and then they all got naked, smoked some weed and prayed to Gaia together. But still, riot girl made other girls want to get involved with punk. It made women want to make their own feminist DIY punk culture.

For whatever reason, Afro-Punk doesn't seem to be doing that for black kids. Or perhaps it's doing it for individual black kids across the U.S., Canada & western Europe, but we don't have any kind of political DIY art movement yet. And hell no, I'm not counting the corporate sponsored Afro-Punk tours as signs of a movement. Please.

I think mostly it's just a question of numbers. In LA and parts of Texas, everywhere you look, you see a (light) brown face looking back at you. And since Latinos generally don't have that same kind of pressure to like a certain type of music according to their race, like black people do, it's generally gonna be easier to find LatinPunx than AfroPunx. There's always been a Latino HC scene in Cali, and "Mas Alla De Los Gritos" ("Beyond the Screams") came out long before the "Afro-Punk" documentary did. Of course, it all depends on where you are. I'm thinking about my friends Ana & Mando surrounded by all those white people in Portland, Oregon. They're Latin art punk kids orginally from LA and they play in a two piece called Magic Johnson, in which they sing all of their lyrics in Spanish to an audience who mostly has no idea what they're saying. I hope one day, they get to play with XYX from Monterrey, NL, Mexico cuz obviously not all Latin punx play hardcore. Adding Mutating Meltdown (Austin) to that imaginary lineup = dream show.

Having missed the 80s, I've never been much of a hc kid myself, but I'm inspired by how overtly political many of those bands are. The LA Raw Ponx are no different. From what I've seen, they can't wait to speak out about the fact that we still live in a racist police state that we should all be actively critiquing and resisting. Whenever I'm in a band, my lyrics tend to get kind of dreamy and personal, but after watching that Tuberculosis interview, I finally wanna try to speak what's on my mind instead of hiding behind abstractions.

This is such a cool time for punk rock! I'm so glad I didn't give up on it! MRR is run by feminists, brown punks across the country are trying to get together. This is the moment many of us have been waiting for. We can still change the world, and in fact we already have.

For DIY punk shows in New Orleans or to get in touch: nomorefiction@gmail.com