Latin America and the Caribbean haven’t gotten enough attention on this site. We’re going to intentionally rectify that, and I’m excited to start by sharing this video from sometimes collaborators of mine, Los Rakas.

Beyond having worked with Los Rakas I’m a fan, especially because they are able to take the best of what Panama represents in its multi-cultural, multi-lingual stew of Afro-Caribbean culture, and mix it so effortlessly with another amazingly multi-cultural place I once called home, Northern California.

The above video is for a single from the Hip Hop in Spanish project: 24 Horas Escuela de Karate, by the always impressive Ski Beats (check the first single with Spanish rapper Tote King here).

If you don’t know much about Panama’s historical cultural mix, I’d say start here. And if you really want to go in, head on over here for sounds like the following, and a lot more.

http://youtu.be/NLvhg_143Qg

About the Author

Boima Tucker is a music producer, DJ, writer, and cultural activist. He is the managing editor of Africa Is a Country, co-founder of Kondi Band and the founder of the INTL BLK record label.

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.