Close to the Edge by Sujatha Fernandes

least within hip hop. But if hip hop was an essentially black cultural form, as scholars such as Tricia Rose and later Imani Perry argued, then on what grounds did hip hoppers of other races claim to belong?
    I t's hard to understand much about race or hip hop in Chicago without visiting the South Side—the predominantly working-class part of the city populated by large numbers of blacks and Latinos. My chance came just a week after my trans-Pacific relocation—after my initial Cuban sojourn, I had briefly returned home to Sydney to prepare for my move to Chicago. I moved into an unfurnished apartment in the university neighborhood of Hyde Park before the semester started at the University of Chicago. Mike suggested that I come by his parents' house on the South Side to pick up a mattress that I could sleep on.
    I caught a bus from Hyde Park and then switched to the “L” train. As the train went on its aboveground route, I looked out of the window at the landscape. We passed burned-out carcasses of buildings, empty lots surrounded by barbed wire and overgrown with weeds, and boarded-up storefronts.
    The train whizzed by scores of graffiti pieces and tags. The veteran graffiti writer William Upski Wimsatt recounts in his book Bomb the Suburbs that hip hop culture in Chicago had some rocky beginnings. In 1974 a crew of New York City graffiti writers had a meeting with the Chicago gang Blackstone Rangers to introduce its members to graffiti. But the gang youth were not so interested. 2 It wasn't until about 1982 that graffiti took off in Chicago, with artists such as CTA, Car Crew, Trixter, and ABC Crew.
    Between 1985 and 1987 the rooftops along the CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) train lines were the focus of graffiti art. In 1987 Trixter and the ABC Crew began to paint trains like their counterparts in New York City and elsewhere, bombing entire lines like the Congress Line. In 1989 the area north of Chinatown became a hot spot for graffiti with the Wall of Fame around the Eighteenth Street railroad. 3 As Wimsatt recalls, sessions at the Wall of Fame were often preceded by all-city writers' meetings attended by upward of eighty kids, in an effort to unite crews across the city. 4
    B-boying had started in the mid- to late 1970s, with crews such as Down to Rock, Krazy Krew, and the Windy City Breakers. In 1978 Lord Cashus D started a chapter of Afrika Bambaataa's Universal Zulu Nation in Chicago. In 1990, together with Geoffrey Watts and Aaron Brown, Cashus D created a hip hop organization called the New World Order that flourished briefly and then died out. The political and organizational efforts of Chicago hip hop pioneers were linked to the city's history of militant units that included street gangs, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panthers. Hip hop meetings—with the first held in the Cabrini Green housing projects in 1985 by a high school senior named Warp—were a distinctly Chicago phenomenon and one of several efforts to organize the disparate Chicago scene. 5
    I got off at the Ashland and Sixty-third Street stop, and Mike was waiting there in his parents' beat-up, gun-metal gray 1993 Dodge Caravan.
    As we drove the few blocks along Sixty-third Street to Kedzie, Mike explained that the black population of the South Side had migrated from the rural South during the early and midtwentieth century to work in the steel mills and meatpacking plants. They were housed in tightly cramped conditions in the South Side's Black Belt and later in public housing projects such as the Trumbull Park Homes, Dearborn Homes, and the Robert Taylor Homes. But by the 1980s the industrial base of the South Side was in decline as meatpacking companies and steel factories, such as Wisconsin Steel and US Steel's South Works, closed down. Large sectors of the South Side turned to urban wasteland. Whites fled to the suburbs. Small businesses shut down. Banks foreclosed on people's homes. And through all this hardship, the