That block is the block.” And indeed, on Rutgers Street, a four-block stretch in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, you can see abuelitas pushing grocery carts past old Chinese men smoking cigarettes in undershirts young Asian American children walking to school past car stereos blasting Latin music. “It’s like Chinatown meets Puerto Rico, where the projects are, this weird Chinatown meets LES. “There’s this block over there that’s so fire, Rutgers,” he says. When we meet Morales at an apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown, he points out that just a block away, you can actually see the melting pot in action.
He’s proud of his ancestry, but is quick to admit that when it comes down to it, he’s a New Yorker first. Half Puerto Rican, half Irish, he’s a lifelong New Yorker. Morales is a producer and MC who records and performs with Ratking, a hip-hop group signed with XL Recordings. Perhaps no young rapper today embodies this spirit more than Patrick “Wiki” Morales. But when the mix happens within the five boroughs, it coalesces into something else, something uniquely New York. The ingredients aren’t unique, and most households in the 70s had turntables and records. Too poor to afford instruments, hip-hop’s pioneers took the tools they had (records, turntables) and created something no one had ever heard before.īoth hip-hop and its birthplace are a prime example of what happens when disparate cultures come together to make something new, something arguably better than the sum of its parts. Itself the child of soul, jazz, and disco, hip-hop was conceived in the basements and park jams, a youthful sound built from the record collections of a previous generation. Hip-hop has been a part of New York City’s longstanding diversity from its humble beginnings in the Bronx. Through Intersect, a new column by Matthew Ismael Ruiz, we’ll take a look at a pair of bands or musicians whose music represents a coalescence of disparate cultures to make something new. But not every cultural exchange is exploitative, and whether it’s through an exploration of personal identity, mutual respect, or just genuine curiosity, artists are constantly borrowing and sharing art and influence from other cultures. A s society slowly and painfully becomes more “woke,” we’re more careful than ever to identify and condemn cultural appropriation - the ugly exploitation of a culture for selfish gains.
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