The NYPD Rips Up Rappers
Rebel Diaz and their hip-hop politics run afoul of the cops
By Tom Robbins
Wednesday, July 7 2008
On June 18, a pair of brothers named Rodrigo and Gonzalo Venegas decided to take a friend visiting from Chicago for a city tour. The brothers Venegas, who comprise two-thirds of the activist hip-hop group known as Rebel Diaz, are big on the Bronx, and one of the sites they wanted to show their pal was the wonderful wall mural dedicated to the late rapper Big Pun on Westchester Avenue in Hunts Point.
Gonzalo Venegas, 22, whose rap name is G1, tells what happened when they reached the corner of Westchester and Simpson Street: “We see police picking up boxes of street vendors’ product and throwing it away. This one vendor was looking all bewildered and helpless. We approached him, and he says in Spanish that he doesn’t understand why they are taking his stuff.”
The pair asked the police if it was all right for them to translate. The cops, Gonzalo says, didn’t seem to have a problem. One of the officers explained that there were health-department violations, but others became belligerent, he says, and told the brothers to butt out. This degenerated further when the brothers asked for badge numbers.
It is important here to understand that in addition to being rappers, the brothers Venegas—whose Chilean parents fled into exile after Pinochet’s coup—are also organizers. In fact, the slogan of their group is: “If Hip Hop organized, the whole world would be in trouble.”