Given that most punks of that era were white kids without strong racial identities, it is unsurprising that of the race-class-gender trinity, race has been explored least in punk scholarship. Like the participants, the music itself was very white: either three-chord rock ‘n’ roll with little rhythmic complexity, or cerebral and discordant art rock influenced by white avant-garde traditions. As an overwhelmingly white phenomenon, punk rock of the 1970s and early ‘80s infrequently made overt reference to race and racial understandings. It is perhaps more surprising that punks of color rarely addressed race in the music of punk’s early years.
Los Angeles is a great place to examine Latinx punk, because the scene was home to a significant number of Chicanos, even in the early, relatively insular Hollywood days. Early punk rock was hyper-focused on individualism, and initially, Chicanos in the L.A. subculture thought of themselves first and foremost as punks, i.e., as individuals rebelling from mainstream popular culture. In their own view, race was incidental to their participation in the scene. For some punks, this understanding of self changed over time, however, and by the early 1980s, participants like those in the band Los Illegals embraced an identity that was explicitly and vocally Chicano as much as it was punk. This paper explores the processes by which that shift happened.