Beyond Dreams: Hip Hop Performances and Immigration Panel

Feb. 20 is the third installment of a four-month long series of panel discussions, performances, pre-show workshops, and community events at schools and other community sites and public spaces showcasing artists who engage the four elements of hip-hop in their work and are also immigrants with both the greater hip-hop culture and the pressing dialogue in immigration policy in the United States. The project is a cultural activist series that makes an asserted attempt to bridge the cutting-edge music of artists with their identity as immigrants uncovering some of the important historical and current day dialectic through music, dialogue, activism, and community engagement. Beyond Dreams makes the link between immigration and the arts, and has the capacity to educate all audiences but particular young people about the contributions of immigrants to our culture and musical heritage, especially here in the Bay Area. Each event will showcase the impact of music and art by immigrants and the impact on the hip hop movement and arts and culture locally and globally. This series builds on the 2012 NEA supported program Hip Hop Beyond Gender, a project that illuminated the inherent connection between hip hop culture and the struggle against misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. Beyond Immigrant Dreams takes the art form of hip-hop and explores it within another civil rights struggle of time in the context of immigration, documentation, and “dreamers.”