Rapper Yaoh finds his future in his past
by Gustavo Arellano
Yaoh was born in 1978 on the eve of a Salvadoran civil war that wouldn�t end until 1989, leaving tens of thousands dead and the country in ruins. But his story begins where the story of Orange County�s Chicano punk movement really begins, sometime after the leveling of the Aztec empire in 1519. The Spaniards set their swords upon Cuzcatlan�a place they�d later, ironically christen El Salvador, "the Savior"�and forced Natives from the Valley of Mexico to battle Cuzcatlan�s inhabitants. After the successful subjugation, these kidnapped mercenaries intermixed with the locals, settling in the capital city of San Salvador in a section now known as "Barrio de los Mexicanos: the ghetto of Mexicans".
This is where Yaoh was born. And this is where a primordial tradition of resistance was born as well: during Yaoh�s childhood, the colonia hosted some of the fiercest battles of the Salvadoran civil war. "You couldn�t live there after a while," he recalls, his always-serious eyes now squirming in remembrance. "People were always disappearing with no explanation. And if you didn�t join either the government or the rebels, you�d probably be dead."
He remembers as a child seeing corpses rotting on the street, remembers right-wing death squads storming houses and demanding payoffs from frightened villagers. But mostly, Yaoh remembers the hiding. The Salvadoran military became notorious for kidnapping children to enlist in the war�much as the Spaniards had done 450 years earlier�and whenever the military came to Yaoh�s village, someone would signal the parents to hide their children.
"Everyone would go to a store," he says�no bigger than the office where we�re talking today, he adds. "And they�d stuff us in a hidden cabinet like sardines. I was confused at the time, but I knew that if I didn�t do what I was told . . ."
Yaoh concludes abruptly, "You had to do it."
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