Program

There is a less widely told—but absolutely essential—story in the history of West Coast hip hop: the role of Latino artists in shaping the culture, with a focus on brothers Henry “Hen-Gee” Garcia and Eric "Evil E" Garcia, pioneering DJs and MCs of Honduran Garífuna heritage.

When we talk about the origins of West Coast hip hop, the conversation often centers on household names like Ice-T, N.W.A, and the gangsta rap movement that exploded out of South Central Los Angeles in the late 1980s. But what often gets left out of that narrative is how deeply Latino communities—especially Afro-Latinos—were intertwined from the very beginning in building and defining hip hop culture on the West Coast.

Hip hop didn’t arrive in Los Angeles as a fully formed East Coast product. It evolved in parallel, through party crews, breakdancing circles, graffiti writers, and street-corner poets. It was shaped by the shared realities of Black and Brown youth living in neighborhoods marked by poverty, over-policing, systemic neglect, but also rich cultural pride and resilience. These youth took hip hop’s building blocks—MCing, DJing, breaking, and graffiti—and remixed them through their own lens, giving birth to a distinctly West Coast sound and style.

This is where Hen-Gee and Evil E Garcia enter the story. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and migrating to the Los Angeles area as teenagers, Hen-Gee and Evil E brought with him the sensibilities of East Coast street culture and combined them with the rapidly evolving scene in LA. As Afro-Latinos of Garífuna descent—a culture rooted in African and Indigenous traditions from the Atlantic coast of Central America—they embodied a layered identity that reflected the multicultural reality of West Coast life. Their Afro-Latino background placed them at a unique cultural crossroads, and that intersection became central to their artistic voice.

Hen-Gee rose to prominence as part of Rhyme Syndicate, the influential hip hop collective founded by Ice-T. His older brother, Eric “Evil E” Garcia, served as Ice-T’s official DJ. The two brothers would later form their own duo, Hen-Gee & Evil E, releasing the album Brothers in 1991. But their work began long before that record dropped. As early as the mid-1980s, they were active performers, touring and recording with Ice-T, and bringing East Coast hip hop’s technical sophistication to West Coast stages—scratching, lyricism, cadence, and battle-ready energy.

Hen-Gee and Evil E were not simply background figures. They were central to the cultural exchange between coasts. They helped introduce and adapt East Coast hip hop practices—particularly DJ techniques and lyrical complexity—into the growing LA scene. Their presence helped establish an early template for what would later become West Coast hip hop—before it had a name, a sound, or a national spotlight. And crucially, they did this years before Cypress Hill, Kid Frost, Mellow Man Ace, or A Lighter Shade of Brown reached mainstream visibility.

This timing is significant. While artists like Kid Frost would go on to define Chicano rap with hits like “La Raza” in 1990, and Mellow Man Ace would introduce Spanglish flows with “Mentirosa” in 1989, Hen-Gee and Evil E were already touring internationally, performing at sold-out shows, and recording with one of the pioneers of gangsta rap. Their visibility in the early 1980s helped legitimize and normalize Latino and Afro-Latino participation in hip hop culture—at a time when those identities were often rendered invisible.

Importantly, Hen-Gee’s and Evil E's Garífuna background adds a vital and often overlooked dimension to this narrative. Afro-Latinos have historically been marginalized in both Black and Latino cultural spaces, often erased from both canons. The Garcia brothers challenge that erasure. Their presence reminds us that identity in hip hop has never been binary—that the culture has always been shaped by hybridity, migration, and intersectionality. Their story shows us that Afro-Latino voices were not additions to hip hop—they were there at the foundation.

In revisiting their contributions, we revisit a broader truth: West Coast hip hop was never a monolith. It was born out of coalitions—across languages, neighborhoods, racial lines, and lived experiences. It fused the boom-bap of New York with the funk of LA, the language of the streets with barrio slang, the sounds of soul with the pulse of lowrider culture.

To understand hip hop in Southern California and the West Coast is to understand a shared creation between Black and Brown youth, and their story is not an exception to that rule—it is the rule. Their legacy stands as a testament to Afro-Latino innovation in hip hop, and as a bridge between communities that are too often siloed in our historical narratives.

So today, as we continue to reexamine and expand the canon of hip hop history, let us remember Henry “Hen-Gee” and Eric "Evil E" Garcia not just as a backup to Ice-T or a regional footnote, but as foundational figures—cultural translators, and symbol of hip hop’s true multicultural origins on the West Coast.

• Introduction/Moderator: - TBD
• Featured Speaker: Rapper-Producer Henry “Hen-Gee” Garcia: Pioneer, Innovator, Founding Architect, and Unofficial Cultural "Mayor" of West Coast Hip Hop; also Founding Member of The Latin Froz, instrumental in creating space for bilingual lyricism and Afro-Latino identity within a predominantly lighter-skinned hip-hop landscape