Guest Commentary written by
Tama Brisbane
Tama L. Brisbane is Stockton’s Poet Laureate Emerita and a literary and performing arts consultant.
I watched a new era in Stockton’s hip-hop scene come of age.
Moving to the Central Valley city in the early 2000s, I found a hip-hop community that was its own form of resistance. Smoldering frustration with poverty, racial tension and a reputation for violence that it couldn’t seem to shake. Stockton’s sound was silenced more often than it was supported…