San Antonio-based rapper and UTSA professor Marco Cervantes, known as MexStep, has released his first new music in nearly three years.
“The Eagle,” an urgent commentary on issues of displacement and colonialism at the U.S.-Mexico border, also marks the first time Cervantes has collaborated with DJ/producer Svani Quintanilla, or Principe Q, on a release.
Quintanilla is notably credited with inventing a new music genre called “screwmbia,” which combines Latin music styles with a uniquely Houstonian strain of hip hop. He also happens to be the son of Latin music superstar A.B. Quintanilla and the nephew of late icon Selena Quintanilla.
With a family legacy like that, it is perhaps no surprise that Quintanilla believes it’s important to keep older Latino music styles — from Tejano to cumbia — fresh so that younger generations can relate to them in their own way. This is a part of how he sees his work with the screwmbia sound.
Quintanilla said he loves working with Cervantes because the rapper “doesn’t stay in one place, so making beats for him, I don’t have to stay in a particular box either.”
Known for infusing most of his work with commentary on social, cultural and economic issues, Cervantes said that his latest song — and its release during Hispanic Heritage Month, with election season ramping up — is inspired by his desire to continue using his music as a platform to talk about important issues.
During Hispanic Heritage Month, when the tenor tends toward celebration, Cervantes feels it is “important to also state something that can build awareness around issues facing the community.”
“The Eagle” is at once a reflective bit of poetry, a critique and a plea, with Cervantes challenging his listener to take a broader, more critical view of what’s happening at the border.
“The public discourse about border issues can be dehumanizing,” he said.
“Read the math, heed the facts, walk the path / McAllen, Laredo, Brownsville, El Paso to Eagle Pass / barbed wire fences, set up after nations were invented / ownership amended, battles won and lost but never ended,” he raps in the song’s second verse.
Meanwhile, the chorus and end of the track center nature’s example as a kind of wisdom, offering that “the eagle flies back and forth crossing state lines” and that “Madre Tierra has the final say.”
Cervantes said that he chose the eagle as the centerpiece and namesake of this song because he “wanted to make a statement on respecting nature and showing compassion to each other.”
“When I reference animals, plants and bodies of water, I wanted to pronounce the ways nature, like people, continually crosses borders,” he said. “Although some may try to get in the way of this movement, La Madre Tierra, Mother Earth, has final say on how we exist here.”
For his part, Quintanilla feels a personal connection with the eagle as a symbol.
“The eagle going back and forth across the border applies to me and my life so well,” Quintanilla said. “And it’s cool that he’s rapping this on a beat that is very much on both sides of the border.”
Fans hoping to hear more from the duo of Cervantes and Quintanilla may not have to wait long. Both artists were eager to note that more music, whether an EP or a full album, is on the way.
