Life after Los Crudos promises more music and political activism for Sorrondeguy, who is now raising money to create a public meeting space in Pilsen. Although it will be used for an occasional punk concert, the space, tentatively titled "Nuestra Casa," will more often be the venue for the activities of community organizers and local artists. Sorrondeguy, however, is digging in his heels for what is likely to be an extended battle to keep Nuestra Casa open: "We have serious issues with the local politicians here, and they will try to close us down." After challenging, at a neighborhood meeting, local alderman Danny Soliz on his favors to outside developers and his support for gentrification-friendly tax codes, Sorrondeguy and his roommates were suddenly evicted from their apartment. In addition to planning Nuestra Casa, an undeterred Sorrondeguy has brought his message to Pilsen's Christo Rey Jesuit High School, where he has twice been invited to speak with students about music, politics and low-income community organizing.

Whereas Los Crudos once represented an anomaly in punk rock, the band has helped to draw young Latinos into the underground through a highly politicized point of entry, and has in turn helped to raise awareness in the predominantly white, middle-class punk subculture. "A lot of new young Latino bands are forming and singing about these issues, singing about how California's propositions have affected them and their families," explains Sorrondeguy. "It brought a whole new voice into punk rock. A lot of kids were not talking about these things, because they weren't directly affecting them. Our experiences were not the same as those of a lot of other punk kids. For us, this became the focal point of what we were doing."

Like Los Crudos, Rage Against the Machine is among the small number of punk groups with nonwhite members; unlike Los Crudos, their music is released by a major label, Epic, and they have sold more than 8 million records. Members of Rage Against the Machine were musically educated in the hardcore scene, and the band continues to take cues from Fugazi and other punk trailblazers. RATM guitarist Tom Morello is dismayed that so few of the band's commercially successful peers on major labels "are willing to take a stance on political issues that go beyond feel-good celebrity causes." The band's overtly political lyrics and the revolutionary visual imagery that it projects in all of its album artwork and music videos are reinforced by RATM's participation in direct actions, including civil disobedience in solidarity with the garment workers' union, UNITE, and the coordination of delegations to Chiapas, Mexico, to help bring an international spotlight to the Zapatista uprising. "I was an angry teenager in a small Midwestern town," says Morello about his own musical upbringing, "and a band like the Clash was giving me a much more accurate portrayal of US foreign policy in Central America than Dan Rather was. It confirmed some of my suspicions and helped fire me up to pursue something bigger than sex, drugs and rock and roll."

Unfortunately, punk rock has not enjoyed the same cachet among older progressives that artists like Country Joe and the Fish and Bob Dylan once did. Punk activism has always existed outside most progressive political channels, and its subversive undercurrents have, for the most part, been unrecognized. Positive Force's co-founder, Mark Andersen, is troubled by this divide. While acknowledging the confrontational--sometimes antisocial--underpinnings of the musical culture, Andersen has been working for years with his group to build bridges between the underground and like-minded activists. When Positive Force was conceived in the mid-eighties, punk organizers in DC were recovering from an ill-fated partnership with the Revolutionary Communist Party. For the most part, he says, the left has not "reached out to some of the very creative young people who could possibly formulate new ways of approaching political questions, new ways of bridging justice and service, and ultimately building some sort of a movement that could actually put the left in contention for organized power in our society."

Andersen's reflections are echoed by others in the music underground who feel that the traditional left lacks a visible cultural component that could give its causes more populist appeal. Of course, punk rockers must accept some culpability for the chasm that separates them from older generations of political activists. Underground rebellion has too often become more of a vehicle for expressing youthful desires and frustrations than for fighting injustice; for many punks, the prospect of working side by side with older activists who may resemble their parents is decidedly uncool. Fugazi's MacKaye describes his own aversion to activism as a teen: "Straight politics or radical politics--it all seemed boring to me." Having patiently endured the major labels' foray into punk rock, Andersen now sees the development of a broad and inclusive vision as essential to the politics of the underground. "The independent music community needs a political analysis--an anticorporate analysis--to connect it to other common institutions and to a general ethic of fostering healthy, democratic community."

And now you want to mobilize
A million misled youth against
Some enemy that you devised
Don't trust our loyalty.
   --Beefeater, "Insurrection Chant"

With independent rock providing many disaffected kids with a portal to political activism, the established left must challenge itself to look beyond the bland feel-goodism being churned out by the major labels. "The great tragedy of the sixties was that there was a whole counterculture that could have been the basis for a transformation," says Positive Force's Andersen. "Somewhere along the line, the politicos and the artists split apart." The organizing efforts of entities like Positive Force and Mumia 911 provide springboards for crossover, but if the left fails to recognize the value of the political and artistic expression that punks have been developing over the past two decades, it will lose one more natural ally in the battle to stem the rightward drift of American politics. Punks, for their part, need to stop romanticizing isolation, or they may find their political endeavors, along with their music, doomed to perpetual obscurity.

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