Kevin Bronson on July 26th, 2021

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“Corre,” the new banger from Tijuana-bred, L.A.-based singer-songwriter Ceci Bastida, is broadly about the immigrant experience — but not only the one which she witnessed as a youth and then as an Angeleno. Palestinian rapper/activist Tamer Nafar checks in with some pointed verses that draw some parallels between refugees.

Of the song, Bastida says: “I started writing ‘Corre’ because I wanted to talk about people in different parts of Latin America who live in constant danger and decide to make the long, deadly journey to come to the United States to seek asylum just to end up being collected and held in detention camps while they wait incessantly to see if their claims will be heard or if they will be deported back to the places they fled. Growing up next to the border wall that separates Mexico from the United States made me aware of this fight from an early age.”

The scope of the song broadens as Nafar, a founding member of the Palestinian hip-hop group DAM, enters.

“I first heard about him from his revolutionary band DAM, pioneers of Palestinian hip hop,” Bastida says. “He is very smart, an amazing rapper and a prominent political voice. I knew that he would be the perfect person to collaborate with. Tamer is a Palestinian living inside Israel under occupation, and although our struggles are different, they have many similarities. Both the United States and Israel are societies that have built borders to keep out the unwanted. Both have built their countries through colonial violence, land seizures and expulsions. And in 2014, the U.S. hired a private Israeli military manufacturer to build a ‘virtual wall’ and control the influx of migrants who cross into the U.S. To this day, Israeli security companies help militarize the Mexican border and Israeli police help train the U.S. police. Tamer’s daily life is similar to the one I had when I lived in Tijuana and also to life here in Los Angeles, a city of migrants, of people who never wanted to leave their home but in the end had no other choice.”

She adds: “In the song, Tamer and I play very different roles. I imagined myself as a migrant mother who is talking to my young son before heading north and promising that I will never leave him. ‘My body will be a shield that will protect you,’ I tell him. The wall that we will face is like the one that Tamer wants to tear down. ‘[Punch] the apartheid wall’, he says, ‘break it down and run, run, towards the sun'”

The video for the song, which combines footage shot in L.A. and Palestine, is the work of Jacqueline Santillan and Matthew Beighley (the married duo who make music as Wait. Think. Fast.).

||| Watch: The video for “Corre”