“On Wednesday, we will be getting a visit from Las Hijas del Maiz, Daughters of Corn,” said Professor Moody.

After being informed that our class was getting a visit from a Nicaraguan dance troupe, I was quite excited about meeting people from a culture that I had been studying for the past month. Immediately after class, I headed back to my dorm, pulled out my laptop, and Googled our visitors. Here’s the result of my first search:

For some reason still unbeknownst to me, my brain had registered the words Los Hijosinstead of Las Hijas. Rather than finding the high-spirited dancers that I would eventually meet, I found myself staring into the hard, stoic faces of three Latino rappers. At that point, I was a bit surprised, but wasn’t quite alarmed enough to doubt that my search had gone completely in the wrong direction. So watch the entire video I did.

Interestingly, my initial astonishment dissolved as I watched the music video. The song expresses some very dark and melancholy themes. The protagonist is a young man who lives in destitute with his grandfather, barely surviving off of the meager produce from their farm. He laments the insecurities of his community, the political corruption, hunger and violence. He bemoans the death of his grandfather, who died working in the same field that now enslaves him. These themes perfectly characterize the gross and systemic brutality of Somoza’s regime, when Nicaraguan life force was suppress to a minimum. Famine and violence plagued the poor, while the wealthy bathed in the treasures of their embezzlement. There was a great overlap between the song and Nicaraguan history, and I wholeheartedly thought that “Los Hijos del Maiz” was a work by the Daughters of Corn.

I now know that the song above is an original piece by Kinto Sol (a Latin Hip-Hop group based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) and not by the Nicaraguan Dance Troupe, but to find such a coincidental intersection between two almost completely unrelated groups of people was truly a surprise.