Low-G arrived to the U.S. as an illegal alien in New York at nine-years old. He made his way to the Rio Grande Valley, then up to Houston. He couldn't speak English and would soon have to put together a Second Ward gang called GTC (Gangsta Type Criminals) to fight his own people, Mexican-American kids and Black kids who made fun of him and his fellow ESL students for not speaking English and wearing L.A. Gear tennis shoes versus Air Jordan kicks. It led to a life of serious gangbanging and eventually a murder charge he was acquitted of in 1995 at 16 years old.

The thing about Second Ward's Latino rappers is that they're no studio gangstas. They've truly lived the thug life and have lost friends to bullets and to jail time, as a result of shooting bullets. Not glorifying the life (we'll let hip-hop do that) but we can't help but think that maybe it took those kinds of nuts, and "I don't give a fuck" attitude to enter a genre of music that you know already wasn't going to have a warm welcoming. 

Regardless, it's thanks to artists like Low-G and all those Second Ward cats that helped pave the way for the wealth of Latin rap we have available today in Texas. Low-G is also special because he's one of the few artists that rap in Spanish in a way that resonates with the streets. If you're a fan of music, you might spit off a few rappers in Latin America or Mexico that do it, but it's different. Low-G is from the Houston streets and if you know anything about rap, where the messenger is from is just as important as the message.

Low-G took the Texas Latin Rap Awards' "Best Spanish Songwriter" in 2009 and twice before that. For those whose assimilation swept them away from their native language and could only take with them a handful of words in the process, or those like us, who were born three, four or five family generations into the United States and didn't have the opportunity to learn it, but wanted to, Low-G's work gives you the only precious chance to know Spanish for a few bars and sound cool speaking it.