MEANING OF THE TRADEMARK “Da Hood”.
The term “Da Hood” comes from colloquial American slang, specifically from urban culture. Although it can be confused with it, it does not refer at all to the term ghetto, or at least to its negative connotations; on the contrary, the term “Hood person” is perceived as something positive, as a remarkable and successful person who has emerged from less favorable circumstances than others. Although this does not mean that it refers to people who may have succeeded in the ghetto, a place of gangsta and more hardened people. Rather, the Hood arises with the project neighborhoods where middle-class families are accommodated who, although they share ethnicity and origins with the ghettos, do not live under the same circumstances at all.
Hood” is a respectful and affectionate way to refer to your neighborhood, unlike ghetto which is more of an empty word of hope. A “Hood” is a person who not only succeeds in his personal life despite his origins, but also does not forget his neighborhood and wants to improve it. There may be “Hood persons” in the ghetto, but this occurs after the project neighborhoods.
It could be said that these neighborhoods are the result of a possible economic development in the originally more marginal sectors of the city, so that the people who live directly in these project neighborhoods can coexist with the reminiscence of the ghettos, but by no means can they say that they live under the same circumstances of what was.
So a “Hood” person can also be described as acting as if he or she is from the ghetto even though he or she is not, acting in the sense of pulling forward with an admirable attitude. When you want to negatively label other people who act as if they live in the ghetto but in a negative way you call them Wanksta, a person who acts like a gangsta (violent and uncontrolled ghetto person) but has never done anything thug or gangsta in his life.
It can be explained with some cinematographic examples. In Boyz N The Hood the tragedy lies in the fact that these kids from project neighborhoods (Cuba Gooding JR, Ice Cube…etc) are dragged down by the old ghetto values (vendettas, territoriality…) and live between the opportunity to get ahead and live a better life and the weight of the pessimism of the old ghetto. The protagonist Tre Styles (Cuba Gooding JR) is a “Home Boy” who has grown up knowing only the project neighborhood and his destiny will be to become a “Hood person” when he manages to overcome all that situation.
His father Furious Style (Laurence Fishburne) is a “Hood person” who comes from the ghetto and tries to keep his son from being dragged down by those values and pessimism that he has had to live with more intensely. “Doughboy” (Ice Cube) however is a person who lives in more or less favorable family circumstances but fails to overcome the ghetto values and see a different future for his own person.
As a counterpart, he has his brother, a promising athlete who almost unconsciously represents the “person Hood” he would like to be. So Doughboy is for most of the film a Wanksta and his friends pick on him until a personal event leads him to act like a gangsta even though he later regrets it.
Another cinematic example is City of God.
The main character, Buscape, is a person who lives from the emergence of the favela to its development as a project neighborhood. He lives with the crudest and most extreme values and facts of the ghetto but with the passage of time, simply because he does not want to be dragged by those values, he ends up becoming a homeboy who knows well the origins of his neighborhood and is a “Hood person” because he manages to overcome all those circumstances by finding a passion that will allow him to survive: photography. As a counterpart there is Little Ze who represents all the negatives of being a gangsta and never ends up reforming or changing. It is the worst thing that can give a ghetto and even ends up being but that its supposed influences being small.
In conclusion, DaHood is a term that is difficult to understand for those of us who have not experienced truly limiting circumstances such as growing up in a ghetto, but it represents a positive view of it.
