ALEX DE VORE
And You Don’t Stop
12
JULY 21-27, 2021
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SFREPORTER.COM
For Santa Fe’s 3HC breakdance crew, breaking is life
T
BY ALEX DE VORE a l e x @ s f r e p o r t e r. c o m
welve-year-old breakdancer Ricky Rodriguez Jr. is literally upside down inside a space at the New Mexico School for the Arts campus, which formerly housed op.cit books. The hardwood seems custom-made for dance and, nearby, bass thumps from a speaker connected to an MP3 player. “They say they have an ultrasound picture of me doing handstands,” he says. Rodriguez’s father and the rest of the 3HC breakdance crew’s leadership watch on as Little Ricky, as they call him, busts a series of moves to the music—impressive for anyone, let alone a kid who hasn’t quite hit junior high yet. A few weeks earlier on June 19, as locals packed the Plaza in droves for the Juneteenth Love & Happiness event—one of the first public affairs after the long, cold lockdowns—3HC arrived on the scene to perform windmills, flares, head spins and hand hops. Mouths agape, the concertgoers simply watched, abandoning their own dance moves in sheer wonder. These days it’s rarer to see the crew take to the streets like that, what with the pandemic and all—but even as the world around them has shifted and evolved, one can always be sure Ricky Rodriguez Sr., Alejandra Avila and Tyrone Clemons will be breaking somewhere. A staple in the dance scene since the ’90s, 3HC’s core has certainly changed over the years, but in its current incarnation, featuring Rodriguez Sr., Clemons and Avila as its guiding members, the crew has become a dedicated and nigh unstoppable force of dance. For Juneteenth on the Plaza, the trio was on fire, and someplace between the music from DJs D-Monic, Sol, Raashan Ahmad and others, the crowd learned exactly why the art of breakdance has risen and endured parallel to the establishment and rise of hip-hop itself—
