Rather than assume that ethnicity or race necessarily marks the edges of one's culture or politics, the contributors to this dossier highlight the messy, blurry, and often contradictory relationships that arise when Chicana/os and African Americans engage one another. The essays explore the complicated mix of cooperation and conflict that characterize black-brown collaborations in activism, music, literature, and art. They illuminate how nonwhite racialized groups share and contest the past, present, and future. Instead of charting culture and politics through the prism of a singular race or ethnicity, the essayists choose to highlight the intersections of Chicana/o and African American lives, paying special attention to how culture, as critic George Lipsitz suggests, often serves as a dress rehearsal for the possibilities and limits of politics and social movements. The intertwining of Chicana/o and African American culture and politics, moreover, is not simply a recent phenomenon but is deeply historical, steeped in decades of experience, stories, and struggle. The rest of this introductory essay recalls something of the longer history of Chicana/o-African American cultural and political relations. (Contains 8 notes.)