BOOKS / FILMS
Latin Empire Productions preserves and celebrates the true origins of the Latin Hustle and its Puerto Rican History. Discover our legacy, learn about our history, and discover why this culture continues to bring people together worldwide.
Set against the backdrop of the South Bronx in the 1970s, this powerful true story follows Willie Estrada and his friends as they navigate gang life, violence, and the search for peace. From the chaos of street battles to the birth of the Latin Hustle and Rock dance, the book captures how music and dance became an alternative to violence and gang warfare.
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More than a memoir, it’s a firsthand account of how young people reclaimed their community, creating a cultural movement that spread from neighborhood parties to clubs across New York City.
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Members of the Imperial Bachelors
Memoirs from the Concrete Jungle is the continuation of a journey that began on the streets of the South Bronx. It is about growth, faith, and the strength to rise when everything seems lost. A survivor of the South Bronx during its darkest years becomes the builder of his own dreams, trading the dance floor for boardroom meetings in corporate America, and speaking truth no matter the cost.
​Following the first book’s mission to bring peace through the Latin Hustle, this chapter chronicles Willie’s next steps as he rebuilds his life with integrity, starts a family, and learns what real responsibility and devotion to community truly require. It is a story about family intervention, hard work, love, and profound loss.
It follows Willie Estrada as he rises after a toxic marriage, returns to school, and is saved by family intervention when he stands at the edge of self-destruction.
The result is a powerful and multifaceted story about self-belief, cultural preservation, and a journey of self-discovery that leads to a destiny shaped by love, truth, and unbreakable spirit.
This feature-length documentary reveals how a South Bronx gang, the Imperial Bachelors, chose dance over conflict and ignited a movement that inspired peace and reshaped a generation. Narrated by Willie Estrada and built from rare photos and original footage, the film traces how the Latin Hustle and Rock turned one of New York’s toughest neighborhoods into the cradle of a cultural revolution.
It is a heartfelt story of one gang’s resilience, creativity, and triumph, told with honesty and authenticity.
Members of the Imperial Bachelors
Author’s Reflection
When I wrote The Dancing Gangsters of the South Bronx, I wanted to capture the nuances of my generation, the laughter, the danger, the music, and the wild beauty of growing up in a turbulent but creative world. It was a story about youth, unity, and how the Latin Hustle brought peace where chaos once ruled. It reminded people that the South Bronx was alive, creative, and full of flavor long before anyone gave it credit.
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Memoirs from the Concrete Jungle came from a different place inside me, which was twenty-six years in the making. It was written after the music stopped, when I had to face myself and everything life had thrown my way. It speaks about love and loss, betrayal and forgiveness, and how faith kept me standing when nothing else could. It is honest, unfiltered, and rooted in everything I lived through.
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I also added the history I experienced since the 1960s from my own perspective, not only from my exposure to my family’s prominent dance culture and traditions, but also everything else I witnessed firsthand, up close and personal. That includes my participation in gang culture, music, and the styles we adopted to fit in as Americans before and after our arrival from Puerto Rico. People today act as if they can tell us what our influences were, but most were not there. My observation is, how can someone else tell me, or anyone else for that matter, where our influence came from? For me, that is a personal preference that stems from what inspires me.
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That said, I remember those early years clearly. Yes, there was tension between Blacks and Puerto Ricans at first, but much of it came from language barriers, belief systems, and the different ways we were subjugated. What most people fail to recognize is that the larger New York community, the dominant groups who had settled here before us, carried their own racism and made sure we felt it. That prejudice ran deeper than anything between Blacks and Puerto Ricans. During what we called the Great Puerto Rican Migration, there was also a substantial Black Migration from the Southern States, with both communities seeking their own place in a city that did not welcome us.
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The first book captured the movement that saved my generation, and how music and dance served as the catalyst that brought peace to our broken community. This one tells the personal story of the man who had to find his way back from obscurity and the influence of negative choices. Together, they reveal how purpose and pain can define a life lived in survival mode and how the will to rise above and beyond the turbulence can be born from redemption.
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And Book Three: The Lost Generation, which I am currently working on, is my grand finale. It breaks through the myths and the noise, revealing our hidden stories, what really happened, and how history got twisted along the way. There are no filters, no apologies, and no pretentious reasoning, only truth told from the front lines by someone who lived it and documented that history well. It brings the story full circle and closes the gap between what people think they know and what really went down.
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The Estrada Family
