I'm one of hip-hop's original b-boys. As breaking grows internationally, we shouldn't forget its Black and brown roots.

• Richard Colón, widely known by his nickname "Crazy Legs," is a b-boy and early pioneer of breaking.
• Crazy Legs was exposed to hip-hop as a kid in the Bronx, and went on to create iconic dance moves, like the back spin.

This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Richard "Crazy Legs" Colón, a b-boy who pioneered breaking in the '70s and '80s. The essay has been edited for length and clarity.

I'm one of the people who helped bring hip-hop around the world. I come from a single-parent family of five boys, one girl. We grew up with all the typical ups and downs of a childhood in the Bronx — you name it, I've faced it, the good and the bad.

I've always been around music because my family's Puerto Rican, so all you need is a reason for a party. I grew up in the disco era, as well as the funk and soul era. That was the music I grew up around, whether it was with people I was hanging out with on the streets or back at home with family: Michael Jackson, Barry White, Donna Summer, El Gran Combo, Héctor Lavoe.

I first fell in love with what would come to be known as hip-hop watching park jams in the Bronx as a kid, like the Cold Rush Brothers, the Furious Five, the Treacherous Three — the pioneers making rap music. I was watching these people before they had recording careers.

I started breaking when I was 10 years old

When I first encountered it, it wasn't called hip-hop yet. I was nine years old, and I saw my brother Robert and a DJ named Afrika Islam, who were part of a b-boy crew, dancing in front of where we lived on Garfield Street in the Bronx. As I saw my brother throwing himself on the floor without any music or any kind of context, I felt shame and humiliation for my family. I had no idea what he was doing.

It wasn't until a year later, when someone brought me to a park jam on a school yard on 180th Street, that I began to understand. I saw all these people, it was like they were all victims of the Pied Piper. It's like, you hear the echoing off the buildings from the thundering sound system, and then you find your way to these parts and realize, "Oh, wow, there's a jam right here." Next thing you know, it's a whole vibe. People are dancing, maybe they're tagging up on the wall, and you have a DJ and some rappers.

I was just 10 years old, a shy kid from a very poor family, with little to no resources for any kind of after-school activities. But this park jam became my way of being competitive. I can't sit here and tell you that I rationalized at the age of 10 that this was the way I was going to express myself, but it became my voice.

I got my nickname in middle school from the captain of the cheerleading squad. She saw me dancing in the auditorium, practicing for a production of "Grease," and she said, "Ooh, he got some crazy legs!" After they saw me breaking on stage, the whole school called me "Crazy Legs."

Competition is the bedrock of hip-hop

Hip-hop was a genesis of things that came together, a group of people who had mutual appreciation for one another. You would try out being an emcee or a DJ or a graffiti writer, but then sometimes you found out you were horrible at certain ones and great at others. And then you stuck to what you did best.

That's how you got your name in the scene, by putting your reputation on the line in competition. Hip-hop is built on competition.

These weren't necessarily all organized competitions because we didn't have the resources or the facilities to do that. You were lucky if you had the opportunity to use a community center in your neighborhood. But you would go to an underground party or find someone you heard about in a particular neighborhood. Maybe you would catch them coming out of school or sitting on a street and go, "Hey, are you this person? You break? Wanna battle?" Out there on the street or on the tenement hallway, that's how your name got around. We were just so hungry. We had so much fire.

Competition creates an element of surprise. The more you practice, the more you stumble upon things. When you catch it yourself or somebody is watching you and is like, "Whoa, do that again," you know you're onto something. When you see people spin on their backs, or do the windmill, those were moves that I created. Both were complete accidents while I was practicing.

Building my legacy

I never set out to become an entertainer or some kind of pioneer. I did it out of love. To me, breaking was just what the average Latino did growing up. It's just culture.

It took me 10 years to realize I'd made a move that went around the world. In the world of breaking, you don't want to be a biter, who's someone who steals others' moves, so in the early 90s, I'd get upset because people were doing my moves. But my friends said, "Legs, you gotta appreciate that. You created that. They love your shit."

I became the president of the Rock Steady Crew in 1981, and I set out to help others in the community get into breaking. I never had a mentor or a father figure, so I had to figure a lot of things on my own.

I'm glad my contribution has been cemented already. I'm 57 years old now, and there's no way I can do any of these new moves. Evolution always wins, right? But when it comes to the future of breaking, I can only hope the Olympics doesn't overshadow the independent promoter. Even though we continue to expand, we still have our own events and want to sustain the education within our community.

One of the first brochures I saw of the breaking program at the Olympics only had white people on it. If this dance comes from Black and brown people, why aren't they in the brochure? Because it's our right by default to have someone of color on that cover.

Once you start losing that Black and brown vibe of where this comes from, it becomes something else. It's no longer culture.