Rap Opportunity, Only Just Across El Rio Potomac

It's an American dream -- the dream of young tattooed men who jump in a car, crank up the stereo, drive like hell to a recording studio, lay down killer tracks for their very own CD -- a CD that in no time will be blasting from big speakers in cars and clubs around the country.

Ol' Skool Ru is at the wheel of his teal Scion, wearing silver sneakers, gray sweats, a red Nationals jacket, a white pirate kerchief and a big costume rock in each earlobe.

Ru reads a sign on the highway and shouts out: "Prince William County, here we are!" He taps the glove compartment. "I got my passport in the glove."

He's serious. Whenever he drives down from Columbia to make music in the county with the famously tough immigration enforcement laws, he says he brings his passport. "I don't have nothing to worry about. I'm in my country, but I hate being harassed," he says.

He's also known as Ruben Diaz, 30, scion of Pinochet protesters in Chile, who switches to button-down shirts and slacks for his day job helping immigrant families in the Montgomery County schools.

Folded in the back of the Scion is Marvin Lainez, a lanky 22-year-old construction worker, a descendant of Hondurans and Mexicans. He is carrying his birth certificate for protection. In another car making the same trip is Ghetto Fama, also 22, a large, round telephone lineman with a shaved head, better known as Carlos Martinez to his Salvadoran parents.

Ru called Fama to remind him to bring his passport, too, but Fama couldn't find it. So Fama left his Crown Victoria at home and jammed himself into his parents' subcompact, which has the name of the family business printed on the door: "Spotless Cleaning Service."

"It's not a hot car," Fama says. "The cops will say, 'He's cleaning houses, leave him alone.' "

They pull into a neighborhood with a golf course tucked among the subdivisions. They stop before a house with a brick front and a two-car garage.

Lainez has never been to the studio before. Already he's impressed.

"These are big houses, man," he says. "We go to Manassas, we go to fight the government, into the house of some Latinos who have made it. It's a beautiful thing."