Songfacts®:

• Hurray for the Riff Raff is the musical project of Alynda Segarra, an American indie rock musician of Puerto Rican heritage. This song bemoans the immigrants who traveled far from their homeland to the US for a chance at freedom, only to get lost in the system. Segarra wrote it after doing some volunteer work in her home state of Louisiana.
  
  "Right now," they told American Songwriter (Segarra uses they/she pronouns), "Louisiana is a hot spot for immigrant detention. They're building new for-profit immigrant detention centers all over rural Louisiana with incentives to rural places that they'll make money for the county. I was learning a lot of immigrant people sent to rural Louisiana get stuck in the system."
• When Segarra joined the group working to help these immigrants, they met two men who had been running long distances for their lives through difficult and dangerous terrain. The singer includes one of their voices at the end of "Precious Cargo."
  
  "That's my friend who I visited when he was in detention," Segarra told Mojo magazine. "He's now out and living his life. I thought it was important to see what he wanted to tell the world since I was telling so much of what I learned from him about his journey and his survival. The point of Precious Cargo was to tell a human story that everyone can relate to. Not even make it a political issue: this is someone's life! This is their youth!"
• "Precious Cargo" is a track from Life On Earth, Hurray for the Riff Raff's debut album for Nonesuch Records. Its 11 tracks on the theme of survival are "music for a world in flux - songs about thriving, not just surviving, while disaster is happening."