alter/nativas: 2, spring 2014 - The Voices of Latin/o American Hip-Hop

Permanent URI for this collection

https://kb.osu.edu/handle/1811/59256

In this issue

What is the place of hip-hop culture in Latin American Cultural Studies? Who is producing, circulating, and consuming these cultural practices and how are researchers from around the world analyzing them? Is the Latin/o American hip-hop culture reproducing the globalized American pop culture or is it producing a particular transnationalized response…?


essays


Introduction


Locating Hip Hop's Place within Latin American Cultural Studies
Christopher Dennis
Article Description | Full Text PDF (208.4Kb)


The Periphery of the Periphery

Hip Hop is not Dead: The Emergence of Mara Salvatrucha Rap as a form of MS-13 Expressive Culture
Alejandro Jacky
Article Description | Full Text PDF (184.4Kb)


Indigenous Activism


Hip-hop Mapuche on the Araucanian Frontera
Jacob Rekedal
Article Description | Full Text PDF (1.123Mb)


Hip-Hop's Transformative Potential


A política do hip-hop nas favelas brasileiras
Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda
Article Description | Full Text PDF (144.9Kb)

Pop Speculation: Tracing Geography, Investment, and Identity in São Paulo's Hip Hop and Open Mic Scenes
Derek Pardue
Article Description | Full Text PDF (303.0Kb)


Gender and the Struggle Against Sexism


Projeto Yabas: Reflections on Hip Hop and Black Women's Self-making in Recife, Brazil
Viviane Santiago da Silva and Cory J. LaFevers
Article Description | Full Text PDF (919.2Kb)


The Literary and Aesthetics Elements


Rap: poesía plebeya
Mónica Bernabé
Article Description | Full Text PDF (417.9Kb)

Itinerarios líricos de la inclusión: el hip-hop y el rap en Colombia (primera parte)
María del Pilar Ramírez Gröbli
Article Description | Full Text PDF (408.8Kb)

líricos de la inclusión: el hip-hop y el rap en Colombia (segunda parte)
María del Pilar Ramírez Gröbli
Article Description | Full Text PDF (408.8Kb)


The Role of the Researcher


Between ► (Play) and « (Rewind): the Making of Son dos Alas
Melisa Rivière
Article Description | Full Text PDF (958.5Kb)

Represent Cuba: Havana Hip Hop Under the Lens
Geoff Baker
Article Description | Full Text PDF (184.3Kb)


Hip-Hop Frontiers


"Searching and searching we have come to find": Histories and Circulations of Hip Hop in Peru
Kyle E. Jones
Article Description | Full Text PDF (687.6Kb)

"(Who Discovered) America": Ozomatli and the Mestiz@; Rhetoric of Hip Hop
Cruz Medina
Article Description | Full Text PDF (273.5Kb)

"Reading" National Identity in Panama through Renato, a first Generation Panamanian reggae en español Artist
Sonja Stephenson Watson
Article Description | Full Text PDF (230.1Kb)


Ethnicity and Ethnic Rights


Black and Tan Realities: Chicanos in the Borderlands of the Hip-Hop Nation
Amanda Martinez-Morrison
Article Description | Full Text PDF (236.4Kb)

Tego Calderón: defendiendo lo negro desde Loíza
Francisco David Mesa Muñoz
Article Description | Full Text PDF (376.2Kb)


poetry/performance


noche cerrada
Ernesto Estrella Cózar
Article Description | Full Text PDF (922.6Kb)

su momento
Ernesto Estrella Cózar
Article Description | Full Text PDF (157.6Kb)

tertulia lunática
Ernesto Estrella Cózar
Article Description | Full Text PDF (1.255Mb)

Voz /Escucha /Poema: escuela de la decisión
Ernesto Estrella Cózar
Article Description | Full Text PDF (111.8Kb)

La voz en el poema
Ernesto Estrella Cózar
Article Description | Full Text PDF (154.9Kb)


visual culture


A Arte e a Rua – Etnografia audiovisual na periferia de São Paulo
Rose Satiko Gitirana Hikiji e Carolina Caffé
Article Description | Full Text PDF (382.7Kb)


reviews


Tango, uma desculpa para abraçar
Rafael Leopoldo
Article Description | Full Text PDF (80.20Kb)

Afro-Colombia's Hip-Hop Performs Intricate Global, Regional, National, and Local Identities
Stephen Kip Tobin
Article Description | Full Text PDF (78.98Kb)


call for papers


general call
Article Description | Full Text PDF (28.80Kb)

Latin American Documentary Language in the New Century: Impact and Perspectives
Claudia Ferman
Article Description | Full Text PDF (37.71Kb)

New Approaches to Transnational Migration and Cultural Change
Ignacio Corona and Abril Trigo
Article Description | Full Text PDF (34.52Kb)



Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 20 of 27
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    Introduction: Locating Hip Hop's Place within Latin American Cultural Studies
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Dennis, Christopher
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    Hip Hop is not Dead: The Emergence of Mara Salvatrucha Rap as a form of MS-13 Expressive Culture
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Jacky, Alejandro
    This essay asserts that the hip hop culture of the transnational street gang, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), helps to account for how the gang and its members consolidate their identities within their marginalized community. This impoverished and peripheral sector of the population produces a kind of rap whose style of music and lyrics seek to represent a misrepresented and often vilified gang culture. The outside depictions of the gang emanate from film, television and news programs, magazine articles and other kinds of popular media, and they tend to look at the gang’s acts of violence without taking into account the dreadful economic and social conditions that would lead teenagers across the Americas to willingly enter this very dangerous environment. In dismissing these origins, such articulations ignore the notion that MS-13 members rely on their gang for money, food, shelter, and a sense of belonging. Mara Salvatrucha rap draws from 80s and 90s West Coast gangsta rap in order to relate their own stories of growing up on the streets and surviving by any means necessary. This gang music reflects violence, poverty, and hardship while also asserting the notion that banding together as a community provides the only real protection from these societal ills. Furthermore, Mara Salvatrucha rap extends beyond the limits of Compton, Watts, or other localized environments, and spreads its narrative past the United States and on to Latin America. The audience hears about life on the streets of El Salvador and in the neighborhoods of Guatemala, in addition to inner city and suburban Los Angeles.
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    Hip-hop Mapuche on the Araucanian Frontera
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Rekedal, Jacob
    This article analyzes musical activism in Araucanía, a centuries-old frontera (borderland), where physical and symbolic exchange between the Mapuche and other civilizations has long characterized social and cultural life. Discord over natural resources and social organization produces a resonant frequency of political distrust in the region. Mapuche rappers, Jano Weichafe, Danko Marimán, and Fabian Marin, freestyle on this frequency, articulating hip-hop concepts such as “underground” together with local preexisting forms of expression and resistance. Hip-hop also vividly portrays the conditions of life in Araucanía’s interethnic poblaciones (urban neighborhoods). Based on interviews and performances, I describe how groups of inner-city youth, as well as Mapuche organizations, have utilized hip-hop to foment indigenous ceremonies in urban environments, and to involve at-risk kids in constructive activities. Finally, I analyze Jano Weichafe’s fusion rock/cumbia/hip-hop song, “Ñi Pullu Weichafe” (Warrior Spirit), which, as the artist explains, “awakens consciousness” through performed solidarity with Chilean rockers, La Mano Ajena.
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    A política do hip-hop nas favelas brasileiras
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Buarque de Hollanda, Heloisa
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    Pop Speculation: Tracing Geography, Investment, and Identity in São Paulo's Hip Hop and Open Mic Scenes
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Pardue, Derek
    This article addresses the relationship between spatial affinities and socio-­‐ economic capital investment in hip hop culture as part of an assessment of urban development in Brazil’s largest city. Through a selected braiding of ethnographic reflections, urban cultural histories, and social theories of speculation, I argue that performers, particularly as they participate in institution-building projects (casas de hip hop) and open microphone circuits (saraus), have influenced the flows of investment and the social geography of expressive culture in São Paulo. Whether these dynamics signify a “sell-out” or shrewd negotiation is up for debate but what is clear is that the value of the marginalized periphery (periferia) has changed and with it the overall conceptualization of São Paulo.
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    Projeto Yabas: Reflections on Hip Hop and Black Women’s Self-making in Recife, Brazil
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Santiago da Silva, Viviane; LaFevers, Cory J.
    In this article, we present and reflect upon Projeto Yabas, a collaborative community-based project that, through hip hop, seeks to facilitate young women’s conceptualization of themselves as Black women and to recognize and combat racial and sexual domestic violence in Recife, Brazil. We explore how Black feminist theory can be used by Black women activists in the hip hop movement in Recife to engage in empowering forms of self-making that are crucial for their development as active political subjects. Reflecting on the experiences of Projeto Yabas highlights the need to critically examine certain aspects of the hip hop movement’s political activism and organization, namely, the participation of women within the movement and the possibilities of Black feminist thought.
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    Rap: poesía plebeya
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Bernabé, Mónica
    Describimos las formas de la dicción en las prácticas del rap para preguntar por el lugar que ocupa su poética en la serie literaria contemporánea. Recuperamos la dialéctica oculta entre vanguardia y cultura de masas para estudiar la particular formación que constituye la cultura del hip hop: una elite de intelectuales de la periferia que gestionan por sus derechos. Al mismo tiempo, y en estrecha relación con el fenómeno estudiado, nos preguntamos por el lugar de lo estético en los Estudios Culturales. Finalmente, abordamos las formas en que el dandismo modernista sigue cumpliendo funciones en el proceso de construcción de identidades en el seno de la cultura de masas.
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    Itinerarios líricos de la inclusión: el hip-hop y el rap en Colombia (primera parte)
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Gröbli, María del Pilar Ramírez
    Las voces juveniles tanto en la urbe como en las zonas rurales se apropian del estilo musical del hip-hop y el rap para resignificar formas de exclusión en sus entornos locales. La conquista en el terreno musical se convierte en una simbología del empoderamiento juvenil que se expresa en la fuerza creativa y propositiva contenida en el canto. Una lírica renaciente adquiere vida a través de la voz que le confiere su intérprete. En sus relatos líricos deconstruye imaginarios y revitaliza la esencia y el significado del espacio local-barrial para la identidad del joven. Este artículo retoma los planteamientos que surgen de algunas canciones de hip-hop y rap producidas en Colombia y formula reflexiones en torno a los siguientes interrogantes: ¿cómo y qué formas de exclusión aparecen representadas en el relato lírico? ¿Quiénes son los sujetos líricos? ¿Qué elementos contenidos en la lírica del hip-hop se constituyen en símbolos de construcción de identidad del joven? En este caso, exploraré estas inquietudes tomando como fuentes las composiciones producidas por artistas colombianos.
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    Itinerarios líricos de la inclusión: el hip-hop y el rap en Colombia (segunda parte)
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Gröbli, María del Pilar Ramírez
    Las voces juveniles tanto en la urbe como en las zonas rurales se apropian del estilo musical del hip-hop y el rap para resignificar formas de exclusión en sus entornos locales. La conquista en el terreno musical se convierte en una simbología del empoderamiento juvenil que se expresa en la fuerza creativa y propositiva contenida en el canto. Una lírica renaciente adquiere vida a través de la voz que le confiere su intérprete. En sus relatos líricos deconstruye imaginarios y revitaliza la esencia y el significado del espacio local-barrial para la identidad del joven. Este artículo retoma los planteamientos que surgen de algunas canciones de hip-hop y rap producidas en Colombia y formula reflexiones en torno a los siguientes interrogantes: ¿cómo y qué formas de exclusión aparecen representadas en el relato lírico? ¿Quiénes son los sujetos líricos? ¿Qué elementos contenidos en la lírica del hip-hop se constituyen en símbolos de construcción de identidad del joven? En este caso, exploraré estas inquietudes tomando como fuentes las composiciones producidas por artistas colombianos. 
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    Between ► (Play) and « (Rewind): the Making of Son dos Alas
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Rivière, Melisa
    From New York to Rio, from Nairobi to Tokyo, hip-hop, more than any other musical genre or youth culture, has permeated nations, cultures, and languages worldwide. "Between ► (Play) and « (Rewind): the Making of Son Dos Alas" is about the experience of conducting research on the globalization of hip-hop and its local expressions between Cuba and Puerto Rico. Using songs and music videos produced as primary research data, this essay proposes hip-hop as an avenue for the study of social behavior and media as a "place" for contemporary anthropological inquiry. The research consists of original collaborative songs produced between rappers from each location who, due to political restrictions between nations, could not personally meet one another. The research reveals that it is through value systems and common civil rights struggles, more so than strictly the four elements of hip-hop (rap, break dance, turntablism, and visual art), that youth relate to one another and their global audiences. "Between ► (Play) and « (Rewind)" frames the research experience, bringing to the forefront a fieldwork methodology titled Participatory Ethnographic Production that offers the discipline a manner in which to use media beyond a means for archiving, documenting, and disseminating cultural data. This analysis is further intertwined with an overview of the art of politics (and the politics of art) between two nations that have not had diplomatic relations with one another for over 50 years.
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    Represent Cuba: Havana Hip Hop Under the Lens
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Baker, Geoff
    Between 1997 and 2010, the Havana hip hop scene was the subject of some two dozen documentaries, the majority by non-Cubans. This article considers how the act of film making may participate in the dual process of transnational connection and division, and explores the politics and ethics of transnational cultural production, reception, and representation. While documentaries have given Havana rappers a voice, they have also exposed them to the "tourist gaze" (Urry 1990) and have actively shaped the hip hop scene on the ground as well as on film. Film makers were not only documenting censorship but actually indirectly responsible for it, and they played a role in the local hip hop economy. Events involving Cuba's leading hip hop group, Los Aldeanos, illustrated the risks that accompanied the transnational circulation of filmed images. Such problematics are elevated to a central theme of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's Young Rebels.
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    "Searching and searching we have come to find": Histories and Circulations of Hip Hop in Peru
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Jones, Kyle E.
    While ethnographic and historiographic research on hip hop has predominantly focused on large metropolises, less attention has been paid to smaller regional cities and the specific ways hip hop travels between urban locales. This paper examines the movements of youth and hip hop practices in Peru, tracing moments of exchange and interaction to contribute an alternative perspective for understanding how hip hop has taken shape across Peru. Such an approach extends the scholarship on hip hop's socio-spatial dynamics and provides a rich lens through which to understand the ways particular hip hop practices and social forms emerge. Situating the experiences and recollections of hip hoppers from several cities in 1990s and 2000s Peru, while drawing parallels with other forms of expression, also illustrates how hip hop's histories and circulations reflect longer-standing patterns of mobility, cultural appropriation, and the centrality of expressive forms in navigating changing circumstances of Peruvian urban life.
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    "(Who Discovered) America": Ozomatli and the Mestiz@ Rhetoric of Hip Hop
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Medína, Cruz
    This article examines the rhetoric of Mexican-American hip hop through the analysis of the music by the multicultural hip hop fusion band, Ozomatli, from Los Angeles. The objective is to examine how Ozomatli performs linguistic, epistemic, and musical-rhetorical border crossing that provokes cultural and social consciousness. As a cross-cultural site of analysis, Ozomatli embodies cultural mestizaje, mestiza consciousness, and mestiz@ rhetoric that illuminates social justice issues beneath surface-level beats and rhythms. Appointed cultural ambassadors by the U.S. government, Ozomatli navigates dominant systems of power while performing music that contests hegemony. Their mestiz@ hip hop draws from diverse musical traditions like banda, cumbia, merengue, ranchera and others while addressing transnational social justice issues of immigration, inequality, and revolution.
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    "Reading" National Identity in Panama through Renato, a first Generation Panamanian reggae en español Artist
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Watson, Sonja Stephenson
    Reggae en español (reggae in Spanish) is a hybrid cultural and musical form that blends elements of Jamaican dancehall and reggae. Panama gave birth to reggae en español in the late 1970s in the urban West Indian barrios of Río Abajo and Parque Lefevre in the capital city of Panama. As a product of West Indian migration from the Anglophone Caribbean and Central America, Panamanian reggae in Spanish evinces racial, cultural, and linguistic hybridity resulting from on-­‐going processes of transculturation. As a hybrid cultural discourse, reggae en español pulls from various geographic areas (Africa, Caribbean, Panama) and musical genres (Jamaican dancehall and reggae). It is a prime example of cultural identity and difference, which reflects the multiplicity of the African diaspora experience. The lyrics of first generation Panamanian reggaesero Leonardo "Renato" Aulder convey the effect of hybridity and transculturation and aid in the reinterpretation of Panamanian national identity.
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    Black and Tan Realities: Chicanos in the Borderlands of the Hip-Hop Nation
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Martinez-Morrison, Amanda
    Drawing from ethnographic observation, this analysis explores the dynamic, oftentimes surprising ways race matters within hip-­‐hop by focusing on U.S. Latinos—specifically, Latino rappers in the San Francisco Bay Area. The extensive participation of Latinos in hip-­‐hop culture regionally as well as globally suggests that hip-­‐hop can no longer be understood (if it ever could) narrowly as "a black thing" where blackness is equated solely with African Americans in the U.S. At the same time, I argue that the experiences of U.S. Latinos in hip-­‐hop cannot be understood in ethnic isolation, but rather must be framed relationally in terms of Latinos' engagements with African Americans and black cultural forms. Of particular interest here are Mexican Americans, who comprise nearly seventy percent of all Latinos in the Bay Area, in California, and the U.S. more broadly. I examine the ways Bay Area Chicanos simultaneously assert their own distinctive ethnic identity through participation in the hip-­‐hop arts while at the same time recognizing commonality and building community—however tenuous—with other racial and ethnic groups, particularly African Americans.
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    Tego Calderón: defendiendo lo negro desde Loíza
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Muñoz, Francisco David Mesa
    Tego Calderón es uno de los artistas del hip hop latinoamericano más conocidos a nivel mundial. Aunque el rapero afropuertorriqueño es más famoso por sus éxitos de reggaetón, su producción musical abarca realmente una gran variedad de géneros y ritmos, entre los que cobran una gran importancia los de herencia africana. En este artículo, después de analizar las realidades raciales en Puerto Rico, se explorarán algunas de las herramientas musicales y discursivas que Tego emplea para denunciar el racismo en la isla, celebrar la herencia africana e inculcar un sentido de orgullo en sus oyentes. Finalmente se considerará cómo en la última etapa de su producción musical establece conexiones y alianzas transnacionales con otros miembros de la diáspora africana que comparten una agenda similar en sus canciones.
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    noche cerrada
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Cózar, Ernesto Estrella
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    su momento
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Cózar, Ernesto Estrella
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    tertulia lunática
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Cózar, Ernesto Estrella
    Esta pieza es una interpretación vocal de la primera parte de la Tertulia Lunática de Julio Herrera y Reissig, quizá uno de los poemas más delirantes y herméticos de la lengua española. La idea de la que parte proviene del hecho de que la estrofa utilizada en el poema es la que también suele utilizarse en la milonga, algo que ya más de un crítico y lector había observado. Por ello, el intento aquí es situarse entre la melodía y la recitación con la voluntad de crear un espacio inestable, emocional y sónicamente, acorde con la dinámica del poema. Zona crepuscular, intermedia, para la exploración vocal. La pieza forma parte de mi Mapa sonoro de la poesía y fue presentada por vez primera como grabación en dúo con Stelios Michas en "Veladas Beatnick", Montevideo, Uruguay, septiembre de 2010. También recibió una interpretación a cargo del trío MES durante el festival Sonography: An Homage to Uruguayan poet Julio Herrera y Reissig. Parte del evento puede escucharse en: http://soundcloud.com/ernescozar/sets
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    Voz /Escucha /Poema: escuela de la decisión
    (Ohio State University. Center for Latin American Studies, 2014-01) Cózar, Ernesto Estrella