WORD TO DESMADRE:

HIP HOP, VOICE, AND THE RHYTHM OF CHAOS IN MÉXICO

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIʻI AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN

ANTHROPOLOGY

APRIL 2020

By

Ruben Enrique Campos III

Dissertation Committee:

Christine R. Yano, Chairperson

Ty P. Kāwika Tengan

Jonathan E. Padwe

Christina Higgins

Roderick N. Labrador

Keywords: México, urbanity, voice, resonance, hip-hop This is for my family, for our love of music. Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the artists of Anáhuac for their music and their generosity. First, thank you

Pavel for the beautiful gift that made my cover art. Now in no particular order: R-Baster, Slack,

Khampa, Leslie, Karen, De EM, Alex-o, Hase, Reyvax, Cyteros, Dianita, Diego, Kriber, Dhaudi,

Siete, PerroZW, Aczino, Montebel, Dos Letras, Eric el Niño, Kolmillon, Jerry Funk, El Pinche

Pastok, Afromega, Presunto, Fisko23, Preck, E Track, Tenso, Livera, Toshee, Jack Adrenalina,

Rojo Cordova, Mexica SKSK, Jezzy P, Miicherry Sirena, Dayra, MC Luka, Lirika Inverza, Eso-

O, Van-T, Forte Realtá, Elemsiburrón, Gahlahad, Nedman Guerrero, Crow, Spia 104, Sidu La

Chiquita Maravilla, Dragon Fly, Audry Funk, Kauking, Lil Franco, Kirko, Ximbo, Caporal,

Yleer, Joseph D. Jacobs, Krater, Towhee DFK, Herack, Leydi Garcia, LCK Rap, Efrain Master

Lopez, Pelon Gutierrez, MC Indigente, Danger Alto Kalibre, MC Lokoter, Travieso, Simpson

Ahuevo, and Juan Pueblo. Thanks to the many organizers including Heticko, Magali Cadena,

Feli, Lalo, Alexis Tigre, Brenda Roxo, Lizbeth Hernandez, Jovany Avilés, Ruben Romero,

Mardonio Carballo, Fernando Espejo, Akusado, Carlos AG, Tiosha Bojorquez Chapela, Mariana

Castillo, Andrik Noble, Klaudia Bgirl, Fernando Contrerasa Miranda, Alek Scratch, Fer

Martinez, Causante Enrique Llevanos, Eze tal Marco, Luis FS, and Topis. Thanks to the crews,

55, VFK, and Pulciga Rec. Again, thanks especially to Pavel and Samara.

I would also like to thank my best friends and caretakers in Mexico, Nahui, Alex, Fher, and the dogs, Javier, Abril, and the kids, and all my friends at Hotel La Selva. I also owe gratitude to every stranger and kind pedestrian in México that helped me navigate through the city and arrive safely to my destination. Many thanks go to my clients of English as well, who certainly enriched my understanding of México and its many cultures.

I could not have accomplished any of this work with out the guidance and support of many professors. I would like to especially thank Dr. Christine Yano for reading this document again and again and always giving me confidence. I am also grateful to my committee members Dr. Ty

P. Kāwika Tengan, Dr. Jonathan Padwe, and Dr. Christina Higgins. Thank you Dr. Andrew Arno.

I miss you.

I would also like to thank Dr. Monisha Das Gupta, Dr. Brian Chung, Dr. Ethan Caldwell, Dr.

Jonathan Okamura, Dr. Ulla Hasager, Dr. Ibrahim Aoude, Dr. Noel Kent, Dr. Rich Rath, and Dr.

Davianna Pomaika'i McGregor. Many thanks to Dr. Quemuel too. I especially want to thank

Kawehi Kina. I also want to thank every student who has come through the Ethnic Studies

Student Association as well, and our friends in Native Hawaiian Student Services, Black Student

Association, La Raza Unida, and ACCESS.

In writing this dissertation, I also benefited from the help of my colleagues at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa including Maura Stephens, Zakia Boeger, Mattias Van Omman,

Phianphachong Intarat, Dylan McCurdy, and David Goldberg. Thanks Paul Christensen and Eric

Cunningham. Thanks Skayu Louis and Kyle Kajihiro. I also received support from the Graduate

Student Organization.

I could not have accomplished life in Hawaiʻi without my best friends Chris, Darby and

Cormac Filimoehala, Ethan Capone and Phu Tran, Jonah Moananu and Kelsey Walter, Micah

McLaughlin and Amber Sowiak, Fletcher Gaydos and Maria Robben, and Lindsay Delong.

Thanks to the Underpass Crew, Jeremiah French and Chantelle Gaugrin and Saikrishna

Upadhyayula. Thanks Rachel Hoerman and Lani. Thanks Joel, Sarah, and all the folks that supplied kava.

Thank you Hawaiʻi Hip Hop, especially Punahele and Rukka, Kealoha Mahone, the Broke Mokes, DJ Packo, Seph-One, PaizLee, Kristylez, Jon Evangelista, Justine Takamoto, Jermaine,

Devon, Cease, and Sosa.

I owe an unimaginable debt of gratitude to my mentor, Dr. Rod Labrador. Sir, you have been everything for me over the last decade. I cannot express how much you mean to me as a scholar, a career coach, a collaborator, an accomplice, and especially as a friend.

This all started with my parents before my parents. So thank you Grambam and Grandpa

Peterson. I love you and miss you. Thank you Grandma and Grandpa Campos. I love you and miss you. Thanks to all my Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, and Kin on both sides. Thank you Kellie.

Thank you Karrie. Thank you John. I love you Lucas and Landon. I love you Layla and Holden.

Also many thanks to my Taylor, von Zabern, and Whitesel families and my Poortman, Herrera,

Benjamins, Howe, and Ford families. I could not have done this without you either. I especially want to say good Yoshi!

Mom, I love you so much and I cannot express my gratitude for everything you have given me in life…but can I get another haircut. Dad, thank you for everything, especially my ears.

Sorry I stole your records.

Finally, Heidi. I love you so much. Thank you for dedicating your life to this dissertation and supporting my scholarship. What’s next? Abstract

This dissertation explores life in desmadre, or the overwhelming, noisy chaos that continually changes underfoot in the streets of the metropolitan valley surrounding Mexico City, the largest urban landscape within North America. I chronicle the experiences of contemporary rap artists as they move through the city, creating a hip-hop scene in looped interconnectedness.

Artist develop their artistic voice in three ways. First, by practicing their poetry and their breath control they learn to render the aural sensorium and echo the city itself through their bodies— from the noises of its mass transit to the acoustic registers of its ambulant vendors; from the sounds of familiar language games, poetics, and popular culture to appropriated Nahuatl vocabulary and place names. Second, by learning to navigate through the city, flowing against its conservative logic for their own artistic and cultural purposes, they come to embody a difficult to explain yet deeply felt awareness of the desmadre, rather than seeing that chaos as a source of frustration (to state control), as inefficient (to capitalist profit), or as unnecessary imperilment (to citizens of the general public), they find direction and purpose in creativity and community.

Third, by engaging with others in desmadre artists recognize their place, authenticate their experience, and overcome anonymity through the choral voice, hearing their own subjectivity echoed back and affirmed by others who have travelled a different route. Based in ethnography, sociocultural linguistics, mobility and sound studies, my research situates the artist’s voice at the nexus of subjective materiality and ideology, the body and its social horizon. I conclude that to understand hip-hop one has to be hip-hop, moving through desmadre, embodying the aural sensorium, and developing a choral voice right alongside other artists. Table of Contents

Chapter 1: How to Become Hip Hop in Mexico City 1

It Started on the Train 1

How To Talk Hip-Hop in México: A Matter of Voice in Desmadre 4

The Main Argument 10

Theoretical Review 11

Dialogism: The Voice Echoes its Social Horizon 13

Performance: The Voice Creates Self and Society 16

Phonosonic Nexus: Bodies Make Sound and Cultural Meaning 21

México is Chaotic, Hip-hop Gives Direction 23

Hip Hop Literature Review 27

The Scene 36

Methodology 38

La Crónica 44

The Significance and Aftermath 48

Gender 52

The Outline 56

Chapter 2: History: Music and Power Resound in México 60

Introduction: Representing Desmadre Through Sound 60

Part One: The Resounding City 65

From Anáhuac to Ciudad de México 65

The Golden Age of Nationalism 69 The Nation Breaks: 1968, 1985, 1994 73

Early Hip-hop in the City 76

Part Two: You Have to be There 79

Una Infinidád de Grupos 79

La Raza Cósmica Outside the Library 83

Conclusion: A Chronotope of Looped Interconnectedness 86

Chapter 3: Methods and Movement 89

Introduction: The Story of Ollín 89

Learning Like an Anthropologist 90

Part One: Navigating to Find Hip-hop-1 95

Forgetting the Bird's Eye View 95

Meeting Heticko at Bombay 98

Community Centers from Biblioteca Vasconcelos to Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl 103

Concerts in Parks 109

The Studio of Victoria Emergente 113

Prisons 115

Hip-hop is Destiny 116

Part Two: Hip-hop is Placeless 119

La Chinampa: Hip-hop is Placeless 119

Conclusion: From Overview to Underground 128

Interlude: A Moment of Silence for this Small Crónica Break 130

Choking Back Knowledge 130 Chemical, Social, and Methodological Effects of Marijuana 133

Chapter 4: Learning in the Streets 138

Introduction: Breathing in the City; Breathing out Rap 138

Hip-hop As Cultural Text, Remix 142

Part One: Learning in Class; Learning in the Street 144

Breath Control 144

The Cypher Effect 149

¡Un saludo para el Bubu!: Traveling Together Through Desmadre 150

The Development and Dissolution of a Crew and of a Style 155

Part Two: The Dialogism of a Posse in Hip-hop 157

The Dialogism of Los Hijos de Poeta 157

Slack 159

Khäf Vocablo 161

Khampa 164

R-Baster 165

Generations 167

¡Güau!: Dialogism Beyond the Word 169

Stability in Desmadre through Looped Interconnectedness 172

Conclusion: Each One Teach One 173

Chapter 5: The Voice As Sample And Loop 178

Introduction: Hip-hop as Sound Study 178

Part One: The Sample, The Loop, and the Studio as Ritual Space 185 Siete Teaches the Loop 185

Finding R-Baster’s House by Graffiti 187

Democratic Group Audition 189

Part Two: Voice, Embodied Practice, and the Resounding City. 193

Learning to Speak Dialogically: The Inspirations of MC Luka’s Voice. 195

The Performance of Different Registers 202

Part Three: Kolmillo, Deep Méxican Sound, and the Mic Clan 208

Misunderstanding Kolmillo 208

From Mictlan to Mic Clan 210

Conclusion: Apophenia in Ritual Space 215

Chapter 6: Learning on a Trip 218

Introduction: It's Good to Stay Paranoid 218

Desmadre, Danger, and Drug Use 219

Part One: Lectures And Laughter On Risk 224

Part Two: Between Danger And Delinquency 229

The Ambivalent Role of Marijuana in Hip-hop 230

Pulled Over with PerroZW 237

Another Night After Another Night 242

Part Three: El Pinche Pastok 246

The Last Train Home 248

Huérfanos de la Calle 253

Hip-Hop, Transgredience, and the Choral Voice 259 Conclusion: Voices Echoed Back 261

Chapter 7: Confessions of a Cultural Appropriator 264

Introduction: Hip Hop against Literature. 264

February 28, 2016 at 9:33 PM 266

Ubuntu 270

June 9, 2016 at 11:25 PM 272

Self Critical Discourse Analysis 276

Discussion 279

Conclusion: A Dialogic Ethics 293

Conclusion: ¿Por que callar si nacimos gritando? 297

Part One: Enter the Summary 297

Part Two: Exit the Chambers 300

The Chamber of Lefebvre 301

The Chamber of Ethno-Rhetoric 302

The Chamber of Tears 307

The Chamber of Being Found in Being Lost 311

El Sub, The Final Echo Chamber 313

Glossary 317

Bibliography 322 CHAPTER 1: HOW TO BECOME HIP HOP IN MEXICO CITY

I moved to Mexico City in July of 2015 to understand hip-hop, rap music, and the creative voice; I spent most of my time learning to walk again, learning to navigate through desmadre, a special kind of chaos endemic to urban México.

It Started on the Train

From El Centro Regional de Cultura del Municipio de Nezahualcóyotl to the bus stop, from there to the Metro station at Pantitlan, I was consistently behind a few strides, having to watch my step more intently than my friend, PerroZW, the 30-year-old rapper I was following.1 He seemed to glide through the streets, never tripping on the ragged asphalt, never slowing as he crossed dangerous, traffic laden intersections. He was always of sound footing even when the bus driver hit speed bumps and craters in the road and, of course, even when he was packing more mota into his one-hitter glass pipe and smoking.

PerroZW and I had left Khäf Vocablo, Slack, R-Baster, and Khampa behind in Ciudad Neza and were crossing the city to Tacubaya. They were his students and at least ten years his junior.

He was teaching them as part of a state-funded workshop. That day, he had started class late and ended it early. They understood both mistakes in timing: class never began on time because everyone was late in México; he had to leave early because he could not miss the opportunity to collaborate with Chema Arreola. Chema was some famous drummer that had played with

Alfonso André’s post-Caifanes band; he was also the grandson of the author Juan José Arreola.

Chema had asked PerroZW and Forestero507, another rapper, to contribute to his new project,

1 See “Perro Zw Ft K-Road & Audry Funk - Música de Locos (Faltosos Crew)” on Youtube.

1 El Imperio del Ruido, which fused rock, electronic music, rap, and poetry.2

When our Metro arrived, the moment its doors opened, we aggressively pushed our way through the throng of exiting commuters to secure seats. We had a long way to go. Pantitlan was at one end of the Brown line. Tacubaya, our destination, was at its opposite. It was rush hour.

After a breath, we talked hip-hop. We compared our favorite rappers and contrasted the hip-hop scenes in México, Hawaiʻi, Los Angeles, and what we had gathered about Houston, Texas. We discussed the progress of the young students in his class (he too thought Khäf Vocablo stood above the rest) and the possibility that I might follow him out of state to Puebla for a concert in the new year. Before the train plunged underground, we caught one last glimpse of el Oriente, the eastern periphery of Ciudad México. The sun hung low in the sky. It would be dark by the time we surfaced.

Station after station we passed, continually talking, hardly interrupted by the raucous vendors selling special compilations of popular musics, frozen paletas, headphones, and extension cords. Each shouted their sales pitch, adding their particular melody, tone, and timber, but each still sounded like the city. “Que tal y buenas tardes, estimado pasajeros, en este ocasión le traigo un producto de calidad. ¡Diez pesos le vale! ¡Diez pesos le cuesta!” (Good evening esteemed passengers, on this occasion I bring to you a product of quality. It’s worth 10 pesos! 10 pesos it will cost you!)

Then there were the spectacles. PerroZW and I could ignore the woman selling frozen Bubu

Lubu, talking under her pitch, but we had to watch the man that threw himself onto broken glass, somersaulting to slam his shirtless back onto a mountain of brown and green shards in the

2 Listen to “Comando Escandalo / El Imperio Ruido” on Souncloud.

2 middle of the aisle. We did not give him any pesos though. Even if we couldn’t look away, we had seen that trick enough times.

PerroZW told me he had partners in Los Faltosos Crew and El Manicomio Clan before, but he was now solo. He was disappointed they left but now appreciated that without their support he was forced to stand by the power of his chest alone. It required so much more performative skill. I thought many scholars had discussed rappers as singular voices; few had shown them as relying on collaboration. I looked down to scribble this idea into my notebook, then heard him bellow over the Metro’s din. I assumed he was just performing his stage voice to reinforce his point. I continued scribbling until I heard him shout again, now further away. When I looked up, he was already cutting through the aisles, heading towards the back of the train, waving. The aisles were now packed tight, crowded as we had passed the halfway point of the cross-city line.

He weaved easily, nevertheless. I struggled to follow, confused and apologetic.

I caught up to PerroZW and before I realized it I was shaking hands with Jerry Funk, also known as Sepulterero.3 Then 37-years old, he was one of the founding members of La Vieja

Guardia, one of the most important hip-hop posses in México. Jerry wore an unfaded black t- shirt advertising MC Luka’s (another member’s) MXDFVG album. He wore a fitted black baseball cap embossed with his own name, and black löc style sunglasses. He had a thick, well- groomed goatee and Vieja Guardia tattooed on his forearms. His style was familiar to me,

California Chicano, different from ZW’s more 1990s New York-style of oversized clothes, thick gold and silver chain necklaces, and corn-rowed micro-braided hair. Jerry and I at once began talking hip-hop. In the short time it took to pass two stations, we knew where the other was from,

3 See “Jerry Funk aka Sepulturero ‘Ñero What’ (Video Oficial) HD” on YouTube.

3 what our role in the music was, and that we had a mutual friend, Heticko, in the scene. I wondered aloud about the seeming randomness of our meeting and mutual acquaintance. I had only met Heticko, a younger organizer from Tonanitla, accidentally in Tepito and I found

PerroZW from Iztapalapa in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl. Now Jerry and I were meeting on a moving train at la hora punta.

“That is hip-hop,” PerroZW said.

“It is fated to happen,” Jerry explained.

“Destiny” PerroZW followed.

I was beginning to understand what they meant. The city was absolute desmadre, but desmadre was not just any old chaos.

Upon reaching Tacubaya, the end of the line, Jerry said goodbye. He still had to catch another bus to complete his journey to La Fiesta Bar in old Santa Fe. He assured me we would meet again at Heticko’s event the following weekend. He exited towards the South. PerroZW and

I exited to the North. We only had a few more blocks to walk to find Chema’s basement practice space, but we took our time, talking hip-hop along the way. It was darker, but somehow I felt more sure of my footing.

How To Talk Hip-Hop in México: A Matter of Voice in Desmadre

The most basic question I ask within this dissertation is how does one become hip-hop in

México? Hip-hop is a cultural and musical genre not traditionally associated with México; yet artists there claim the identity as their most basic essence, preceding even their national, gender, or racial identity. I also ask, how does one come to speak for México as hip-hop? The practice of representing México is always part of a problematic process whereby an infinitely complex place

4 and population are simplified and limited; yet artists seem especially skilled at the task. Finally, I ask how does one become convincing in both being hip-hop and speaking for México? As performers and public figures, every artist’s success is defined by their audience, who judge the artist’s authenticity and give over their authority to be spoken for. In a metropolis of over 23 million people, where life is loud and cacophonous, where being heard can be a matter of survival, the work rappers do to speak for an audience is no small accomplishment.

To frame these questions another way, for many rappers in México the idea of becoming hip- hop—of becoming an authentic representative of a culture, which started in a different time and place—is entirely unproblematic. They explain that uttering the words “Yo soy hip-hop” (I am hip-hop) is the sole requirement. Thus, rappers become hip-hop by identifying as such in language. I take artists at their word. But I add that learning how to utter the words “Yo soy hip- hop” and learning how to “talk hip-hop,” as I framed it in the opening vignette, is a complex process. It requires a commitment to a street-centric lifestyle, which includes moving across urban landscapes, engaging in meaningful interactions with other artists, and collecting and sharing cultural resources. It is through this labor that artists come to speak for México, representing the complexities of place through layered dialogue and echoes of meaningful sound.

It is also through their successful mastery of techniques of vocal performance, speech genres, and audio recording that rappers lobby for authenticity and ultimately gain the authority to represent place. These are all questions of Voice, questions about an essential confluence between bodies, sound, identity, and ritual performance.

Voice is a central trope in debates about cultural, social, and political life. Within these debates, scholars use voice as a metaphor for subjectivity, authenticity, and power. Steven Feld

5 and Donald Brenneis define voices as “material embodiments of social ideology and experience” (2004: 332). Amanda Weidman defines voice as “a phenomenon that links material practices with subjectivity, and embodied sound with collectively recognized meanings, voice is a crucial site where the realms of the cultural and sociopolitical link to the level of the individual, a site where shared discourses and values, affect, and aesthetics are made manifest in and contested through embodied practice” (2014: 38). Within this dissertation, the voice is not only a trope or metaphor, it is a problem to be solved, a social process to be analyzed through ethnographic research.

Answers to all questions posed above presented themselves along my cross-city trip with

PerroZW—though recognizing them would take over a year of ethnographic research. I continually experienced answers between places like the community center in Ciudad

Nezahualcóyotl, where ZW and I left his students los Hijos de Poeta; La Fiesta Bar, where Jerry

Funk was headed to prepare for a concert I would attend; and La Biblioteca Vasconcelos, where I would interview a rapper named Kolmillo that I hung out with at that event. Answers could be heard in our conversations, performances and recordings, even in the sounds of the train vendors, and especially in ZW’s own voice when it cut through the noise of the city. Answers could be felt in what the two called fate and destiny, especially after I gained the ability to navigate through desmadre.4 All these connections, echoes, and reverberations define hip-hop and redefine the rhythms of life in México.

Within this dissertation desmadre is a key concept and the primary context through which

4 Alex E. Chavez (2017) finds a very similar, if not overlapping, notion at work in the music and migration of transnational huapango arribeño artists. Further work must be completed to theorize the similarities and differences between these two artistic communities.

6 artists move in the city, both literally and figuratively. As noted in the project’s title and in the opening gloss, the Mexican term desmadre overlaps with the English term chaos—though not perfectly. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, within ancient Greek, Latin, and Western

Christian traditions, χάος, khaos, or chaos preceded creation; it was a formless and empty void, an infinitely dark abyss. Only later, in its adjectival form, did chaos come to suggest a disorder and confusion between multiple, uncontrollable parts, and, more importantly, an anarchic enemy of the ordered State. Although, I use the term chaos as a translation of desmadre intermittently throughout this dissertation and in the title; it is important that desmadre is never confused as standing for empty space, nor essential confusion—though to be sure, there are some anarchic qualities to the term as it is quite apparent that the desmadre of urban life in México confounds the State (Scott 1998).5

According to el Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española, the verb desmadrar is the act of weaning or separating a child from its mother. It is literally a de- mothering. In México, however, the term madre carries different vulgar connotations and desmadre is related to disorder, a lack of control, and an overabundance of life. Noting the inordinate amount of pejorative terms and expressions related to mothers, prostitutes, and virgins in Mexican Spanish, Liza Bakewell (2011) studies the word madre (mother) in relation to the nation’s history of and ongoing discourse surrounding gender politics, respectability, and control.

She finds that the obsession with “good mothers” and their inversion into symbols of the worst

5 Since its meteoric rise in the natural sciences, some anthropologists have found it useful to approach complex cultural and symbolic systems through Chaos Theory (Mosko 2005). I do not. It is possible the science of chaos might have provided me with metaphors or tools to better understand the chaotic streets or bridge various contextual scales and to theorize about deeper patterns; however, the time it takes to understand and translate the abstractions of mathematicians, physicists, biologists, and meteorologists hardly seems worth it, especially when México has its own theorists of chaos.

7 kind of badness is related to the paternalism of the Church and the liberal State. As example,

Bakewell quotes Melchor Ocampo’s 1859 Epistle, which was required reading at all state- sanctioned weddings until 2007. It states, “the woman, whose main attributes are self- abnegation, beauty, compassion, shrewdness and tenderness, must give and shall always give her husband obedience, affability, attention, comfort and advice, treating him with the reverence due to the person who supports and defends us” (184). The absence of these qualities in any household, including the national, would lead to disorder and unrest.

The gendered connotations of the term desmadre are apparent, and as many female rappers noted throughout my study, one can hardly cuss in México without engaging in sexism.

However, the kind of policing of politeness and respectability that Bakewell found directed against her in her ethnographic investigation into the term was hardly present in the hip-hop scene. Of the many explicitly vulgar and sexist terms I learned in Mexico, desmadre was not counted as one. Therefore, within this dissertation, I will not limit my focus on gender or the gendered qualities of that term (a decision I do not take lightly and one I will more completely justify later in this chapter); rather, for better or worse, I will use this term as artists did, as shorthand for the crowded, noisy, smelly (sometimes scary) streets of Mexico and the overabundance of social life that can be found within them. Desmadre, then, is about traffic, but it is also about the endless possibilities for moving forward. I am not the first to argue for this definition.

In Mexico, the premier theorist of desmadre was Carlos Monsiváis, who dedicated his life to exploring and explaining life in México (1997; 2003). He argued that desmadre is not simply disorder but an alternative order; it is not an alteration of hierarchy, but a way of living as if

8 hierarchy did not exist (Monsiváis 2003). Looking to the Metro, films, sport, politics, and the streets after sundown, Monsiváis wrote, “desmadre is a social necessity, something more than relief or unstoppable energy; desmadre erases hierarchies, turns clock faces mobile, gives palm readers and astrologers the opportunity to creatively imagine new lives and gives their customers the happiness of knowing their good luck. The barman is the perfect gatekeeper at the entrance of

[desmadre’s] exaltation” (2009: n.p.). In other words, desmadre does not proceed creation as a void. It is creative imagination and possibility itself. It can be difficult, frustrating, and exciting.

It can be absolutely intoxicating.

If desmadre is an alternative order or a wellspring of creative possibility, then it contrasts with any predetermined, monologic system of meaning whether that be within the realm of mobility in the city, traditional or national forms of cultural expression, or language and identity.

Thus, within this dissertation I will show how hip-hop echoes desmadre and promotes new emergent and temporary kinds of meaning in a city that is difficult to represent and impossible to control. Hip-hop provokes practitioners to move about the city in a distinctive way; that is, where most city dwellers simply follow the same routes to find work, selling goods to other commuters, and quickly returning home thereafter, the artists of hip-hop flow against the trend, mindfully exploring the dark streets. Hip-hop also pushes artists to reconsider traditional notions of what

Mexicans can be or what they can sound like; that is, where popular trends in music might foster national obedience and cultural myopia or set unattainable standards of conspicuous consumption, drug abuse, or fame, hip-hop demands cultural critique, presence, and authentic experience. Finally, hip-hop revels in the complexities of language and the aural sensorium. As I move through this dissertation, narrating how I moved through the city itself, listening along

9 with artists, I will make clearer the feeling of desmadre, especially its relation to voice.

Another way that I bring the concept of desmadre alive in this dissertation is as an analytic tool. Considering that chaotic traffic, unknowing, and unfamiliarity proceeds life in the city, and considering the way hip-hop artists enjoy this reality and purposefully set themselves to play within it, I will approach “knowing” and representation playfully by including tongue-in-cheek references to ideas in hip-hop and anthropological theory in my writing. A case in point is the very title of this dissertation. As noted, desmadre literally translates as de-mothering, but in

Mexico the term is more complex. Within the Hip Hop Nation Language (Alim, Ibrahim, and

Pennycook 2009), the constantly shifting language practice of the diverse imagined community that is hip-hop, the idiom “word to your mother,” “word to your moms,” or “word to the

Motherland,” has its own long history related to Afrocentrism and a number of songs by Black and White rappers seeking authentication through their use of black vernaculars (Smitherman

2006). My title is a playful nod to this but also a hint to my argument that it is through their linguistic practice, their naming the city, learning to speak in different places, and sharing words that Mexican artists make sense of themselves and their voice within contemporary urban

México. It also a nod to the fact that even though this dissertation is not about the global ideologies or transatlantic black consciousness, dialogism and desmadre assure that those histories and connections are always relevant, even if left unspoken.

My Main Argument

My third question, how does one speak for México, is partially a question of authority. Joel

Kuipers (2013) notes that outside of philosophy and evidence-based science “far less discussion has been devoted to the ethnographic description and analysis of the actual language of authority;

10 the observable linguistic practices through which influence is constructed” (404). Within this dissertation, I show how artists justify their authority to be hip-hop and to represent their city only as part of a totally sounded environment, through their experiences in the street and through voiced language practices. This question is related to an as-yet-unasked question: how does one come to hear México and understand those speaking for it? Answers to this question stand for my main argument. In discussions of voice, I find there is far less concern with the listening faculties that precede and constitute the production of voice and the ears that follow it in interpretation as part of a listening audience. The voice is never the work of an individual artist.

It has very little to do with textual representation. And it very much reflects desmadre. The voice in hip-hop is about hearing the city in oneself, and hearing oneself echoed back from the bodies of others.

I argue that to appreciate the authority of voices within hip-hop, general listeners cannot simply look to one artist or read their individual lyrics; they must experience along with an artist’s community, navigate along with them through their streets, and engage in the dialogic relationships that make up a musical scene. Thus, I further argue that to understand hip-hop, analysts must become hip-hop.

Theoretical Review

Anthropology now approaches language as a semiotic, pragmatic, and metapragmatic phenomenon rather than a semantic-referential one (Harkness 2015). This shift in approach has allowed anthropologists to see culture and communication as embodied. Analysts highlight how information is conveyed, or rather multiply indexed, through isolable phono-sonic signals and through various qualities of voice. In this dissertation, I am less interested in the poetic and

11 semantic-referential meaning of rap lyrics and more interested in they way artists modify their voice in performance and the way audiences come to associate emotion and meaning with the sounds of others through their indexical linkages to the sounds of desmadre.

Following Andrew Arno (2003), I eschew prescriptivists definitions of language that highlight grammars and lexicons alone. Instead, I define language as an embodied process of communication in the sensory world. He argued: If the language module is amodal in the sense that it supports verbal and gestural language, it may also be embedded in a more general multi domain communication module that supports nonlanguage meaning systems as well as language. Thus those who share the innate capacity for meaning system construction and common experience in social life can automatically develop intersubjective systems of communication based on virtually every other mode of shared experience, cutting across elemental input domains of perception such as sound, color, shape and so on. This hypothetical general meaning module makes sense in terms of the prevalent definitions of culture as shared meaning because obviously there is more to culture than meanings expressed in language. (ibid: 809)

I therefore study the voice in hip-hop through a “heterogenous array of theoretical sources” ranging from dialogism, performance studies, sociocultural linguistics, and anthropology

(Bauman and Briggs 1990). In this section, I review these fields of study and the basic concepts they offer.

Artists define hip-hop flexibly. Sometimes they use the word to refer to the musical genre of rap alone. Most times, they relate the musical genre to at least three other artistic modes of expression, or elements, including graffiti, break dancing, and DJing. Other times, they use the term to refer to a specific style of fashion, way of talking, or total lifestyle. Basically defined, hip-hop is a culture, a “specific system of language and meaning” (Arno 1994: 21). Within this

12 section, I define hip-hop flexibly as well. First, I explore how the culture reinforces a dialogic imagination, a term related to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, which focuses on the connections between voices, speakers, and meaning across time and place. Next, I recognize hip-hop as performance; that is as “a special mode of situated communicative practice, resting on the assumption of accountability to an audience for a display of communicative skill and efficacy” (Bauman 2000). Although artists perform rap on stages for audiences and in studios for consumers of rap, I focus on how artists perform hip-hop off-stage and in movement across the city. I contend that to learn how to perform hip-hop, individuals must learn to navigate the city, to become accountable to other artists in an order of discourse (Fairclough 2001), and to echo their group experiences in a specific way. Therefore, I also define hip-hop as an identity. It is emergent, positional, indexical, relational, and partial (Bucholtz and Hall 2005). When individuals say, “Yo soy hip-hop,” they are positioning themselves and others, indexing various experiences and ideologies, and re-constituting the culture in new places. Finally, I position my study of hip-hop within a larger turn within anthropology to embodiment, the sensory world, and the semiotic dimensions of creativity (Porcello et al. 2010: Streek 2015; Harkness 2015; Howes

2019; Wilf 2014).

Dialogism: The Voice Echoes its Social Horizon

I noted earlier that the concept of voice augments studies of cultural, social, and political life by placing focus on the embodiment of immaterial aesthetic, historical, and ideological contexts.

Literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin did not focus on bodies per se; however, he did explicate the connections between individual voices and broader social horizons. He argued that language is necessarily social. Meaning does not stem from abstract grammar or philosophical abstraction.

13 Rather, meaning occurs between the utterances of speakers and interlocutors. Utterances are not defined by their length but by their intentionality of meaning, by their answerability to rejoining utterances, and by the relationship between the two. Utterances only exist in a chain of dialogue.

I quote Bakhtin (1999) at length to show his inclusive thoughts on language, meaning, and dialogue and how his theory of language parallels Monsiváis’s theories of desmadre (Egan

2001). He writes:

Utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self–sufficient; they are aware of

and mutually reflect one another. These mutual reflections determine their character. Each

utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related

by the communality of the sphere of speech communication. Every utterance must be

regarded primarily as a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere (we

understand the word “response” here in the broadest sense). Each utterance refutes,

affirms, supplements, and relies on the others, presupposes them to be known, and

somehow takes them into account…The utterance is filled with dialogic overtones, and

they must be taken into account in order to understand fully the style of the utterance.

After all, our thought itself—philosophical, scientific, and artistic—is born and shaped in

the process of interaction and struggle with others’ thought, and this cannot but be

reflected in the forms that verbally express our thought as well. (106)

In this quote, Bakhtin defines experience as dialogic, as existing at the border between what has been said before, what any speaker intends to mean, what response any utterance receives thereafter, and the connections between each. Between these relationships, we can find no privileged center, because otherness defines everything. Bakhtin used terms like heteroglossia,

14 polyphony, and transgredience to assert that meaning is heterogenous and unfinalizable (Bakhtin

1991; Morris 2003). Heteroglossia is the wellspring of meanings that exist prior to every utterance and informs it, even in absence. Polyphony, meaning multiple voices, refers to the way an utterance can maintain multiple perspectives. Transgredience is the necessity of the other to define the self. It is for this reason that my main argument about the voices of artists necessarily includes a listening subject.

Within their music, artists deliberately use heteroglossia and polyphony. Their creative language, poetry, and word play inspires new meaning, as do the instrumental tracks over which they rap, which reuse loops of previously recorded music in a new context. These practices have the important consequence of indexing their place in the city and the shared experiences of their audience. While I assume the aforementioned to be true and demonstrable through lyrical analysis, I will show that artists do not reserve their dialogic creativity for their stage performances and musical recordings alone; they live by it, imagine the world through it, and come to embody it through their street-centric lifestyle.

Despite the heteroglot nature of language, stable genres form through tradition and socialization and by the schemes of authority figures (Bakhtin 1999: 99). This gives order to the endless possibilities of language, assuring that meaning is interpretable but also constraining.

Centripetal forces reinforce monologism to centralize language and ideology and make irrelevant other perspectives and other subjectivities. Within México, “masters of thought” such as traditional musics, stereotypes, classism, and rituals of marginality push to finalize the verbal- ideological life of the nation (Bakhtin 1991: 273). This dissertation is less about these discourse, though, and more about how artists themselves intervene in bounded systems of language and

15 enter the ongoing dialogue between society, sound, and identity. In particular, I analyze how they become popular, convincing, or what Bakhtin called infectious:

Every socially significant verbal performance has the ability—sometimes for a long

period, and for a wide circle of persons—to infect with its own intention certain aspects

of language that had been affected by its semantic and expressive impulse, imposing on

them specific semantic nuances and specifically axiological overtones; thus, it can create

slogan-words, curse-words, praise-words and so forth. (ibid. 290)

Because Bakhtin studied the novel, using literature as a metaphor for other aspects of existence, he left under-theorized the actual process whereby language comes to mean, voices come to be polyphonic, and verbal performance comes to infect. To correct this aporia, I turn to the concepts of performance and performativity.

Performance: The Voice Creates Self and Society

Performance has wide implications in society—especially ritual, folklore, and oral performance (Briggs 1988; St. John 2008; Turner 1985). Various scholars contribute to this trend.

Victor Turner, for instance, found that ritual performances expose the major categories and contradictions of cultural processes (Turner 1969). Throughout his studies of the Ndembu people of Zambia, Catholicism, and theatrical dramaturgy, Turner “strove to grasp and reveal how society (symbols, conflicts, performance) is actually lived by its members, how symbolic units, social ‘fields’ and aesthetic genres condense, evoke, and channel meaning and emotion” (St.

John 2008: 3). His structural and processual approach showed how performances simultaneously reproduce and transform society. Hip-hop is not ritual performance or rite of passage in the strict sense that Turner described in Zambia; but, as a lifestyle dedicated to the streets and to rupturing

16 national cultural traditions, it reproduces anti-structural meaning, or liminality and functions as an “exceptionally dense representation of spatiotemporally wider categories and principles in an interactional here-now” (Stasch 2011).

Charles L. Briggs (1988) demonstrated how performers of Mexican verbal art actively engage in social process, consciously selecting and interpreting cultural patterns. Dialogically, they respond to the demands of their audience. Bauman and Briggs (1990) stressed:

Performances are not simply artful uses of language that stand apart both from day-to-day

life and from larger questions of meaning… Performance rather provides a frame that

invites critical reflection on communicative processes. A given performance is tied to a

number of speech events that precede and succeed it (past performances, readings of

texts, negotiations, rehearsals, gossip, reports, critiques, challenges, subsequent

performances and the like). (61)

This is important in hip-hop, where artists seek to shift what Mexicans in the nation’s capital actually listen to and interpret as authentic expression. For artists to be popular, to be heard beyond their neighborhood, they must be strategic and diligent in their dialogue with audiences.

They must convince their audience of their realness as artists and prove their right to represent life in México. Hip-hop is therefore individual creative performance, part of a larger communicative process, and always exists in dialogue with other cultural texts.

J. L. Austin’s work on the speech act has further implications for those who study performance, verbal art, and other cultural texts (Bauman and Briggs 1990). In his landmark text,

How to Do Things With Words (1975), Austin showed that language is not only descriptive but performative. Language both reflects preexisting reality and actually creates reality anew. Austin

17 (1975) gave the examples of uttering “I Do” during wedding vows, breaking a bottle to christen a ship, bequeathing property after death, and betting. In these moments, reality is the consequence of rather than the inspiration for a speech act. Austin showed that mundane speech is constitutive of daily life. Austin inspired a number of scholars. Gregory Bateson and Erving Goffman similarly found that individuals use semantics, gestures, and other metalinguistic signals to frame events; that is, they engage in “face-work” to assure their actions, their meaning, and their selves are interpretable (Bateson 1972; Branaman 1997).

Judith Butler (1988; 1990; 1993) argued that gender and sex—categories often taken as natural—are the “effects” of performativity. Butler claims, “if we say, for instance, that gender is performatively constituted, then we call into question whether there is a stable gender in place and intact prior to the expressions and activities that we understand as gendered expressions and activities” (1990: 148). Butler’s work counters the notion that permanent identities, even institutions, exist prior to their performance. She says, “performativity counter[s] a certain kind of positivism according to which we might begin with already delimited understandings of what gender, sex, the state, and the economy are” (ibid). In this way, the notion of a rapper uttering

“Yo soy hip-hop” to become hip-hop is sensible and part of the larger process of performative identification and stylization. Hip-hop does exists before any one utterance, but only as a habituated series of performances. It is also through performing hip-hop that several Mexican cultural traditions, discourses, and institutions come to exist again, but more on that later.

Bucholtz and Hall (2005) argue that identity is emergent in speech acts. They outline a productive framework for understanding hip-hop, reminding us that identity is “a relational and socio-cultural phenomenon that emerges and circulates in local discourse contexts of interaction

18 rather than [a] stable structure located primarily in the individual psyche or in fixed social categories” (585–86). They offer five principles, outlining identity as emergent, positional, indexical, relational and partial.

Richard Bauman’s work (2000) reflects the first principle of emergence. He says, identity is

“the situated outcome of a rhetorical and interpretive process in which interactants make situationally motivated selections from socially constituted repertoires of identificational and affiliational resources and craft these semiotic resources into identity claims for presentation to others” (1). When individuals say, “Yo soy hip-hop,” they are constructing identity for themselves and for others on a moment to moment basis. PerroZW and I did the same throughout our conversation on the train.

The second principle, positionality, challenges the idea that identity is a collection of broad social categories. Rather, individuals rely on identity categories to position themselves in interaction. Identities “encompass (a) macro-level demographic categories; (b) local, ethnographically specific cultural positions; and (c) temporary and interactionally specific stances and participant roles” (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 592). Hip-hop is one resource used in interaction, along with other macro identity categories like age, gender, or social class, and with local categories like malandro, naco, ñero or narco (which variously mark youth as delinquent or drug-affiliated) or like reggaetonero or rocero (which are musical genres made identity categories).

The third principle shows that identities are indexical. They are linguistic forms that link different symbols with social meaning. Whether mentioned explicitly or presupposed, identities rely on specific contexts for meaning. They are rooted in cultural beliefs, values, and ideologies

19 about others in the city and world. The concept of indexicality is important in the study of voice because artists, communities, and critics rely upon semiotic links to position themselves and others within an ideological world. Thus the interviews and vignettes that make up this dissertation are mediations of wider dialogues circulating in México. They show how hip-hop endures and become a societal norm through interaction.

Bucholtz’s and Hall’s (2005) fourth principle argues that identities are neither autonomous nor independent. They are relational, having meaning because they overlap with, complement, and compete against other identity positions. Hip-hop emerges when artists engage in processes of adequation, downplaying difference from others or other communities of hip-hop in the world.

Hip-hop also emerges when artists distinguish themselves from others and from the artists of other musical genres. Adequation and distinction imply ideologies. Artists also relate by authenticating, denaturalizing, authorizing, or illegitimating themselves and others. In this way, hip-hop is dialogic and defined by otherness.

Finally, Bucholtz and Hall argue that identity is always partial. They say, “because identity is inherently relational, it will always be partial, produced through contextually situated and ideologically informed configurations of self and other. Even seemingly coherent displays of identity, such as those that pose as deliberate and intentional, are reliant on both interactional and ideological constraints for their articulation” (2005: 605). Hip-hop is therefore something that shifts, never defining the individual entirely. Hip-hop artists are dynamic. They bring forth identities and ideologies deliberately and unconsciously. They sometimes bring their artistic identity to the fore, downplaying the relevance of their gendered, sexual, or national identity. At other times, they question their hip-hop identity and claim to be something more. Nevertheless,

20 they engage in meaningful social interaction and performance.

The socio-cultural linguistic approach to identity implies transgredience, or the recognition that the self is made real or validated by the other (Holquist 1991). These concepts are important for understanding hip-hop in México for several reasons: first, because rap is associated with the speaking voice; second, because it shows how individuals relate to larger scales of ideology and structural organization through their voice; third, because it offers tools to dissect the process by which artists form their voice in desmadre; and finally, because it maintains that identity is mutually constitutive, showing that even as artists create their voice; their voice is created by the street, and interpreted by their audience.

The Phonosonic Nexus: Bodies Make Sound and Cultural Meaning

The preceding discussion of the semiotic turn (Harkness 2015), amodal language (Arno

2003) and various conceptions of performance apply to the study of voice because artists purposefully sound like the street through their music and through talking hip-hop. They accomplish this by mastering the relationship between culture and body. In his study of Christian singers in modern Korea, Nicholas Harkness notes that the metaphorical productivity of the

English term voice can lead to confusion. The symbolic possibilities of the term (as when referring to political, literary, or artistic voices or when imagining the voice of a people) differ from the more literal, technical features of a speaking or singing organ. In the Korean language, two separate words define the voice, Moksori and Ŭmsŏng, thus allowing for analytic specificity between materiality and immateriality. Despite the cultural relative nature of Western conceptions of voice, Harkness finds the overlapping terminology that does not exist in Korean quite productive in English-language anthropological study. He says:

21 I treat the voice as an ongoing intersection between the phonic production, shaping, and

organization of sound, on the one hand, and the sonic uptake and categorization of sound

in the world, on the other. I give this practical, processual intersection the name

phonosonic nexus… this concept clarifies the relationship between literal understandings

of “voice” (e.g., a laryngeal setting involving vocal cord adduction, a material locus of

human sound production, an instantiation of a speaking or singing individual, etc.) and

more tropic understandings of “voicing” (e.g., a metonym of political position and power,

a metaphor for the uniqueness of an authentic self or collective identity, an expression of

a typifiable persona, etc.). These two related views consider voice as a ubiquitous

medium of communicative interaction and channel of social contact and as the

positioning of a perspective within a culturally meaningful framework of semiotic

alignments.

Attention to the phonosonic nexus allows me to hear the world first, to listen to rappers completely as creators of sound-objects and music, and to define them as existing interdependently with their social context (Goldberg 2018). On the train, it was not only what

PerroZW said about his self-reliance that was meaningful. It was how he said it, the aural context in which he said it, and my ongoing dialogic response to his utterances as I spent more time with him and his students. Later, when Jerry Funk convinced me that destiny assured our eventual meeting, both his voice as a laryngeal setting and his voice as a metaphor for collective identity rang true. In both these instances, meaning is not only what I experienced in ethnography, but how I hear these experiences in every new instance of listening. In this dissertation, voice is about bodies struggling to cross the city, struggling to make a meaningful sound. Voice is about

22 the dialogic imagination, connecting to a public, and echoing a cultural identity. It is all about performativity. It is all about desmadre.

Before shifting to the specific context of this study, I define a two more key analytic terms that I rely upon throughout this dissertation: resonance and apophenia. Considering Bakhtin’s analogy that “echoes and reverberations” are inherent within dialogism, I use the term resonance to indicate how meaning is heteroglot and unfinalizable and simultaneous tends toward constant change and stability. The word resonance is submerged in notions of sound sitting at the cusp of noise. Echoes are transitory and latent in returning, changed by their acoustic route. Like sound, artists are ever changing as they bounce between the hard objects of the city and other intentional speakers. I define resonance as a temporarily stable kind of dialogism existing in the voices of individuals. I use the term apophenia to index the experience of recognizing something meaningful in the loose and heterogenous connections within a culture and city, what Arno

(2003) might have called “intuition” or my friends called destiny. The vignettes of this dissertation represent key moments of apophenia when hip-hop and desmadre simply made sense. By using resonance, echoes, and apophenia as the overriding framework for understand hip-hop in desmadre, I follow works in anthropology (Lepsetler 2016; Feinberg 2003; Tsing

2015), ethnomusicology (Baker and Knighton 2011; Novak 2013; Kun 2005), queer theory

(Halberstam 2011), and border studies (Chavez 2017), all of which turn toward the noisy, distorted edges of social research.

México is Chaotic, Hip-hop Gives Direction

México is desmadre. It is loud, clamorous, and continually changing. Nearly 23 million people live in 7000 square kilometers of urban agglomeration. 8.8 million live in the 16

23 delegations of Mexico’s federal district alone. Urbanization has swallowed 27 more delegations in the surrounding states to link México, Hidalgo, and (soon enough) Puebla in a continuous sea of urbanity. The population of the metropolitan area is greater than 170 countries in an area far smaller than most of them. To be any more specific does little to describe the place.6

Since the 1950s, when 2 million people lived there, growth has occurred rapidly and with little planning (Heathcott 2019). The streets are now crowded and confusing. Two-lane roads sit between towering residential buildings with no parking. Six-lane roads bisect otherwise quiet neighborhoods. Many roads have two or three given names and two competing systems of postal address. Automobiles congest every road, honking and sputtering. Busses and dump trunks grind and screech at every intersection. Ambulant vendors are continually shouting and calling out to possible customers. El Metro, a massive public train system, connects many corners of the city, vibrating a network of 195 stations along over 140 miles of track. It is still far from comprehensive, though. There is always further to go by bus, by taxi, by foot.

To exist in México is also to confront the desmadre of social life. Every competing social structure bellows its own sound structure, filling the streets with noise. The economy screams.

The police state clangs and marches. Resistance shouts back. The rhythms of the Indigenous city,

Tenochtitlán, still resound. Immigrant populations and global trends chime in from outside.

Histories, meaning, and ideologies resonate in the voices and noises of the streets. Recent historical shifts in political power, economics, and cultural production have destabilized the role the capital city plays, yet México remains an epicenter of the verbal-ideological life of the nation

(Bakhtin 1991: 273).

6 For specifics see Garza 2019

24 Within this dissertation, I show that by moving throughout the city in the performance of hip- hop, individuals make intelligible the chaos. They put word to desmadre and find temporary direction and purpose. Through their labor to become artists, they develop their poetry, their breath control, and their embodied awareness of the streets. They recognize their place, authenticate their experience, and become convincing as representatives of hip-hop.

Hip-hop is a cultural and musical identity that first developed in the Black, Latinx, and immigrant neighborhoods of 1970s, postindustrial New York. There, new affordances in global telecommunications, the demands of a greedy financial sector, a conservative city’s budgetary cuts to arts education, and other racist policies all left the city’s youth with little prospect for a career or any formalized means to express their unrest. The youth suffered under the weight of this “politics of benign neglect,” but they also made do (Chang 2005). They taught themselves not only to survive within their limited economic context, but to thrive artistically. Ultimately, they gained their political voice within mainstream society to define their generation (Collins

2006). Some grabbed cans of spray paint and transversed the city, tagging it with their self- ascribed names and defiant art. Some threw block parties, filling up community centers and abandoned buildings, stealing power and redefining how marginalized youth interacted. Some took apart record players and rethought popular sound to recreate funk, soul, and disco. Some danced, pushing their bodies to a new extreme. Others grabbed microphones to become emcees, new folklorists, revolutionary poets, and urban griots. They called it all hip-hop. The culture was live. Style was everything. Soon enough, the DJs and emcees entered the studio to record rap, a rhythmic and looping genre of music structured by samples of previously recorded drum breaks and punctuated by complex rhyme schemes and layers of meaning (Rose 1994).

25 Although hip-hop began in New York, the culture itself does not have any one point of origin

(Pennycook and Mitchell 2009). By that I mean, within this dissertation I forego the important

(but already thoroughly answered) question as to whether hip-hop is an example of Western neoliberal cultural imperialism, or a mostly benign creative resource for globalizing citizens.

Instead, I follow transcultural studies that eschew this binary and “destabilize the dominant conceptualization of English [and here I imply hip-hop] as a global language by drawing attention to the cultural and linguistic bricolage in which English is often found” (Higgins 2009:

4). The fact is that the music of rap now dominates popular media, trending in nearly every consumer market with radios playing it; advertisers using it; movies and TV portraying it. The culture of hip-hop is a global force reproduced on nearly every continent and perhaps in every major city by individuals coming from very different circumstances to create very different styles. In all this hip-hop undergoes a process of reterritorialization, seeming as if it had always been local (ibid). Even in Spanish-speaking México hip-hop continues unifying artists and communities, invigorating complex forms of language, diverting power, and keeping itself live.

Scholars, journalists, and cultural analysts study the music of rap across the United States

(Forman and Neal 2004), in Europe (Mitchell 2001; Durand 2002), Africa (Saucier 2011;

Higgins 2009), Asia (Bodden 2005; Condry 2006), Asian America (Labrador 2018; Sharma

2010; Tiongson 2013) and Latin America (Castillo-Garsow and Nichols 2016; Flores 2000;

McFarland 2012, 2013). These studies inquire into the meaning of the music, analyze its samples and its lyrics, and seek to understand how artists relate to their sociopolitical context and their often marginalized racial or class statuses through their artistic production.

26 Hip Hop Literature Review

While the early innovators and practitioners of hip-hop were multicultural (Chang 2005), hip-hop is decidedly Black (Smitherman 2006). Its basic aesthetic system, artistic heritage, and political sensibilities all have their roots in 20th century black cultural production (Ogbar 2008).

The great majority of studies of hip-hop, therefore, have focused on “Black cultural priorities” (Wilson 2010). Even those studies that centralize non-Black participants often do so to explore artists’ negotiation of their marginal (or at least non-normative) status in the scene and the strategies they use to authenticate their role in the Black cultural form (Akom 2008; Alim,

Lee, and Carris 2010; Campos, Labrador, and Caldwell 2020; Cutler 1999, 2007; Sharma 2010).

While popular critiques of hip-hop abound (Wilson 2010; McWhorter 2008), most scholarship has defined the culture in a positive light, as resistance to hegemonic epistemology and as disrupting dominate theories of race, language, and capitalism (Alim 2006; Gilroy 1994;

Keyes 2002; Rose 1994, 2008). Su’ad Abdul Khabeer’s (2016) recent study of Muslim hip-hop is notable. She shows how through hip-hop Muslim youth gain a stance of self-determination, self- knowledge, and political consciousness and learn to reject the “white supremacist, imperialist, capitalist patriarchy” with “black cool” (29). Rather than simply noting how hip-hop informs

Muslim identity, she traces how Islam informed hip-hop’s early development and is now looping back to invigorate networks of young Muslims across the US.

The focus on black cultural priorities has continued in the study of hip-hop throughout Latin

America, especially in Brazil, Columbia, and Cuba. Derek Pardue’s (2008) study of hip-hop in

Brazil, for instance, describes how the musical culture empowers Black practitioners to deconstruct and reconstruct societal notions of race, gender, and life on the margins, especially as

27 they engage in transcultural dialogue with American Black popular culture. Gerard Béhague

(2006) places hip-hop alongside other “alien” musics in Brazil to show how race affects and reflects major cultural, political, and economic issues. Bollig (2002), too, studies hip-hop in

Brazil as a “symbol of Black protest and economic power” and as an “interesting subject of study for those with an interest in race, racial oppression and its resistance” (159–160). Dennis

Christopher (2011) focuses on the way Black hip-hop in Columbia articulates a counter-narrative to mestizaje (to be defined later) and racism. Marc D. Perry (2015) investigates the exchange value of Cuban Blackness in the country’s culture industry. Baker (2011) focuses on the relationship between hip-hop artists, the government of Cuba and an international community of culture critics, academics and Black artists searching for a purely revolutionary music. Ralph,

Aisha and Palmié (2017) study the relation between hip-hop and Afro Cuban religion and spirituality. Considering the generative and flexible nature of Paul Gilroy’s (1994) work on cultural production across the transatlantic Black diaspora, it is not surprising that many scholars place great value in drawing connections between musics at this scale, even if those connections are more imaginative, abstract, and textual than those actually lived by artists.

There is no doubt that in these places and in México, Black-American music has helped to inspire conversations of blackness in Latin America and encouraged resistance against mestizaje, the dominant racial ideology that celebrates its European and Indigenous mixtures but mostly ignores Black contributions. In México, however, Black populations have mostly remained along the coasts of Oaxaca and Veracruz and undergone a distinctive cultural development largely disconnected from Mexican urbanism (Lewis 2012). I interviewed no rappers that identified as afrodescendiente and met only two. I did have conversations with mestizo artists about the

28 meaning of Blackness in hip-hop; I will not, however, focus on those conversations in this dissertation.

I do not prioritize Blackness partially because I did not encounter a large population of afrodescendientes in México, but also because to do so would be to skip the long history that exists between hip-hop’s origins, its current form in Latin-America, and the process by which the culture arrived to and has moved throughout México. In chapter two, I will show this history and movement of hip-hop not as a disembodied text that inspired later cultural production but as an active culture at every moment. Even as a text, many older rappers in the scene first encountered rap music not as a specifically Black form of cultural expression but as a Chicano one. Younger rappers now only know African-American rap secondarily. They do come to recognize Black

America as the site of original production as an ongoing paragon of popular rap, but only after they have already gained a more complete knowledge of rap and hip-hop through Spanish- language, Iberian, Latin-American and Caribbean forms, all of which have been popular for years. Of course, no matter the amount of spatiotemporal distancing… word to desmadre.

Many of the previously discussed studies of hip-hop trace what Kato (2012) called the revolutionary potential of popular culture in the context of globalization. And while their contributions to the study of hip-hop have been profound, their reliance on textualism and lyrical analysis has had consequences; or rather, is the consequence of two rather problematic interpretations of hip-hop.

First, there is a tendency in the study of hip-hop for authors to write as if the original production of hip-hop culture occurred once in New York (perhaps again in LA), then assume that original product has since been recycled by local scenes around the globe. Such portrayals

29 begin with a nostalgic history marginality in “the ghettos”7 of New York; they then lament that once commoditization of this original culture occurred, it forever changed what the culture could be and what artists might be doing through their music today. M.K. Asante Jr’s book, It’s Bigger than Hip-Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (2008) exemplifies this common narrative, more-or-less engraving the tombstone of hip-hop with the year 1991.

Such studies polarize the genre through a few exemplary texts, arguing that while the original culture and some of its underground performers fulfill the revolutionary potential of the counter- hegemonic art form, the unfortunate appropriation of the music by the popular cultural industry has led to many more artists in the mainstream to reproduce the retched sex-murder-party rap that sells. The continual bracketing of Public Enemy against N.W.A. and then Jay-Z against Dead

Prez reifies this polarization and ignores the great majority of artist who do not limit their music to these subjects or who might write in both veins. This tendency extends to the global context.

Arlene B. Tickner’s (2008) comparative history of hip-hop in Columbia, Cuba, and Mexico is indicative of this. She claims “following its spontaneous genesis in the 1970s in the urban ghettos of the United States, hip hop went global, eventually feeding the cultural practices of youth groups in virtually every corner of the planet.” She continues: Members of the “progressive” hip-hop community in Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico also assert that one of their main goals is to make marginal actors interpretations of reality increasingly “public.” To succeed in this, they must make use of symbols and lyrical and musical strategies that are sellable-to the media, global record labels, activist communities in the North, and even national governments. Practitioners of hip-hop thus seem to recognize that “politics” is largely a marketing activity, and that the struggle to gain a voice depends on their ability to play the game of capitalism and to sell themselves

7 I place the term ghetto in quotes because in the following section I will critique the term and its use in hip-hop scholarship.

30 to “consumers.” Yet the marginal, unemployed, and poor status of most hip-hoppers means that hip-hop is never simply a means of escape or a way of life but also a potential source of livelihood. Therefore, the practitioners are constantly torn between “keeping it real” and packaging their music according to the interests of distinct buyers. (141)

Tickner’s interpretation that hip-hop is a “symbol network” connected by textualism across

Latin-America “ghettoes” reveals her lack of engagement with actual practices in these scenes.

Because Tickner is simply consuming rap from her own globally positioned context, she sees hip-hop as a metaphorical struggle of the imagination rather than an actual struggle by artists to be networked in the streets, speaking self and scene into existence. Consumption has very little to do with it. Text based studies obviously range. The best, though misguided, aim too introduce hip-hop into schools as a resource for teaching without engaging the street (Hill 2009; Petchauer

2012). The worst simply use interpretations of hip-hop to theorize about the philosophical nuances of what the post-modern aesthetic might be (Ciccariello Maher 2005; Shusterman 2000,

Potter 1995), or worse yet, what “the ghetto” might be like (Oliver 2006) without engaging with actual artists.

By focusing on lyrics, scholars search for the common ideology, or the “connective marginality” that links the transnational hip-hop culture (Osumare 2007). Although, the scholarly focus on rap music contributes to our total understanding of the hip-hop culture, I argue that strict focus on the text-based lyrics of rap centralizes the commodity form and “privileges the

(scholar’s) act of listening” (Gramit 2002: 4). In turn, the actual relations of cultural production in place are “rendered all but invisible” (ibid) and artists’ actual voices are left unheard. Rap must be recognized as hip-hop’s commoditized musical form. Hip-hop must be considered as the ongoing cultural process and set of social relationships that produces rap. Before we might ask

31 questions about the competence, form, or performance of rap, before we can interpret any theory, value, or structure of power as essential in the music, we must first understand the culture’s material environment (Feld 1984).

Within this dissertation, rather than investigating what artists say in the music, I investigate how they come to say it and call it hip-hop in the first place and how we, as listeners, come to hear it. I move away textual reductionism. I engage with hip-hop not as something that was created once before or as something that exists in lyrics, but as something that is the process of creation itself.

The second problematic tendency within the study of hip-hop, is the reliance on the under theorized consideration of space and conceptualization of “the ghetto” as bounded and marginalized. Since at least Murray Forman’s (2004) landmark essay, the link between space, place, and hip-hop has been apparent. Adam Krims (in the preface of Durand 2002: ix) suggests we take the opportunity to “see hip-hop culture and urban space as two faces of the same process, as mutually conditioning and determining” and as revealing the complex mapping of the economic and cultural contours of contemporary cities. David Beer (2014) suggest we use hip- hop as a form of urban and regional research.8 While I ultimately agree with these scholars, their over-reliance on texts (as described previously) leads them away from a complete consideration of place.

Murray Forman (2004) starts his hip-hop historiography by telling of the way early DJs secured their relationship to their “turf.” He goes on to consider how space, place, and race “get taken up by rap artists as themes and topics and how they are located within a wider range of

8 He is right even if he develops this theory only by reading Jay-Z’s book.

32 circulating discourse” (2004: 202). Finally, he shows how particular songs are connected to regional independent record labels and the particular kinds of sounds that grow out of particular places.

Although Forman attempts to write that these boundaries are porous and negotiable, he ultimately defines space as a static and bounded territory. He says that hip-hop reproduces “the basic geographic components of territory, possession and group identity that place such an important role among gang-oriented activities.” (2004: 203). He says, “the issue whether or not the [musical] tracks refer back to a consistently verifiable reality is rendered moot by the possibilities they present as textual spaces of representation” (2004: 217). I find this to be a problematic turn in his work. Oral histories of hip-hop’s first decade reveal that this narrative about the culture—that it rose out of and maintains gangland sensibilities—is greatly overstated and likely the result of a long tradition to criminalize African Americans (Aprahamian 2019), yet scholars continue to tell it.

In common parlance “the ghetto” denotes immobility and ethnic-racial spacial segregation and marginalization (Jaffe 2012). Rivke Jaffe “explores the role of “the ghetto” as a discursive space of immobility and traces its global journey as a mobile imaginary” (674). Recognizing an overreliance on the term in scholarship, Jaffe nevertheless assumes the immobility and segregation of artists; or rather; studies the mobility of the genre of rap and its representation of

“the ghetto” by counterposing it against the “physical immobility of the ghetto dwellers” (ibid).

Thus her study of hip-hop is still about the movement of a text over and above the movement of artists.

These studies of “the ghetto” overlap with studies of “the street” where both are defined in

33 the negative—as a representative space of the failures of the formal sectors of education, economy, and high-culture and as a road to subpar and dangerous socialization (Anderson 1990;

Oliver 2006). While there is no proof to support the belief that hip-hop provokes violence

(Fearing et al. 2018), the association of street-life, hip-hop, and crime is all too common, even within hip-hop scholarship. Take the following: The emergence and intergenerational existence of “the streets” as an important ghetto institution is also the product of exposure to inadequate family and community support, community tolerance of various patterns of dysfunctional behavior routinely engaged in by marginalized Black males, and the lack of organized and sustained community resistance directed toward Black males who embrace street-related values, norms, and roles (Oliver 2006: 922)

Oliver goes on to link hip-hop with high rates of incarceration, interpersonal conflict and violence, disruption of family life and abdication of fatherhood responsibilities, and disconnection from employment opportunities.

These analyses of place seem all too easy (if not racist) when their authors rely on texts about place rather than on their experiences in place. Certainly in México populations are excluded spatially, racially, and economically; however, it is important to remember that these people are more than their poor conditions, judgements about their marginality assume a powerful, more important center, and assumptions about their (im)mobility are relative to their own biography. In my dissertation, when I talk about the street, “la calle” I am not talking about the street that

Oliver (2006) and Anderson (1990) imagine and demonize. Nor am I trying to find tough guy/ gangster, player/pimp, or hustler/baller stereotypes in the music as Oliver (2006) does. Instead, I define the street and desmadre positively, as a space of creative possibility. I show artists not as marginal or immobile but as very much part of the city, its essence and emotional core. Of

34 course, this core is complex, reflecting Mexico’s larger context of poverty and inequality and including pain, danger, and anomie, but it also includes fun, excitement, ribaldry, philosophy and most definitely conviviality across the scene.

While studying hip-hop not specifically as text but through ethnography is nothing new, previous ethnographies have taken a different tack. Ian Condry’s work in Japan is a good example. He does not focus on the mega-hits of the music industry but on the transformative potential of the music in the actual places of performance (or genba in Japanese). Ultimately, he returns to questions of globalization and a study of Japanese rappers alignment to American rap.

Jimmy Patiño (2017) studies one record store in Houston, Texas, reading the signs and symbols of the store and the buying practices of consumers to understand the larger context of the local hip-hop scene. However, by focusing on one commercial retailer, he puts too much focus on consumption practices in the determination of culture. Khabeer (2016) includes “ride alongs” and “memory sight tours” in her larger ethnographic practice, yet still sees the Muslim scene as

“a mentality, a way of thinking, and an epistemology” (34) Although she speaks of a network, it still is something imagined across the IMAN network, that transcends the city, state, and national border.

Even in those studies that utilize ethnography, abstract ideology ultimately becomes their focus. More importantly, they take for granted that their subjects have prior command of moving through the city and connections to the scene. In my ethnography, my primary concern will be revealing how artists become hip-hop not through their disembodied engagement with an abstract ideology or in a single site of performance, but through their process of being in and moving through the streets. My primary contribution in the study of hip-hop and the study of

35 México will, therefore, be methodological not theoretical. Before discussing the specifics of my methodology, I must define “the scene” especially because it is through this definition that we might overcome textual reductionism and reifications of the concept of “the ghetto” in studies of hip-hop by adopting a mobility studies approach (Sheller and Urry 2006).

The Scene

Hip-hop in México is a scene made up of various cultural focal points, where artists come together to perform. I use the word ‘scene’ in the same way Alan O’Connor (2002) uses it to describe the punk rock scenes of Washington D.C, Toronto, and México. He says:

Theoretical arguments about cultural hybridity and disembodied flows of ideas and media

in space are usually made against simple concepts of place, community and shared

culture…The argument made here is that the conduits through which musical culture

flow are not random but have a social organization. This is often difficult to document but

this does not mean that the only alternative is chaos theory…This difference can be

explained by the social geography of each city as the field in which punks actively

struggle to create a scene. Each city provides a different set of resources and difficulties

including the availability of places for bands to play, housing, record stores and such like.

(232-233)

Like these punk scenes, hip-hop in México is defined by its social geography of resources.

Artists cross the city to find and create the culture. They navigate between venues, studios, and social spaces to be and become hip-hop. In this dissertation, I tell the story of how they make these connections and how I found hip-hop along with them.

Rather than resolving a singular definition of the hip-hop culture, the notion of scene hints at

36 how places, people, and events emerge dialogically and resonate with meaning. There is no one site where hip-hop happens, no one group who makes it, nor even one relevant context that can define it. Hip-hop exists only in the relationships between. For those in hip-hop, movement across México becomes more than simply arriving to a concrete building, public stage, or prison cell block to share music. It becomes a way to build a network of relationships between friends, collaborators, and competitors; between media companies, state agencies, universities, and activist organizations. Artists navigate through complex environments to encounter, collect, and create different resources. Resources are not only material—though some artists secure their basic survival through the culture or at least supplement their income—resources are social, mythic, and aural, inspiring artists and helping them to refine their sound (Feld 1984). To become hip-hop in México, individuals must become capable of navigating within this extensive environment and continually redefine their relationship to different sites, styles, contexts, and sounds.

While it should now be clear that rappers move from one site to another, from one context to another, it is worth affirming that they do so in their bodies. They experience desmadre first hand, seeing it, hearing it, and feeling it, viscerally and unmediated. They interact directly with the world and perform the culture live. While the internet is helpful in sustaining the scene, and while some rappers have built notable careers via social media, it is physical interactions, like the one I experienced on the train, that drive the scene. Presence is integral to socialization within hip-hop.

More than seeking fame, fortune, or even individual expression, artists seek to understand and analyze their world directly in the presence of hip-hop. Their navigation is a strenuous type

37 of labor, but by moving across the city, constructing relationships and talking hip-hop, artists can produce a wealth of experiences and knowledge of the city. They produce affect and collective subjectivity (Hardt 1999). They have their perspectives, their name, and their existence affirmed in transgredience.

By highlighting that hip-hop artists dedicate themselves to movement, I am not suggesting that the culture only occurs on trains, busses, or streets. Some rappers do busk on public transportation—they climb onto busses and walk down Metro aisles to share a few rhymes and search for a generous listener—but I did not follow these rappers. In fact, I did not study any rapper in a single moment of stage performance, as if rappers only called themselves hip-hop while they were sharing their music. I did not focus on any single site, style, or mediated form of the culture. Instead, I focused on rappers as they made connections across the city to talk hip-hop and to make their culture in communication.

Throughout this dissertation, I avoid using a rhetorically imagined rapper archetype. I name rappers directly. Only two out of the three dozen rappers I interviewed wanted to be given pseudonyms. For the rest, anonymity was laughable and counter to their goals as hip-hop artists.

They demanded I cite them directly. For that reason, as we encounter the various rappers I learned from, I will include hyperlinks to their online music videos. When possible, I have selected videos that show artists in collaboration or that resonate with the themes being discussed in the chapter. I also include video titles within the footnotes for print.

Methodology

As I have already shown, hip-hop methodologies tend to study hip-hop as text through

“lyrical analysis, critical examination of representations, and hip-hop as a discourse linked to

38 narratives of race, class, gender, and sexuality under material conditions of inequality” (Khabeer

2016: 9). In response, some ask what hip-hop looks outside studies, stages, and street corner cyphers and instead in family rooms and friendships (Dimitriadis 2009). I ask, what does hip-hop look like in movement?

I offer answers to my questions on voice after spending over 12-months conducting ethnographic research within a large community of hip-hop artists living across the greater urban area surrounding Ciudad México. My intensive fieldwork spanned July 2015 to August 2016 with a 5-week long preliminary trip in February 2015 and shorter return trips in 2018 and 2019.

Throughout most my stay, I lived in La Colonia Asturias just south of El Centro Histórico in

Cuauhétemoc; however, my multi-sited research took me to countless other neighborhoods in

Miguel Hidalgo, Álvaro Obregón, Tlalpan, and Iztapalapa in Ciudad México; to La Paz, Ciudad

Nezahualcóyotl, Atizapán de Zaragoza, and Ecatepec de Morelos in the state of México surrounding the federal district; and to Puebla de Zaragoza in Puebla. To conduct ethnographic fieldwork, I entered the hip-hop music scene and took part in the daily lives of many artists— some long-established, others novice. I observed concert performances. I visited studios, retailers, and underground venues. I enrolled in workshops, sat in recording studios, and wrote music. I took in situ field-notes and wrote in a reflection journal after each of my experiences in the field. I followed both men and women, interviewing 35 and 15 respectively in sessions that lasted anywhere from two to six hours. I recorded, transcribed, and translated these interviews, coding them for the common themes and concepts that artist made most relevant outside of interviews and across the scene. I did not, however, use these transcripts in my final analysis. For that, I went back to the original recordings and simply listened. I also collected and listened to

39 100s of hours of music on YouTube, Spotify, Bandcamp, and on Compact Disc.

Following Merriam’s (1964) prior urging that it is not what we study but how we study it, the ethnomusicologists Cooley and Barz (2008) urge we shift emphasis away from representation

(that is text) and toward experience. H. Samy Alim (2006) similarly critiques scholarly distance and hierarchical divisions between researcher and researched. He calls for a “hiphopography,” where scholars closely engage with the culture-creators of hip-hop through ethnography, biography, and social and oral history (2006). I follow his lead in this respect, working directly with artists and focusing on their language practices; however, I place far less emphasis on formal linguistics, syntactic structures, and language ideologies than he does. Instead, I aim to explain hip-hop language as embodied human communication and multimodal interaction

(Streek 2015). Facial movements, hand-gestures, joint attention to contextual queues, tools, electronic media, other sensorimotor actions all have a bearing on communication and index multiple meanings in the semiotic process (ibid). Rather than freezing these actions and falsely separating them as separate stages in communication, I am far more interested in understanding how embodied language becomes sensible as it is embedded within an ecology of communicating humans and nonhumans; that is to say, I aim to understand how the meaning of rap music is embedded within a total scene of hip-hop, thus I turn to performance studies as a way to access the breadth and complexity of visceral experience in-the-moment and as a way to produce knowledge intersubjectively with interlocutors (Khabeer 2016).

Although my work mostly focuses on sound and aurality, my ethnographic experience and hip-hop artists’ practice in desmadre is “intersensorial” (Howes 2019). It had as much to do with sight, smell, taste, and touch as it did hearing, and not as disembodied or separable modalities of

40 experience contributing to or being processed by a central cognitive, logical-thinking mind, but as being part of a totally integrated, experiencing body. Again, performance studies provides a route.

Acutely aware of post-structural and post-colonial critiques of anthropology, Dwight

Conquergood (2013) has defined performance as both an important object and powerful method of research. Performers are “committed—doing what must be done or going where they must go

—to experience the felt-sensing dynamic of that world: its tone-color—the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, rhythms—the visceral ethos of that world” (Madison 2018: xxvii).

Although ethnographic fieldwork privileges the body as a site of knowing—in that it assumes that the authority of the scholar derives from their rigorous commitment to the physical and emotional risks associated with long term embodied practice—published ethnographies typically repress “bodily experience in favor of abstracted theory and analysis” (ibid: 84).

The textual paradigm privileges distance, detachment, and disclosure as ways of knowing;

“rising above immediacy and rising above subjects” (Conquergood 2013: 48). Aside from not being sensitive to nonverbal, indirect, or extralinguistic dimensions of communication and meaningful action, textualism is tied to larger historical regimes of knowledge production based on surveillance. Performance studies insists upon immediacy, involvement, and intimacy as modes of understanding. The goal is to decenter, not discard, textualism (and visualism) as a way of knowing. The goal is to approach culture not by “reading it over the shoulders of those to whom [it] properly belong[s]” as Clifford Geertz (1973: 452) would have it, but to recognize our privilege and humbly listen, absorb, and stand in solidarity with those performing it as Fredrick

Douglass (1969) recommends.

41 Deciding to move “beyond the text” pushes me to utilize performance studies as a primary methodology in my research (Conquergood 2013). However, because I neither directly analyzed artist’s time on the stage before live audiences (Condry 2006) nor took up the regular performance of rapping and recording myself (Khabeer 2016), I argue for a more inclusive definition of performance in hip-hop. Artists often reminded me that individuals could rap and still not be hip-hop. They reminded me also that there were plenty individuals, myself included, who did not rap or practice any of the four elements but who were hip-hop. It is to this kind of performance in hip-hop that I am specifically attuned.

Amanda Weidman (2012)—after months of ethnomusicological fieldwork living as an apprentice in the home of a South Indian classical music master doing her teacher’s chores, relaxing, and interacting with her guests—realized that the body-sensorial knowledge that is required to perform music extends far outside the actual practice of playing an instrument.

Weidman had to open herself to all pedagogical encounters even when she was not

“participating” in ways that led to easy “observation,” as in field notes, interviews, or observation at concerts (ibid 217). Her learning was slow and difficult to articulate, but it led to a visceral feeling of the music rather than a formal aesthetic one.

My pedagogical encounters were as broad as Weidman’s; however, mine did not occur exclusively in homemaking; mine occurred in the streets as I learned to navigate the scene. I will extend the conversation of methods in chapter three and four, showing how artists learning to move through the streets is as instrumental a form of practice in hip-hop as is practicing an instrument in classical music.

Considering the total bodily discipline required of a musician, it is not surprising that

42 Weidman draws on Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus (1977) to note how apprentices (and ethnographers) are disciplined or inculcated in socially significant structures of feeling. Bourdieu defined habitus as “the durably instilled generative principle of regulated improvisations” (ibid

78); that is, the way historically contingent ways of being, like class, gender, or musicianship, become second nature in our bodies, thought, and feelings. I argue that through hip-hop, artists turn against what many in the city feel or embody. Rather than seeing desmadre as a negative; rather than seeing it as a source of frustration (to state control), as inefficient (to capitalist profit), or as imperilment (to homebodies), hip-hop artist explore it as a fount of culture, creative, and safety.

Representing hip-hop in this way counters “recurrent, most recently Romantic, ideologies

[that] conceptualize creativity as the solitary, ex nihilo creation of products of self-evident and universal value—most emblematically in the field of art—by highly exceptional and gifted individuals” (Wilf 2014: 398). Such ideologies of creativity obscure the social dimensions that come into view via anthropological analysis, which provides essential tools for clarifying at least three dimensions of the ethnographic context of “creativity”: (a) the nature and ubiquity of creative processes as communicative, interactional, and improvisational events, with real- time emergent properties, involving human and nonhuman agents in the context of pre- existing yet malleable genres, conventions, and constraints; (b) the role of socialization, apprenticeship, and pedagogy/learning in the making of creative individuals, implicating processes of social reproduction; and (c) the processes by which certain objects and individuals are recognized, constructed, and authenticated as bearers and exemplars of creativity and thus acquire their value.” (ibid)

Through performance studies, I highlight the social, communicative dimensions of creativity and how socialization, human and nonhuman agents, and desmadre itself comes to play a role in

43 the process.

As much as I commit to moving beyond the text in my work (Conquergood 2013), I commit to movement and mobility itself (Sheller and Urry 2006; de Certeau 1984; Cresswell 2012, 2014;

D’Andrea et al. 2011). Mobilities studies “undermine sedentarist theories present in many studies in geography, anthropology, and sociology” that “treats as normal stability, meaning, and place, and treats as abnormal distance, change, and placelessness” (Sheller and Urry 2006: 208).

Instead, they focus on how sociality and identity are “produced through networks of people, ideas and things moving rather than the inhabitation of a shared space such as a region or nation state” (Cresswell 2010: 551). For that reason, I define hip-hop as existing only by the mobile connections across a total scene rather than in any one place as others have (Condry 2006; Patiño

2017).

La Crónica

My ethnography was no more experimental than any others; however, my focus on sound and my writing style might suggest otherwise (Fisher 2018: 42). In translating this fieldwork into a text, I have been inspired by the Latin American and Mexican literary genre of la crónica.

Exemplified by the work of Carlos Monsiváis (1997), la crónica is a hybrid style of journalistic documentation and artistic essay that does not hide the authors’ voice nor their role in interpretation. In la crónica, objectivity does not require obfuscation. Linda Egan says, “la crónica makes quite clear that it enjoys dressing up its reportage in the fashionable language of narrative” (2001: 92). Although I do not employ all of its techniques, I do play with a few which

I have adapted from Egan’s list (ibid):

⁃ Inform and comment by means of scene rather than summary;

44 ⁃ Linger over characterization of witnesses and other figures central to the “story” I am

telling;

⁃ Impede closure, propping the text open with inter texts, epigraphs, subtitles and

extraneous genres such as popular song;

⁃ Freely (and sometimes with deliberate hostility) use other languages, usually without

warning, explanation or translation;

⁃ Imbue my discourse with sensorial imagery, metaphoric indirection and the centrifugal

allusiveness of symbol;

⁃ Ignore the standard journalistic and historical taboo against irony, sarcasm, satire, puns

and outright comedic laughter;

⁃ Rely on structuration of the discourse to simultaneous withhold and multiply meanings,

thus forcing the reader to participate in making the discourse; and

⁃ Foreground the narrative constructedness of historical time by presenting events in a

paradoxically antichronological order.

⁃ Unlike some cronistas, I do not fictionalize voices in this account nor speak for others.

Though, in chapter four, I do imagine the workings of other’s internal subjectivity after

an ethnographic analysis of their dialogic voice.

While these techniques for writing might be unfamiliar in the social sciences and while they shift this dissertation from being a writer-responsible to a reader-responsible text, I believe “final meaning ought to emerge when we insert our consciousness into the gap that [a] narrator has purposely left open between iconic referent and poetic discourse” (ibid).

Marcus Fisher (2018) pushes for more experimental forms of not only ethnography but of

45 ethnographic writing. He claims that in the “meantime”9 the challenge of anthropology is to avoid self-indulgent and “confessional ethnography” (Fisher 2018). Considering that I follow the style of la crónica which purposefully foregrounds the role the author plays in analysis, it seems warranted I introduce myself. In the following, it is not my intention to be self-indulgent. Rather,

I aim to give readers one more resource by which they might interpret the “scenes” and

“participate in making the discourse” of this text.

I am a middle-class, White-passing, cyst-gendered, heterosexual, Chicano man. I was born in

1984 in Thousand Oaks, California but raised in Yucaipa, California, a small town mostly known for its chicken farms and orange orchards. My father’s mother was Mexican and Indigenous from

Arizona. My Father’s father was from Michoacán, México. He immigrated to Southern

California at a young age, picked walnuts, joined the US military, and then worked at Sears,

Roebuck and Company until he retired. He was quite brilliant financially and was able to secure for his family a solidly middle-class lifestyle in El Monte, California. My Mother’s father and mother were both northern European, though born and raised in Iowa. After both serving in the

Navy during WWII they bought a farm in Iowa. After the farm failed, they moved to El Monte,

California. My grandfather worked nights as a janitor. My grandmother worked at Sears as well.

My mother became a hairstylist, and my father worked in the automative industry. By the time he retired, he had found great success in upper-management at a number of major corporations. Like his father, he successfully countered California’s structural racism and geography and moved his family eastward. For my two older sisters and I, our identities as

9 According to Fisher (2018), “Anthropology in the meantime” is a methodological injunction to not get lost in dystopian or utopian theories. He urges us to simply do the ethnographies of “how the pieces of the world interact, fit together or clash, generating complex unforeseen consequences, reinforcing cultural resonances, and causing social ruptures.” (3)

46 Mexican Americans were formed less by our relationships to the language or culture of our heritage and more by the continual reminders from our White friends and neighbors that we were not entirely like them, that we did not entirely belong where we were. We did not speak Spanish growing up. Our father and his parents refused to teach it to us for fear it would be more a liability than an advantage. Despite these micro-aggressions from our peers and the lack of bilingual support, we each developed a kind of pride in our non-White ethnic heritage. For me especially, this was the result of my love, my father’s love, and my grandfather’s love for music.

Growing up, while my friends were listening to the bland and redundant popular musics of the season, I was following my lineage and exploring an ever-widening pool of Latin rhythms, world musics, and Chicano sounds. My love for hip-hop solidified only once I realized its ability to sample everything and provide a kaleidoscopic window into other places and people’s ways of life.

This exclusion from absolute belonging and this love for music informed my eventual career path in the anthropology of music at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and my decision to focus on Mexican hip-hop from the middle of the Pacific. It was my grandfather’s dedication to listening that lead me to music. It was my father’s predilection for untrained cross-cultural, social psychology and guerrilla ethnography that led me to anthropology. And it was my experience in the Department of Ethnic Studies at Mānoa that provoked me to “return” to México to study “my origins” rather than continuing to study “the Other” in Hawaiʻi. I put these in quotes point out the fact that my family came from the state of Michoacán not México and that it was never my intention or belief that by studying hip-hop I would better understand some essential ethnic identity. Nor do I mean to suggest that I am more like one population of hip-hop artists than the

47 other. Questions of language, class, national belonging, and ethnicity would make such a suggestion problematic, if not impossible. Rather, I mean to say that my research is as motivated by personal reasons as it is by its objective significance.

My best friend in México once teased me that people become psychologists because they don’t understand themselves; sociologists because they don’t understand others; and anthropologists because they don’t understand either.

The Significance and Aftermath

While traveling across the valley of México following hip-hop, I encountered thousands of happy, welcoming, and generous people. I witnessed innumerable communities filled with hard- working and dedicated individuals attempting to make their world a better place. Dozens of charismatic rappers and strangers on the street acted as my guide. I felt safe there. I was well taken care of in all parts. This is the México that I want to represent foremost, thus countering the negative, often racist stereotypes about México and Latin America reproduced by some

USAmericans and middle-class Mexicans. From the perspective of the people I encountered there, their lives are not pitiable or hopeless. Representing my time in México as anything less than peaceful would be a betrayal of my friends there.

Nevertheless, at the structural level, México is in a tragic state and failing to confront serious problems on the national scale (Camín et al. 2017; Davis 2006). The country suffers from corruption and a disabled system of law. Democracy is tenuous. Public health and security are miserable. There is little economic growth, while poverty and inequality increase (Davis 2006).

There is no actual functioning welfare state. Globally, Mexico’s relationship with its northern and southern neighbors is increasingly insecure. A Drug War exists with state violence and cartel

48 terrorism occurring across the country (Campbell 2009; 2014). The environment is toxic

(Roberts 2017). Populations of women and Indigenous peoples suffer especially.

All this tragedy and chaos is foregrounded in sound and defines the rhythm of life in México.

All this echoes and reverberates in the heteroglot voices of hip-hop artists as they struggle to speak over anonymity and flow through desmadre. Making sense of the seeming contradiction between the hopeful voices of the city and the generally terrifying state of México is a central goal of this dissertation.

Two years after my study of rap in México, I learned of QBA a hard working rapper from

Guadalajara. His lyrics were aggressive and unapologetic. His voice was smooth and melodic.

With that style and his brilliant smile, he burgeoned on success, collaborating with a widening community of rappers for sold-out audiences across Guadalajara. Many of his YouTube videos hit a million. I did not learn of QBA by way of his musical talents though. I learned of him by way of news media. QBA had been apprehended for dissolving the bodies of three film students on behalf of El Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel. Soon after he confessed to the crime, dozens of news sources, both Mexican and International, had QBA’s name and musical occupation in their headlines. They had images of his visage pulled directly from his music videos. Some promised further investigation into his music to better understand the heinous crime.

The event was startling and, although Guadalajara is far outside my ethnographic purview, it forced me to reflect on the representation of hip-hop, crime, and the life of urban subjects in

México. The event reminded me of the importance of music as a form of communication. Music is consequential in not only cultural matters, but in relation to the political, economic, and judicial violence which defines the lives of people living in North America. Josh Kun’s (2005)

49 concept of the audiotopia and Alex E. Chavez’s (2017) extension of it are revelatory in this.

Their studies of music show how the experience of sound constructs the audio-racial imagination. In the US and México, music allows the nations to hear themselves, their sameness and diversity. Music also allows nations to define themselves against the Other, that foreign noise, that sound worth silencing.

In both México, Guadalajara, and the US, the state, the media, and popular culture often espouse progress, yet inscribe marginalization and injustice and criminalize certain bodies and actions over others. Hip-hop in both places calls attention to the nations’ overlapping, contradictory audiotopias. Artists voice different stories. Artists resist the myths of the nation.

They negotiate issues of class, race, and social identity, telling their counter-narratives in sound

(Labrador 2015).

Reading the many retelling of QBA’s case, it is clear the media does not recognize that cartel violence is the expression of its own political, economic, and cultural network (Campbell 2009).

They fail to document that a rapper’s art can be separate from that. Analyzing QBA’s lyrics, of course, offered them little insight. Like most successful rappers, he wrote about diverse and imaginative topics. However, if you have already determined him and everyone around him a criminal, as long traditions of metonymy have trained us to do, the lyrics and videos become self-incriminating proof of his criminogenic setting. QBA became the savage and violent urban pelado (Bartra 2002), undifferentiated from the rest of los Narcos with an alias and the stereotyped bad Black rappers of the United States (Jones 2013). His voice, his art, and his popularity stood as proof that these places breed crime and violence. These places beyond the edge were responsible for the murder and disappearance—not the state, not consumers of drugs.

50 The violent work of QBA, the cartels, drug enforcement agencies and a corrupt justice system have a direct impact on politics and daily life across the continent; however, it also has a profound impact as an exhaustive emotional tax. In my time in México, el Narco was the trope middle-class persons in both México and the US used to warn me from continuing my foolhardy excursions into the dark streets at the periphery of the city. It was the sign so many connected with hip-hop to tell me that those lives I study were not worth my own. It was absolutely the trope Donald Trump used throughout his electoral campaign to imagine Black and Brown bodies as representative of crime and social deterioration. His mastery of using the media to imagine conflict in society, stir racist and hateful public opinion, and steer the political process ultimately led to his capturing the American presidency (Lakoff 2016; Lempert and Silverstein 2012; Stolee and Caton 2018). This strategy somehow made his voice worth listening to, believable and powerful.

To study hip-hop is to study one small counter public within a much larger population of humans struggling to survive in desmadre. Though hip-hop artists are invested in their political and economic landscape, they have little individual or collective power to make real change.

Even as a popular culture, their market share is limited. And yet, they offer unique voices in our understanding of México at the turn of the millennium. Individual artists move through México’s contemporary landscape, actually witnessing inequality and experiencing difference. They dedicate themselves to understanding desmadre. Proclaiming “Yo soy hip-hop,” is therefore a powerful challenge, countering prevailing educational norms, social relationships, and systems of power. Even if it leads some artists to utilizing state institutions and to succeeding in more formal, more exploitive capitalist economies, the culture works as a viable counter-hegemonic

51 strategy. It has so for at least three generations. If we are going to counter the racist and classist hegemon through music and scholarship, if we are going to imagine a Northern Hemisphere not defined by el narco, if we are going to retell a Black and Brown parallel narrative, perhaps precolonial and reafricanized in its imagining (Castillo Garsow & Nichols 2016), we have to understand this relationship between rap, representation, and violence and continually ask whose voices are being heard? How did that sound come to be meaningful?

Gender

In Mexico, I encountered hip-hop as a mobile culture—not a static one—and as a performed identity—not a permanent state of being. I found a diverse population that came from very different places in the city and represented different class positions who all declared their likeness under hip-hop. Despite this, one difference remained apparent throughout my study: gender. Considering hip-hop’s relation to rap, a genre of music often associated with subordinate, rebellious, or toxic masculinities within Black-American, Chicano, and global contexts (Adams and Fuller 2006; Belle 2014; Delgado 2013; Greenberg 2009; McFarland 2012; Perullo 2005;

Perry 2004; Rose 2008; Sedlak 2016; White 2011); considering one cannot utter desmadre with mention a mother (Bakewell 2011); considering this study’s setting in Mexico and Latin

America, a place often associated with the normative term machismo, or assertive and aggressive form of manliness and violence against women (Bolton 1979; Gutmann 1996, 1997a, 1997b,

2003; Mirandé 1997)—considering all this, accounting for the question of gender is important.

Gender is neither a reflection of the sexed body nor a set of behaviors held in the head of individuals. Gender is, rather, a contradictory system of norms, expectations, symbols, and structures organized in relation to the reproductive arena (Connell 2005). Gender identity is a

52 process of engagement with this complex and historically contingent system of social relations; it occurs simultaneously with experiences of class, nation, ethnicity, and racial identities; and its consequence on these intersections is always greater than the sum of its parts (Collins 2000).

Within patriarchy, a sociopolitical order where men control the strategic means of production and reproduction, and economic and political systems, normative gender identities justify male- dominance and create a hierarchy idolizing certain hegemonic masculinities, emphasizing certain femininities, and subordinating others. As men and women define themselves in interaction and respond to their contradictory positions within the system, they enact various resistant, protestant, and complicit subject positions (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Wetherell and

Edley 1999; West and Zimmerman 1987).

Matthew Gutmann’s (1996) landmark text The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico perfectly exemplifies the multiplicity of masculinities in México and challenges the essentialist notion of Mexican machismo. He reveals the complexity of working-class men’s lives in México, showing how they are crosscut by myriad social factors, relationships with women, and the passage of time. True to Gutmann’s ethnography, I found no static typology by which I might have interpreted men’s or women’s lives in hip-hop in México. Patterns emerged though.

Within studies of gender and sexuality, we can define masculinity as anything that men think, say, and do; as what men think and do to distinguish themselves as men; as some quality that certain men have more than other men; and as something that necessarily involves women

(Gutmann 2003). Hip-hop is certainly something men in México are doing. It is not, however, something they are doing entirely to be men or to differentiate themselves from women. And while many of the stories I will tell are about me exploring the streets with other men, to

53 associate every moment of male homosociality with hegemonic masculinity (Sedgwick 1985)— even if those moments included conversations about women or with behaviors long associated with masculine rebellion or even criminality (Collier 1998)—is to risk collapsing men, masculinity, and patriarchy (Wiegman 2002). Applying the concept of compensatory masculinity, which explains certain men’s hyper-masculine behavior as stemming from their class-based frustrations (Pyke 1996; Eastman 2012; Vigoya 2003), seems to impede rather than illuminate a deeper understanding of men and women in hip-hop. Though, an analysis of female masculinity might nuance our understanding of women in the culture, overall, I did not find female rappers to be occupying gendered male role (Halberstram 2002; Perry 2004).

During every interview that I conducted, I asked questions about the meaning of gender and sexuality in hip-hop, and in a few interviews I received interesting answers. One young male rapper explained that he was not sexist for disliking female rappers; the problem was women’s inability to rap about universal subjects accessible to men. Another older rapper, reproduced a common trope in American hip-hop where one’s authenticity in the culture is measured by their proximity to suffering; he claimed that in México, where everyone suffers from poverty, women actually had something interesting to rap about. Several female artists blamed mothers and sisters for the reproduction of machismo. One woman criticized the up-and-coming Guatemalan feminist rapper Rebeca Lane, who regularly toured in México, for her unfounded proclamations that the Mexican hip-hop scene was sexist. Beyond these responses, the great majority of artists rejected the question or qualified their answer as not necessarily applicable to their identity in hip-hop. Woman especially suggested that while sexism and violence against women were a major problem in México and while traditional roles and representations did not allow for or

54 support their street-centric lifestyle, they did not see that sexism as endemic to the scene or that their gender resulted in any limitation in hip-hop. Even if the streets were more dangerous for them, they were like their male counterparts and had the same opportunities to enter the scene.

Hip-hop is often stereotyped as a sexually explicit genre of music, and even a minimal review of the music produced by Mexicans while I was in the field would show that stereotype to be well founded. However, within this dissertation, I forgo an analysis of sexuality. Although I discussed sex and sexuality, love, romance, and heartbreak with many of my subjects , the topics surrounding sex were brought up no more often than less “exotic” topics such as politics, economics, literature, pop culture, and history. I did hear sexist and homophobic language, but I also heard it criticized. I met a few queer identifying women, but I met no gay-identifying men, nor any men who openly discussed their emergent homosexual identities (Carrillo 2003). To be sure, my bonding with men buttressed masculinist ideologies even if I played the least masculine role (Skelton 1997; Tristan 2013). I will show this in chapter six. However, because my interest is rapper’s relationship to the street and to other rappers outside the particularities of their intersectional identities, my primary goal is to describe the context of their movement, the where and how they perform their identity in interaction, more than what becomes of their difference when it intersects with another’s.

As will become clear in later chapters, I limit my study to the scale of the local and the experiential. Having not studied in schools or within the home-spaces of rappers where they directly interacted with their families or within other places of early childhood development, I cannot speak to the psychic formation or socialization of gender difference in México. I can, however, speak to my experience moving through the streets with artists, male and female.

55 The Outline

In the following chapters, I analyze the voice in various ways, showing the process by which rappers learn to speak hip-hop, perform the culture, and relate to the city through sound and as sound. This process reveals hip-hop as something like an institution of learning whose subject of analysis is the city and whose goal is clarifying desmadre.

Music plays a central role in the daily life of artists (DeNora 2000). Within the second chapter, I contextualize hip-hop as a musical genre in the desmadre of Mexican history.

Following Geoffrey Baker (2011), I represent México as a resounding city, or a place reverberating between history, music, and power. The heteroglot voice of every artist is determined by its relationship to sounds that came before, therefore an abridged history of the city and nation is necessary, especially as it relates to the process by which elite groups struggled to define what a proper Mexican sounded like. Artists certainly recognize that these larger histories of México have a consequence on their lives. They also understand that hip-hop is neither the oldest nor most recent musical culture or identity to exist in México. They regularly mention that their genre and scene exists in relation to other traditional genres like Indigenous musics, bolero, mariachi, and trova (Pedelty 2004; Vargas-Cetina 2017) and to more contemporary and global genres like rock, punk, metal, and most recently to reggaetón (Castillo

Bernal 2015; Rivera et al. 2009; Tatro 2014; Zolov 1999). However, talking music, talking power is only one part of their learning process. What is more important for understanding artist’s voice is the direct connections they make through hip-hop to community and the experiences they have of the city as a moving place. This chapter sets the theme that every sound, every voice, is an index to some greater dialogue between society, style, and political event, but such indexes can

56 only be understood in consideration of particular chronotopes and scales.

While I have already described the basis of my methodology, I will discuss my performative participant-observation more thoroughly in the third and fourth chapter. I will show how my work of conducting ethnography overlapped with artists’ own method to become hip-hop. I will argue that in moments like the one described in the opening vignette, my own identity as an ethnographer became less relevant, and the personal relationships I built across the city while talking hip-hop became centralized. In these interactions, we relied on various resources like earlier meetings in the city and shared knowledge of underground rappers from other cities. We identified and affiliated ourselves to other shared contexts. We exposed the major classifications, categories, and contradictions of our cultural processes. But all this took time.

I then take a break, an interlude in the vein of la crónica, to discuss how my use of alcohol and marijuana effected my fieldwork. I argue that “participant intoxication” was an enlightening, perhaps necessary, but nonetheless problematic decision that contributed to my process for learning in hip-hop because it revealed the dangers of the streets (Fiskesjö 2010).

In the fourth chapter, I expand on the idea that artists must travel across the city to perform, by showing how they dedicate themselves to learning the streets and making connections with other artists to talk. I focus on one novice hip-hop crew to understand how their first learnings in hip-hop shaped their voice. Not only did they learn to rap, breathe, and handle the microphone but they learned to relate to a crowd, navigate through the city, and experience sound. It is through this kind of work that artists come to embody urban rhythms (Lefebvre 2004). In this chapter, I focus less on the individual voice of the rapper and more on dialogism between the posse. That is, while technical skills are important in rap, it is an artist’s ability to cross the city,

57 relate to sound and crew, and communicate the complexities of their experience through ritual sound that makes them hip-hop.

In the fifth chapter, I return to the idea that hip-hop is the purposeful exploration of culture, contexts, and meaning in México. I also key into the idea of ritual sound. Rupert Stasch (2011) defines ritual as an “exceptionally dense representation of spatiotemporally wider categories and principles in an interactional here-now” (160). He shows this to be a semiotic process that overlaps with oratory performances and persuasion. I show how successful artists are able to

(re)voice the resounding city itself through their commitment to hearing the streets and reshaping the acoustic features of their voice. They sample cultural traditions, loop linguistic registers, and represent common, relatable, or mythic experiences. It is largely through this work that audiences come to trust an artist’s voice.

In the sixth chapter, I admit that the streets of México are dangerous. Because artists construct their voices by navigating through the city, they necessarily encounter danger.

However, danger is not always something that should be avoided. Unlike those in mainstream society who lecture about and fear danger; hip-hop artists laugh in the face of it, they tell stories about it to authenticate their experience and presence in the scene. Danger, however, is not the final value of hip-hop. Danger is only important insofar as surviving it requires help from friends. It leads to an important kind of intersubjectivity where the boundary between self and other, individual and posse, voice and audition collapse, and the choral voice resounds.

Each chapter loosely works to define hip-hop as very similar to anthropology. In the seventh chapter, I consider the meaning of this discovery, asking what are the ethical implications of the academic study of hip-hop and the meaning of translating it onto the white page. In a highly

58 reflexive chapter, I put my own research under the scope of critical discourse analysis to reveal how my position within the study of hip-hop might reproduce inequality and mute the culture of hip-hop.

Within each of the chapters, I centralize ethnographic vignettes to meet artists’ own definition of the culture. PerroZW once explained to me that the initials of hip-hop, H.H. stand for haciendo historias, making stories. In each chapter, through stories, I continually tie together a number of themes—dialogism and talking hip-hop, the infinite and universal qualities of the culture, and the meaning of desmadre and movement—and reconsider how they resonate with danger. I continue writing in the same recursive, looping style, and reintroduce previous rappers to expand on narratives and themes. Rather than focusing on a single group or place, I introduce new crews, venues, and dialogic relationships. I tell of a hip-hop occurring in movement. I always tell of how I learned simultaneously with rappers. I following Feld and Fox and “pay attention to the social immanence of music’s supreme mystery, the grooving redundancy of elegant structuring that affectively connects the singularity of form to the multiplicity of sense” (Feld and Fox 1994: 43–44).

59 CHAPTER 2: HISTORY: MUSIC AND POWER RESOUND IN MÉXICO

Long after creation, the Mexica, a Nahuatl-speaking people from Aztlán in the North, came to inhabit the valley of Anáhuac. They settled in Lake Texcoco after they found an eagle eating a snake while perched atop a cactus. It was an omen. They constructed their capital city there, calling it Tenochtitlán. On the bed of the lake, they raised a dense network of soil and root chinampas, where every flora and fauna was interdependent and balanced. And with this productive agricultural system, they supported a powerful civilization, military class, and artistic network. In just two hundred years, the Mexica rose to dominate the valley and spread their cultural, economic, and political influence throughout Mesoamérica. Tenochtitlán became the center of the Aztec’s vast network of power, influence, and trade and the home to hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of diverse ethnic backgrounds including the Olmec, the Maya, the

Toltec, the Mixtec, and the Zapotec, all connected and balanced in their complexity. When invaders arrived from Europe and settled on the valley, they dried the lakes, destroyed the chinampas, and irreparably changed the balance of society. These colonizers did their best to recreate that abysmal chaos before creation, but would always have to contend with the desmadre of already vibrant life.

Representing Desmadre Through Sound

The struggle to understand desmadre and to represent México is a long literary tradition.

Accounts of daily life in the city range from the writings of pre-Columbian poets like

Nezahualcóyotl; conquistadors, priests, and cultural archivists like Fray Bernardino de Sahagún

(Klor de Alva 1988); the city’s beloved authors, journalists, and cronistas like Fuentes,

60 Poniatowska, and Monsiváis (Egan 2001; Gallo 2004); and today’s urban scholars (Davis 2006;

Garcia Canclini 1995, 2000; Low 1999, 2000). Despite centuries of such written descriptive work, the task of representation goes unresolved. There is too much to describe, too many streets with a different view at their intersection. The difficulty everyone faces in representing the city is that its complexity goes beyond its size. The valley’s long history as a colonized place contributes to confusion; the political and economic role it plays for the nation leads to frustrating contradictions; its demographic makeup is dauntingly heterogeneous. The role of all these factors becomes still more complex if one considers the region’s relationship to national and global issues and countercultural trends.

Because desmadre is a fundamental constant in México, in this chapter, I contextualize my study of voice by describing first the seemingly chaotic, multilayered history of the place and then (in the next chapter) the logistics of traveling through its streets. When Ruben Gallo (2004) considered desmadre, he asked:

What intellectual framework can help us make sense of a place long associated with

disorder and chaos?… What kind of questions should we ask to try to understand Mexico

City? What can be our frame of reference, our point of comparison? Should we discuss

the problem facing Mexico City in the year 2000 by contrasting it to the city of 1950 or

1900? Or is it more productive to compare today’s city with other megalopolises around

the world? (6)

In the first chapter, I offered a critique of textual approaches to hip-hop as a way to position my own study in la calle. I also critiqued studies that represent hip-hop culture as if it were produced only once before. I found that these kinds of studies tend to ignore artists’ ongoing

61 embodied experiences as they actively make hip-hop; these studies mute the full complexity of artists voices. To approach “México” itself as a text and to represent it as if it too were produced only once before would be similarly wrong. This chapter, therefore, struggles to historicize hip- hop within México without reproducing allochronicism, or that style of writing that positions subjects outside the “here and now” of the anthropologist (Fabian 1983).

I accomplish this in two ways. First, I follow Fabian (1983) and counter visualism—which seeks to understand cultures by quantifying them and diagramming them; that is, by seeing them from above (I further show this in the third and fourth chapter). I adopt an aural approach instead and experience history through sound, speech, and music; that is, as something experienced audibly in the city’s streets and as something maintained in the dialogism of “intersubjective time” rather than in the library (ibid). If desmadre is defined not as empty chaos but as a wellspring of prior life, meaning, and creativity free of hierarchy, then sound offers a particularly useful frame of reference for making sense of it. Labelle (2010) says: … an entire history and culture can be found within a single sound; from its source to its destination sound is generative of a diverse range of experiences, as well as remaining specifically tied to a given context, as a deeper expressive and prolonged figure of culture. (xvi)

So rather than offering a history of the valley and a description of the transportation system in a dissertation that aims to be mobile, I focus on the history of music and the music of history as made relevant by, as moved by, the artists themselves.

Second, I utilize the concepts of chronotope and scale (to be defined below) to better contextualize hip-hop alongside this sonic history. Distinguishing between the micro and the macro, the local and the global, the synchronic, allachronic and the historic is a common though

62 problematic and untenable approach when describing context. In hip-hop, for instance, to claim that one artist’s utterance is exemplary of their agency over hip-hop language while another’s is the echo of some dominant ideological force—as is the case in so many studies—and then placing this discussion along a historical timeline seems quite inadequate. Most authors would argue that inadequacies occur precisely at the interstices of several levels of context, as when the range of contextual-conversational inferences transcends the scope of what is purely brought about in the local conversational context and needs to include broader sociocultural frames of contextual knowledge...; or they may occur when what looks like a single and coherent activity—a multiparty conversation, for instance— proves, on closer inspection, to contain several, not entirely aligned or even conflicting, activities, calling into question the levels of “sharedness” in purpose and orientation of the different participants… So, what is brought about as a joint collaborative activity such as a conversation may obscure deep differences in what is being brought along by different participants and, consequently, in what is taken along by these participants after the activity. As those of us who teach well know, people can walk away from seemingly focused speech events with divergent understandings of what was actually said (Blommaert 2015: 107).

Jan Blommaert (2015) traces the development of the concept of the chronotope and scale in anthropology. He finds that recognizing how subjects invoke “chunks of history” and index relations between time and place (that is recognizing chronotopes) and accounting for the extent to which signs are “non-unified, layered, and stratified” and applicable to only to a certain pattern of circulation (that is accounting for scale) allows scholars a more nuanced understanding of context and the multiplicity of meaning in society. Including a discussion of the chronotope overcomes one-dimensional models of meaning and highlights what is “achieved indexically through a complex mode of communicative behavior in which pragmatic and metapragmatic

63 (ideological) aspects are inseparable” (ibid). It overcomes the assumed boundaries between levels of context and culture and highlights the contextualization cues that prompt local interpretations of translocal historically configured tropes.

Chronotopes are discursive organizations of time, space, and narrative (Bakhtin 1891). They are spatiotemporal frameworks that speakers or authors use to aligning themselves to particular histories and events and evaluate meaning. Artists regularly reference history in a general and unspecific way as they perform their identities. They do not, however, place these sonic moments into a singular history that leads invariably toward hip-hop as my chronological approach might imply. Instead, they purposefully index sonic history as an active part of their experience in the city, their understanding of nationhood, and as part of their ideological process of identity formation.

I break this chapter into two parts. In the first, I define the primary chronotope by which scholars prefer to contextualize hip-hop: the national. I abridge México’s history into broad phases. I highlight how particular social relationships and power always relate to music and continue to resonate in sounds heard today. I begin with pre-Columbian sounds because artists themselves begin there as they self-mythologize. I begin there also because artists celebrate and struggle with the language of their city, especially as it is partially defined by aztequismos, or appropriated Aztec words and place names (this will become more evident in chapter five). I then move through the colonial, revolutionary, and post-revolutionary epochs, wherein national ideologies were defined in sound and the contradictions of today’s city developed in its streets.

Artists refuse to be determined by this process.

I then offer a short, less-than-comprehensive history of rap music in México over the last

64 twenty years. It is important that readers do not confuse this short history of hip-hop as exemplifying a different chronotope. In fact, even though it is a necessary inclusion, it absolutely falls within the teleological and textual history, which my dissertation aims to overcome.

This will make sense in the second part, wherein I contextualize this historical review through ethnography, showing how artists value (or ignore) historical information in their process of self-identification and seek to limit the scale by which they interpret meaning. In this part, I analyze a moment of miscommunication that occurred in an interview when I mistakenly interpreted a rapper’s response in an interview to a longer history of literary citation.

Nodding at desmadre, these two parts highlight the non uniformity of interpretations of time- space and meaning. I do not write them to argue that the hip-hop artists in México of 2015 were somehow unrelated to México’s long national history; instead, I aim to limit the scale of my own study to the time-space of the streets and to recognize the power I have as an academic to frame the meaning of hip-hop as a musical genre in the history of México and thereby frame the lives of artists under that scope.

Part One: The Resounding City

From Anáhuac to Ciudad de México

To create the universe, the gods sacrificed much. The Aztec were the beneficiaries of this work and they owed a blood-debt for it. They were charged with assuring the ongoing movement of the sun. Thus, the ruling class held various state ceremonies and religious rituals to offer human sacrifice to the gods. They sacrificed cherished ritual subjects who embodied the gods.

They sacrificed prisoners captured in warfare. They sacrificed slaves stolen from the margins of their empire. These were highly musical events. Two bitonal percussive instrument, the

65 Teponaztli and the Huehuetl, were core elements in Aztec ritual music. Their name symbolized two gods who sacrificed themselves to secure the universe; their sound echoed the palpitating heart, contributing to the visceral sonic environment of Anáhuac. For the Aztec, sacrifice and musical ritual reproduced the cosmic order. It also secured social inequality and military dominance (Caistor 2000; Damrosch 1991; Pedelty 2004).

In 1519, explorers and priests, colonizers, arrived from Spain. Through blood and betrayal, they settled in Anáhuac and imposed a new imperial regime. Indigenous groups, a devastating smallpox epidemic, and a violent lust for power and mineral wealth helped the Spanish along.

Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors overran Tenochtitlán, burned it to the ground, and established a new capital in the name of the Spanish crown, the Catholic church, and imperial greed (Galeano 1997; Restall 2003). Whatever story might be told of the modern capital it must account for this violence when European civilization overlaid the Indigenous (Bonfil Batalla

1996).

Mark Pedelty (2004) says, “musical ritual was at the center of the Conquest. The Spaniards brandished musical ritual as a tool during their two-year campaign to conquer Mexico, and the

Mexica responded with their own ritual arsenal…Musical ritual was an essential weapon for both sides” (39). For their part, Teponaztli and Huehuetl struck fear into the hearts of the invaders, but the Aztec gods were ultimately silenced.

Over the next 200 years, the choral music of Catholic Mass, villancicos, and other European musical genres dominated and sounded power. The colonizers used music as a tool for the religious conversion of Indigenous groups and as a conservative discourse reproducing European values and urban harmony (Brothers 2011). Geoffrey Baker (2011) coined the term resounding

66 city to centralize sonic history in his study of the formation of urban Latin America. Baker draws from Angél Rama’s (1996) notion of the lettered city, which showed how colonizers deployed writing itself as an instrument of power in the imagining, modeling and construction of New

World cities. Just as the lettered city is well-ordered to suit the colonial project, the resounding city is one well harmonized to control space and the masses. Baker (2011) explains “harmony… was not just a socio-political ideal, but also a means of achieving that ideal, a tool in the dual process of civilization and Christianization at the heart of the city’s purpose in colonial Latin

America” (14).

Despite the conservatory efforts of Old Spain the music of New Spain came to echo the dialogic interactions between the elite peninsular-born Spanish, called gachupines, the

American-born Spaniards, called criollos, the diverse Indigenous ethnic groups, populations of

West Africans taken as slaves, and the various castas of mixed race subjects (Vinson 2017). The musics that each group contributed were further differentiated by class, gender, geographic differences, and by their particular approaches to sound. In time, musics of a specifically

Mexican character formed.

On September 16, 1810, the cry of Manuel Hidalgo y Castillo’s rang out in the city of

Dolores. The Criollo priest protested against the distant Spanish crown, demanded independence, and hailed la Vírgen de Guadalupe, the patron saint of Indigenous Mexican Catholicism. This shout gave start to the war for independence. Battles and rebellions raged until 1821, when

Agustín de Iturbide and Vicente Guerrero signed el Plan de Iguala and established México as an independent constitutional monarchy, as a Catholic country, and as a place where the Spanish and their American-born descendants had sovereignty to define the meaning of freedom and

67 equality. The country was independent, but it was not equal. It was called México, but it was not of the Mexica.

No longer justified by its relation to Spanish cultural traditions of royalty and religious expansion, the criollo state had to redefine itself by a new foundational narrative. Throughout the first century of independence, European, and USAmerican musical influences filled the void of

Spanish cultural hegemony. The popularity of the járabe tapatío (what many English speakers call the Mexican hat dance) and regional sones came to symbolize nascent forms of mexicanidad and mestizaje: that is, the ideas that Mexicans had a unitary national identity and culture, and that their culture was a harmonious blending of European, Indigenous, and African influences

(Brading and Urquidi 1989; Vargas-Cetina 2017; Walsh 2004). The popularity of the Waltz and

Opera music spoke to the new influences of market-driven liberal capitalism, the rise of a metropolitan culture, and urban elitism (Pedelty 2004: 87).

A tumultuous era of foreign invasions, global debt, and government unrest followed independence. France intervened twice. Then in 1848, the United States took one-third of

México’s total territory. During this era, the notion of malinchismo came to prominence. The term is drawn from the name of the historical figure Malintzin, who was the Indigenous woman taken by Hernán Cortés and used as slave, concubine, and intercultural translator in his stratagems of conquest. Various parties in the developing nation interpreted the biography of

Malintzin, Malinche, or Doña Marina (as she is various called), aligning her with various subject positions and chronotopes to make contradictory political statements (Paz 1985; Palma 1988).

Malintzin became the mother of the mestizo, or mixed race Mexican, offering her knowledge and culture to the colonizers. At the same time, as Liza Bakewell (2011) notes, if the “fathers of the

68 state and church” defined the virgin and the “good” mother, they also needed a symbol of the bad. So popularly, la Malinche took up this role as a traitor to the Indigenous “Mexican.” Her name continues to be used to police those Mexicans who look outside México, especially toward

Spain or the US, for cultural value and who cater to foreign ideologies. The biography and myth of Malintzin remains a rich sight for feminist critiques of Nation and ethnicity in Latin America

(Romero and Harris 2005).

Then from 1910 to 1920, México endured another revolutionary war. Peasants fought the war. They sought to gain some level of land ownership and social justice and to end Porfirio

Diaz’s near 40 year dictatorship (Mallon 1995). Over a million lost their lives. Military brass bands and ambulant guitarists offered the soundtrack to the revolution. They sang long ballads called corridas and documented the heroic deeds and rebellious spirits of Francisco Madero’s,

Victoriano Huerta’s, Pancho Villa’s and Emiliano Zapata’s militias.

The Golden Age of Nationalism

After the Revolutionaries ousted Porfirio Diaz, a new political party supposedly institutionalized their spirit. El Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) rose to power and held it for the next 71 years. From the start, they promised they would live up to the people’s demands and guide the country into modernity10. The epoch spanning from 1920 to 1985 deserves special attention. Throughout this time, the idea of the Nation played a central role in the hegemonic

10 Nestor García Canclini (1995) defines modernity as four basic movements: first, it is an emancipating project linked to secularization, market economies, and increasing individualism; second, it is an expansive project linked to capitalism’s search for profits and science’s search for knowledge; third, it is a renovating project linked to innovation, a change in the relation to between nature and society, and the continual reformulation of signs of distinction; fourth, it is a democratizing project linked to a trust in education, the diffusion of art, and specialized knowledge. In México and greater Latin America, these four movements were often contradictory, and left incomplete by hegemonic entities. Industrialization and liberalism were unevenly spread. Democracy was truncated and inaccessible for many. Religion and traditional cultures continued to shape modern sound.

69 process. The state and elite groups determined the relationship between the territory and the people, and justified their ongoing control of both. I use the term hegemony in two ways: first, hegemony is a continuous process whereby elite groups and subaltern classes contest, legitimate, and redefine power and meaning at all levels of society; second, hegemony is an end point, a precarious agreement reached among contesting forces that allows those in power to rule through a combination of coercion and consent (Mallon 1995: 6).

Nationality is a form of hegemony.

[It] is neither an accomplished fact nor an established essence; it is, rather, the moving

horizon that actors point to when they need to appeal to the connections between the

people and the polity, when they discuss rights and obligations, or try to justify or reject

modernization and social change. National filiation is therefore used in order to hammer

out a consensual, or hegemonic, arrangement; it involves cajoling and purchasing,

exhibits of strength and coercion. (Lomnitz 2001: xv)

Like identity, nation is emergent in discourse and communication. Music was a primary medium by which the Mexican nation was imagined and continues to be performed in today’s city (Anderson 1983; Pedelty 2004; Turino 2003). Using music, elite groups secured hegemony.

Using music, oppressed communities contested it.

During their tenure, El PRI built and broke the democratic state. Every candidate called for democracy; then when elected, took advantage of patron-client relationships, brokerage, political friendships of convenience, and other favor-producing exchanges to secure their gain, what

Carlos Vélez-Ibañez (1991) called “rituals of marginality.” They created national public education, but were constantly at odds with student groups and higher education. They celebrated

70 their indigenous heritage, but reinforced a racist program to acculturate indigenous populations and make them “legible” as Mexicans (Vasconcelos 1997; Walsh 2004; Scott 1998). The capital city became the economic center of the nation. Investment, industrialization, and jobs flooded the streets. Government institutions and services expanded to keep pace. By 1953, the federal district had expanded to the edge of its boundaries (Álvarez Enriquez 2009). By 1968, the city began construction of El Metro. Thereafter, Ciudad México would spill out into the surrounding state of

México and became an urban leviathan, caught in a tense political and cultural dialogue with greater México (Davis 1994).

The PRI-dominated State justified its regime and secured hegemony by investing in cultural politics, and reinforcing a nationalist mythology called mexicanidad, or the essence of being

Mexican, and mestizaje, the notion of being racially and culturally mixed (Joseph, Rubenstein, and Zolov 2002). Key government offices selected and reproduced public art, education, and entertainment. They sponsored many rituals of consumption and cultural products. This official culture “depicted the post-revolutionary period in essentially benign terms to validate the

Mexican State’s own Whiggish tale” (ibid: 4). It imagined national unity and historical continuity and implied the singular will of the citizenry. Roger Bartra (2002) argues that this search for mexicanidad also distorted popular culture to form three stereotypes: the stooping peasant, the violent revolutionary, and the pelado, the disenfranchised peasant turned, vulgar urban proletariat. For many decades, these stereotypes cast a shadow of nostalgia on the face of

Mexican modernity and compelled Los Mexicanos to believe themselves permanently underdeveloped. The notion of mexicanidad transformed these characteristics into ideology and obfuscated political domination by calling it all culture (ibid). The ideology imbricated a system

71 of habits, reinforced political authority, and rationalized the state and its economic structures. It erased the ongoing violence of settler-colonization, and silenced the needs of the heterogeneous population (Lomnitz 2001: xiii).

Music played a key role in these ideological processes. Classical and avant-garde music reflected “diverse ideas about modernity, identity, Cosmopolitanism, and ethnicity…” (Madrid

2009: 3). Composers appropriated and reimagined indigenous musics to reinforce Mexican essentialism and the myth of mestizaje (Delpar 2010). Corridos were re-contexualized and rewritten for Mexico’s growing film and radio industry. They came to symbolize Mexico’s agrarian and rural authenticity (Pedelty 2004). Ranchera and mariachi musics, which grew from this tradition, appealed to conservative values, reinforced patriarchal gender norms, and celebrated a general sense of xenophobia and loss (Guillermoprieto 1994; Mulholland 2007). The bolero, danzón, and a widening variety of transnational Latin-American genres (namely salsa, cumbia, and tropicalia) spoke to urban sensibilities and capitalist consumption. All this reinforced bourgeois values and their call for an authoritarian, capitalist government; all this related to the cosmopolitan and vernacular and the relationship between the center and the periphery (Rubenstein 2010; Franco 1996; Bartra 1987; Vargas-Cetina 2017).

Despite the state’s work to underwrite a singular national ideology, by the 1950s and 1960s novelists, artists, journalists, and peasant organizers and labor unionists began resisting and voicing their diverse perspectives. Musicians, too, played a central role in this rewriting as they used their music to political effect (Pedelty 2004; Chavez 2012). By the start of the 1960s, the

Mexican youth were angry and ready for a change. They saw through the promises and projects for modernity. They saw that the government ultimately assured inequality, corruption, and

72 patriarchal government control.

The Nation Breaks: 1968, 1985, 1994

In July 1968, only months before the city was to host the world Olympics, students held a massive protest in la Plaza de Tres Culturas, Tlatelolco. The state sent in militarized police forces and massacred countless students and civilians. The event had major consequences, not so much upon el PRI’s command of electoral politics, but upon Mexican national identity. Yareli

Arizmendi (1994) says:

Citing the student and labor movement of 1968 as one of the country’s most significant

movements since 1917, intellectuals, artists, and historians have identified the Massacre

of Tlatelolco as the event that divides Mexican life into an irreversible before and after.

This break with the official image of the country, this before and after, was processed

artistically through literature and all disciplines (106).

From here forward, rock music would define Mexican, counter-cultural identity. It would stand for the strength of voice, a rejection of the official culture, and rebellion against patriarchal authority and the long stagnant political system (Arizmendi 1994; Adams 2004; Monsiváis 1997;

Zolov 1999). However, as much as rock artists screamed and rejected the idea that the Mexican populous needed an authoritarian government, the state would continue to engage in electoral corruption, silence the poor and the indigenous, cater to global capitalist exploitation, and place the burden of economic depressions on the people (Schelling 2000).

A number of other events throughout the 1980s and 1990s, showed México would enter the new century much as it had the last: in desmadre. On September 19, 1985, an 8.1 earthquake left the city in ruins. Aftershocks continued for two months. Anywhere from 500 to 5,000 citizens

73 died or disappeared. The event was cataclysmic. The government failed to respond. The people had to rescue themselves, rebuild the city, and overcome chaos. They formed brigades to search for buried survivors. They housed and provided for those left homeless. They reconstructed schools and children’s programs without state resources.

Nine years later, in 1994, a series of events again shook the nation. First, president Carlos

Salinas de Gortari signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (or El TLC as it was known in México). This act confirmed the public’s fear that their government was not much more than a technocratic oligarchy in cahoots with gringo (USAmerican) capitalists. They would take advantage of the majority of Mexican people. Then a Zapatista uprising reminded the nation of its colonial present. Indigenous peoples resisted their marginalization and inspired mestizo people to do the same. Finally, a number of prominent and unsolved assassinations occurred, hinting that violence and corruption would only increase. Those assassinated included Donaldo

Colosio, a presidential candidate who promised social and economic change, José Francisco Ruiz

Massieu, the secretary general of the PRI and president Carlos Salinas’ brother-in-law, and

Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas, whose death was either an accident of cartel violence or politically motivated.

Now as “official culture” has faltered and the promise of modernism has ended, increasing flows of people, technology, finance, media, and ideology have contributed to new dynamic, imagined worlds beyond the nation-state (Appadurai 2002; Canclini 1995, 2000). Far from marking a more-democratic globalized world, these shifts mark the sway of neoliberalism— where commodities and capital flow freely to the benefit of multinational corporations but where people flow largely to follow the now more flexibly exploitive economy.

74 In this time, music has resonated the complexity of post-national identity (Bartra 2002). It has contributed to collective and individual memory, reinforced and resisted national myths, and been equally enrolled in cultural change and aspirations of fixity (Aparicio and Jáquez 2003;

Corona and Madrid 2008). Contemporary artists appropriate the sounds of the “official culture” to create non-traditional digital musics, to write counter narratives to cultural hegemony, and to secure a sense of belonging and authenticity (Aparicio and Jáquez 2003; Simonette 2000). Even as they appropriate global, cultural musical forms like electronic dance music, rock, punk, metal, and hip-hop, they resist globalization and affirm a redefined sense of mexicanidad (Martinez

1993; O’Connor 2002; Schelonka 2008; Castillo Bernal 2015).

Before turning to the history of hip-hop and a chronotope of the streets, I want to consider the relationship between music, time, and power in the contemporary Mexico. Sabine Kim (2017) writes of sound, music, and poetry as “entangled” in political, social, cultural, and economic discourse. She argues that because it is “at the same time related to sites (of enunciation and reception) and ‘floating’ freely between them…[Sound] destabilizes the ‘once-presumed stables of origination and causation,’ while remaining linked to a non-causal network of affective ties…” (17). These qualities, make music an incredibly powerful force in the world, inspiring change in ideology and materiality in unpredictable ways. A number of scholars of Mexico have found this to be the case. Gabriela Vargas–Cetina (2017), for instance, calls the manner in which trova musicians in Yucatán, Mexico use music and its social appreciation as a form of “beautiful politics,” asserting their social will and redistributing political resources through non- confrontational means. Paja Faudree (2013), similarly argues that Indigenous language and music programs in Oaxaca, México offer “a perspective whose insights about the lived stakes of

75 political difference are grounded in concerns that are not explicitly political” (8). Though rap is generically and historically quite distinct from these case studies, the culture of hip-hop has an equally oblique or hidden relationship to the nation and social power. Though many outside the culture hear no “beauty” in the culture, for its practitioners the music nevertheless entangles affect and political discourse, and through youth programs and public performances (to be described later) it redefines the meaning of the nation and redistributes power unto the street.

To be sure, hip-hop does relate to the long, national chronotope. It echoes the resounding city just the same as the genres described within this section. However, within this dissertation, I am more interested in exploring how hip-hop artist themselves discursively organize time, space, and narrative. In the next section and in later chapters, I will show the ways hip-hop artists position the culture out of time and space. They place most value on their lived experience with other hip hop artists and their presence in time and place in the streets, studios, and venues that keep the culture live in continual (re)performance.

Early Hip-hop in the City

The oldest rappers that I interviewed remembered the 1985 earthquakes and the events of

1994. The youngest could only imagine them but recognized their importance. A movement of hip-hop existed prior to the earthquakes, but it was lost when the city collapsed. Fans still heard the earliest Mexican rap albums like Mucho Barato, released in 1997 by Control Machete from

Monterey, Oriundo 98 released in 1998 by Caballeros del Plan G of Goméz Palacio, and the

2003 self-titled album by Cartel de Santa from Santa Catarina. They heard chicanos rappers like

Kid Frost, Mellow Man Ace, Cypress Hill, and Akwid from the United States and Spanish rappers too. But nobody had time to create culture at that point, because everybody had to

76 struggle to rebuild their streets.

The years between 1994 and 1997 produced few obtainable recordings in México.11

However, many artists told me that during this time they regularly met with other rappers, performed around the city in small events, and recorded and traded cassette tapes. Hip-hop as an active community took hold thereafter; a few major festival events, album releases, and video recordings evince this. For instance, American rap group Cypress Hill filmed their music video

“No Entiendes La Onda (How I Could Just Kill A Man),” in 1999 in Ciudad de México.12 They relied on Mexico’s already massive hip-hop scene to fill el Zócalo. In this same year, the ¡Viva el

Mexside! Festival brought together at least 3,000 fans and artists of hip-hop to perform and celebrate their developing counter-culture.

By 1998, MC Luka and El Infermo of Sociedád Café were contacted by EMI to record an album under the group name Chicalangos.13 Unfortunately, the project was canceled before they could release it. Vieja Guardia, which was less a cohesive rap group and more a posse of artists from various parts of the city, began releasing their self-produced mixtapes in 2000.14 They released the more professional All Stars album in 2007 through Mantequilla Records, which was under Universal Music. During the same period, Fonarte Latino released massive compilation albums collecting the city’s various artists and hinted at the formation of early scenes of hip-hop: their Rapza series in 2001 and their Hip Hop Hurra series in 2003 with multiple volumes following over the next five years.

11 See Chapela (2005) for a more complete description of hip hop during these years. 12 See “Cypress Hill - No Entiendes La Onda (How I Could Just Kill A Man) (Video)” on YouTube 13 See “Mc Luka - Chicalango 25-11-09” on YouTube. MC Luka is performing a song of the same name in TT Caps. Unfortunately, El Enfermo died in a car accident on April 13, 2014. 14 See “Vieja Guardia-De Vuelta A Los 90's -Video Oficial BY Tino De La Huerta” on YouTube where they play with themes of nostalgia and seniority.

77 Since these formative years of hip-hop, the culture has expanded. Never specifying a particular date, artists often narrated a kind of development in the culture, an increase in access to cultural resources. Before, artists could only expect to perform for their closest friends. Now, some artists could expect to perform for thousands of fans and reach millions of viewers on

YouTube. Rap music is now “Pop” music (in the US and increasingly in México) and competes with rock and reggaetón for market share. Many of the rappers I interviewed lamented this turn and critiqued pop forms of rap that only focused on conspicuous consumption, drugs, sex, and fame. They argued that underground rap, what they considered authentic hip-hop, should value consciousness and transcendence. But they also experimented with trending genres to connect with a wider audience and never limited themselves to explicitly political topics. Nevertheless, even the most popular rappers of México are little known outside the state, let alone the country.

Control Machete from Monterrey had a moment of stardom in 2002 when their song “Sí Senor” was featured on a Levi’s Super Bowl television commercial. Thirteen years later, Mike Diáz from Aquascalientes was the first Mexican rapper to perform at a major North American musical festival, “South by Southwest” in Austin, Texas. Most members of Vieja Guardia do tour regularly throughout the country and live entirely off their careers in music, but the oldest member MC Luka had yet to be paid to perform outside the country. Battle rappers, on the other hand, had started to acquire more international notoriety. Battle rap leagues began pitting rappers from different Latin American countries in competitions of disrespectful humor. During my time there, the 25-year old rapper Aczino from La Paz in the State of Mexico was just beginning his meteoric rise to international stardom and thereby putting Mexico on the map as it were.15 The

15 See “Documental Aczino Episodio 1 La Palabra Mi Vida” on YouTube.

78 great majority of rappers in the scene, however, were unable to earn a living wage (or even supplement their income) with their music. Most worked in the semi-formal or informal economy caught up in the urban reproduction of poverty where labor was continually subdivided into smaller and smaller tasks for smaller and smaller sums of money (Cross 1998; Davis 2006).

The preceding chronotope of formal histories and genre relations is mostly useful for those of us outside the culture, offering a starting point to understand desmadre and place. For artists, however, formal histories only emerge through dialogue and as a part of their performative identity. In the final section of this chapter, I introduce Kolmillo, another founding member of

Vieja Guardia in his late thirties. I met him at a concert in Tonanitla far outside Ciudad de

México by way of Jerry Funk,16 who I had met by way of PerroZW. I interviewed Kolmillo in a quiet corner of Biblioteca Vasconcelos after I ran into him at the nearby Plaza Peyote, a small weekly hip-hop flea market. Encountering him randomly and then interviewing him in that place seemed to be another fated turn in my research. Here is that story.

Part Two: You Have to be There

Within the first part, I presented México’s history as something that is continually audible, in this part, I use a moment of miscommunication to highlight how conversations about hip-hop and conversations within hip-hop occur at different scales of recognizability. During our interview, Kolmillo did not recognize one of my references to the longer historical durée that I have written in the first part. While his ignorance is interesting to note, my goal is not to analyze why he did not have the tools necessary to interpret my question. My goal is to highlight what he values in hip-hop and in the time-space of his life. Blommaert (2015) is again instructive:

16 See “Fat Rapers / Sepulturero - Son Callejero ‘Remix’” on YouTube. Note that Rapper is misspelled.

79 The issue of Bakhtinian voice is thus not just a matter of what exactly has gone into the actual voice, but also—and predicated on—who has the capacity to create voice, to be a creative meaning maker in the eyes of others and someone who has access to the resources to make sense of these meanings… I may have lived through important historical events—contexts available to me—but if I lack the actual resources for narrating these events in a way that makes their importance resonate with interlocutors— a matter of accessibility—I will probably end up talking to myself. (113)

I argue that hip-hop scholars ought to spend more time researching at this scale so they might better understand the cultural producers lives and their relations within the scene.

Una Infinidád de Grupos

Months after our first meeting in Tonanitla, I ran into Kolmillo walking around Plaza Peyote

(a place I will describe in more detail in the next chapter). He was dropping off new Vieja

Guardia hats to the vendors. He was wearing one himself, blue and embroidered with his name. I asked for an interview. He had time. We walked over to Biblioteca Vasconcelos. When we arrived, El Siete happened to be there, finishing another workshop.17 El Siete was an important artist and organizer in the scene (who will play a large part in chapter five). To my surprise, they did not know each other. Perhaps it was a matter of age since Kolmillo was already approaching his 40s while Siete was still in his early 30s. Perhaps it was simply a matter of distance as

Kolmillo was from el Centro and Siete was from el Oriente. Perhaps it was a testament to both their role as being organizers first and rappers second. Either way, I introduced them.

Unfortunately, El Siete could not stay to talk hip-hop.

Kolmillo and I found a small bench in a quiet courtyard to record. Our interview differed greatly from earlier conversations. Usually, I could not understand much of what he said, but for

17 See “Lirika Inverza FT Siete Gonzalez, Aczino & Musser | Amanecer” on YouTube.

80 the interview, he slowed down and spoke in a more acrolectal form. I could follow most of his talk and even rejoin with proper follow-up questions. Yet the interview was less than enlightening. The information was too specific. I left the interview feeling unfulfilled. Now, in review, two dialogues stand out, both showing important themes in hip-hop. The first concerned the way Kolmillo described the hip-hop scene as a collection of names. The second concerned the way Kolmillo identified Biblioteca Vasconcelos itself.

Jerry Funk and MC Luka had once told me that if I were to interview Kolmillo, he would talk about others before talking about himself. They were right. They also told me that his deference belied his importance. In the early days of hip-hop in México, Kolmillo found and disseminated early Spanish and Latin-American rap to the pirates at El Chopo and Plaza Peyote. Before he began his international mail order search, only the American and Chicano rap that travelers to US brought back with them was available. That was all in English so it had a limited audience.

Kolmillo was also responsible for building relationships between several crews, organizers, and otherwise unrelated scenes.

When I asked Kolmillo to describe what hip-hop was like before Plaza Peyote had secured its weekly space nearby, he said, “TT Caps was a major port for hip-hop. They sold all our material there. Tomás supported a lot of that. Truthfully the hip-hop movement owes a lot to TT Caps.

And well, I think the most representative sounds were born because they had places, various delegations, where also, it had been present. But as for hip-hop as four elements, brother? That was difficult, congregating all in one place. In Neza, güey. Neza also was huge, güey. Really huge, güey. In Neza there was a place you could rent, La Consa. La Consa was open to El Fly, El

Fix, Estón, La Banda de SHK, SF, güey. All that gang was chopping it up a lot of the time. And

81 every year there were events, güey. Also there were big events that groups organized like los SF,

El Circo Volador, güey. There were other places like Rocotitlán, güey. They threw themselves into that, güey. And that’s just a few of the groups that there were. There was Rapaz. There was

Vantage. There was PLP. There was Lirika Libre Flav. There was Big Metra. There was Petata

Funky. There was Rector. There was Raper. There was Kabiño. There was MC Luka. There was

Cartel de Aztlán. There was Crimin Urbano. There was Yoalli G, Ximbo. There was Malik. Los

Pollas Rudas. Sociedad Café. Damn, güey, an infinite number of groups, güey. And later, others started earning spots like Manicomio Clan. Then Faltosos came about a bit later, but they were getting their own spaces, güey. They were growing bit by bit. El Rocotitlán was big for all of us, güey, in that epoch, güey. Everything was great then.”

As the interview continued and Kolmillo listed more rappers, writers, breakers, old crews, and old venues his voice strengthened. His pace sped up. He named streets and neighborhoods. I was familiar with some names, having pieced together the history from a dozen earlier interviews, but there was little context to connect or make sense of his oral history. I thought that because his utterance lacked a narrative form, it lacked meaning as anthropological data. Such talk, however, is among the most important talk in hip-hop, noting one’s presence and what I call

“looped interconnectedness” in the scene. By that I mean such talk becomes increasingly sensible the longer you spend in desmadre, as going to any one place in hip-hop leads to reinforcing old relationships, making more unexpected friendships, and experiencing ”alternative orders of urban life” (Monsiváis 2003).

Hip-hop is related to the major political events that occur during any epoch. The movement of rappers reflect the changing economy and the technological affordances of the time. In their

82 lyrics, artists echo society, critique government policies, and resist the hegemonic official culture. However, for Kolmillo it is the people that define the scene and chronotope, the connections they make and the sounds they develop. Although Kolmillo spoke excitedly about the past, his speech was not just nostalgic longing for a bygone era in hip-hop. I will show throughout this dissertation, that apophenia and looped interconnectedness are a continually experienced within hip-hop when the culture is re-performed in new sites between new groups of rappers who come out to redefine the sound of desmadre.

La Raza Cósmica Outside the Library

The next moment that stood out in my interview with Kolmillo occurred when he explained that Mexicans were people of una raza cósmica, a cosmic race. He said this after our conversation about drugs and delinquency, after I asked him what he thought of the police. He paused, leaned to place his mouth directly in front of my microphone, then shouted, “en mi caso,

Fuck the police!”

I laughed. He smiled. The security guard thirty feet away did not look up from his cell phone.

It was likely the first time that collection of sounds had vibrated so forcefully in the hushed building. Kolmillo went on to explain how police harassed him regularly. He said the basic problem was that the authorities could not understand the Mexican people. Real Mexicans (a category which, it seemed, not all people born in Mexico were part) were of Aztec roots and represented “una raza cosmica.”

When he said this, I thought he was purposefully referring to the foundational text La Raza

Cósmica, written by José Vasconcelos (1997) and first published in 1925. Vasconcelos acted as the Secretary of Education in the years following the Mexican revolution. He was a major

83 architect in designing mexicandad. He was the namesake of the library. Vasconcelos’ publications reinforced the notion of mestizaje, or the belief that the Mexican people were the successful cultural, spiritual, and racial mixture of its Spanish and Indigenous (and sometimes

African) heritage. Vasconcelos’ major goal in publishing his theories on race was to counter

European and American discourse of racial purity and eugenics. He intended to reinforce a positive self-image of Latin Americans based on love and aesthetic production. Although the notion of mestizaje valued the crossing of presumed racial and cultural boundaries and celebrated desmadre, it ultimately obfuscated the difference and domination of Indigenous populations and justified the institutionalization of indigenismo, or the moralistic and patriarchal incorporation of

Indigenous people into national society and culture (Chanady 2003). Emiko Salvídar (2011) has shown that “indigenismo is not about creating equality or hegemony, but about reproducing the state’s right to rule” (68).

I asked Kolmillo to expand on his thoughts on Vasconcelos’s work. He asked back, “Who?”

I paused and repeated the name, “José Vasconcelos.”

He looked still more confused. I explained that we were in a library named after him; that

Vasconcelos had coined the term raza cosmica. Kolmillo shrugged, admitting that he had not known that. Uninterested in a citation that offered him no context, he moved on to discuss his own theories of Mexican identity and the internal diversity of Mexican roots, especially as it related to the way different regions used language and how, “just like in the Bronx,” diversity led to the generation of culture.

Kolmillo was echoing something impossible to pin point, re-voicing something he heard and uttered a dozen times before as he listened to the city and learned to use culture. My initial

84 interpretation of Kolmillo’s words relied upon my own experiences in the library, not only the one in which we were sitting but those in Hawaiʻi and Southern California where I first began studying Mexican history. As his and my dialogue progressed it became clear that Kolmillo had no intention of simply echoing José Vasconcelos words. He certainly was not interested in reproducing the state’s right to control his body or cultural expression. His understanding of the long history of México and ethnicity, was actually based on or entangled with his understanding of hip-hop and culture in the Bronx, New York.

Further explanation is warranted here, in case English-speaking readers further misinterpret

Kolmillo’s use of the translated term race. Both the United States and México suffer from structural racism and reproduce hegemonic ideologies that obfuscate injustice. In the United

States, a black-white racial binary dictates access to resources while colorblind ideologies provide individuals ways of talking around inequality (Bonilla-Silva 2002). In México, there is not a black-white binary; however, shades of skin color do often correlate with privilege and prejudice. The national ideology of mestizaje celebrates Indigenous roots, but the politics of indigenismo and the distribution of wealth reveal contradictions and structural racism (Salvídar

2011). Despite similar structures of inequality in both countries, the seemingly cognate terms race and raza hold contrasting significances and cannot be used as translatable and mutual analytics. John Hartigan says,

…the notable contrasting significance of ‘raza’ and ‘race’ indicates an additional cultural

dimension is at work. More than just masking reality, in an ideological sense, culture

provides the templates of meaning by which people pursue the daily, manifold

interpretive tasks involved in making sense of the world. That is, “race” is imbricated in a

85 much larger dynamic of meaning, one that is reductively rendered only at the risk of great

distortion (2013:33).

In our interview, hearing raza as race, just as hearing una raza cosmica as a book written by

José Vasconcelos, was in error. The terms were temporarily in sync, but he was using the terms to convey a particular meaning that I could not yet interpret. As I heard the term used by other artists in other interviews, raza came to stand for community, neighborhood, or a group of like- minded individuals. For Kolmillo, la raza cosmica was that community of hip-hop artists that he listed and linked within the formative era of the culture. Throughout the remainder of this dissertation, I will show how such a community forms and, more importantly, how individual artists come to speak for it.

Conclusion: A Chronotope of Looped Interconnectedness

Since colonization, Anáhuac has had many names. The capital of New Spain, La Ciudad de

México, stamped over Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco as a violent reminder of settler dominance.

Then, after the criollo and mestizo population revolted from the Spanish Crown, they called it el

Distrito Federal in the State of México, the central political, cultural, and economic power aligning the new confederacy of states. Now, officially, it is branded as CDMX. These changing names do not account for the co-urbanated mass that spans la Zona Metropolitana Del Valle de

México (ZMVM). Nor do they account for the many differences between the delegations or the way the youth stylize them with names to index other global cities and experiences. Nor do they erase the names that already exist in this place.

This chapter has defined several related concepts: the chronotope and the resounding city, the scale and the looped interconnectedness of the streets. Desmadre in the city is more complex

86 than any representation can account for. Its streets overflow with noise, but through music the city becomes sensible. I offered an abridged history of México and its music, dividing the nation’s development into several epochs. The first epoch spanned from the beginning of Aztec time to the criollo revolution of 1910. In this epoch, a violent and homogenizing settler colonial state destroyed a heterogenous Indigenous Mesoamerican civilization; European music expanded, but it changed and muted the Indigenous in the process. The next historical epoch spanned from the post-revolutionary era of 1920 till 1985. Here, a powerful modernizing state and cultural industry secured hegemonic control. Mexican national music reinterpreted the meaning of indigeneity to unite the land, its population, and an identity. But it also silenced heterogeneity and reinforced inequality. Ultimately, the state system did not provide for the needs of its citizens, and national ideologies failed to justify the contradictions of the public’s experience. The next epoch spanned from 1985 until 2015, when I began my fieldwork. In this epoch, political and economic upheavals were common. Heavy metal, hip-hop, and other globalized forms of media and culture dominated. Though global in their origin, these musics became endemic to reflect the city’s own diverse history.

Hip-hop artists undoubtedly understood the relationship between power, national ideologies, and sound. Many noted that nationalism failed to represent life in the city. Instead of relying on that chronotope, however, artists talked hip-hop and indexing movement in the streets, what I called looped interconnectedness, to make sense of their lives in the city. While a direct history of México makes sense for contextualizing artist’s lives within a political and economic conjuncture, through the example of Kolmillo, I show how history is only made relevant as part of artist’s emergent identities and dialogic imagination. The moment Kolmillo remembered his

87 movement in the streets and the connections he made with artists, he expressed excitement.

When I inquired into an academic history, he saw no value in the citation. Instead, he lobbied that his people’s complexity could not be understood by any homogenizing power. His people were defined by their difference and the creativity of their language.

This chapter has reflected back upon my larger critique of textualism and revealed the importance of sound and voice in creating “intersubjective time.” As Monsiváis said, desmadre is a state of existing as if hierarchies did not exist. Hip-hop can certainly be represented from above, as part of a national history; however, as experienced through the actual voices, that productive nexus of body and sound reverberating across a multimodal bridge of meaning to attentive and complex ears, hip-hop has a way of conveying a different route to the truth.

In the following chapter, I engage more closely with the contemporary hip-hop scene to show how artists actually navigate. As Kolmillo hinted, an infinite number of artists continue to find each other and perform the scene in the streets. Their looped movement through the streets becomes important as work for learning to embody desmadre and represent it in their voice.

88 CHAPTER 3: METHODS AND MOVEMENT

The Story of Ollín

Before time, Ometéotl created Tonacatecuhtli and Tonacíhuatl. Tonacatecuhtli and

Tonacíhuatl created all else. From their dwelling in the 13th level of the heavens, they created

Tezcatlipoca (red), Tezcatlipoca (black), Quetzalcóatl (white) and Huitzilopochtli (blue). These gods would create the cosmos, the world, and all life within it. But they would not create it all at once; they would never create it perfectly. In the first creation, there was the heavens, the Earth, and its waters. The first sun, Nahui Océlot, hung dim and motionless in the sky. Time could not be counted. Nahui Océlot disappeared. So the gods tried again. Their second, third, and fourth attempts at creation ended just the same—if only more violently as they continued their capricious antagonisms. Nahui Echécatl, Nahui Quiátl, and Nahui Atl, the suns that followed the first, were destroyed by wind, fire, and rain. What humans were not killed in the calamities were turned to apes, turkeys, and fish. Upon the death of the fourth sun, the gods got to serious work.

They sought stability, cleared away the waters, lifted up the sky with great trees, and organized the cardinal directions. They set the East for the masculine, the West for the feminine, the North for Death, the South for Life. The gods gave corn. They gave pulque. Then, in a great fire they sacrificed two of their own to create the Sun and the Moon.

These great lights hung immobile at the edge of the sky too. So in their final act of creation, the remaining gods gave their own lives to set the Sun and Moon in motion, from East to West above the sacred Teotihuacán. It was by the motion of this sun called Nahui Ollín, that the universe fell to order, and movement overcame chaos.

89 Learning Like an Anthropologist

I met Spia104 at the turnstiles of el Metro Escuadron 201 at exactly 12:00PM.18 The other’s punctuality mutually surprised us. We always had to wait for people but never got away with being late ourselves. After laughing about our otherwise bad luck, we boarded a pesero towards

La Viga. A half conversation later, we hopped off under a block-buster of Spia104’s name. He had tagged it there, years ago, over an auto mechanic’s garage.

“Welcome to my neighborhood,” he said.

I laughed. We cut through the final few alleys to his apartment. I told him I had just navigated with graffiti the week before, with los Hijos de Poeta, a young hip-hop crew, out in

Aragón. He appreciated the story and explained that the new generation relied too much on the internet. They do not move through the streets or introduce themselves to new people simply because they look hip-hop. They do not trade cassettes or compact discs. We arrived at his apartment and carried on the conversation.

After an hour interview, before we began listening to his record collection, he said, “It’s crazy, everything I have said, but it happened. Hip-hop is magic. It has brought me to different places to meet different rappers. It has brought me to different studios, given me experience, shown me where I can walk, where I have to keep my distance and watch constantly. Hip-hop shows you all this. It makes you more intuitive on the street, and in life… So for me, that is hip- hop. It’s a discipline, a therapy, a style of life. It transforms into a style of life because at first you learn like an anthropologist… I’m not one of those rappers with a lot of views, but it’s funny when I walk on the street and people know my name, Spia. It is unbelievable. Definitely, it is cool

18 See “Spia104 ft. Ximbo - Still Have Fun (Video Oficial)” on YouTube.

90 that when I go walking in the street people say, ‘what’s up’ and recognize me. That is the street. It is real contact… I become like an anthropologist. I see how others live, how hip-hop is in the

North, the South, the West, how they live, and why and how they are motivated.”

As a matter of representation, the morphology of the city, especially as witnessed by an overhead view, is an index of the multiple developmental logics of the city’s history (Heathcott

2019). As waves of immigrant to the valley arrived, settlement and expansion occurred sporadically and unevenly. The result is a patchwork of urban forms, threaded together through a complex metropolitan infrastructure of roads, buses, subways, waterways, sewers, gas lines, and electric grids. While the social composition and built environment of the city change faster than a lover's heart (to paraphrase Baudelaire), the city-building process nevertheless lays down shapes that endure, persistent polygonal and curvilinear forms that are often difficult to apprehend on the ground, but which nevertheless frame everyday urban life over generations. (ibid: 214)

Stationary in a neighborhood as a homebody or stationary vendor might experience it, the city seems sensible; moving along one of the major ejes (the cross-city multi-lane thoroughfares) in an ultra-quiet, blindado (bullet-proof), cocoon-like car (Bijsterveld et al. 2013), traveling from one financial district to the next as those of the upper-class experience it, the city might seem sensible. For everyone else, especially those striking out to find a route to a new destination, sense falls apart and everything is desmadre. But hip-hop gives direction and artists moving throughout the city not only cross from one morphology to the next but also explore the alleys and passageways they encounter. The movement I describe in this chapter and the next (my own and those of hip-hop artists) represents their a command over and comfort within (though not a control of) desmadre. It also stands to highlight the way hip-hop artists embody knowledge that

91 la sociedad cuadrada (square or normal society) simply does not.

Within the first part of this chapter, I describe the geography of hip-hop in México and how artists maintain the culture by moving through the streets. Within the hip-hop scene there are six major types of venues for performing hip-hop. There are bars, markets, festivals, community centers, studios, and state prisons. Rather than describing these venues schematically, I tell of how I encountered them. I do so to capture these places’ liveliness and to avoid giving the false impression that Mexico’s geography is orderly or static. It is, in fact, defined by desmadre and distance. Every venue I found was quite different from the others, and they changed even in the short time I was there. Too schematic a description of the geography might imply that the venues were themselves hip-hop, when it is the rappers themselves and their social relationships that make the culture.

At the same time, this chapter situates my study of hip-hop within the field of the performance ethnography as described in the first chapter. The relationship between these topics will become evident, but for now parsing the words of Spia104 should be indicative. Spia104 like Kolmillo was approaching his 40s and played a formative role in early hip-hop, bringing rap records and other cultural artifacts back from the US. In our interview, he suggested that through hip-hop he learned in the world like an anthropologist. As an anthropologist, I employed the method of ethnography to understand the world and people through first-hand experience.

Recognizing México as a world unto itself, I conducted a multi-cited ethnography (Marcus

1995). At times, I “followed the people”, at others “the thing” or “the metaphor”, to encounter hip-hop (ibid). I did so to create a specific kind of knowledge that values sense over context.

Artists employ strikingly similar methods for understanding their own world and becoming hip-

92 hop. Both practices of anthropology and hip-hop confirm the centrality of travel, embodiment, and dialogue within human experience. Anthropologists take empirical knowledge as key to understanding. They call this participant-observation, immersion, or situated practice (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007; Ong 1982; Lefebvre 2004). Hip-hop artists similarly hold that experiencing events in time and place, being there in the scene is most authoritative. They navigate across the city to find, observe, learn, and perform in looped interconnectedness. In doing so they enter into and reproduce a complex geography called la calle, the street. They might call this presence, keeping it real, and destiny. This is what artists and brands celebrated when they talked of la calle vida (street life) or la calle escuela (street school). This is what Jerry Funk and PerroZW were alluding to with fate and what Spia called magic. When one is committed to being in the scene—being in the streets, encountering others and developing relationships—the feeling of apophenia is constant. It becomes mastery of la calle escuela that authenticates the voice and speaks to the intelligence, presence and survival of the rapper within hip-hop. (I will return to survival in the sixth and seventh chapter.)

My ethnographic work, thus, gave me access to la calle, and like Spia104 said, allowed me to make a name for myself in it. Artists regularly commended me for moving to the city to learn about their hip-hop. Many even claimed that what I was doing was itself hip-hop.

Because both schools of thought might criticize me for speaking beyond my experience, this chapter historicizes my ethnography, limits its scale, and authenticates my hip-hop through narrative. I tell the story of how I entered la calle escuela. I introduce the various locations, resources, and rappers that I encountered in my year there. By totalizing the scene in this way, I accomplish several tasks. First, I make explicit how I came to know what I know as an

93 anthropologist so that any overlap between my work and hip-hop is clear. Second, I reconfirm that the culture is something that emerges dialogically between artists and other individuals, including organizers, state functionaries, and scholars, all talking within and between locations.

Third, I reinforce my main argument that you just have to be there. Finally, by narrating my own movements, I highlight the individuality of artists’ processes to become hip-hop. Like myself, they explore strange places for the sake of culture and improvise on the streets to make sense of desmadre.

Over a lifetime, hip-hop becomes recursive, because a place does not make much sense on the first visit. An identity does not matter until it is reconfirmed later. Rather, the meaning of both places and persons emerges dialogically. In my own experience, as I continually looped back to these places and back to relationships I had previously built, and as I was recognized by old acquaintances in new places, my identity as a scholar began to matter less and my identity as hip-hop began to matter more. Johan Fabian (2006) has said and said again:

For the ethnographer, there is a kind of experiencing the other ‘that may grow with time

and, at any rate, needs time to grow’ (Fabian 1990: 769, 1991: 221). In fact, a similar idea

had occurred to me in Time and the Other where I said that in order to be knowingly in

each other's presence we must somehow share each other’s past.

In the second part of the chapter, I confirm Fabian’s words and tell another story of one specific location in México. In doing so, I temper this chapter on place and method with a far more personal narrative on how I learned about the placelessness (a term I use to highlight the mobility) of the culture. In the third part, I take up the question of getting too close to my informants and the consequences that had upon my objectivity in social scientific study.

94 Part One: Navigating to Find Hip-hop

Forgetting the Bird’s Eye

The day I flew into Benito Juarez International airport to start my year of fieldwork was clear. I had expected the pollution to be thicker. I had come from Los Angeles on a particularly smoggy day, and México was supposed to be worse. It is, but not on that day. I had also expected that with a population so large, I would have to fly over suburban developments for a long while.

Instead, there was three and half hours worth of mostly empty countryside with only a few squared plots of agriculture, and a few dense pueblos along the way. The country of México seemed sparse from my little window 30,000 feet up. Then I reached the point of descent into metropolitan México. I saw how it was possible that over 89% of the entire country’s population lives in urbanity, and around 20% live around the capital city. My panorama spanned from the northern edge of the metropolitan area to the South—from around Atizapán de Zaragoza to

Xochimilco or Ciudad Universitario. The density of habitation was astonishing and disorienting.

Below me was some 73,000 streets, with apartments, offices, schools, stores, and cars lining every one. I could not make sense of what I saw. My window was just too small, and I could press my face only so far into it. I wrote a note to remember the bird’s-eye view, writing that it was my goal to represent it all at the end of my stay. An instance after stepping off the airplane, when I was confronted with the actual question, “Where is hip-hop, and where am I?” I forgot the note entirely.

I had spent years planning, preparing and researching for my project. I knew the basic history and literature on the city. I even knew the term desmadre, and how it was used by the scholars of

México. I had spent countless hours consuming whatever music I could find online. I knew there

95 would be hip-hop somewhere in the city, just not where or how to get there. My first weeks in

México were spent scouring the city for any brick and mortar address that promised hip-hop.

Every day I would find some lead online, draw a tiny map on a 3x5 card pointing the way, then set out on foot, walking towards my destination from whatever temporary hotel I was staying in.

Soon I had covered every major street in a three to five-mile radius. I began to take the Metro to more distant points. I would then walk back till I reached the edge of some previous day’s hand- drawn map, then take another, less direct route home. Soon, I was combining Metro rides with bus rides to follow leads. To my great frustration, many days ended in failure, with no hip-hop encountered. At the end of every adventure, I would return home with only a notebook full of thoughts, a head full of new experiences in the city, and a stomach full of whatever looked best on my journey.

The first promising location I found was a dance studio called Hip Hop Inteligente. It was their anniversary the weekend I arrived. I attended and watched the dance cypher. It was obvious the hip-hop dance scene was strong, but I did not intend to study B-boys and B-girls. So I kept searching. The next locations I found were the few puestos, or shops with addresses, selling hip- hop goods. I visited Asfalto DF, 4Elementos, and TT Caps in my first weeks, and returned to them throughout my time. The latter two were located in El Centro, just blocks from El Zócalo.

The former was located just blocks from La Arena México, the home of Lucha Libre wrestling.

They were cramped spaces, filled with clothes, magazines, endless cans of specialty aerosol paint, but no more than a dozen pressed and packaged CDs of local artists. These stores were struggling. Hip-hop paraphernalia could not compete for formal retail space in the middle-class and tourist consumer markets of El Centro. In fact, after over a decade in business, TT Caps

96 closed shortly after my year of fieldwork.

Few artists printed concert flyers and advertised through those locations. They advertised by posting to their personal social media pages. So until I was personally linked with them, most search engines would relegate them to the third or fourth pages of relevance. My project seemed to stall for weeks. When I would catch word of a concert, I would arrive way too early, play the wall-flower journalist, talk to a few people in the audience, then leave early, either because the show started late and the Metro closed early or because I was bothered by some gorrón, some character I would meet in the crowd who would promise to introduce me to the rappers they knew, if only I would share another caguama, or 40oz bottle of beer with them. Shows seemed to mean nothing.

My problem finding hip-hop was not my method or even a lack of events in the city though.

My problem stemmed from the fact that meaning in hip-hop is only relevant across a network of places, between ongoing events, and by way of social relationships. Finding hip-hop required far more improvisation and more risk than I was prepared to take in the early weeks. The following story of how I met Heticko, a 27-year old organizer of hip-hop events, is indicative of the first part of a much larger process for finding hip-hop and building a name for myself within the scene.19 This vignette not only accomplishes descriptive work to define the various venue types of hip-hop, but it shows the importance of making connections in hip-hop. My initial meeting with Heticko led to another and then reinforced my relationship with other artists like PerroZW,

Jerry Funk, and Kolmillo thereafter.

19 See Heticko’s YouTube channel “Vida Calle.”

97 Meeting Heticko at Bombay

After a long day following another dead-end lead, I attended a private event at El Legendario

Bombay, a club between El Barrio Tepito and La Plaza Garibaldi. Google said Bombay was permanently closed. Yet Sociedad Café, one of the city’s oldest and most iconic rap groups, was set to perform there. I contacted the organizer online, explained my project and received an invite. When I arrived at the address, there was a big sign for the bar spray-painted along the entire facade, but there was no entrance. There was no line nor related activity out front. I turned circles around the block, confused and concerned that I drew my map in error. As I turned down another side street for the second time, I passed two men headed in the opposite direction. They stopped, turned, and said something that I could not hear over the street noise. I responded nonsensically and waited as they approached. One introduced himself as Heticko, the other was too quiet to hear. They were both wearing baggy T-shirts, pants, and sunglasses after dark. They seemed hip-hop in their fashion. I asked if the group Sociedad Café was playing at Bombay and where I could find the entrance. They said yes and ushered me down a dark ally. If there was any risk to following the strangers, I did not consider it at first. Heticko knocked on a rickety wood door at back. We waited in silence. He knocked again. At that point, I started to remember the multiple warnings people had given me about the surrounding neighborhoods. Muggings and violence were supposedly common. I started to get nervous, but then the street noise subsided for a moment, and I could heard Black Soul and R&B music bleeding through the door. Whoever was inside was listening to “lowrider oldies,” the music California chicanos listened to as they cruised. I could hear that everything would be fine. Heticko knocked again much harder. The door cracked open.

98 Upon entering, I immediately saw why the place was called legendary. It oozed underground hip-hop. Graffiti covered every wall. In the past, there had been a waist-high mural that wrapped around the bar featuring cartoonish skeletons in fluffy rat costumes. Now most of it was covered over in aerosol paint, paint pen, postal stickers, and permanent ink throwies. The above-waist, mirrored walls were now covered over in tattered black plastic tarp, which was itself covered over in white mop paint pen tags. The tile floor was thick with dried beer and tracked-in road grime. Google Maps was not wrong. El Legendario Bombay had been permanently closed; it was nonetheless quite active that night. A crew of two dozen men and a few women sat drinking beer, listening to the Chicano music of my youth. Most of the audience seemed to be in their late 30s.

Their clothes were baggier then Heticko’s which was a sign of his relative youth at 25 and changing trends. Most wore tan Dickies pants and either a black, white, or tan shirt. Most wore thick löc-style sunglasses. The darkly lit scene could have passed as a sepia-toned photograph save for the glints of the deep red and thickly lined lipsticks of the women there, and there was the pop and lock dancer wearing the royal blue tracksuit and white gloves. Two beautifully maintained, chrome laden lowrider bicycles sat on the stage. Tomás, the owner of TT Caps arrived after me. He sat at the bar to chat with El Bombay’s owner. Both were in their late 50s and had invested in hip-hop as more than a fad years prior. They had given the culture space to flourish, but had to watch as their business dried up.

Sociedad Café’s performance went well. Heticko and his partners filmed it and conducted short interviews between songs to post online.20 The video has yet to reach a thousand views.

After the event, I approached Heticko and thanked him for allowing me to come. He was

20 See “Sociedad cafe En el legendario Bombay Etrevista y hiphop de sc” on YouTube.

99 similarly grateful for my attendance and asked if I would like to join their online media company, La Vida Calle. He invited me to attend a concert the following weekend, Hip Hop

Music Fest Vol. 1. I could help translate any interviews they might conduct with the visiting

American artists. I agreed.

The following week, Heticko and I met at Metro Ciudad Azteca, the station farthest from the city’s center. It was exceedingly out of the way for me, and he was an hour and a half late. After a quick greeting, we hopped back on the Metro then traveled to the other end of the line at Buena

Vista to meet I-pac, a rapper and member of La Vida Calle. Since it was a Saturday, they decided to stop in at Plaza Peyote, a hip-hop tianguis. The word tianguis is an Aztec word referring to a market or fair. Tianguis does not refer to the place but to the commercial traffic that occurs on certain days, in a certain place, for certain buyers (Cabrera 1982). Heticko explained that La

Plaza Peyote was where fans of the subculture could go to keep up with the latest music and fashion. It grew out of the tianguis at El Chopo, which itself had a very long history in the rock, metal, punk, and ska music scenes (Gama 2009, Castillo Bernal 2015). In the 60s, El Chopo was a renegade, unlicensed tianguis where people traded and bartered counter-cultural artifacts.

Recently, it has fallen under a more capitalist frame and supposedly lost its original character.

Regardless, I was excited for what I might encounter at El Chopo, imagining some warehouse music store where pressed CDs of underground rap would line tidy racks, and where a bank of cashiers would sit between the merchandise and the exit. After all, El Chopo was near Forum

Buena Vista, a massive, high-end shopping mall and train station.

El Chopo was nothing like that. It was constructed from folding tables, tents, and tarps. It filled three blocks of street and sidewalk. Like all tianguis, it left no trace of itself beyond the

100 single day of the week it was in action. The place was loud and exciting. Vendors were shouting to hawk old records, CDs, and anarchist literature. Costumers were laughing, haggling, and arguing. Tattoo machines plugged into car batteries buzzed from behind half closed drapes.

Every other vendor had their favorite music playing at full volume without concern for their neighbor’s competing tunes. A ska band played at the far end of the street in the shadow of a massive power transformer feeding the nearby shopping center. Their horns blared and their distorted guitars screeched to overpower the din of the industrial equipment. The smells of marijuana was thick in the air. Young men whispered they could sell me some.

Plaza Peyote was sequestered outside of El Chopo, across the active Eje 1 Norte. In comparison to the blocks of rock music, all that was hip-hop amounted to just ten tables lined along a single sidewalk. Along with the merchandise commonly sold at the hip-hop stores, there were boxes of pirated rap CDs from the US, Latin America, and México. Vendors sold them for

$10–$15 MXN, or $.59–.89 cents American. This was much cheaper than the $70–$100 MXN artists sold them for directly. Most local artists did not mind the piracy, but relied upon it to spread their music to a wider audience (Bulnes y Bojóquez 2006; Aguiar 2013).

Because we were already an hour and a half late, we did not have time to peruse or chat with the vendors, but I began to return to Plaza Peyote on a regular basis thereafter. Instead, we caught a South-bound Metrobus for the Pepsi World Trade Center to watch the international rap concert.

Nach, Rapsuskei, and Kase-O came from Spain. Public Enemy, Xzibit, Crazy Town, and

Delinquent Habits came from the US. Ariana Puello, originally from the Dominican Republic, was there as well. Prices were $600 MXN. The show was far from sold out due to its prohibitive costs. It was also quite boring as Heticko failed to secure me a press pass, so I had to stay with

101 the general audience.

My night at Bombay was like many others I had. Artists held events at iconic hip-hop bars like Bombay or La Fiesta Bar in Santa Fe, or at working-class bars like Yelis y Pera in Los

Heroes del Chalco or Cantina La Victoria in Atizapán de Zaragoza. Sometimes they held them in decidedly fresa places, a term designating conceited upper-class people and neighborhoods like

La Condesa and La Roma. No matter the neighborhood, artists and fans would come together, have a few drinks, and listen to music under the watchful eye of the bar owners and staff. As my time progressed, and I met more people in the scene, we would pay less attention to the performance on stage and more time shouting over the music to talk hip-hop. Since rock and metal were dominant in México, no venue had a sound system properly equalized for hip-hop.

Even if fans paid close attention, rappers’ lyrics were usually lost under their unmastered backing tracks. If listeners did not know lyrics before hand, there was little possibility that they could decipher them at a live event. Thus, it was the conversations people had along the way, backstage, and after the event that made the scene.

In a similar way, events held at arenas like the Auditorio Blackberry, Deportivo Lomas

Almas, and Carpa Astro were not the primary sites of the hip-hop culture—and not because a majority of the rappers I studied had yet to reach that level of commercialization. Artist cited these shows when discussing inequality in the global hip-hop market and how Mexican audience’s betrayed the local. These shows payed Spanish and American rappers large sums of money to perform for Mexicans, but the invited foreigners rarely showed respect to the actual scene of Mexican hip-hop.

Although neither El Legendario Bombay nor the concert at the Pepsi Center WTC

102 themselves can define hip-hop completely, the events led to other important events, venues, and connections in the scene. First, and as narrated in the opening chapter, my time with Heticko helped me secure a relationship with Jerry Funk and Kolmillo. This resulted in more exciting stories of late night travel to be narrated later. Second, the events showed me the way to El

Chopo, to La Biblioteca Vasconcelos, and to other important venues in Mexico’s hip-hop scene.

Community Centers from Biblioteca Vasconcelos to Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl

I returned to Plaza Peyote on a regular basis, not every Saturday—especially not after some all Friday night event—but whenever I felt a lull in my schedule. It was only eight Metro stations and a transfer away, which was relatively easy. Sometimes I would get lucky and meet artists there promoting their new albums, advertising for an upcoming show, or confirming their place in the scene by hosting a freestyle cypher being held there. One Saturday, after visiting the tianguis, I decided to visit the nearby Biblioteca Vasconcelos. The night manager at Hotel La

Selva, which had become my permanent residence, had described the 409,000 square-foot library as a source of national pride and as a marvel of post-modern architecture. It was quite fortuitous that I walked in that day. The moment I did, I saw the words “Hip Hop” flash momentarily across an LCD–monitor advertising upcoming events. After another cycle through the calendar, I learned of two impending hip-hop events. The first was an event for Pat Boy, a Mayan rapper from Quintana Roo. He was performing as part of a series called Música Contemporania de

México Profundo. The series alluded to Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s (1996) totalizing, if not patronizing, term for the indigenous peoples of Mesoamérica. The event was organized by the famed poet and nahuatl-speaking, Mardonio Carballo, who I would later meet at Chema’s house with PerroZW.

103 The second program advertised was a series of free hip-hop workshops held at the library and other community centers throughout México from September to December. These workshops became central to my ethnography. They introduced me to a group of artist-educators in there late twenties and early thirties and to groups of dedicated students in their late teens and twenties. Both groups used the classes as one part of their process to become hip-hop. Each of these workshops were free to students and open to both male and female participants (though the gender distribution of the courses tended to reflect my own sample of interviews of five men for every two women). El Siete, a rapper, producer, organizer, and post-graduate student in philosophy and pedagogy organized the workshops.21 He worked closely with a state official and ally to hip-hop (who shall be introduced below but remain anonymous) to develop the program and record a rap song by every participant on the singular topic of human rights. El Siete taught the class at the library and traveled to all other locations to record the students. He edited, mixed, and equalized student’s tracks and released them on compact disks. I attended Siete’s classes and followed his recommendation to attend another workshop in La Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl the following week. I met PerroZW there. In the next chapter, I will return to describe El Siete’s classes in more detail. For now, I continue to follow my expansion into the hip-hop scene.

The trip to El Centro Regional de Cultura del Municipio de Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl was long, but I began to take it multiple times per week. Often, I would go there after finishing work in

Santa Fe, leaving some high-rise building playing American top-40 billboard hits, walking up a massive hill to catch one of the few buses headed to Metro Tacubaya playing reggaetón unless a troubadour playing a guitar busked along our route. Once at Tacubaya, I had to fight my way

21 See “Lirika Inverza x Siete Gonzalez | Dos Calles Después Del Infinito (FT Cat Lira) | L.S.V. 7” on Youtube.

104 through a maddening maze of trinket and food vendors all shouting their prices. I would ride the train to its furthest end in Metro Pantitlan, then move with the mass of commuters off the train, off the platform, down the stairs, and through the turnstiles. Every week, still tired from work, I struggled to free myself of the diverging currents of people: some headed to the pink line, some to the yellow, others to the light train toward La Paz. I would finally catch the stream of people headed towards the bus carousels, where I would find and wait for my bus heading towards

Chimalhuacán either by Avenida Bordo de Zochiaca or Av. 4a Avenida and going at least as far as Avenida Nezahualcóyotl.

When crossing the city alone, trips were exhausting, loud, and colorless. To put myself in the right mindset, I would try to remember the excitement that my first bird’s-eye viewing of the city had instilled in me, but more often than not I would put on my headphones, listen to rap, and—if

I was not standing cramped in the center aisle—just stare out the window and read the wild-style blockbusters passing outside my etched and hazy Metro window. Most walls in México, and perhaps every wall controlled by the state, were painted with a thick colorless industrial acrylic paint and covered over in grime and chemical particulate. The recurrent green of Boing brand juice, yellow of Corona brand beer, orange of the Metro system, and neon pink of CDMX’s rebranding did little to distract from the homogeneity of urban space.

Week after week the trip was draining, but always to my delight when I neared the cultural center the streets would overflow with vibrant and colorful life—not human life, but the life of fantastic and strange creatures. Painted on every wall were graffiti murals, all with their own narrative and history, some political, some hopeful. Like so many other community centers throughout México, the one in Nezahualcóyotl had opened its doors to hip-hop and made its

105 support permanently evident by asking graffiti artists to paint their walls and the walls of the surrounding neighborhood. Graffiti was not always so accepted. Many in hip-hop remembered the deaths and injury that the first generation of illegal graffiti artists suffered at the hands of the city’s Rudy Giuliani-inspired, no-tolerance, task force. But now, times were good, and many artists were happy to contribute to beautifying their city along with the traditional plastic artists, and folkloric dancers also given space at community centers.

Unlike its exterior walls, the interior of the community center in Nezahualcóyotl was austere.

It was a plain, modern educational space with utilitarian rooms, filled with clean but aging vinyl flooring, faded and squeaky classroom furniture, dusty green chalk boards, and chipped dancer’s mirrors. I met Khäf Vocablo, a freshman at UNAM, Slack and R-Baster, two cousins and graffiti artists, Leslie, a quiet and shy poet, and Khampa, who sometimes rapped on busses for money.

They all attended PerroZW’s classes. The first time I attended, everyone introduced themselves to each other. I described my project. They welcomed me to stay and learn with them over the next twelve weeks. After the course ended, we all began to travel, write, and record together, a story I will continue to tell over the next few chapters.

The community center in Nezahualcóyotl was not the most active. It was not even the most dedicated towards hip-hop, but it did come to represent an important set of relationships I made with artists. Otherwise, each delegation and its community center was different. Faro Indios

Verdes seemed the oldest. It was built into an old Spanish style hacienda and had rooms dedicated to dance classes, traditional art fabrication, and small concert venues which all surrounded an interior patio, a fountain repurposed to be a community garden, and a massive, mysterious looking, brightly colored papier-mâché snail named Ollín. Forum Buena Vista was

106 the newest. It was inside a massive shopping mall, on the first floor, right under the escalators.

The commercial center had a community stage where artists could hold free events, and sell their own limited merchandise. El Sub was more of an artist collective and gallery for youth art than it was a community center. It was held in a tiny underground passage under the traffic circle at

Fray Servando and el 20 de Noviembre by Metro Pino Suarez. Workshops there had to compete with confused pedestrians and the constant, near-deafening sounds of passing traffic.

Although artists’ voice and movement remain the focus of this dissertation, the experiences I had in these free workshops imply a larger organizing frame contributing to the total hip-hop scene. Workshops were funded by either local community centers or, as in the case of Siete’s and

PerroZW’s workshops, by a complex and tenuous bureaucratic relationship negotiated between multiple delegation governments and the central Mexican Institute of Youth (Instituto Mexicano de la Juventud), the Secretariat of Culture (Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes), and sometimes non-profit organizations. Although I do not focus on this important behind-the-scenes aspect of organization in hip-hop it is worth stating that I did interview one cultural director that worked for various State cultural and educational offices throughout Mexico and another organizer that led a non-profit organization. My interview with the former, who I shall call

Ángel, took place in the busy office of a delegation headquarters.

Although the exterior of the delegation headquarters was as vibrant as any cultural center, the interior hallways were damp, unpainted, and riddled with old office furniture. All walls and doors were covered with tacked and taped up pieces of printed and hand-written notes advertising lapsed programs, seeking missing persons, or warning workers of some new bureaucratic policy.

The linoleum floors were cracked, some showing deeper fissures in the concrete substructure.

107 The workers look tired and stressed. The luckier workers were crowded together inside offices with doors; the rest were simply forced to sit at desks crammed into the hallway.

My busy informant met me at the elevator. It took us at least five minutes to navigate the long halls back to their office. Multi-tasking as we walked, Ángel sipped from a styrofoam cup of coffee, talked to me about my project, and negotiated with every new assistant and colleague who seemed to plead for their attention every five steps. Flustered, I tried to keep up, respond to questions, and write notes. I failed at all three tasks and left a wake of bumped desk, knocked over papers, and disrupted workers behind me.

The moment we sat at Ángel’s already in-use conference table, their phone rang and I had a chance to collect myself. I stopped trying to get Ángel’s attention, stopped paying attention to the madness around me, and just focused on what Ángel was trying to accomplish. I did not feel bad eavesdropping, because Ángel continually gestured at me, winking, shrugging shoulders, and rolling eyes. Ángel was talking a mile a minute, firing off names, acronyms, cultural centers, and offices. It was as if Ángel was simply naming cousins and where they lived. What Ángel was actually doing was naming these connections and defining to the person on the line how exactly they might use those channels to accomplish some task. Suddenly, after 15 minutes of breathless, frustration-filled explication, Ángel paused, said something sarcastic about bureaucracy, laughed, and said goodbye and good luck. Ángel breathed a moment, got a glass of water, and our interview began.

The resources that state offices contribute to hip-hop are absolutely related to larger systems of governance and control. Ángel lamented this in our interview, noting that high levels of corruption were endemic to politics and governance in México, that every budget set aside for

108 counter-cultural formation was laughably deflated, and that because most government positions were endangered every six years (when new elected officials take charge and bring in their own ideas and teams) no positive programming could be expected to last. Despite this, Ángel’s career was quite stable and successful due to their incredible amount of institutional knowledge and the extraordinary amount of work they put in to securing space and funding for cultural expression and youth programs. Though contributing to hip-hop from a very different side, Ángel’s central goals were quite similar to artists’ own; everyone celebrated self expression, human rights, and non-violence and felt that the state would otherwise fail to secure these things without their involvement. So Ángel and those artists who benefited from state programs claimed it was their right and responsibility to take back that money and put it to good use.

Before turning to the next site of hip-hop, it is worth noting that the halls of the delegation headquarters and the network Ángel outlined on the phone were themselves a kind of desmadre.

There was simply too many people and too many projects to house in one building or to understand through the description of one place or person. Governance (or at least the redistribution of public funds) was performatively enacted by the work of people moving through busy halls and connecting across distant sites. Ángel, El Siete, and a number of other artists like Los Mujeres Trabajando, learned how to navigate this networks to find alternative orders and perform hip-hop in new contexts.

Concerts in Parks

As I built my relationship with the students, I built my relationship with PerroZW, their dedicated teacher and a rapper with a remarkably deep voice. His songs were sometimes cartoonish and marijuana-obsessed, sometimes political. His rhymes and poetry were complex

109 and compelling. I began to travel with him to other concert venues and even into the neighboring state of Puebla. He introduced me to several artists, including Jerry Funk, Fisko23, Caporal, E-

Track, Kautyn, H-Ham, and Forestero. PerroZW was also part of La Caravana Respeto, a posse of rappers who each had their solo career but who would come together under the organizational leadership of El Siete to give free shows throughout the city. Each member had various roles in the industry. Rappers Aczino and Jack Adrenalina, for instance, were champions in city-wide, national, and international circuits of battle rap; Lirika Inverza wrote brooding, romantic, almost gothic rap music and poetry; Dragon Fly identified as a rapper first, then a barber, and finally as a queer woman. T-Killa was considered the most Mexican of Mexican rappers, though I never learned why.22

I followed La Caravana Respeto as they performed in public parks, mostly in Iztapalapa and

Nezahualcóyotl. In these parks, the rappers’ massive PA speakers were often still overpowered by the speakers of nearby mobile vendors selling pirated DVDs and compilations of cumbia, salsa and classic rock. Despite the competition for sonic dominance, the rappers and the hundreds of fans in attendance were fully welcomed to use public squares. Most passers-by enjoyed the liveliness. Unlike concerts in major venues, these free concerts in parks were evidence of the number of fans of hip-hop that lived throughout the city. These fans were ready to find just enough money for their bus fare from the surrounding neighborhoods and perhaps a bit more for a few tacos or a styrofoam cup of pulque to share with a dozen friends.

One weekend, PerroZW invited me to a non-Caravana event. I was unsure of the details but

22 See “Perro Zw - Mariachi Ninja (Locos en el Barrio)”; “Spia 104 ft. Etrack - La,La,La,La (Video Oficial)”; “Replay-Records 'Jack & Kautyn' [Freestyle & Flaut”; “H-Ham - El Todo ft Joaka (prod. El Ci)”; “¡La Historia Completa entre Aczino y Jack!”; “Lirika Inverza Ft Rapozt Mortem - Diluvio Prod. H Ham”; “Dragòn Fly Ft. Ese.O - En la mira” all on YouTube.

110 excited to explore a new part of the city. When I stepped off the Metro, I heard his characteristic shout. He was sitting on the steps leading to the road above. He nodded at me, took a hit from a small marijuana pipe, then coughed for the next two minutes as we began walking to La

Esplanada de la Delegación Iztapalapa. After he finally cleared his throat, he asked if I knew much about the politics of México and the relationship between delegations. He joked that he would one day be mayor of Iztapalapa. He was personable, hard-working, and closely aware of the streets through which he moved. His joke seemed to carry a large amount of truth. Indeed, throughout the whole of the following event he walked the crowd, greeting people diplomatically, and making them feel welcome as part of the hip-hop scene.

La Esplanada was a beautiful community park. The delegation’s motto, “con el poder de la gente,” (with the power of the people) was printed on massive vinyl banners and hung on the central building. There were children laughing on trikes, teens lounging on the grass, elderly couples walking hand in hand, and so many others simply enjoying community and conviviality.

For such a well-kept and quiet park, I assumed there would be vigilant police officers trolling the grounds. They always filled El Zócalo. But there were only two at La Esplanada, and they were only passing through to grab food and enjoy the show along with the diverse crowd. A tianguis had set up along the outer edge of the park. Each vendor had a matching yellow tarp. None of them were shouting or hailing costumers like other markets. Instead, one vendor who sold pirated CDs and live concert DVDs provided music for everyone. He played a Juan Gabriel concert—Juan Gabriel being a wildly popular Mexican singer and songwriter that sold out stadiums and transcended genres. The woman cooking tlacoyos sang along to every hit.

Otherwise, the park was uniquely quiet compared to places like Metro Tacubaya or el Chopo.

111 The day’s event was a competition. PerroZW was the host. It was sponsored by El Instituto para la Atención y Prevención de las Adicciones en la Ciudad de Mexico (The Institute for the

Attention and Prevention of Addictions in Mexico) and La Victoria Emergente A.C. The community organizations’ presence seemed understated. Only two women were there to represent them. They sat off to the side of the stage smiling at the proceedings, humbly waving when thanked. It also seemed ironic that the sponsoring groups were dedicated to anti-addiction, considering that PerroZW had the constant habit of smoking in public and would begin his own performance of the day with a song that featured the sound of someone taking a deep inhale from a bubbling water bong than exhaling in pleasure.

Otherwise a sound engineer, PerroZW, Ximbo of the rap group Magisterio, Caporal from

Gomez Palacio, Durango, and a small group of less established rappers were the main attraction.23 They all worked to set up the stage and carry out the event. PerroZW was an amazing host. He kept the audience interested, even those unfamiliar with hip-hop. He avoided vulgar and violent topics, which he often celebrated in front of more homogeneously hip-hop audiences. The event proceeded, but due to technical difficulty the sound was terrible. PerroZW had to yell into the mic, and then it was still unclear what he was saying. I could not understand what the competition was. PerroZW, introduced each of the contestants one by one. Each said a few words and thanked the organizers. I had expected a rap battle or a performance from the young rappers, but there was none. Ximbo and Caporal, who PerroZW introduced as judges, performed, but they never selected a winner. The event just ended.

I might have never understood the purpose of the event, but afterwards PerroZW, myself and

23 See “Ximbo - Ya No Quiero Estar Contigo Ft. Jezzy P y Ese O - Audio” and “Magisterio - Rap Serio Ft. MC Burron” on YouTube.

112 three contestants, E-track, Kautyn, and H-Ham left to find a pulquería, a bar serving fermented maguey alcohol. We walked up a long hill past three massive Calvary crosses to find a bar with dirt-floors and wood-plank walls. It was a converted stable. While entering, we had to stop and retreat. Two men were hauling an unconscious woman out through the door to put her in a cab.

When we did enter, nobody inside seemed concerned. We found an empty wood table bench and rearranged the tree stump seats to our liking. We ordered our drinks and carried on with the many conversations we had started while huffing up the hill.

I learned the event was part of a larger competition to secure a year-long residency at Victoria

Emergente’s Laboratorio, a newly constructed studio in the heart of Iztapalapa. PerroZW and the winners of the contest would be given seminars in sound design, business, and marketing. They would receive the keys to run the studio as they saw fit for the next year. At the end of the year, they would each record and mass-produce an album. The four rappers I sat with, and two others,

Presunto and Brerap, would win. I began attending their concerts and studio sessions. We visited

El Laboratorio together a few weeks later.

Like concerts, any one park was meaningless in the greater scheme of the hip-hop scene.

However, with time and dedication to following hip-hop wherever it might lead, the scene began to make sense.

The Studio of Victoria Emergente

El Laboratorio was a five by five meter cinderblock box, built under a highway overpass. It sat between a rarely used skate park and an always inactive exercise park. Local pedestrian police officers also used the building to take their lunch and go to the restroom. Its exterior was painted a beautiful earthy red. Its windows and doors were all caged for security then taped over

113 with old posters from the organization’s previous concert events. The interior was mostly bland and unpainted. To the right there was only a crooked plastic table and two folding chairs, but to the left, there were two yellow doors leading to two rooms separated by a wall and connected visually by a sound proof window. Both rooms were covered floor to ceiling in pyramidal acoustic foam. Walking into the rooms from the noisy, anterior space was a strange experience.

The noise of the street faded away. The minor echoes we were used to ignoring disappeared. Our coughs, loud breathing, and even shouts would disappear after they left our chests. If somebody said something but was not facing directly at their listener, their voice was lost. There was silence, and we all played with it continually, making small sounds, turning in circles to try and hear the outside world vibrating in. Recording in this environment made all the difference. By cutting every echo and any possibility of feedback, the microphone could capture the subtle dynamics of voice.

El Laboratorio had new computers and sound equipment. In many respects, it was on par with more professional studios like Apothheosis Mvsic or Homegrown Entertainment, where unsigned rappers paid hundreds of pesos to record each song. The artists could access El

Laboratorio at any time, yet they would mostly record in PerroZW’s one-bedroom apartment.

Like many home studios I visited throughout my time in Mexico, ZW’s space had no acoustic foam and no professional sound equipment. Recordings would pick up sounds from the street below and the restless movements and giggles of everyone in the room. Other artists sometimes used more professional studios, but more often they would record right at home or at the home of a friend who had collected second-hand equipment and built their own makeshift sound cabinets.

It did not take many visits to home studios before I realized why artists gave up so much in

114 terms of quality of sound. Beyond my time with PerroZW, I followed Jerry Funk to recorded at

Tony Tonz’s, Preck to record at Galahad’s, and RRMx to record at Daudhi’s studio.24 Each were social events. Food, drink, and marijuana would accompany hours spent listening and writing to the same looped measure of music. Conversations would break out and drift in every direction.

Every moment would be hip-hop.

Prisons

The final venue where I found hip-hop was within state men’s prison. Finding my way in to prisons was quite easy. I followed Las Mujeres Trabajando, a posse of female rappers, dancers, and graffiti artist, who gave regular concerts at el Reclusoria Norte, one of Ciudad México’s largest detention centers. We drove to the facility and breezed through security. We walked through the outdoor labyrinthine halls, walled with chainlink and razor wire, passing guards and inmates along the way. In these common areas the only major difference between the two segments of the population was the uniform: the guards wore formal, dark brown or green wool suits with pockets, badges, and batons; the inmates wore an array of different pant and t-shirt styles only slightly matching as light tan. Apparently, it was the family of the incarcerated who were responsible for clothing and feeding them.

When we finally reached the auditorium, a few inmates welcomed us excitedly and respectfully. They were B-boys. It turned out we were an hour late, so the crowd had already returned to their cells, but they had stayed back to practice on stage. They explained that while

Los Mujeres Trabajando set up, they would run out and spread the word that the concert was back on. The crew of dancers left, but quickly returned with a few dozen others who scattered

24 See “Fuera De Control Tony Tonz Qué - Entrevista 1 de 3” and “Adicto - Preck” on YouTube.

115 themselves throughout the auditorium in groups of three to five.

As the emcees performed, the incarcerated B-boys continued to break-dance on stage right there with the women. Freestyle cyphers took place quietly in the crowd around me. I sat somewhere in the middle front rows, and fielded the averages questions as to my presence: was I rapper, manager, or journalist? I showed them my notebook and gave them my hardened steal mechanical pencil when they asked to tag their names inside. One or two guards must have been present, but I cannot say I noticed them.

The event preceded exactly as I came to expect in any other location. The performance ended and we reversed our steps to exit and drive back home. And so I learned prisons do not only host events for outside artists, but also detain artists and create communities of hip-hop. Spia104,

Tony Tonz, Pavel, and a few other artists I met had spent time in prison as inmates. Presunto

Culpable had actually spent over two years in prison for a crime he did not commit.25 He was only released after two attorneys took his case pro bono to make a documentary film about the contradictions of the Mexican judicial system (Hérnandez and Smith 2008). Each of these artists, used their time in prison to hone their craft and talk their hip-hop. When Las Mujeres Trabajando invited me to an event at a prison, I had expected something more spectacular or at least novel.

In the end, it was simply another mundane trip.

Hip-hop is Destiny

In the few months it took for me to navigate from el Legendario Bombay, to la Plaza Peyote, to the community center of Nezahualcóyotl, to el Estudio Emergente, and finally to the home recording sessions of artists, I became a deeply engaged member of the hip-hop scene of México.

25 See “Iztapa Rap Presunto Culpable HD Jose Antonio Zuñiga” on YouTube.

116 I built relationships with los Hijos de Poeta and Rap Reál de México, another young crew I met at el Sub through El Siete’s workshops. I began following more established artists and crews beyond La Caravana Respeto and the artists in residence at El Laboratorio. Vieja Guardia, Las

Mujeres Trabajando, Pulcilga Rec all welcomed me into their lives.26 More importantly, they asked me to travel with them to venues further afield of the city and later and later into the night.

We followed hip-hop and committed to la calle escuela, risking much and improvising to find our way home. My entanglement in the scene reached an exciting high point when fans from the audience would ask me to sign their T-Shirts, CDs, and flyers right along with the artists themselves. It reached a different kind of point, perhaps a nadir, when people started confusing me with a drug dealer.

In each of these locations and with each of these groups, I could have restarted my study, pinning it down to one location or neighborhood. Instead, I began to see the true complexity of the scene as it was laid out across the city and how the best approach would be multi-sited

(Marcus 1995). I began to see how no one site could provide artists with all the resources required to develop their artistic voice. Hip-hop was made up of professional artists, young participants, fans, followers, cultural organizers, and even family members. These individuals came from distant places within their delegation and availed themselves of the resources they found for the sake of cultural production. They sought access to safe spaces to learn, practice, record, and perform. They entered into or built their own mobile markets to supplement their limited incomes. Sometimes they encountered formal paid positions. Private business owners might pay them to secure a new consumer base. The offices of various state, city, or delegation

26 See “The Cypher Effect - MC Luka / Sepulturero / Gogo Ras / Muelas De Gallo [ Vieja Guardia ]” and “The Cypher Effect - Jezzy P / Audry Funk / Rabia Rivera ( Mujeres Trabajando)” on YouTube.

117 governments organized these free courses, paying the teachers a minimal honoraria, as a way to foster self-expression and reduce delinquency in city youth. Artists and their closest friends also pooled and managed their own resources through carnalismo, or communalism. All these people and places related and defined hip-hop in dialogism.

At the start of my hunt for hip-hop, I had hopes of finding one delegation, one location, one group to follow. But I soon realized that no matter how hard I wanted to find a single, lively location like Neza’s cultural center, I would always be pulled to some other place. In the end, the artists I followed did not come from one neighborhood or delegation within México. Some lived in the city’s center, in Cuauhtémoc or in Benito Juarez, where Mexico’s monumental government, church, and economy as well as its violent architectures of Conquest still stand.

Some lived in the city’s peripheries, in Cuajimalpa or Iztapalapa, where Mexico’s politics of abandonment and structural inequality are starkly revealed. Some lived beyond the capital city proper, in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl or Ecatepec, where the complexities of the metropolis are even more marked. The artists I followed did not represent one age set, either. They ranged from their teens to their thirties and into their forties. Hip-hop in México, then, is not a “youth” culture in the sense that all practitioners are young, or in the sense that practitioners exist in a transitory, adolescent phase preceding adulthood. The artists I followed ranged in terms of their socioeconomic status. Some lived with their parents. Some were self-reliant and had successful businesses, life-partners, children, and pets of their own. A more in-depth sociological analysis of the social-class and position of these artists deserves attention; however, for now I can conclude that although they represented various delegations, age sets, socioeconomic statuses, and genders, and although they had different styles, life-histories, natural abilities, and goals, the

118 artists I followed were each committed to moving beyond the boundaries of their neighborhood into unfamiliar territories, finding new collaborators and audiences, learning from difference, and voicing the desmadre they encountered along the way.

Hip-hop is defined by this movement between places; however, in the next part I want to tell one more story about one final place to argue that hip-hop is placeless. It is about presence.

Part Two: Hip-hop is Placeless

La Chinampa

Fat and wheezing, the bulldog smelled my hand, lost interest, then waddled toward the couches. His owners sat there. A child playing with a Yo-Yo nearly smacked the dog as it sniffed its way past. On arriving at the couch, the dog was simultaneously scorned for being so obese and thrown a few corn chips. Laughing at the pup’s good luck and not foreseeing my own, I turned toward the bartender as he put a plate of chilaquiles and a beer in front of me. Before I could thank him, he introduced me to a woman walking by. She greeted me warmly, yelled at the child for swinging the Yo-Yo too erratically, kissed the air near my cheek to complete our greeting, quickly cut and served me a slice of birthday cake, then dashed off to bring another round of beers to her family on the couch, nimbly avoiding the slow lumbering dog. I had not asked for the food, beer, or cake. I had never met the family nor been invited to their birthday party. That mattered little. I had walked in to La Chinampa at that particular time, and they would not treat me as if I did not belong.

From the balcony opposite the front door came an exploratory strum and a greeting from a musician checking the tuning of his guitar and the levels of his vocal amplification. Along with everyone else, I turned to look up at the dark, mud brick alcove, where he sat. He strummed a

119 few more times, tweaked his tuning slightly and his volume once more, and then fully introduced himself. The eight person audience already knew who he was and yelled up at him to start. He responded back that he was still quite unaccustomed to performing. They laughed, sat back in the couch, and held their gaze upon him, anticipating their night of music and tradition. I turned back to take a bite and survey the total scene. It was hard to hold your attention at La

Chinampa; there was always something new to look at. I turned to see the family, the dog, and a few new people just entering. I turned to see the whole of the bar, claustrophobic with art. Almost every inch of wall space was covered with clever aphorisms painted on old wood; with iconic celebrities dressed in unlikely modern, urban fashion painted on unstretched canvas; with cultural artifacts and antique curiosities sitting in glass cases; with old landscape oil-paintings repurposed and covered in new, psychedelic acrylic layers. All of it crowded my vision, begging to be studied. And then there was the music, so familiar to my youth. But, ultimately, it was the feast set before me that really made me smile. It was a feast given to me freely by gracious strangers. As I had been scanning and smiling, the bartender, Pavel, my friend, had been watching me all the while. I noticed. He hugged his clay mug filled with steaming cafe de olla, loaded with extra scoops of sugar, smiled, and said, “Aquí estamos, güey. Aquí estamos.

¡Provecho!” (Here we are, man. Here we are. Enjoy!)

I met Pavel months earlier there at La Chinampa. La Chinampa was a community center between Metro Jamaica and Mixiuhca. It was unaffiliated with the state and existed only by the generous patronage of one elderly land owner. I had walked past the building a dozen times before, never noticing the hand-written signs out front that promised it to be a Hogar de Hip Hop and an Hoya de Rasta, meaning a hearth of hip-hop and a basin of rasta. When I did finally

120 attend an event there, I immediately felt at home. The place held musical events and poetry performances nightly. It offered free boxing and yoga classes throughout the week. It opened its doors to neighborhood birthday parties and reunions. It always featured new art pieces and vibrated with life.

Pavel was the caretaker there. Like me, he was in his early thirties. He was also the bartender, janitor, events organizer, and the decorator. He was there nearly 24 hours a day and seven days a week. If he was not busy teaching classes, cleaning, cooking, or serving drinks, he was making art. Pavel was always welcoming, urging me to relax, to explore the walls, and feel at home.

Throughout my time in México, I returned to La Chinampa often. I would come whenever Pavel would host a hip-hop event. I would come after work when there was nothing happening elsewhere.

In time, Pavel and I began talking personally. He would tell me about his art. I would tell him about my developing project. I would tell him of any upcoming concert, and he would confirm he knew the rapper well. He introduced me to regulars at la Chinampa and introduced me to newcomers as a regular. I would invite my friends to visit. Most nights, after an event ended or business slowed, Pavel would join whatever guests remained in the open-air patio above the front entrance, overlooking both the street and the interior bar. It too was screened by his art projects and always filled with a changing collection of unique pieces of furniture he had found as trash on the street and repurposed. We would ascend the spiral stairs, sit, and relax. He would offer us beer, coffee, or marijuana, or he would accept a hit from anyone else offering. It was his habit to take a hit right before he had something important to say. With red-eyes and a puffed up chest, he would hold the smoke tight in his lungs, letting only enough breath to escape to

121 minimally vocalize some raspy and brilliant harangue on culture, society, and philosophy. Then, suddenly, he would punctuate his utterance by exhaling, coughing, and passing the joint.

One night, after PerroZW had visited La Chinampa and left and we had all grown tired of smoking, Pavel, two other employees, and I were milling about, listening to Ana Tijioux, picking up left-over beer bottles, plates, and piles of ash spread around the closed bar. Once the place was in order, we sat back at the bar to rest and have one more beer and one more conversation before saying goodbye. Knowing that they were old friends, I asked Pavel and the other caretakers how they had met. Pavel explained that they had each carried out sentences on La

Colonia Penal Federal Islas Marías, a prison without bars on an island 70-miles off the coast of

Nayarit. Assuming I had misunderstood, I asked for more clarification. They laughed at my incredulity and affirmed again that there were no cells and minimal guards there. Prisoners, or colonists as they were called, were left to their own devices. As I was still in wide-eyed disbelief, they found a YouTube video that showed images of the prison.27 Las Islas Marias was founded in

1905. In its early history, it housed only highly dangerous criminals, enemies of the state, and the mentally unstable. Until the 1970s, there were continual complaints of mistreatment, exploitation, malnutrition, torture, and violence between inmates. Today, the island is home to less dangerous criminals and even their families. The media mostly represents the place as a peaceful. UNESCO-designated it an ecological treasure.

As we watched the video, the group spoke of the island’s beauty, its sunsets, pleasant breezes, and its crystal clear waters. They recalled sneaking to the beach often. Going there was against the rules, but the guards would let them because a fear of sharks kept most inmates from

27 See “Las Islas Marias una Prision sin Rejas” on YouTube.

122 trying to escape by sea. Slack-jawed and wide-eyed, I hung on their every word. By our second beer, though, their stories were less nostalgic and less celebratory. They began to tell me stories about how they were constantly uncertain of where they would get their next meal and how creative they had to be to survive.

After another beer, the music had stopped playing. Longer silences endured between our turns at talk. I told them I would love to interview them on all of this and pointed to the microphone and notebook, which they knew I always carried. Pavel smiled but shook his head and waved away my hand. He said an interview was neither necessary nor why they were sharing. I apologized. He again shook his head. Nonplussed, he sat back in his bar stool and began to tell me stories of living there and stories from the youth detention center he lived in beforehand. The others shared their stories too. They were all horrifying.

Weeks later, at that birthday party, when Pavel affirmed exactly where we were, “aquí estamos,” I gleaned a bit more subtext than he might otherwise have uttered.

Pavel’s stories are not mine to use as a resource in completing my ethnography of hip-hop.

Scholars of rap’s lyrical content, ever seeking those experiences that authenticate rap artists’ political consciousness, might urge me to use Pavel’s stories as proof that hip-hop grows out of violent contexts and gives voice to the victims of state oppression; however, Pavel did not label the pain of these stories as his hip-hop. By my own study, which eschews poetry for presence, I might be inclined to write Pavel as just one more case study, comparing him to Presunto, reading both their stories through my own experience at el Reclusoria Norte. But still, this would be more anecdotal than descriptive of the culture. And yet, my time with Pavel was not an analytical dead end. The story continues.

123 One night, weeks after telling me of Las Islas Marias, another event had ended at La

Chinampa. Our party had not. Pavel invited me and a group of others to sit upstairs, to listen to reggae, to drink beer and coffee, and smoke. As we fell into comfortable quiet, Pavel brought out rolls of canvas sheets and stacks of poster paper that had been stuffed behind a shelving unit.

Crinkled and dusty, it was his archive of paintings, all the work he had completed while at La

Chinampa but not found suitable for the center’s walls. He spread them out chaotically across the patio floor and began rifling through them, shuffling them with his feet. When one caught his attention, he would uncover it completely, laying it atop the others and disrupting any previous order the stack might have held. He would call us to look at it together, then tell the story of the piece and its inspiration—not pedantically though; for just as often as he would have a story, he would laugh, shrug at the image, and leave all interpretation to his audience. Then, he began to offer pieces to us.

He would see one and say, “here, you should have this because…” and then fill in some personal bit of knowledge he had garnered from our time together, or say it simply seemed to suit us. The piece he gave me was meant to be evidence of my being in México. It was proof of my being at La Chinampa with him. We continued haphazardly through them all until the night ended. I took my prize home.

A few nights at La Chinampa later (weeks by any other calendar), Pavel organized a similar event. He invited me up to the roof to relax and talk after closing. We listened to music. We chatted about how far I had come in hip-hop in the city and how sad it would be to leave. He pulled out a folder overflowing with randomly sized and weighted scraps of paper, all creased to the point of shredding. They were his artistic works from his time at Las Islas Marias. I put my

124 field journal back into my bag, deciding to take part fully in the moment. He handed half the sheets to me. Since they were his artistic life-writings collected from his time there on the island,

I assumed they were of great value to him, sacred even. I received them gently and reverently, as if I were being handed Gramsci’s original prison notebooks. Connoting no such sentiment, Pavel grabbed half the papers back and began rifling through them for me, unfolding them, changing their order, and demonstrating them briskly, just as he had his last archive.

As he worked through them, I realized they were not a chronicle of his suffering or his harrowing experiences in a penitentiary. They were an incredible record of his time building and sustaining a hip-hop culture on an island. For over an hour, Pavel displayed dozens of self- drawn flyers, faux album covers, portraits, caricature drawings, and graffiti style letterings. He had completed and given away the final drafts of most of these, but he kept the stories inspiring them. He roughly spread out sheet after sheet, telling of who it was designed for, where they had come from, and how it conveyed some part of another story, style, or personality in the hip-hop scene. He spoke about these pieces in the same tone as he spoke about the newer, Chinampa-era paintings, and never implied they were more important than right where we were. We sat there for an hour or so, looking through his designs and discussing his various styles. Before completing the stack, we got tired. I got up to leave. As he showed me out, he said “Aquí estaremos, güey,” (we will be here man) and reminded me to return soon.

I include La Chinampa within this dissertation for a number of reasons. First because La

Chinampa was incredibly valuable to me throughout my study. It felt like a home-base, both emotionally and intellectually. There, I could sit quietly, think anthropology and hip-hop, and imagine the possible future of my work. I could also shut my notebook, listen to the variety of

125 music played there, and take inspiration from the art around me. I could introduce myself to others, learn about the neighborhood, explain my reason for being there, and practice putting my own hip-hop into discourse. If I had anchored my study to one particular location, I would have likely stationed myself at La Chinampa.

Pavel himself was also valuable to me. He may have denied me an interview but he did not deny me from knowing him and his life. He did prohibit me from removing his voice from the moments we shared, but for that I am grateful. In so doing, he forced me to understand him across the greater dialogue of our relationship. In the months following that night, when we were not perusing his archives, Pavel would continually reinforce the idea that La Chinampa was his life. He would say this not to remind me of his life before or to prove his upward mobility, but to keep me truly present there with him. Event after event, every time I would visit, he would see me taking notes or staring at a blank page, smile, then chuckle. He would commend me for always studying in place then confirm that right here and now was the only place we really needed to be. He said it at rap events, reggae events, and traditional Mexican music events. At each of my two failed attempts to hold “Learning English through Hip Hop” courses, he assured me there was nothing lost, because we still had the opportunity to talk. He said it throughout the day one Sunday while we visited Tepito, ate the biggest hotdogs we would ever see, drank agua fresca, and browsed antiques. He said it after he told me about his two previous sleepless days and nights working at the center, scolding me for interpreting his words as a complaint rather than the admission of good fortune he intended them to be. He said it at that birthday party. He even said it twice more, when I visited him years later at El Banco and then still later at Calpulli

Jamaica, the two community centers he ran after he left La Chinampa. “Aquí estamos, güey.

126 Aquí estamos. ¡Provecho!” and in those moments, Pavel and I shared our hip-hop.28

Second, I write of Pavel to discuss the greater practice of hip-hop. Pavel answered my anthropological interest in his life-narrative, but only by committing to a longer process of dialogue. After denying me an interview, Pavel slowly and methodically introduced me to his past. But ultimately, it was our times together and the art he gave me, not those unrecorded stories, that he meant for me to use as anthropological evidence and as representative of his hip- hop knowledge.

It was in each of these moments, the chronotope of La Chinampa, that Pavel defined the hip- hop he wanted associated with his name. Non-traditional autobiographic utterances like this became quite familiar to me. Spia104 had spun the records he had produced and collected as he traveled across the local and global hip-hop scene. MC Luka showed me his linguistic inspirations in Chava Flórez and El Vulgarcito. Elemsiburron showed me his millisecond of stardom in Cypress Hill’s music video filmed in El Zócalo. Jezzy P laid out her flyers and press clippings. Pastok displayed his folder of crew graffiti pictures. Pavel simply marked our time together. The value of the voice in hip-hop is in this process. It is not rap’s narrative content nor the authenticity it derives from marginality, but the very act of transmission in presence.

Third, I share this narrative to counter certain common sense and academic understandings of the culture. I note that even though Pavel continually confirmed our presence at La Chinampa, he also deemphasized place. Pavel shared his prison archives just as jovially as he had shared his most recent posters. He discussed his prison collaborations just as warmly as he discussed his connections with Kolmillo and Tony Tonz. He did not try to add any extra weight to them or

28 See “Centro Cultural Calpulli Jamaica” on YouTube to hear Pavel and Samara talking about their newest project together.

127 mention his survival of Las Islas Marias to authenticate his art. For Pavel, hip-hop had nothing to do with representing place. It only chronicled the relationships he had built in artistry. In fact, the stories he told of organizing hip-hop in Las Islas Marias were not unlike my own experiences organizing events in Hawaiʻi, or traveling with RRMx and HDP, connecting with others and reproducing the culture. For Pavel, it did not matter that he was isolated from society and was neither seen, heard, nor interpreted by fans or scholars. The work was his purpose. Marginality mattered little. His hip-hop was placeless.

Conclusion: From Overview to Underground

Months after I first saw the city from my window in the sky, I took a short trip to California.

During my second landing, I found my perspective had changed entirely. I could focus on the details and feel the city’s shape. I had come to embody it over the previous months as I walked miles and miles in search of hip-hop. As the flight was in its final bank before landing, I saw my neighborhood, right in the crux of Calzalda San Antonio Abad and Viadad Miguel Alemán. Then

I saw my faded peach building among the spectrum of gray urbanity. The rooftop billboard advertising a new flavor of prepackaged tuna really gave it away. Had I been in another seat, I might have seen La Chinampa. Had there been less smog, I might have seen all the way to Neza.

After landing and taking the Metro back home, I was surprised to find the graffiti on the hotel’s retainer wall had changed in the week I was gone.

When Spia104 welcomed me to his neighborhood, compared himself to an anthropologist, and then described my own work as hip-hop, I nodded in agreement, knowing it to be true. “You don’t have to rap,” he explained, “but you can represent it, because you can say you were here.”

In the previous chapter, following Fabian (1983) and Scott (1998), I critiqued visualism, or

128 the tendency to quantify and diagram people and places as if we were seeing from above. In this chapter, I contextualized the history of hip-hop within the resonant city, showing how musical genres in México have always been in dialogue with power and resistance, but at a very particular scale. I ended the chapter with Kolmillo alluding to the fact that the chronotope of national and literary history is not meaningful in and of itself, but only as one small (perhaps forgettable) part of an emergent identity. For rappers, history is better told through a chronotope of the connections they make with other rappers across the city in various locations through looped interconnectedness. I, therefore, ground the culture (and my study of it) in just this way, describing specific spaces and connections I made while traveling to them. We cannot define hip- hop by its existence within a single neighborhood, stage, or recording booth. Rather, hip-hop forms as artists constantly move through the entire city and perform it in interactions linking each of these distant places and people. These spaces act as a necessary but insufficient resource in the environment of hip-hop. Aside from being in a space, one must develop close relationships with others there. This demand to be present in hip-hop led me to following a questionable line of participatory intoxication which I will turn to in the following interlude. Then, in the chapter following, I will expand on what I alluded to in my story about La Chinampa and Pavel—that learning hip-hop is based on direct experience. I will look closely at how artists themselves move through desmadre to fortify their voice and learn to talk hip-hop.

129 INTERLUDE: A MOMENT OF SILENCE FOR THIS SMALL CRÓNICA BREAK

One of the recurring explanations of the power of drugs is their ability to loosen cognitive social categories. Conceptualizations are socially provided and given in language. One of the sources of wonder and ecstasy in the mystic experience is the direct perception of the world, without the intervention and precedence of language and interpretation. The mystic experience is nonverbal precisely because it takes one back behind the word, or more accurately, before the word, to the stunning immediacy of sense data. (Myerhoff 2001: 431)

Participant Intoxication: Choking Back Knowledge

In this chapter and the next, I blur the line between my anthropology and their hip-hop, highlighting both cultures’ dedication to presence. This inspires questions of closeness, or the extent to which I became too involved in the lives (or lifestyles) of my informants. In this interlude, I problematize my own commitment to participate along with artists smoking marijuana. I consider what psychotropic effects marijuana has on the human brain—specifically how it leads to a heightened acuity of sound and apophenia and paranoia, or the belief that everything is somehow connected. I theorize about the positive effects the drug might have had on my research, arguing that the effects were not simply psychotropic, but related to a heightened ethnographic awareness, simultaneity, and dialogic intelligence in both my anthropology and hip-hop. Through these moments of participatory intoxication (Fiskesjö 2010), I learned exactly why it is good to be paranoid in desmadre, an idea I will return to in chapter six.

Scientific research into the neurological effects of cannabis is expansive. As legalization occurs across the United States and the long held stigma of the drug wears thin, studies into its deleterious consequences have made way for studies of its health benefits. Despite these studies’

130 more favorable approach to cannabis, many still begin with peremptory justifications.

Apologetically, each researcher explains they are only now attempting to answer seemingly obvious research questions about the chemical because a long history of detrimental legalistic and social factors has limited earlier research (Baron 2015). Researching the drug remains too difficult and risky in most academic settings.

Social scientific research has recognized that the behaviors, stigmas, and the creativity associated with marijuana are socially constructed. Moreover, scholars have shown that the various historic, legalistic, and economic trajectories of marijuana are culturally determined and often part of racist and colonial projects (Becker 1953, Bourgois 2008, Levine 2005, Mills 2007,

Rubin 1975, Williams-Garcia 1975). Although, social scientists have described well how the drug is used by others; they have explored little its usage by social scientists themselves.

To even admit smoking marijuana during my field work—let alone to begin thinking about how the drug contributed to my methodology—provokes no small amount of paranoia. Where other scholars might simply take for granted this paranoia, I want to investigate it as related to my own subject position as Chicano and as a first generation college student. Thus, I include this moment of self-reflexivity and return to questions of methodology.

The bitter feelings I have admitting to smoking rise up like bile even as I utter the word— marijuana, marihuana, mariguana. Of course, the feeling of the word in my mouth and how it strangles me is linked to the word’s Mexican-Spanish origins and Harry J. Anslinger’s 1930s anti-cannabis and explicitly anti-Mexican campaign. Salinger popularized the word marijuana over cannabis, as it was known scientifically, or hemp, as it was known in American parlance. By calling it marijuana, Salinger associated the plant with foreignness and impurity (Booth 2005;

131 Piper 2005).

Growing up, my own father had taught me to listen to how harshly our White neighbors pronounced the X when saying Mexican. He noted how tensely they constricted the /k/ sound, especially when they were telling us what kind of people we were. He noted the sounds differed in Texas, where Mexican sounded more like meskin, but the meaning remained the same. Despite these lessons and my own project to fight derogatory mock Spanish (Hill 2008) and overcome such internalized oppression, Salinger’s campaign still resonates in my own vocal chamber.

Before speaking, I fall to the self-absorbed questions of what will my peers think? How will I be able to persuade my colleagues to take my work in hip-hop seriously, especially once I tell them

I conducted ethnography—some of my best ethnography, in fact—while under the influence?

Will being honest in my dissertation make securing a position in academia impossible? Will any future work spark the same controversies Alice Goffman’s (2015) On the Run has, especially considering my informants refused anonymity.29 These questions coerce me to silence. They urge me to retreat to the safety of studying the Other, to turn outward in self-defense.

Against this, in the following section, I take my intoxication seriously as part of my participatory anthropology (Feinberg 2003; Fiskesjö 2010). First, because the social and chemical effects of marijuana overlapped with my greater methodological focus on sound; second, because the psychological terminology associated with marijuana resonate with talking hip-hop; and finally, because the process of socialization into marijuana use put me into proximity of danger and risk.

29 See Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s 2016 article “The Trials of Alice Goffman” in The New York Times Magazine for an account of the controversy inside and outside the academy.

132 Chemical, Social, and Methodological Effects of Marijuana

There is an inextricable link between marijuana, music, and creativity (Fachner 2006). Artists from various genres of music have long stated as much in their autobiographies, and research by cognitive scientists points to how marijuana augments parameters of acoustic sensory perception.

Marijuana “acts as a psycho-acoustic enhancer, or exciter, equalizer, attenuator, etc., used in modern recording studios, making sound clearer and sound sources more distinct” (ibid: 82). It effects duration, or the perception of time, thus allowing one to effectively hear the space between the notes. It effects loudness, or the perception of the intensity of sounds, thus allowing sound to feel more enveloping. It augments timber and speech discrimination, or the ability to perceive “prosodic and suprasegmental parts of speech” (ibid: 82), thus allowing listeners to hear more meaning in talk. It compounds with the experience of music to increase activity in regions of the brain associated with emotion, memory, and selection, and areas dedicated to the development of complicated cognitive structures.

Social scientific, humanistic, and literary studies of voice sometimes ignore its sonic features, highlighting its social, political, and semiotic features without fully recognizing it as part of an aural sensorium. In these works, voice became an abstract concept rather than a vibration formed in lungs, carried through the atmosphere, and received in the inner ear. Thus, the voice’s direct association with tone, timber, register and the perception of auditory fields is lost. But the voice is always musical. Like Fox (2004), Feld (1984), Gray (2013) and Harkness (2013), I centralize the voice’s aural aspects and investigate how different people interpret the voice and contextualize it within culturally specific systems of values and discourse. Because the voice ought to be experienced in time and space, I ask what does tracking the change of auditory

133 perception under the influence of marijuana do to help a sensorial methodology for anthropology? One cognizant of time, place, rhythm and voice.

To do so, I want to reconsider the psychological effects of marijuana. Aside from an altered perception of music and acoustic space (Fachner 2006), marijuana is associated with a number of other psychological “side-effects.” Euphoria is a feeling of happiness, confidence, or well-being sometimes exaggerated in pathological states of mania. Apophenia is the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas).

Paranoia is characterized by delusions of persecution worked into an organized system. It can result from chronic personality disorders like schizophrenia or drug abuse. These effects do well as analytic metaphors in the description of hip-hop.

Access to other’s cognition, their psychological experience, is largely beyond the scope of anthropology, social science, and perhaps even psychology itself (Bilmes 1986, Edwards 1997),

Therefore, I do not use these psychological terms to argue that the joint use of a chemical compound results in psychologically (or ontologically) comparable experiences. Rather, I use these terms to label hip-hop’s larger order of discourse and investigate how rappers (and anthropologists) talk in the presence of marijuana. I use these psychological concepts as a way to reflect on different styles, genres, and discourse I found in the performance of hip-hop. The shared experience of euphoria and apophenia, then, is less a matter of cognition and more a matter of the socialization of the drug in la calle escuela.

Various situations determine a shared way of being under the influence, or being bien pacheco as Jerry Funk and Tony Tonz called it. In later chapters, I will exemplify this by highlighting the broad connections artists make between disparate ideas, claiming the infinite

134 and universal essence of the culture—that excited “güaü” of Los HDP, the purposeful dialogism of vocal registers by MC Luka, my sudden revelation of the wordplay of Kolmillo and all the good feelings associated with recognizing such connections. We all experienced meaning and order in looped moments of sound and in looped movements in the city.

Johannes Fabian (2001) wrote, “much of our ethnographic research is carried out best when we are ‘out of our minds,’ that is, while we relax our inner controls, forget our purposes, let ourselves go. In short, there is an ecstatic side to our fieldwork which should be counted among the conditions of knowledge production, hence of objectivity” (31). More than a peremptory defense for being “out of my head” occasionally, I argue that observing hip-hop while under the influence of marijuana opened my ethnographic work to new channels of communication and to a wider regime of sound. Calling for a more perceptually attuned ethnography, Andrew Arno

(2003) argued “the analysis of non-language referential meaning in ritual… suggests that ethnographic validation of the analyst’s interpretation of ritual details can be pursued, not only in direct interviews talk or natural conversation but more pertinently in obvious and therefore unremarked associations in non-ritual life” (815).

The success of my ethnography—my effortless, automatic, and unconscious progression into auditory learning exemplified throughout the previous chapters; the apophenic connections I made across the resounding city; and my hyper focus on the voice and regimes of hearing— stems not from the drug alone, however. My success stems from my continual willingness to carry out and enjoy the more dangerous methods of being hip-hop. Thus smoking marijuana opened my research to deeper experiences in the scene, understandings of rappers, and awareness in the resounding city. Hip-hop’s system of learning values presence and participation

135 foremost. My knowledge of the scene came only after I came to share risk, reality, and a past with artists, after I made stories with them. Smoking with artists built rapport and reinforced phatic communication. This led to longer conversations and informal interviews and often helped me to secure secondary invites and introductions to other artists. I did not smoke on every occasion that I was offered, and when I refused, I was not rejected from participating further.

Nevertheless, the beneficial role participant intoxication played in my research was undeniable, especially in the collection of tales of lo más rapero, which I will introduce in chapter 6.

Arguing that the use of marijuana opens methodological avenues, especially in this dissertation which highlights sound and dialogism, might problematically overlap with similar stereotypical epiphanies had by the countercultural youth of the 1960s who began experimenting with psychedelic substances in the United States and in their travels to México and India (Adams

2004, Feinberg 2003, Zolov 1999; Saldanha 2007). Krippner (1970), for instance, found users regularly expressed a “sense of simultaneity in time and space” and a “sense of solidarity with all people in the world.” Feinberg (2003) found similar discourse in his studies of psychedelic mushroom use in Mazatec, México. Such statements, though well-meaning, do not account for cultural appropriation, white privilege, and the ongoing structural inequalities defining difference between tourists and third world peoples (Simonette 2011; Saldanha 2007). Nevertheless, that a limited sense of simultaneity and solidarity is what I want to argue for within the ethnographic context and in my discussions of presence in hip-hop.

Although I do hope to work against the stigma of marijuana use, I do not claim that smoking marijuana while doing the work of anthropology is the same as ingesting nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, or mood-stabilizing pharmaceuticals. Many anthropologists need these to survive in the

136 field—especially the latter—and although the chemicals have certain consequences on individual perception of reality, they do not have the same effect as marijuana. Nor do they hold the same social value. Several specific problems arise when using psychotropic chemicals while conducting ethnography. It affected my objectivity as an observer. I lost information that I might have otherwise captured. At times, I would become distracted from taking detailed notes, but only because I began to take part in dialogue fully. At other times, I would find myself lost in the music, writing feverishly, ignoring the ongoing conversation between others in the setting.

Recreating the gaps left in my notebook after the fact was always a partial and subjective exercise. Deciphering the notes I did take while under the influence was often more difficult than it was helpful. There is a definite link between marijuana use and acute impairment of learning and memory, attention, and working memory and motivation (Volkow et al. 2016).

In my own process of data collection, although certain kinds of information dissipated as quickly as the smoke, the stories I built with rappers while smoking were far more important, as was the rapport it gave me in interviews to discuss drugs with rappers as a nonjudgmental smoker, or initiated marijuano.

In the next chapter, I tell of my experience with a group of young rappers as they learned to navigate and recreate the hip-hop scene. I focus on how their movement through the city not only introduced them to a particular soundscape (Schafer 2012), but also reinforced their dialogic or laminated identities as a posse (Campos 2018; Goodman, Tomlinson, and Richland 2014).

137 CHAPTER 4: LEARNING IN THE STREETS

Breathing in the City; Breathing out Rap

Individuals become hip-hop by proclaiming themselves to be so; however, for this to be convincing, they must also commit to presence in the scene and master a discursive genre of talking hip-hop. In the last chapter, I showed how accomplishing this for myself meant moving throughout the city. Rappers similarly move throughout the city, perform, and build relationships with others. In this chapter, I investigate in more detail the first steps some novice rappers take to enter desmadre. Specifically, I tell the story of Los Hijos de Poeta (Los HDP), the diverse group of novice rappers that I met in El Siete’s and PerroZW’s workshop program at El Centro

Regional de Cultura del Municipio de Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl.

These classes were a significant, but not entirely sufficient, part of a much larger process for socialization in hip-hop. While these classes gave a kind of order to hip-hop, teaching certain aesthetic forms, the more important lessons occurred outside of the classroom and had very little to do with crafting lyrics. Although I discuss this process of learning by starting in the classroom,

I argue the actual place of learning is in the street as artists navigate through desmadre to and from the classes and reinforce their relationships with others through looped interconnectedness.

And although I discuss this learning through my experience with a few young rappers and their teacher in a formally defined state-funded program, I argue there is no formal hierarchy in hip- hop where teachers stand above students. Rather, everyone can be a teacher and continually learn in the moment. And finally, although I begin with young rappers, all new to any scene, I argue that becoming hip-hop is not something accomplished just once; it is a recursive process that

138 artists commit to, continually relearning and re-performing it across time and space.

This chapter builds on previous chapters in several ways. In the second chapter, I discussed the historical relationship between power and music in the valley of México. In this chapter, I show how rappers use a basic knowledge of this relationship to position themselves in the resounding city. In the third chapter, I described the geography of the hip-hop scene to show how the culture emerges across a series of locations. Here, I show how rappers in all stages of cultural production strategically navigate between venues, actually moving through the soundscape, to expand their experience and to secure their presence in hip-hop. In this chapter, I focus on how artists construct a shared voice, a process that I continue to investigate in later chapters.

As described in the introduction, identities are performed and relational. Once subjectivity is understood as a dialogical achievement—that is, as emergent within one or more deictic fields—the door is open for an embodied speaker to formulate, transmit, or in other ways convey knowledge that is understood to belong to another subject, being, or institutional entity. Citational practices thus constitute pivotal links between subjectivity and knowledge production and transmission. (Goodman, Tomlinson, and Richland 2014: 455).

I position this chapter within larger discussions of citational practice and personhood in anthropology. My goal is to reveal how hip-hop artists become “laminated” subjects, echoing their dialogic relationship with their posses and their group experiences in the city. Such conversations of citation often aim toward with the concept of genre, or “routinized vehicle[s] for encoding and expressing particular orders of knowledge and experience,” (Bauman 2004: 6) which take the shape of routinized interactions and mediate wider formations of power, knowledge, and authority (Briggs and Bauman 1992). In this chapter, I show how citation works at a smaller scale, between neophyte hip-hop artists who are just beginning to form their

139 “individual” voice.

This form of citation between posses, which would go unrecognized without ethnography and the particular form of performance studies I engaged in, further exemplifies the semiotic, emergent, and social nature of creativity (Wilf 2014). Moreover, by engaging in citational practices, rappers and anthropologists learn to become recognizable culture types within the scene of hip-hop solidifying their authority to speak for the city. I demonstrate through a series of interviews “events.” A speech event perspective on interviewing emphasizes the multiple interactional feats interview participants accomplish in addition to, and alongside, reference. These feats may include opening and closing the encounter and asking, answering, narrating, listening, evaluating, and aligning with each other's contributions, etc., in more or less appropriate and effective ways. As participants accomplish such feats, they also signal and infer their relationship, their relative social identities, and their stances toward the states of affairs they refer to and/or describe… In this perspective, participants negotiate an interviewer–interviewee relationship alongside other potential relationships of relative power, distance, solidarity, difference, and similarity (Koven 2014: 501–504).

Because interviews are multifunctional, ideologically mediated communication events, I follow Briggs (2007) and argue that, “good ethnography requires determining the relationships between things said in interviews and the circumstances of their production and projected circulation (ibid: 565). Meaning I represent my interviews not as standalone events, but as following and preceding other communicative events in the scene and as always referring to experiences with other rappers. I argue that for a complete understanding of hip-hop this kind of ethnographic commitment is absolutely necessary. In hip-hop studies, where the culture is seen as a text and the analysis of rap takes center stage, interviews are often reduced to becoming

140 mere tools to more deeply interpret what is gleaned in lyrics. By comparing interviews across a posse, I show the emergent dialogism that connects every artist's identity within the scene and exemplify how individuals actively create what comes to be known as culture within their interactions rather than simply responding to it.

This chapter is written in two parts. In the first part, I summarize PerroZW’s in-class lessons on breath control and stage performance and Los HDP’s learning in the streets. I do not describe his lessons to create a standardized syllabus for the performance of hip-hop. Instead, I show how rappers commit to teaching others whatever they personally excel at in rap and also actively connect students into the wider geography of hip-hop. At the same time that Los HDP were learning to perform as rappers, they were also learning to travel as members of a posse and to use sound as a way to make meaning.

In the second part, I compare excerpts of interviews that I conducted with the members of

Los HDP months after the workshop to show how culture travels through voice. With these excerpts, I demonstrate how the young artists reflected on their first learnings in hip-hop, how they quoted PerroZW’s teaching, and how they defined hip-hop dialogically. I show how they used this style of meaning making to interpret my interview questions and to represent their experience-based knowledge of the scene. In a final section, I investigate how hip-hop is communicated outside words and formal language, and instead, within gesture, sound, and ritual communication. This final section prefaces readers to later chapters, where I investigate the meaning of looped sound, trance, and apophenia in hip-hop.

Before beginning these sections, though. I make a short detour through anthropological theories of the text.

141 Hip Hop as Cultural Text, Remix

Because the overall focus of this dissertation is voice and I have spent so much time critiquing textualism, it is important to understand how hip-hop moves through desmadre in language and body. Hip-hop is a culture in the sense that Greg Urban (2001) has conceived it— as being characterized by both “onceness,” and “futurity.” The culture began in New York. It is now and will be in México. Urban says, “reduced to its simplest formula, culture is whatever is socially learned, socially transmitted. It makes its way from point A (an individual or group) to point B (an individual or group)” (ibid: 2). Urban maintains that culture is immaterial—it is shared meanings, symbols, and ideologies—and yet, it must be lodged in material—a voice, a gesture, a bootleg mixtape, all widely defined as texts—to move in space and time. Silverstein and Urban (1996) call this process “phenomenal textuality,” where “entextualization” refers to how culture as an immaterial entity is plucked from abstraction by language and deposited into materiality; and where “co(n)textualization refers to how individuals or groups move these texts and unpack culture in a new context, or compare it to other readable (co)texts. Hip-hop is thus a type of amodal language, an interactive performance, and a process of phenomenal textuality that occurs in movement across the city.

Silverstein and Urban’s equation of cultural transmission (what gets from A to B) is far from linear and has more to do with chaos theory than even complex theories of transmission and reception (Mosko and Damon 2005). David Novak (2013) finds a productive vocabulary in his study of “Noise,” what can only tentatively be called a genre of music. Novak highlights the way that international circuits of culture, their study, and their representation are always subject to feedback loops, distortion, and impedance. Hip-hop in México can certainly be defined as a

142 global genre, preceded by already modulated transmissions and stereotypes, however in this dissertation I can only hint at some of the ways this is so. For instance, in chapter two, I took for granted Kolmillo’s association of the hip-hop in México with the original hip-hop of the Bronx,

New York. In this dissertation, although I discuss the transmission of hip-hop between crews and generations of rappers in Mexico, I compress the scale of resonance, shortening the envelope of decay as it were. Thus, each vignette within this dissertation might be read as a singular speech act, a moment of entextualization and con(n)textualization in hip-hop, where the dialogue between, artists, audiences, collaborators, organizers, scholars and even the police performatively creates hip-hop as a “seemingly shareable, transmittable culture” (Silverstein and Urban 1996).

Though the actors in these moments often construe hip-hop as being one way, they also necessarily change the culture.

They can, for example, take some fragment of discourse and quote it anew, making it

seem to carry a meaning independent of its situation within two now distinct co(n)texts.

Or they can transcribe a fragment of oral discourse, converting it into a seemingly

durable and decontextualizable form that suggests to interpreters a decontextualizable

meaning as well. Or they can take such a durable text and reanimate it through a

performance that, being a (mere) performance of the text, suggests various dimensions of

contextualized “interpretive meaning” added on to those seemingly inherent in the

text.” (ibid: 2)

Although I do not focus on song lyrics, I nevertheless focus on hip-hop as a text and attempt to understand what of hip-hop gets from point A to B, in what condition, and by what duration.

While I imagine asking what arrived from 1970s New York to México, what translates from rap

143 as black noise to rap as sociedad café, or brown society, would be a valuable question, I believe that would require a far greater project based on the oral histories of the various rappers who actually travelled between the US and México in the formative years and detailed discourse analysis of lyrics (Rose 1994). Therefore, within this chapter, I limit my questions, focussing on looped interconnectedness in the city, and simply ask what gets between different co(n)texts in desmadre, from La Poniente hasta El Oriente, from la calle escuela hasta la Universidad (from the West to the East, from the street school to the university).

Part One: Learning in Class; Learning in the Street

Breath Control

I had suffered months of anticipation, disappointment, and self-doubt. Despite the passion I felt for my research and my dedication to find meaning, I had not found a path. Every day and night of ethnographic research was filled with potential and heightened expectations that hip-hop would be in México everything that I had found it to be in Hawaiʻi. Unfortunately, my study languished. I was only collecting odd if novel personal experiences. At concerts, I would meet with unrelated members of the audience, some gorrónes, talk with them about rap, then leave to sit at home before blank white pages. Rap events became routine. Then, I met Los Hijos de Poeta in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl.

The first trip out to la Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl was its own ethnographic event. Though every first trip to a new location was an empowering, personal accomplishment in my quotidian life in

México. To arrive anywhere, I had to take indirect and accidental routes. I had to navigate by improvisation, discovering my way toward my destination. I had to fall off my 3x5 card as it were. There was no other way. Per my first lesson on the way to Bombay, I knew online maps

144 were unreliable or—more often than not—non-existent. The only way to find a place was to ask pedestrians directly and to transfer between at least two or more modes of transportation—

Metro, bus, combi, pesero, and foot. Every new transfer whirled me about, forcing me to search for new clues, new directions, and new approximations of distance. The trips were loud and clamorous. Every transition meant a new sonic landscape and included more than one conversation held at full volume over cars, crowds, vendors, and music. In every conversation, there was a new accent and style. If I ever did encounter orderly sound, it was always temporary and often as mobile as the fleet of trucks playing the exact same decade old recording of a 10- year-old girl soliciting to buy scrap-metal30, or as pointless as the pharmacy workers and mascot promising the best deals. For the drab gray of the city’s architecture, its chaotic noise heralded the vibrancy and life of the city, its desmadre.

I encountered the graffiti murals of Neza’s community center after over two-and-a-half hours spent in disorienting, deafening movement. The walls were beautiful and comforting at first sight. Although I was already late, I lingered along the block to pause and touch the walls and to enjoy the quiet of the neighborhood. Then I heard a familiar click, clack, hiss. I smelled paint.

Someone was painting on the other side of the compound’s wall. In an instance, I remembered I was there to find more hip-hop. I had direction again. I rushed passed the main gates and the three graffiti artists laying their ghost lines for a new mural. I found the building’s entrance, entered, asked for the room number, then crossed the interior courtyard to knock on the door. A surprisingly tall man opened the door and peered out with red and tired eyes. He wore thick gold chains on his neck and had tightly rolled braids in his hair. He greeted me and invited me in. It

30 See “El otro México | Marimar, la voz del ‘fierro viejo’” on YouTube to hear this recording.

145 was PerroZW.31 I crossed the threshold, nodded my head to the room, and sat. I felt relieved for the respite from desmadre. Finally, there was hip-hop,

Class, it seemed, had started an hour late. After I sat, PerroZW continued his introductory remarks. He explained that his primary goal in the workshop was to introduce the basics of rap and hip-hop. Throughout the rest of the class, he and the students used the words interchangeably. He asked students to introduce themselves and tell their first impressions of rap, the artists they liked, and whether they tried rapping before. After each spoke, he expanded on their assertions and answered questions they asked. He then introduced hip-hop as both infinite and universal. Rap was infinite because there were no limits to its content. Rappers could write about any topic including their feelings, literature, popular culture, or even sex; the best rappers could rap about them all uniquely. This required rappers to write their thoughts constantly, document their world, and explore every avenue to learn. Hip-hop was universal because it was appreciable by, relevant to, and possible for anyone. To drive this point, PerroZW described aliens cruising through outer space listening to Earth’s music and soon rapping for themselves in their own language. PerroZW also described hip-hop as a nation without a flag and as an identity that crossed borders; New York was still its Mecca though and deserved pilgrimage by all serious rappers. While PerroZW explained all this, twelve young faces gazed back at him, thoughtfully and excitedly. Some took notes. Others fidgeted with their mobile phones. Most took part and responded with more questions. They were all between 16 and 21. When PerroZW asked whether they knew each other, they scanned the room and shook their heads to say no. He was pleased.

31 See “Perro Zw - SuperCali O.G.” on YouTube.

146 “Well, you are all friends now,” he said. “Hip-hop is a big family.”

Over the next few weeks, PerroZW would provide various lessons on hip-hop and rap. I fully invested myself in the workshop. The students were inviting and hard working. PerroZW was an incredible teacher, performer, and recording artist. It was an easy fit for all of us. Of the original attendees, only six stayed the course: Khäf Vocablo, Slack, R-Baster, De Em, Leslie, Khampa, and sometimes George. Since the students already understood the basic poetic scheme of rap,

PerroZW worked to strengthen their flow, breath control, and competency as stage performers.

Depending on the particular skill he was teaching, PerroZW would listen to students recite whatever they had written since the last class. He gave detailed critiques of the problems he saw, suggesting edits to poetics, pacing, and energy. The students would repeat their lyrics, practice his advice, and improve. He taught students to focus on the last words of their bars and to make sure their rhymes were clear. He made them pay special attention to their hooks and punchlines, the clever, funny, or aggressive meaning they arrived at after a series of bars. He suggested they relax their poetic delivery and play with different grooves and rhythms. They should change their flows strategically, adding double-time rhymes to keep the verse lively but not adding so many that the verse became overwhelming.

In later classes, PerroZW gave students detailed lessons on how to breathe when rapping and how to control their body to get the sounds they wanted from their voice. He said that rappers had to change their old habits of taking short, noisy breaths. They should take a deep breath in prior to the start of their verse, filling their diaphragms fully. Then they should breath out slowly and deliberately to assure they are able to rap forcefully and emotively throughout. They should only breathe in secretly away from the mic or quickly through their nose during poetic pauses in

147 the lyrics. The technique is necessary on the stage and in the studio—though clarity is the primary concern in the latter, stamina in the former. They must also avoid the bad habits of bad rappers who hold the microphone too far from their mouth or, worse yet, choke the mic by its head obstructing the voice from encountering its amplification. There were no resources in the room, So he demonstrated with a water bottle.

PerroZW taught students how to use their words carefully and move their bodies on stage to incite reaction from the audience, creating a call and response between lyrics, gesture, and feeling. He said the best rappers use the space they are given. Whether they are on a small stage and with an intimate audience or on a larger stage with a full crowd, they must be energetic enough to move the crowd itself. They maintain good eye contact with fans in the front and in the back. If they have a strong, simple chorus, they teach it to the crowd, and hold the microphone outward to capture the chants. Rappers embody a confidence and attitude that most people lack. They portray it with their voice and with gestures of body. At the same time, they do not alienate their audience. When practicing, Khampa used the irreverent word pinche to refer to the audience. PerroZW stopped him. He said rappers should only use that word when referring to the police. When De Em asked an imagined audience if they were ready for “un poco de hip- hop,” PerroZW stopped him. He said there was no such thing, only “un chingo de rap.” That is, there was never just a little hip-hop, only a lot of rap.

Towards the end of the workshop series, PerroZW taught students how to design set lists.

Rappers should shuffle between songs based on energy, theme, and audience needs. Rappers, of course, always perform their own songs; however, they can recite some of their own lyrics over classic instrumental tracks or rhyme a capella to keep the audience surprised. They should add

148 interludes of creative dialogue to introduce songs and to relate to particular audiences. Rappers must also support other rappers. They introduce others in their crew with excitement and double their voices in song by rhyming their most powerful words in harmony. When someone raps a cappella, crew members should be silent, but still animate the crowd by gesticulating support and awe. PerroZW taught that rappers express the culture in shared voice and in the gesture of body. I would find that these lessons were just as valuable for stage and studio as they were for the street.

The Cypher Effect

For all the expert knowledge that PerroZW shared, the workshops were always more social events than they were formal classes on poetry or performance. Even when PerroZW could not attend—which was often—the attendees simply sat in a circle, rapping over instrumental tracks they played from their smart phones. They grabbed a water bottle or my recorder to feign a microphone. They free-styled until everyone’s batteries drained. We shared food, drink, and sometimes intoxicants if anyone had brought. We talked and laughed until we had to leave or until a subset of us decided to go to some other place and talk more. Our friendship formed quickly as much from their generosity of spirit as for our shared interest in talking hip-hop.

With a crew, hip-hop started to make sense. Even after our first meeting everything started to seem almost destined. After that first class, Khäf Vocablo and Khampa volunteered to guide me back to the Metro. I was grateful. I was unfamiliar with the route back and could not bear the desmadre of returning. While walking to our first transfer, we chatted about hip-hop and global politics. We laughed at the possible, but unbelievable, presidential campaign of Donald Trump in the United States. We talked about Los 43. As we talked, we slowly toured the neighborhood

149 graffiti. Then, already caught up in each other’s hip-hop, we found the perfect title for a future dissertation chapter. It was scrawled in simple letters under an ugly beast of a character on a wall a block away from the center. It said ¿Por qué callar si nacimos gritando? Why fall quiet if we are born screaming?

¡Un saludo para el Bubu!: Traveling Together Through Desmadre

After weeks practicing together, PerroZW’s students began to call themselves Los Hijos de

Poeta (the children of poetry). Their name played on two ideas: first, the self-deprecating yet prideful national decree referencing La Malinche, ¡Viva los hijos de la puta madre! Viva la chingada! (long live the children of the whore mother, long live the fucked one!); and second, the history of Nezahualcóyotl, the mythologized warrior, philosopher, poet, and ruler of Texcoco, the pre-Columbian and non-Mexican (non-Aztec) city-state for which the city was now named.

They were children of the poet, children of Neza.

A few weeks before the New Year, the crew attended a rehearsal at Parque Calmeca in

Miravalle, Iztapalapa. El Siete organized it to prepare the participants for an upcoming performance, the culmination of the workshop series.32 They were to perform the music they had recorded and would receive copies of the CD they had made in class. They invited me to join them at their rehearsal. We planned to meet at Metro Canal de San Juan at 11AM under the broken clock (there is always a clock at the central point of train platforms and it is usually broken). I nearly headed to Metro San Juan Letrán but realized my error before transferring. I lost time but showed up under the Metro’s broken clock just five minutes late. Arriving five minutes late was essentially like arriving early in the Mexican hip-hop scene. De Em and

32 See “Aczino FT Siete Gonzalez | Lado Oriente (Video)” on YouTube.

150 Khampa were the only two waiting. R-Baster arrived on the train after mine. Khäf Vocablo,

Slack, and George were on the next. We talked casually about the cold morning air. Some of their trembling seemed more like nervous anticipation than a chill. Slack broke off to read his notebook and better memorize his lyrics. De Em played a common language game with me and asked me to better translate the English words he heard in American rap like “crew,” “posse cut” and “gang.” He knew the translations generally but wanted to hear me say the words slowly. He also asked for translations of expletives sometimes used in Mexican rap. I refused to share the more homophobic and sexist ones. The group also asked about my notebook. It surprised me they asked about it because I had been taking notes throughout our entire relationship. Then, I realized we had only met around the workshop where notation was the norm. They confirmed my ongoing research would be fine.

After Leslie arrived, we spent the next 30 minutes outside the Metro station, searching for the right pesero, asking other pedestrians how to complete the trip to Miravalle, and arguing about whose anecdotal directions were right. Finally, the group gave up. We returned to the Metro station, back through the same maze of vendors we had passed while exiting. We spread around our extra pesos to encumber funds for the unexpected train ride. We went on to Acatitla, a station further along the A-train to La Paz. Once there, the disorienting and deafening bus hunt repeated.

It surprised me that no one in the crew was any more confident at navigating than I. It seemed every one in México had to struggle and improvise to find a new place; hip-hop artists just made a habit of it.

We finally found the stop and were lucky enough to catch a mostly empty bus. We paired off, filled the seats, and settled in for the long trip. De Em sat next to me. We talked more about

151 North American rap. Since I preferred more underground artists and the local artists of Hawaiʻi, he was far more knowledgeable than I was about commercial rap trends. The others in the group split their headphones and free-styled quietly over instrumental tracks. At some point, Travieso, an ambulant rapper, jumped on the bus to perform for the commuters and sell his CDs.

Apparently sick, he coughed deeply and sweated profusely throughout his performance, but he nonetheless gave it all his energy and used his space well. He sold a few discs at the end. He thanked the passengers. Then as he nearly fell out the back of the jostling bus he shouted “Oh,

Mother Fucker!” in English. We all laughed. So did most of the other passengers. That was an

English expletive that translated well in México.

Many kilometers later, we hopped off the bus along a quiet street. Behind us, despite the dense smog, we could still admire most of the valley. Ahead we could see the park. It sat across from a small yellow police vestibule, which was scrawled with the words “Fuck the Police” in green spray paint. Disrespecting the police was its own tradition in México, but it was exciting to see N.W.A.’s popular lyrics so prominently displayed. I laughed and pointed out the graffiti.

Everyone shouted the words aloud with perfect pronunciation.

The park itself was half unfinished. There was a massive excavation pit cordoned off with broken yellow caution-tape flapping in the breeze. There was a small community building and handball walls covered in mosaic tiles, graffiti, and murals. Two other crews, totaling eighteen rappers, were already there. They were in their late teens and early twenties. They sat along thirty feet of concrete seating and watched El Siete assemble his sound equipment on a folding table in the grass before them. Children ran by. Basketball players and skaters passed. It was a quiet day far from the chaotic center of the city; that is until El Siete’s speakers began blasting rap beats.

152 When we arrived, El Siete explained the rehearsals, the basic rules of performance, and common stage etiquette. The groups would each have exactly 26 minutes for their set, and should stick to that out of respect for the other artist’s time. They should also treat the DJ (in this case El

Siete) like a partner, letting them know their set beforehand and being prepared to respond to any improvisations the DJ made during the set. Like PerroZW, El Siete explained that they should never grip the mic like famous rappers do, closing their first around the mesh. He implored everyone to think of themselves as professionals now, not simply as underground rappers—the difference being that underground rappers do not respond to their context. They rap the same for every audience, disregarding whether there were children or presidents present. They perform the same sexual and drug-filled lyrics they might share with their peers. This was a bad idea and would limit future performance possibilities. Los HDP had planned for a 35 minutes set, so they had to negotiate and reorganize their pre-devised set list, chopping an a cappella and another longer call-and-response interlude about sex.

During rehearsal, each group ran through their full set. They made countless mistakes, but pressed ahead and stuck to their timeline. With every mistake they laughed and groaned. Los

HDP’s performance was no more refined than the other groups; however, they did utilize

PerroZW’s training in vocal performance well. Their voices and their stage presence was strong.

After every group had performed, they took a 30-minute break to eat, talk, and smoke. They reunited for a second, more polished performance and applauded their own improvement.

During the rehearsals, the relationship between Los HDP and the two other groups in attendance strengthened. They passed snacks and marijuana and talked hip-hop. They also developed an inside joke, erupting in joined laughter every time somebody would shout “¡Un

153 saludo para el Bubu!” meaning “cheers to Bubu.” They would pronounce the name by extending the final vowel and dropping in pitch. It sounded the same as when certain ambulant vendors on the Metros would shout to sell Bubu Lubu, a frozen, chocolate-covered marshmallow. You heard it all over the city.

In the middle of the second rehearsal, Travieso walked into the park. He wore a fresh shirt, but was still coughing and sweating. He plugged his phone into El Siete’s mixer, rapped two songs for the crowd, thanked the audience, thanked El Siete, then walked off looking for another bus to catch.

After the rehearsal concluded, El Siete quickly packed up his equipment and stuffed it into the back of his blue hatch-back. He received no help from the participants. He looked tired and had another event to attend. He said goodbye and sped off down the hill. I realized how important his role in the scene was. He was a generous organizer, advisor, and mentor—and not only for unestablished artists like Los HDP. He personally affected dozens of lives in the single year that I followed him. The rappers that attended his events and spoke through his equipment suddenly had an amplified voice, a path to express themselves, and a community by which they could understand their place in the world.

The crews stayed for an hour more. Some brought out a small portable mic and speaker and started a freestyle cypher. Others went to play a game of pickup basketball. In the short time, they made lasting friendships and promised to record together. Finally, we began our search for a bus back to the Metro. Since there were no other pedestrians to ask for directions nor markings where the bus would stop, we had to spread around the various streets and shout when any bus approached. Two passed before we found the correct route. The ride back was quiet. We were

154 tired. Most put on their headphones and napped. I read over my notes. As we retraced our path home, members would intermittently say goodbye and hop off of the bus than Metro. Soon it was only Khäf Vocablo and I. She was going to attend a party with her family where they would play rock music strictly. I sympathized with her. I had been to parties like that at my friend’s pizzeria.

She and I both liked rock, but at parties they played it too loudly and with too little diversity of sound. It became overwhelming. We split at Pino Suarez. I resigned to my home.

The Development and Dissolution of a Crew and of a Style

Mutual support is a key aspect in the production of hip-hop, both on stage as in the doubling of voice and on the street as in navigating around. For some, the trip to Miravalle was their first real experience behind a microphone, on a stage, or in front of an audience of strangers. That was the case for De Em and Leslie. After performing, they both recalled first their trembling bodies and then incredible feelings of relief, excitement, self-understanding, and mutual support after performance. For Slack and R-Baster, the performance was not their first, but it was no less important. For all the participants, the trip was their first experience traveling as a crew. They suddenly found themselves in a group joined for a similar goal in an unfamiliar place.

As time went on, the different members of PerroZW’s class linked up with a wider community of developing artists and fell to different internal cliques. Khampa, Khäf Vocablo,

Slack, and R-Baster became Los Hijos de Poeta. They followed PerroZW to Victoria

Emergente’s studio and recorded a “boom-bap” style of rap that was popularized in the 1990’s rap of New York City and characterized by clean drum break beat samples and complex lyricism.

De Em and George formed another crew and sought to collect their own recording equipment so they could follow the then-trending trap style of rap, which was characterized by a slower BPM,

155 melodic low end synthesizers, triplets of 16th note high-hats, and simplistic, repetitive, lyrics.

Leslie did not continue in hip-hop beyond her time in that class, though she likely continued writing rap as she followed her interest to become a veterinarian. Two years after the workshop, I met with Khäf Vocablo and Khampa separately. Both were still active in the hip-hop scene, performing far outside of Nezahualcóyotl. Khäf was fully enrolled in a scene maintained by—but not exclusive to—women. Artists like Afromega, Sidu la Chiquita Maravilla, Montebel, Livera,

Batallones Femeninos, and Amenic Mc Poétika, venues like el Punto Gozadera, and scholars like

Nelly Lucero Lara Chávez were mutually supportive and worked to carve out a space for women’s voices within hip-hop.33 Khäf had even formed a crew with more-neophyte, female rappers from UNAM, helping them to hone their skills and make connections in the scene. She still talked with the members of Los HDP and some of those she had met in Miravalle.

Khampa, on the other hand, had enrolled in la Escuela de la Cultura Urbana (ECU). The ECU was the second phase of la Victoria Emergente’s larger project against violence after el

Laboratorio. It had financial support from the city, state, and USAID and gave young artists outside of hip-hop access to musical production equipment and lessons in small business formation. PerroZW offered intermittent lessons for them. R-Baster, emailed me years later asking me to record 16-bars on a G-Funk style instrumental he had produced. Since I was

California, where that style originated, he thought I would fit well. ! 33 See “Ese O Produce ‘Cypher Series’ ft Afromega, Mare Advertencia Lirika, Malva NBM & Sidu Martínez.”; “Sidu 2016 ‘Doy Fyah/Olvidar el odio’ Live Session”; “Montebel ft. Mels Rock - La Corona (Prod. Luzock MF)”. “Nostalgia | Dragón fly Ft. Livera | Disco ‘Utopía en silencio’”; “Nosotras en el Hip-Hop-Batallones Femeninos-MC Saya” all on YouTube.

156 Part Two: The Dialogism of a Posse in Hip-hop

The Dialogism of Los Hijos de Poeta

After PerroZW’s workshop series ended, Los Hijos de Poeta continued to work, learn, and record together and separately. I followed them in this and PerroZW as he toured further outside of the city. I will describe my travel with ZW in chapter six, but first, I want to show a key aspect of the relationship that artists build in hip-hop and more specifically how sound travels. The following excerpts, taken from interviews I conducted one to two months after the workshop, show how preliminary learnings in hip-hop do not reflect the innate drive of individuals toward self expression alone, but also echo relationships that learners have built with teachers and crew members. These excerpts show how hip-hop and identity emerge as artists construe the world and position themselves within it.

I have not organized the following excerpts to demonstrate an orderly definition of hip-hop or to define a stereotypical neophyte rapper. The artists I interviewed differed greatly from one another. They came from different places and took up different stances to respond to my questions. Yet their utterances do share value when read together. Though seemingly frenetic, these excerpts overlap with one another to reveal how artists make meaning in shared experience. I ordered the excerpts to highlight the dialogic relationships between them and to show a key moment in the performance of hip-hop. These excerpts reverberate the consequences of my involvement as an ethnographic researcher. I selectively portray my voice as the interviewer to reveal myself as an equal participant in the construction of these dialogues.

Hip-hop is part of a larger “interview society,” where artists, no matter their engagement in the scene, are well accustomed to the generic expectations and goals of interviewing and largely

157 assume that through interviews an authentic self can be presented and represented (Koven 2014).

While I am skeptical that an “authentic self” exists, I do hold that some of my interviews were better than others. I was not always successful in achieving the type of interview frame I had hoped for. At times, rappers I had just met would fall back on journalistic expectation and repeat stereotypical answers. Interestingly, the interviews presented here, which I count as some of my best, included the same stereotypic answers; however, because I spent time with these individuals, their answers felt (sounded) so much more authentic. I make this claim in consideration of my larger discussion of language as a semiotic, pragmatic, and metapragmatic phenomenon where qualities of voice can supersede semantic-referential ones. (Harkness 2015).

These theme will come back again and again in the following chapters.

Ultimately, I use these excerpts to argue hip-hop culture occurs symbolically in amodal language as defined in the first chapter (Arno 1994). It is transmitted “intuitively,” not because it carries an abstract essence but because it is part of a concrete, embodied practice of learning hip- hop in the street. In the first excerpt, Slack describes how he first experienced rap, imagined performance, and experienced the support of others. In the next, he describes how he found the workshop, and how it provided him access to experiences different from what he could have at home or in school. Next, Khäf Vocablo better defines the culture of hip-hop in response to my direct prompting and she reconfirms the importance of difference. She then describes PerroZW and his teaching. I then show how both these young artists quoted their teacher directly and yet reco(n)textualized the meaning of hip-hop. Finally, I attempt to translate the meaning of güaü, a single expressive sound, to call attention to the student’s heteroglot voice and our shared embodied experiences of the streets. I avoid differentiating between hip-hop, rap, and the

158 workshop when comparing these texts. Artists rarely did so.

Slack

Slack was born and raised in Nezahualcóyotl in 1998. He was quiet but excitable.34 I interviewed him in La Alameda Oriente, a massive park near Benito Juarez International airport.

He told me that before he took the alias Slack, he called himself Pac like Pac-Man, an old video game character who ran from ghosts in a maze. Slack loved the chase. When he started in graffiti and had to run from the authorities, he felt the same rush of excitement and took the name. His alias Slack stemmed from his other childhood nickname, Flojo. His mother and his grandparents would call him that to call him lazy and to criticize him for sitting around playing video games.

He translated the word into English. Although the word can translate as lifeless, floppy, or weak, he liked how slack sounded. He asked me to repeat it.

“Slack” I said, keeping my tongue rigid against the alveolar ridge at the top of my mouth to making a high-pitched hiss at the start of the word.

“Simón,” he said, then repeated “eslack,” adding the first /e/ sound to his name, unable to make the quick transition between an /s/ sound and another consonant at the start of a word. This is common in the English language but not in Spanish.

Aside from his love for graffiti and video games, Slack loved rap music. He started listening to rap after his uncle introduced him to Akwid, a popular 1.5 generation immigrant Mexican-

American group based out of South Central Los Angeles. Now he was more inspired by Mexican freestyle artists like Aczino and Jack Adrenalina.

I said, “Tell me about your first experience with the music.”

34 See “Slack ft R-Baster ..Lobos en fiesta..” on YouTube.

159 Slack said, “At the beginning it was something strange. I knew of hip-hop thanks to an uncle and cousin. My uncle listened to everything, but once he put on Akwid. I liked it. It was cholo. I don’t know. I liked it. It had a catchy rhythm. Something like, ‘No way! It’s cool.’ R-Baster was there too. We were together as children. ‘Listen to this.’ He liked it the same. Our other cousin put on the music. He’s older. He is 21 years old, so like four years older. When they visited, we would go to a little bench in the house. We put on music. We were probably eight or nine, just little kids. And I remember perfectly, my cousin named Alexis and R-Baster, would go there and rap, imitating Akwid. And I was like the producer. We were kids. Our imagination was a great thing.”

Slack and his cousin R-Baster first began imagining themselves performing as rappers then began writing their own lyrics. They also began dabbling in graffiti art. They found a book of graffiti styles online and were able to print out a copy. They made a small school-yard business together, writing people’s names in graffiti-style lettering for a few pesos. Investing more of their time in the music and painting, they realized that rap and graffiti were more than just pastimes.

They were connected in the culture of hip-hop. They decided to enroll in PerroZW’s workshop together.

I said, “Tell me about the workshop.”

Slack said, “The workshop? You were also there. It seemed cool, because I had never seen a workshop about rap or hip hop in my life. And more, it was published as being by Aczino. He is one of the best. ‘He’s going to be there? I have to be there, and at least take a photo.’ I remember

I had a rap. I recited it, and he said it was great. The class finished, and I left. It was great.

‘Perfect! A rapper, a freestyle emcee, said my song was cool.’ It is one of the best things,

160 someone telling me my lyrics were good. ‘I’m going to keep coming.’ I met Khampa, Leslie, and

Khäf. We each had a different flow and style. I thought I could learn from that. I could have experiences. So PerroZW came and told us to rap about different themes. I’d never thought of rapping on certain topics like sex. I’d never thought about that. It was a great experience. To write about sex. I thought, ‘güaü, I can write about even that?’ It was a great experience, because

I could see different people who rap differently and hear differently. We are all very different but have something in common: we like rap. This is what I like, what I can identify with. With my cousin, I am accustomed to him, but feeling inside of a group that likes hip-hop is something… güaü! I don’t know. I told my Mom, ‘I want to live there. I want to cook with them. I want to live with them, so we can share experiences, share lyrics, share everything. But sharing purely hip- hop.’ This is what I liked about the workshop: knowing and sharing and now we are living different experiences daily.”

Slack had been interested in rap for years, but when he gained recognition by another rapper he decided to commit. He met more rappers in the workshop. Together they enjoyed new freedoms to write, and he realized that even though each member raps and hears differently they can learn from this difference. Another important aspect of the preceding dialogue is the way

Slack continually modified his voice to quote himself in the (imagined) past to create a recognizable and dramatic scene of his excitement at learning about hip-hop and the process by which he became different from himself through his association with others (Tannen 2007).

Khäf Vocablo

Khäf Vocablo grew up in Nezahualcóyotl too, but in a different zone from Slack. She was

161 also two years older than him. Her alias was inspired by the German author Franz Kafka.35 She would have gone as Kafka, but there was already a rapper named that. So she shortened the author’s name and add vocablo to hers for the reason that, as she said, “words are important.

They communicate to others. They share me with others. Put those two [words] together, and it sounds cool.” Khäf had a strong style from the first workshop. Her lyrics were complex; her rhymes were well practiced. She regularly added melody into her flow to make her a truly dynamic performer. PerroZW once told me that of all los HDP, she had the most potential.

Khäf agreed with Slack’s positive interpretation of the workshop. I interviewed her on the steps at La Biblioteca Vasconcelos. When I asked for her general definition of culture. When I asked for her general definition of culture, she discussed the workshop and hip-hop

I asked, “Well you told me hip-hop is a culture, but what is a culture?”

Khäf said, “That is hard. What is a culture? I do not know. I realize that I do not know how to define a culture. It is a different society. We are people that feel a part of a group. This membership is how we identify ourselves and meet new people and identify with them. For instance, at the workshop when we met the other kids, it was a pleasure because of difference.

You can speak with them about different things, but unite to make a group. It is different from the group of kids in philosophy. You can write or make a song together or talk of style. That is hip-hop.”

Khäf had recently enrolled at La Universidad Autonomía de México in the department of

Philosophy. Initially she believed that the place existed solely to allow individuals to discuss ideas. She soon learned otherwise. It hurt her to learn that although the University was free, it

35 See “cypher 1-(Zener,Terco,Matahh,Gerard,Livera,Azteca,Osper Dac,Khäf vocablo,Nikc Santos,H Final)” on YouTube.

162 was not equally open to everyone. Even in that place of liberal learning, she was stereotyped and ostracized for growing up in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl. The reputation of her home, its crime and poverty, preceded her. She explained that this negative reaction to her home motivated her to follow her passion for hip-hop. Khäf similarly appreciated PerroZW.

I said, “Tell me about PerroZW.”

She said, “He is one of the best teachers I know. He is very conscientious. I remember our first class. He spoke of Molotov (a popular rock band). He does not just criticize everything. He talked about the book 1984 and how the government uses Molotov to do things. It is like philosophy. He taught us everything he knew and to write about everything we know. I love his classes.”

I said, “I was surprised. He is such a great teacher and he is always smoking, but his mind is always clear. When his students need certain things, he can see it.”

Khäf responded, “That is what I noticed. When I was recording, he helped with the details.”

This dialogue between Khäf and I, like the longer utterance of Slack, covered numerous topics. She summarized PerroZW’s ability as a teacher and artist by comparing his classes in hip- hop to her classes in the department of philosophy. During the workshop, in a passing comment,

PerroZW had problematized the relationship between music and power, between the band

Molotov and the government. He referenced the novel 1984, an anti-totalitarian science fiction written by Orson Welles. Khäf was obviously well-versed in Western literature and keyed into

PerroZW’s comments. She realized that rap can be related to everything. Aside from this being an example of what I discussed in the second chapter—where I showed how music and sound relate to power as hip-hop artists contextualize their lives in history—this also shows the various

163 ways artists might enter into the culture—exploring topics such as musical genre or literature, popular culture, history, or politics in dialogue with others. Slack and Khäf echoed PerroZW’s idea that hip-hop is infinite and capable of rendering any topic they might explore.

Khampa

In the following dialogue, Khampa echoes PerroZW’s idea that hip-hop is universal. We held our interview as we traveled between el Centro Regional de Cultura del Municipio de Ciudad

Nezahualcóyotl and the massive Plaza Ciudad Jardín shopping center. Khampa was just 18, he had a boisterous personality, but he was no less amicable for it.36 He liked to tease others, and others loved to tease him. He based his alias on an anime he had seen in his youth. He had since forgotten the title and whether it was a Japanese or Korean film, but he recalled the plot well. It was about two rabbits debating whether they should board a fast-moving train. The first rabbit, named Campanella was afraid, but it followed the second rabbit as it jumped on. Once they were on the train, the second rabbit asked why Campanella was so afraid. Campanella said he was afraid because the train was the train of life. Once you were on it you were bound to die. The second rabbit asked why Campanella jumped on. Campanella responded that he would rather follow his friend to the end of the world than let him do it alone. For Khampa, the name reflected his aspirations for loyalty and his promise to share in the poverty and wealth of his friends.

In our interview, I asked Khampa to pretend that I knew nothing of hip-hop and to tell me about it. He offered a standard definition, referring to graffiti, breaking, DJing, and rapping. He then suggested hip-hop related to other subcultural styles of the street.

Khampa said, “Hip-hop is a form of living, of life. There are four principal elements. But

36 See “Gratitud Abstracta - ADP & HDP [Sócrap & Ferrero]” on YouTube.

164 they support many more. Hip-hop branches into skating, parkour, and ways of dressing. New styles and things.

I responded, “I like the word branches,” pronouncing the Spanish word ramas for myself.

“Where is hip-hop?”

Khampa said, “Everywhere. I think there are hip-hop martians. If you walk down any calm street, there will be another with graffiti in it. No Saturday passes without someone rapping or

DJing.”

When Khampa located hip-hop, he placed it within a universal context then related it back to his experience on the street. Although Khampa voiced is his own thoughts, he used the words of

PerroZW and the idea of an extraterrestrial hip-hop to interpret his experience on the street. For

Khampa, hip-hop related to his membership in other, larger crews comprising graffiti artists, skaters, and parkour.

R-Baster

I interviewed R-Baster in a small park in la Delegación Gustavo A. Madero, beyond the northern periphery of la Ciudad de México proper in the State of México.37 R-Baster was the same age as his cousin. He lived in Aragon. He was quiet and pensive. He made his name in honor of a friend who lost his life at a young age. After playing on the bench at his Slack’s house,

R-Baster’s first real experience in hip-hop was at an open mic at El Legendario Bombay. The event was part of a release party for Aczino’s “Psicofonia” album. Lirika Inverza and Proof attended. Siete was the DJ. Because the show was running late, they allowed R-Baster to connect his MP3 player to the sound system and perform a song on the microphone. He was just fourteen

37 See “R-Baster // Funky FT Dupah // Video Oficial // 2019” on YouTube.

165 and had only one song. Since then, he dedicated himself to writing and freestyling. Slack invited

R-Baster to the workshop. R-Baster decided to enroll despite the time and the cost of commuting to Neza. In our interview, R-Baster similarly echoed PerroZW when he defined hip-hop as a kind of family.

I asked him, “What is hip-hop?”

R-Baster said, “For me? Well, it would be like a family. It would be like a family. You come, and they accept you. It is respect more than anything. El Siete drives this point: respect. So if you aren’t good, they tell you. You will not fail to get better. You get better, better, better, coming together with others, making your voice, or making your mode of expression. That is a part of it.

It also links to the DJ, the break-dance, and graffiti. It is not direct, but it is all the same. I do not know how to say it, but I will tell you it is a family.”

I asked, “Well, if hip-hop is a family, who are the parents? Who are the siblings? Who are the cousins?”

He said, “Well the parents would be the most respected, right? Like Tupac. No, that would be the grandparents. The parents would be those that are moving the hip-hop scene, that motivate it.

I would be a child adapting myself to my parents, following their footsteps. Aczino motivates me. I would place him as a father. I like what he did it and want to follow his steps. So I would be the child.”

I asked, “Do you have nephews, nieces, or grandchildren?”

He said, “Yes, I have friends that rap, equally. They look at me as if I were an expert. But I tell them, ‘No, if you knew you would see me as a child.’ I tell them. But yes, I help them. I tell them they are lacking energy. Like Leslie. In those cases we would be our own parents. ‘You

166 need to come out a little more. I like your lyrics, but give it life when you move.’”

I agreed, “Yah, her lyrics are…wow.” Then I pushed the dialogue, “Well to extend the metaphor? Where would the home of hip-hop be?”

R-Baster responded, “Of hip-hop? I say its home is the street. It is born there. I know hip-hop from the street and, equally, from the neighborhoods where we paint. We paint in the street. We see el under. We paint hip-hop. Equally in graffiti, we paint hip-hop vida, like PerroZW.”

Generations

R-Baster’s based his answers on months of lived experience with Los HDP, his enrollment in a larger hip-hop cultural scene, and his earlier experiences as a graffiti artist. Like Khampa, R-

Baster used the words of PerroZW to define hip-hop. He called hip-hop a family, a lifestyle, and related to the streets. He also claimed it allowed practitioners to see el under, or the underground, non-mainstream perspective of the city. When I asked for a family tree. He claimed the grandparents were famed rappers like American rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur, and the parents were the rappers currently moving in the scene. He placed himself and his colleagues in the workshop as mutually supportive children.

Throughout my interviews, I found that other rappers often used metaphors of family to describe the hip-hop scene. They referenced generational sets, considering artists like Vieja

Guardia, Sociedad Café, and Magisterio as the first generation. They considered those that came after, like Caravana Respeto, the second. The third generation was just now presenting itself.

When I asked Khäf Vocablo to expand on the notion of a hip-hop family, she immediately understood and claimed Menuda Coincidencia, a rapper from Guadalajara, would play the role of the young, handsome father. Ximbo would be the mother. Van-T, Bocafloja, and Skool77 were

167 uncles. Tino El Pingüino, Mare Advertencia Lirika, PerroZW, and Aczino were the children. She placed herself in the cradle, then laughed and corrected her position to as still being in utero.

Artists recognized that various generations maintained the scene differently and that changes in industry, technology, and popularity afforded different opportunities across time. Artists also often critiqued across generations. Older rappers claimed it was easier for younger rappers to record and distribute music. They complained that with such ease younger rappers missed the point of struggling to find other rappers and an audience in the city. Younger rappers called older rappers legends and held them as worthy of respect, but complained that they did not do enough for the scene any more or had limited the stylistic possibilities of rap in the past. These negotiations of generation sometimes ran parallel to negotiations of class and neighborhood, where older, dominant scenes like that dominated by La Vieja Guardia formed out of more middle and working class neighborhoods and where therefore less authentic to the streets.

The trope of generation also highlights how the teacher-student relationship exists outside formal workshop series and in the actual relationships built on the street. There is nothing abstract about how the culture is transmitted. Artists continually recontextualize it when they echo what they learn in dialogue with teachers, more established artists, and crew members. In the case of los HDP, the students agreed with PerroZW’s descriptions of hip-hop. There was a definite, directional relationship between the powerful words of the teacher and the polyphonic voice of students; however, PerroZW’s discourse was not unimpeachable. Khäf Vocablo decided this for herself in our dialogue.

I reminded her, “You said hip-hop is in all parts of the world, but where is its home?”

She paused then said, “They say it was born in the Bronx. It came from there, but I do not

168 think it has a home. I remember PerroZW told us that a rapper said ‘If you’ve not been to NYC, you’re not a rapper’ and it reminded me of like the Israelites, the Jews, they have to go to… I don’t remember.”

I recalled PerroZW’s example and suggested Mecca.

She agreed, “Ándale, you have to go there. And well, it does not seem right to me. I do not think there is a home. You can go many places, find a rapper, and link up, and make up a home, a point of reunion. It is not necessary to go to the US, because in all of Latin America, in whatever state of the Republic, there it is. It has a very big home.”

There was slight confusion here. Khäf either sought for the name of some pilgrimage site related to the Israelites, perhaps the West Wall. Or she meant Mecca, Islam’s holiest site, as I mistakenly suggested. Either way, we struck some kind of agreement, which allowed her to disagree with the idea that New York was the spiritual root of hip-hop and that a rapper derived their authenticity by pilgrimage. She added a response to a previous discussion she had with

PerroZW, and PerroZW had with a previous rapper. Despite this difference in opinion from

PerroZW (or perhaps the person PerroZW was quoting), Khäf Vocablo reproduced another important theme in hip-hop by confirming the importance of travel and reunion.

¡Güaü!: Dialogism Beyond the Word

The various dialogues I have shared so far overlap. The themes of infinity, universality, difference, family, travel, and teacher-student relations do not develop logically within the interviews, but they are related. Rappers responded to my question about one topic by leading back to another relationship, then commented on something else to further explain whatever they had stated before. To add to this complexity, the rappers did not continually distinguish between

169 rap as a musical genre and hip-hop as a cultural practice. Despite the seemingly chaotic nature of these moments in interview (and my comparison of them within this chapter), I want to highlight an important moment that occurred in many interviews when words were no longer necessary to make sense of our discussion. In this final section, I investigate hip-hop as ritual communication, as something communicated outside direct language but sensible through what Arno (2003) called intuition and what Lepsetler (2016) called apophenia, or “the experience of perceiving connections between random or unrelated objects…[where] those connections are based on resemblance and repetition. This effect entails mimesis, but the resemblance is partial and fluid.

It is felt. And the intertextual connections feel vertically layered, rather than horizontally bridged” (3–4).

In my conversation with Slack, I asked, “Well what is the process to become hip hop?”

Slack said, “Following it; listening to it. If you want to enter the culture. You have to know it, and know what you want to say in each and every song, or when you make graffiti, or when you

B-boy. Each one of the four elements has a message. They have something. You have to discover it. If you say, ‘hip-hop is this’ and someone else says, ‘Yes it is,’ in that moment, you are inside of it. Because you invented it. Now it is just a question of continuing, continuing, continuing to enter hip-hop. Because if you just listen to hip-hop, you don’t understand it until you enter it. For one reason you do not focus. If you focus in your mind and you understand it, you will enter.

Hip-hop is like a world outside of society. And inside it is…güaü! There is no way to stop…”

For Slack, hip-hop is something you can follow, listen to, and enter. It is something you invent with your musical voice, writing hand, or dancing body. However, as something self- created it only exists after others recognizes it, and then only temporarily. Hip-hop is outside

170 society. It is an act of co-creation. Hip-hop is, in the sound of Slack, güaü, pronounced as readers of English might pronounce “wow.”

I heard something similar in my discussions with Khäf Vocablo, when I asked, “Is there a change of behavior? Have you changed?”

Khäf said, “Yes, I think I have, but in a way that” she paused momentarily then continued,

“Hip-hop has given me a way to understand myself and express myself. I am not in turbulence for not understanding myself. I understand myself through what I do. Güaü! How crazy? I see things more clearly through the music. I don’t know. Plus I feel part of a group, knowing more people. That’s how I’ve changed. I feel more open.”

Khäf contrasts her new clarity of vision with an earlier state of turbulence. She finds in the music new ways to reflect and express herself. She feels part of a group. Considering the rest of our interview, Khäf found a new way to be a philosopher and student of literature in hip-hop as well, and forecasting the direction her hip-hop would take two years later, she found a new way of being a woman and activist. Like Slack, Khäf expresses much about hip-hop with a simple güaü.

I call attention to the hardly audible sounds of Slack and Khäf for a number of reasons. First, as a reminder that language is amodal. Just as a strict focus on the lyrics of rap limits understanding of hip-hop as total cultural process, a strict focus on the obviously meaningful and easily translatable aspects of interview ignores other non-language meaning systems in talking hip-hop. Small gestures and sounds convey much in face-to-face conversation, especially for those who have spent time together. Within linguistic analysis, the sound of güaü functions as an expressive, and within our interviews the sound was accompanied with a tremble of the body or

171 the darting of eyes. Güaü does not relay meaning directly, as in the way that Orwell’s book title,

1984, becomes a common icon for dystopia and governmental control. Rather, güaü denotes a semantic field of meaning beyond direct or logical language. In this case, güaü marks a conversational moment where young learners recognize a type of clarity, a stability of meaning, or what Khäf called a stillness in the turbulence of life in México through hip-hop. With just a small sound, Slack and Khäf Vocablo realized and communicated hip-hop as a type interconnectedness between all things and as something they experienced across their first learning in class, in movement, and in interaction with others and right alongside their interviewer.

Stability in Desmadre through Looped Interconnectedness

Dozens of older, more involved artists communicated hip-hop in a similar manner. They told me explicitly. Or they showed me outside oral language, and in gesture or in sonic cultural reference. As I mentioned in chapter two, Kolmillo listed names. Spia104, too, hinted at the notion in the opening quote of the previous chapter;38 however, for him, it was after our interview when he communicated more to me about what hip-hop was than he could express in our formal interview. After an hour or so of semiformal interview questions, Spia104 shared his aural/musical autobiography and played me through his vinyl musical archive. He played popular music he liked in various genres. He played the first hip-hop recorded to vinyl in México by Cabezas Muertos. He played his own music recently pressed to white label vinyl. He played underground music by rappers he had met or learned about while traveling in hip-hop across the globe. After over an hour and a half of selected listenings, we ended the interview. As we left his

38 See “Spia 104 - Largos Caminos (Video Oficial)” on YouTube.

172 house, he called a friend and bragged at how amazing our interview had been. He explained that his set was especially meaningful since he was not even a DJ.

In the following chapter, I discuss a similar interview I had with MC Luka, where he showed me clips of his inspirations and made sense of México outside language and in sound.39 The interviews shared in this chapter, and Spia104’s and MC Luka’s, show how fully articulated expressions of the interconnectedness of hip-hop are rarely loquacious, and more often than not uttered in a kind of silence. Although the artists spoke differently about hip-hop, using different words and gestures to communicate, they nonetheless defined hip-hop and used it to position themselves and others within the abounding possibilities for life and meaning in México.

Conclusion: Each One Teach One

Silverstein and Urban say, “to equate culture with its resultant texts is to miss the fact that texts (as we see them, the precipitates of continuous cultural processes) represent one, ‘thing-y’ phase in a broader conceptualization of cultural process” (1996:2). Heeding their warning, I have outlined hip-hop as a broad cultural process emergent in performance and notable through ethnographic presence. Within the first part of this chapter, I showed how Los HDP first encountered hip-hop. They learned they could write about any topic. They learned how to manipulate their voice and bodies on stage, how to affect confidence and clarity, and how to communicate to an audience. In this, they recognized the necessity for mutual support in hip-hop from and for other artists. The story of Los HDP was as much about them being students as it was about PerroZW being a teacher.

Although I first encountered PerroZW as the teacher in a formal workshop, I later recognized

39 See “MC Luka - Cuarto Piso (Video Oficial)” on YouTube.

173 him as a friend, collaborator, and mentor for rappers like H-Ham, E-Track, and Kautyn. PerroZW was like a scholar, continually learning in hip-hop, and seeking to build and reinforce relationships with other artists like Jerry Funk, Chema Arreola, the Wu-Tang Clan, and his students. On the train, he said he appreciated the strength of voice he had to maintain as a solo performer. This may have been true while on stage, but ZW was by no means a solo act. He was rarely unaccompanied and always supportive of others.

Los HDP directly echoed PerroZW, but they did so in consideration of their own experiences across the scene and their own nascent understanding of hip-hop as something that preexisted them. Hip-hop was something they actively produce and something that necessarily involves others. Ultimately, it is this form of talking hip-hop that secures an artists’ autobiographic authenticity.

There were multiple workshops like this spread across the city. Students from across a delegation would meet at a cultural center. A more or less well-recognized artist would share whatever practical knowledge they had for writing and performing hip-hop. They would focus on the aspects of production at which they excelled. PerroZW focused specifically on the voice, breath control, and crowd manipulation. El Siete taught basic writing skill, sampling and sound production techniques. Danger, a rapper from Tijuana who recently relocated to el Distrito

Federal, focused on advanced poetics, writing techniques, and freestyle improvisation.40

Beyond these basic skills, teachers also tied their students into a wider hip-hop scene, fostering relationships, and sharing shortcuts. PerroZW, for instance, invited Los HDP to his concerts with la Caravana Respeto and to the newly opened studio of Victoria Emergente. Siete,

40 See “Danger - Moebius (Produce Lenin Peña)” on YouTube.

174 who was more an organizer than a rapper, invited crews of neophyte rappers from across México to meet in a public park and to rehearse for their upcoming public performances. Danger tied his students into a counter-movement within Hip-hop, Los Secretos de Sócrates, which critiqued the increasingly popular, highly capitalized battle scene.41

In the second section of the first part I showed that while these connections in the scene are important in and of themselves, leading to other sites of performance and relationships, the travel to and from these places is equally important. Los HDP took the knowledge that PerroZW gave them and put it to good use further afield in the city. On their first trip as a crew, HDP planned, failed, and improvised to find their way. They experienced new parts of the city and new routes, but they also experienced the same old sounds, the familiar accents of street vendors, the familiar humor of English language expletives. I continually saw and took part in these kinds of trips with other crews. Some crews were new to the scene like Los HDP and RRMx. Others were well established and more travelled like Vieja Guardia, las Mujeres Trabajando, and La Nota Cruda.

Yet, all were equally faced with the difficult challenge of moving through chaos.

Thus, as much as this chapter has been about students learning to rap and travel throughout the city, it has also been about how sound moves, how ideas travel in voice. In the second part of the chapter, I showed how hip-hop is reproduced in dialogue, and how Los HDP authenticated their identities and experience in interviews by echoing PerroZW and by uttering a single, meaningful sound: güaü.

To put what I mean here, and what I think Los HDP meant, into perspective—I want to tell one final story about how hip-hop travels. In the last months of my fieldwork, I interviewed

41 See “Danger vs Vincent Velazquez - Secretos de Sócrates México ‘Los Grandes Debates’” on YouTube.

175 Mexica SKSK, a key member of Mexico’s branch of the Universal Zulu Nation near the delegation Cuauhtemoc’s government headquarters42. He said that even in México, hip-hop carries the ethos of “each one, teach one.” He was quoting an old African American proverb that still echoes in hip-hop. When I returned to Hawaiʻi and I was chatting with DJ Packo, a long- time member of Hawaiʻi’s hip-hop scene, and telling him about the amazing connections I made in México with young and old emcees, he said the very same thing: “each one teach one.”43

The teacher-student relationship is common in hip-hop. Artists sustain hip-hop when they teach other artists in other places. Whether it occurs in a formal classroom, in a studio, or at a concert, hip-hop is an educationally rich environment. Discussions of craft, style, and professionalism are all common, as is the demand for virtuosity and innovation. Artists thus continually reproduce and redefine the style and aesthetic of the culture. However, there is no lasting interpersonal hierarchy that results from the teacher-student relationship, though age and seniority in the scene are often used to determine stage line ups. In the next chapter, I will show what I mean by this by following artists into the studio where sound not individual identity takes precedence.

The recording experience is a special ritual moment in hip-hop. It demands artists listen to the same looping measure of music over and over. It compels a trance-like state that allows artists to write, flow, and create together. It is equally exciting as it is exhausting and doubly reflects how hip-hop values presence and apophenia, or seeking interconnectedness not just in the streets but in cultural knowledge. In the sixth chapter, I leave the studio and centralize travel

42 The Universal Zulu Nation was one of the primary movers of Hip Hop culture. The institution was created and led by Afrika Bambaataa until May of 2016 when he was implicated in a number of child sexual abuse accusations. MC Mexica was very disappointed in this turn of events, but maintained that the culture was not the man. See “Mexica SkSk” and “Balas Perdidas-Mexica SKSK” on YouTube. 43 See “DJ Packo & DJ QBert - QSU HQ Q&A” on YouTube.

176 again, showing that it does not get easier in time, even for more established artists. It does, however, become clearer, more intuitive, and a bit more dangerous. I go on tour with rappers outside the city, risking it all to dive headlong into the street, into the culture, and into the story.

Each of these chapters are connected by themes of presence, movement, and the dialogic imagination.

177 CHAPTER 5: THE VOICE AS SAMPLE AND LOOP

I liked the city a lot. Passing through here… it was so big, filled with advertisements. The

programs on the radio. It sounded incredible. Out in La Baja Sur, it is like, you listen to

ranchero music, there is nothing more than banda or corridos on the radio, and that is it.

There are two or three options on the radio. Here, there are 500. So, it was very… I liked

it a lot. I would always be stuck to the racket of the radio, listening to the emotion that the

announcers put there, because they had a different style, right? I liked the advertisements

a lot. And I always wanted to stop and stay here. But no. We almost never did. My dad

was very… always like ‘I want to get to Morelos, now, now, now.’ (Müelas de Gallo

2016, Personal Communication)

Müelas de Gallo is one of Mexico’s most famous rappers. He makes up half of La Banda

Bastön along with DJ Zupreeme and is a key member of La Vieja Guardia along with MC Luka,

Jerry Funk, Gogo Ras, DJ Aztec, Kolmillo, and the rest. Müelas has an accessible style.44 His flow is smooth. His lyrics are clever and cool. Like so many other rappers, you will not see him without sunglasses covering his eyes. On the day of our interview, I met him on a shady, tree- lined street in la Roma. He strolled up walking a Scottish Terrier and a small Poodle. We exchanged a subtle greeting on the street. He had forgotten my name. He invited me up to the rooftop patio of his brother’s apartment. He was living there between tours. These were his brother’s dogs.

As we climbed the aged, cast-iron staircase, I described my research project again. I dropped

44 See “Me Gustas - La Banda Bastön (Video Oficial)” and “Vieja Guardia - Raperos Adultos” on YouTube.

178 the names of MC Luka and Jerry Funk and the names of crews I had been following out in La

Oriente. At top, we sat at a large glass table scattered with ashtrays, empty bottles, and comic books. He prepared a bowl of cacahuetes enchiladas, dousing peanuts in a mixture of various hot sauces and lime. I set up for the interview, aiming my microphone towards where he sat, leveling the gain so I could capture his voice while minimizing the cacophony of children’s laughter emanating from the nearby kindergarten. When the snacks were ready, we began.

Müelas de Gallo grew up in La Paz, a quiet town in Baja California Sur, but his parents were originally from the State of Morelos some two hours south of México.45 Every summer, his parents, who were both teachers, would pack the family into a sport utility vehicle and take a road trip to visit their hometown. They would stay in Mazatlán, in Guadalajara, in Guanajuato, then cross Ciudad México before arriving at their final destination. The trips were mostly enjoyable, except for when they passed through the Capital. His father hated the city. It was stressful for him, and therefore difficult for the family to endure. For Müelas, though, the time spent passing through the city was the best part of the entire trip.

Müelas’s first remembrances of México are embedded in sound, noise, and radio. For his father, the city was only desmadre and overwhelming to his senses. For Müelas it was ruido, noise, but it sounded different and incredible. The radio was full of music, DJs, and advertisements all making noise together, sounding the vibrant possibilities of city life. It confused his father, but ruido called to Müelas. It hailed him to desmadre.

Hip-hop as Sound Study

Hip-hop artists foreground the importance of being in the city and being in sound. They join

45 See “La Banda Bastön - El País De Las Maravillas.” on YouTube.

179 a long tradition of artists, authors, and journalists representing the city. They do so by way of music and resonance. Like anthropologists and an interdisciplinary community of students of sound, hip-hop artists analyze “sonic practices and the discourses and institutions that describe them,” and pay special attention to “what sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world” (Stern 2012: 2). They contextualize their city and identify themselves within a wide “constellation of sound” (Bessir and Fisher 2013). They reference familiar musical artists, genres, poets, and other sonic fields. They study México’s many dialects and styles of talk. They contextualize discussions of politics, economy, and transnational change within musical histories. They narrate their autobiographies as journeys to acquire sound and claim that their ultimate goal is to change the sonic landscape of México and Latin America. Indeed, music and sound play an active role in their everyday life as they strategically perform their identities and their dialogic social life (DeNora 2000).

In this chapter, I explore the concept of apophenia, or the feeling that all things are connected. Apophenia adds nuance to the previous chapter on movement through desmadre, especially as it relates to the concept of “flow” as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (in Sato

1991: 18):

In the flow state, action follows upon action according to an internal logic that seems to

need no conscious intervention by the actor. He experiences it as a unified flowing from

one moment to the next, in which he is in control of actions, and in which there is little

distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between

past, present, and future.

Ikuya Sato’s (1991) study of “violent driving tribes,” or bosozoku drivers in Japan is relevant

180 here. Sato critiques popular interpretations of these youth, which judge them as simply delinquent, to describe them as his dedicated thrill seekers engaged in practices of stylization and dramaturgy. More importantly, Sato describes the way these drivers and their passengers engage in high-speed communication by screaming, laughing, reverberating their engines, and flashing looks to organize chaos. The flow of hip-hop artists, which is so often interrupted in the chaotic streets, reaches its apex in the studio, where artists put their linguistic creative and cultural knowledge into full effect.

I have already introduced the idea of the resounding city—where history, music, and power are dialectically related. I have demonstrated how artists move throughout México talking, learning, and performing hip-hop. In this chapter, I will demonstrate how the resounding city shapes a rapper’s ear and informs their voice, and how talking hip-hop demands presence and attention to the details of the sonic world. In the last chapter, I told the story of Los HDP constructing their voice in a workshop and through their travels on the streets. In interviews, these young artists echoed their teachers and earlier generations of rappers and used hip-hop as a way to describe the interconnectedness of their awareness of the city. They said güaü. All this requires the apophenia of the ethnographic analysts. In this chapter, I explore other sounds common in the discourse of hip-hop and better define hip-hop as a form of ritual communication.

Throughout the previous chapters, I have focused on the way hip-hop artists navigate the streets and thereby come to embody a particular multi-sensory knowledge of desmadre (Howes

2019). Within this chapter, I focus on or, rather, attune to sound and the way hip-hop artists bring these experiences on the street into the studio to create densely layered. acoustic meaning.

Since his beautiful descriptions of the relationship between the Kaluli People and the sounds

181 of their rain forest, Steven Feld has been a premiere theorist in musical anthropology, exploring the relationship between people and places and sounds, language and music and inspiring others to do the same (Faudree 2012; Feld 1982, 1984; Feld and Brenneis 2004; Feld and Fox 1994)

He wrote: For the Kaluli, the Bosavi tropical rain forest environment takes on several levels of meaning and abstraction. In the most basic sense the environment is like a tuning fork, providing well-known signals that mark and coordinate daily life. Space, time, and seasons are marked and interpreted according to sounds. Sounds give indexical information about forest height, depth, and distance. The time it takes a sound to travel through various kinds of bush; the echoes through land formations, waterfalls, and rivers; the layers of bird sound in the canopy and at forest openings;-all these provide clock and spatial information to the accustomed inhabitant of the rainforest. (Feld 1984: 394)

Though quite distinct from a rainforest, México takes on several levels of meaning and abstraction as a soundscape (Schafer 2012). Hip-hop artists are equally attuned to their urban environment.

To reveal this, I will recount the studio as a ritual space and as something achievable because artists are deeply committed to desmadre and presence. I will show how: Two mutually correlative levels of dense figuration are brought into existence through ritual’s markedly constrained and elaborate forms of action: a level of dense semiotic links between elements internal to the ritual scene, and a level of links between this concrete scene and its multiple “other scenes” of more expansive, abstract, or tacit categories and principles. (Here, “macrocosmic” is a placeholder, not meant to constrain what might count as a “cosmological” element, beyond the premise that it is greater in spatiotemporal reach or in determination of human affairs than are microcosmic elements. (Stasch 2011: 160-161).

Ritual is a matter of degree of intensification. I use the term, then, to signify something that

182 occurs in studios when artists engage in a particular genre of discourse that occurs in hip-hop.

The studio experience is related to but distinct from the experiences that rappers have in the street. Studios are quite freeing in terms of dialogue. They are mostly removed from the ruido of the streets and thereby gives artists a space to render their experiences and other sociocultural citations into densely meaningful sound. If Kolmillo counted his time in hip-hop as outside the normal course of Mexican history (as shown in the second chapter), then the studio experience exists as its own chronotope as well, looped in a liminal moment (Turner 1969).

Second, I label these moments as a form of ritual in contradistinction to what Carlos G.

Vélez-Ibañez (1991) called the “rituals of marginality.” Following Edmund Leach, Vélez-Ibañez did not define ritual as only related to the sacred, but rather as patterns of symbols that reveal socially approved relations between individuals and groups. Specifically, Vélez-Ibañez investigated how patron-client relations, brokerage, friendships of convenience, and informal arrangements were common in the settlement of Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl. Though they often benefited the individuals involved, they ultimately reproduced marginality and hierarchy at the societal level. These rituals structured political relationships in Mexico throughout the 60s and

70s and continue today. Hip-hop, however, especially within the studio, works against these kinds of relationships, and not as a symbolic pattern but as a lived communicative process that occurs in looped moments of sound. Desmadre, after all, exists as if hierarchies did not exist at all (Monsiváis 2009).

In three parts, I show how artists form their ear and contextualize themselves within sound.

Because I define sound broadly, I offer a diverse set of examples from the sound of sampled music, to the textures of the human voice, and the chanting of mythic names. As in the last

183 chapters, I submerge these examples within ethnographic narratives to highlight the dialogic nature of every exchange.

In the first part, I echo a lesson El Siete gave to workshop participants at La Biblioteca

Vasconcelos. He introduced the concept of the sample and loop in rap music. The sample is a small snippet of sound pulled from various archives of previously recorded sound. Producers rearrange and loop these sounds to create new rhythms and new meaning. These loops are the foundation of rap and the basis for hip-hop as ritual communication. In the studio, artists spend hours listening to loops, working in a single moment of musical time, and constructing a resonant ritual space. To exemplify this, I follow HDP, PerroZW, and a number of rappers into the writing and recording process.

In the second part, I describe how individuals shape the acoustic qualities of their voice to convey meaning and (re)voice the city itself. I follow MC Luka, the self-designated “Original

Grandfather” of hip-hop to explore his archive of sonic inspiration. I show that he not only draws from traditional Mexican verbal art and popular culture, but his experience in the streets as well.

In the third part, I follow the rapper Kolmillo. Kolmillo represents another point in hip-hop’s constellation of sound where presence and power resonate. Although he remained unintelligible to me throughout most of my time in México, I finally understood his voice as an index of his own movement in the hip-hop scene and his embodiment of the resonant city.

To learn to talk hip-hop, then, I had to become conversant across this wide spectrum of modes, channels, and texts. I had to relearn the Spanish language in a Mexican context, learning the vernaculars of México, el caló, la jerga, and the relations between vocal registers. I had to know musical histories, from the local to the transnational. I had to know the generic trends of

184 underground and popular rap in the city, in the US, and across Latin-America. I had to be familiar with literature, politics, and Mexican traditions of verbal art. I had to hear the meaning between musical samples reused in new contexts and experience the voice of artists quoting, mocking, and sampling the city’s aural sensorium. All of this learning occurred in or was made relevant through our movement through the streets. The constant barrage of information was at first overwhelming. Like Müelas’ dad, I was lost. But with time, in one moment in the studio, it all became clear in apophenia. My process of learning was absolutely helped along by the artists themselves who continually taught me, demanding I pay attention to the intricacies of their and other’s speech and sound.

Part One: The Sample, The Loop, and the Studio as Ritual Space

Siete Teaches the Loop

It was the second day of El Siete’s workshop in la Biblioteca Vasconcelos. Twelve students, myself included, sat in a conference room behind the main hall of hanging book stacks. Behind us was floor to roof windows that looked out onto a green courtyard. We sat at thick, richly colored wood tables. El Siete moved to the whiteboard and drew a row of sixteen squares divided into four sections.46 He said these represented a single bar of music. Most basic rhythms in rap instrumentals began with a bass drum on the first and third beats and a snare on the second and fourth beats. He began to beatbox, demonstrating the sounds with his lungs, lips, glottis, and nasal cavity. He then moved to his computer, which was weakly projected onto another section of whiteboard. He uploaded a random song to his sampling program. The song was from a compilation of Cuban music he had just bought on the Metro trip for $10. The software

46 See “Siete Gonzalez - Beat Die For a Reason” on YouTube for an example of his production style and the “Free Use” or “Creative Commons” instrumental tracks he places online for aspiring rappers.

185 displayed the song’s waveform. Like reading an electrocardiogram, El Siete identified the compact and dense waves of the kick drum and the rapid spike of its snare. When describing his process, he sometimes used English words to name the drums; he sometimes used the Spanish words bajo y tambor. He cut a small part of the song from the rest then chopped that sample into four equally spaced bits of sound that corresponded to the drum count. He exported the samples as separate .wav files to assure the sounds would not lose quality in the transfer. He downloaded the samples into a sequencing program then mapped them to a small MIDI keyboard connected to his computer. He toggled the sample to play in its entirety when triggered. He re-toggled it to play just as long as he held the key. He explained that on professional Akai MPCs and Roland sampling workstations, the triggers would be pressure and velocity sensitive for a more live feel.

El Siete then showed the students how to lengthen and shorten the samples to fit rap’s preferred tempo of 96 beat per minute. This changed the sample’s pitch, which was especially noticeable with vocals, but could be aesthetically desirable on the right track. He found and chopped another sample from the original song then composed a slightly different rhythmic loop.

With these two patterns he made a longer ABAB pattern, then an AAAB pattern. He chopped a third and fourth sample to make variations of ABCD. Next he found a preloaded synthesizer sound on the software, matched the key of the original song by ear, and then began to reinforce and recompose the bass line of the song. Everyone was thoroughly impressed and relieved that musical production could be so simple. El Siete explained that this was all the Spaniards did in their production. They kept it simple and focused on samples. They did not add extra bars beyond sixteen for a verse and eight for a chorus repeated three times for the standard song. They did not add extra instruments or rhythms. This worked for the Spanish, but it was boring. El Siete

186 suggested that his students should strive for more. In the end, the only limit would be their creativity and their desire to push boundaries. As El Siete explained all this, he played the same loop of sound continually in the background.

Over the next few classes, El Siete taught us to construct simple verses of rap, filling in those sixteen spaces with syllables. Again, entry into the art form was simple, but mastery was entirely up to an individual’s dedication. I began filling my field note journal with sixteen-syllable couplets, grouped in four-, eight- and sixteen-line verses. At first, I would write only during class. Soon after, my post-event field notes fell toward lyric and metered verse. When Metro rides home became rote, but the day’s event had me reeling, and I wanted to continue looking at the city, I would spend a few minutes fumbling with rap lyrics. Although I was writing rhymes, I abstained from sharing them in class. I did not want to take the actual rappers’ time. I was embarrassed by my amateur verses. I imagined rapping would be inauthentic as both an anthropologist and as a member of the scene. I knew that anyone could rap but thought that not everyone should.

Months after the workshops ended, and PerroZW’s group took the name Los Hijos De Poeta, they compelled me to record with them. They argued it would be fun and perhaps necessary for me to experience. They did not press the issue as contributing to some badge of authenticity, but rather as a sign of our friendship and our time together. I agreed.

Finding R-Baster’s House by Graffiti

Weeks after El Siete’s courses ended and far from Biblioteca Vasconcelos, I met Khäf

Vocablo and Khampa at the Nezahualcóyotl cultural center. I was quite late because even though

I knew the route perfectly there was no accounting for desmadre. So they were surprised to see

187 me. Slack, R-Baster, and Leslie could not attend that day, and De Em had already left. When they noticed my portable speaker, they decided to move inside and work on music together. They sat for thirty minutes listening to an instrumental beat on repeat. They counted bars, tracked changes in its sample pattern, and broke the song into its constituent parts. They discussed where choruses might go and how an extra bridge might make the structure confusing. They wondered whether they ought to record it Apotheosis Studios. However, because recording there would cost $300 per song, they agreed to record first at home.

With little more discussion, we were en route to R-Baster’s house in Aragon. We went by bus instead of Metro, since the route was more direct and R-Baster sent us a text detailing which corner we should stand at and which neon window sticker we should watch for. On the way, they suggested that I complete a 16-bar verse to record with them. I began scribbling rhymes in my field journal, ignoring the passing sights of the city. A difficult 12-bars and over 30 minutes later,

Khäf nudged me. We were already arriving but still had to walk a dozen blocks more. Khampa knew the general direction of our final destination but was unsure of the proper name of the street. We walked until he recognized R-Baster’s tag on a wall at an intersection. Pac’s was there too. We knew to turn.

R-Baster met us seven blocks ahead and led us the rest of the way. He had access to an empty, one-room apartment on the third-floor of his vecindad. The apartment’s floor was unfinished. The yellow tile and grout that had been laid was already cracking. Dusty tools sat in one corner. A stray puppy was living in the other. Khäf Vocablo and I came to the humorous conclusion that the puppy was the most hip-hop member of Los HDP. “Puro Callajero,” she said, pure street.

188 Once we were settled in the room, Khampa plugged his phone into a speaker, queued the instrumental track, and put it on loop. For the next two hours, we sat and quietly wrote in a moment of sound.

Days later we recorded that song at Khampa’s house in the heart of Nezahualcóyotl. Weeks later, we recorded another posse-cut with the other members of Los HDP and three other rappers from around Nezahualcóyotl, Iztapalapa, and Chimalhuacán at el Laboratorio. PerroZW engineered. The recording process was as exciting as it was sweaty and difficult. At el

Laboratorio, there was no ventilation in either the recording booth or the cramped engineering room. We constantly traded places while waiting for our turn, nervously watching other artists record through the soundproof window, nervously practicing outside, until finally shuffling in front of the mic to wait for PerroZW to count us in. Because I was unable to memorize my lyrics and control my breath well enough to flow the entire time, I failed to record my verse in any single take. PerroZW explained that single takes were the preferred method, because they conveyed a more cohesive meaning. Splitting the recording in multiple four or eight bar parts was common but it interrupted the rapper’s affective performance. Despite my errors, everyone was supportive and jovial. PerroZW made jokes and asked for the English versions of the technical terms of recording. Recording just my sixteen bars, backing vocals, and ad-libs took over thirty minutes to complete. Since there was so many of us, all more or less at the same skill level, the day took four hours. We spent that entire time listening to the same loop of sound.

Democratic Group Audition

One night, H-Ham (age 23), Kautyn (25), E-Track (30), and I met at PerroZW’s apartment at

189 the edge of Iztapalapa.47 They were there to record a song. PerroZW’s room was a mess, but also an archive of his career in hip-hop. There were no decorations, but there were vestiges of sentiment and artifacts left about in apathy: old fliers, compact discs, a Minnie Mouse piggy bank, a broken trophy, a television playing soccer, and stacks of books. All that was a momentary distraction from what filled most of the space: blackened ashy pipes, jars of green and budding mota, piles of it freshly broken down, sitting on zig zag paper waiting to be rolled into joints, and

40oz bottles of Victoria brand beer, some empty, some warm and half full. There was not much room for us between that, so throughout the night we changed seats. H-Ham’s dense instrumental tracks further crowded and energized the room, filling it with layers of complex automated samples, synthesizers, and a heavy low-end. H-Ham did not know he was also sampling Summer

Madness by Kool and the Gang (1974) when he sampled Summertime by Jazzy Jeff and the

Fresh Prince (1991), but he was excited to learn it. He was also not familiar with the song ’93 to

Infinity by Souls of Mischief though he was born that year.

After we settled in, they turned to the work of selecting an instrumental track. H-Ham and

PerroZW both offered entries. They played the top four songs against one another, bracketing them to find which instrumental grabbed their attention most. After multiple play-throughs, they decided on what seemed—only to me—to be a bland instrumental. They listened through the song again to confirm their decision then began to loop just the eight measures that made up the chorus. At first, they made quiet, senseless sounds, finding the places where words might fit and syllables might turn. One rapper would find a flow he liked, mumbling it louder until another

47 See “”H-Ham Beatbox en la cabina Vol 6”; “Faltosos - Woof // K-Road / Perro Zw / Lobo Estepario / Kautyn / Forastero / Serk / Crack & Oster”; “MC Etrack_Real Vandalo” on YouTube; “Cypher Catrina - Joaka // Dragon Fly // All-essi Curley // Sidu Martínez // Hyna La Fiera” all on YouTube.

190 rapper would listen. The rapper listening would repeat the flow, approve, ignore it, or make their own interpretation of it. They went back and forth like this for a number of loops until someone began humming the love theme from “The Godfather” composed by Nino Rota. At once, the group keyed into the same chordal progression, texture, or rhythm buried in the sample and began humming the tune together.

They each continued to follow the tune they had recreated but brought back the shape of their individual words. They started uttering words sporadically along the eight measures, then rhymes, and complete phrases with a matching couplet. Every eight bars, they started again.

They were constantly verbally creative, relying on their acute awareness of sound, incredible memories, and the strategic performance of their own voice. In every loop, they would improvise, expanding or breaking down words and stylistic variables. They played with different pauses, timbers, and volumes, scribbled in their notebooks, and remembered every turn and twist of poetry that they improvised. One would rap a perfectly acceptable couplet of which everyone would approve. Then the creator would abandon it in a fit of laughter and disbelief at someone else’s stumbled-upon perfection of words. Over time, the lyrics seemed to complete themselves.

In actuality, the rappers lodged themselves within a single moment for over an hour and meticulously created the anthemic—and terribly “hard”—chorus for the song Falsos MC’s, which was finally published on PerroZW’s album “Zwciedad” (2017). The chorus goes, “Llegue la hora de que paguen las deudas de esos falsos emcees / Para que sientas los besos de mis puñas levantado tu nariz.” It translates as “it is time for fake rappers to pay their dues / this is so you feel the kiss of my knuckles lifting your nose.”

They called the lyrics “hard” because they were threatening and violent, but the hardness was

191 also ironic. They howled “¡no mames!” at calling a punch a kiss of the fist. They slowly nodded their head to appreciate the sonic congruence of romance and violence. It really was like Mario

Puzo’s film score.

Suddenly someone noticed the time. Where had it gone? If we left now, we could still catch the last Metro home. We knew the consequences of missing it. So we broke out running, rushing and laughing though the dark and quiet streets. Since we each arrived separately, we argued on the run to find the shortest way back, cutting through back alleys at a full sprint. Fortunately, we had energy and humor to burn.

When you are part of the studio experience, there is nothing annoying about hearing the same few measures of music repeat incessantly. When multiple, talented artists come together, they do not fill recording sessions with cross talk or confusion. The songs develop organically because creation becomes a process of unspoken, yet democratic group audition. Collaborators reach into individual, cultural, and dialogic wells of inspiration. They rupture the flow of language to rethink concepts, characters, and their own conception of what a rap song ought to be. In this environment, rap represents not only personal expression, but the joint exploration of sound, voice, and creative dialogism. All that is as rejuvenating as it is tiring.

Within this part, I have shown the way that hip-hop exists outside the flow of mundane life in

México. If desmadre is a constant factor in the daily life of hip-hop artists crossing the city to find resources—slowing their progress, forcing them to improvise and struggle in the streets— than the studio is a space outside time and space where artists can create voice. In the next two parts, I will detour slightly from the theme of ritual to loop back to an investigation of desmadre.

Specifically, I will look at how artists render their experiences in the street and their

192 understandings of the resounding city through their recorded voice in the studio.

Part Two: Voice, Embodied Practice, and the Resounding City.

Elemsiburrón had been rapping in México for nearly as long as anyone else in the scene.48

He too was one of those hardcore hip-hop heads featured in Cypress Hill’s video in el Zócalo.

Elemsiburrón and I met for beers at a hipster bar at the edge of La Condesa. It was for the young, upper and middle-class residents of the neighborhood. Their beer collection was diverse and on draught. Most of the bars I had been attending served beer that they purchased directly from a nearby bodega, warm and in a styrofoam cup. Perhaps because we met at that bar instead of at a hip-hop event we met as middle-class academics. Either way, our talk was hip-hop and like so many conversations we had prior in sweaty pulquerías, in smoky homemade studios, and in the dark and hushed streets of several cities. With no pretension of formality, writing nothing down, we set ourselves to constructing a scene-objective, common-sense rubric to compare

México’s and the globe’s emcees. We agreed any system would need to include gradable, stylistic techniques like flow, poetic complexity, timbre, content, and stage presence. A rapper’s political mindedness would not necessarily factor in, but their creativity and range of their lyrics would.

Under our terms, a good deal of freestyle battle rappers and even pop artists could score quite well. We agreed first that Menuda Coincidencia was in a league of his own in terms of poetic complexity, but unfortunately his voice was too grating to listen to continually.

Suddenly, the deafening sound of a passing dump truck drew our attention to the street. It was just before dusk. Colorful graffiti was sprayed along a wall on the opposite side of the street.

Elemsiburrón said, “You know who I think might be the best?”

48 See “Elemsiburron - La vida es un batalla (videoclip)” on YouTube.

193 “Who?” I asked.

“MC Luka,” he said.

I agreed, “Ya, man, I’m glad you said that. His voice…”

He responded quickly “It is his ability to describe one little corner of México in just a few sparse bars. He has a way taking a perspective on something we all see daily.”

When Elemsiburrón and I were evaluating MC Luka, I said voice, and he said representation. We were not talking at odds.

MC Luka is a well known rapper across México. Born in 1971, he was already well into his

40s and often joked that when he calls himself an OG, he does not mean original gangster, but the original grandpa.49 For the past two decades MC Luka has committed himself to experiencing and vividly representing desmadre. Within the second part of this chapter, I show how MC Luka’s voice itself is a dialogic history of music and ethnographic representation in the city. Like los HDP echoing PerroZW and their early travels in the scene, MC Luka echoes his inspirations and his mastery of the street. I first review several YouTube videos to show how MC

Luka contextualizes his artistic production within a cultural tradition within the resounding city. I then review three skits MC Luka produced for his DFMXVG album to show how his voice also echoes his experience navigating through the city. In each skit, MC Luka performs as various people arguing in the streets. To create these characters, MC Luka samples different styles of talk. He captures different timbers, prosody, and vocabulary to better “describe one little corner of México in just a few sparse bars.” And in this way, I argue MC Luka embodies and reproduces a constellation of sound that is audible only in the streets of México.

49 See “MC Luka - DFMXVG (Video Oficial)” on YouTube.

194 Learning to Speak Dialogically: The Inspirations of MC Luka’s Voice

One afternoon, I was in El Centro picking up comics. I decided to stop in to TT Caps. By that time, the store was already in its final months of business. Tomás had consolidated the hip-hop merchandise that once filled three rooms onto just a few tables in a cramped passage way. I said hello to the workers tending to the new stock of trinkets, beads, and charms that now filled the space. I said hello to Tomás. Busily, he nodded, directed me toward the back, and got back to tidying the store. To my surprise, MC Luka was there. Of course he was. By that time, I realized hip-hop was fated to happen.

MC Luka broke conversation from a group of younger fans to say hello and give me a big hand slap. He was there to co-sponsor an in-store event with his old label mate Kinto Sol.50 After our first meeting in Fiesta Bar and our meeting at Plaza Peyote (which I will describe at length in the following chapter), MC Luka seemed happy to see me, especially with comics in hand.

The young men that were previously talking with MC Luka tried to reboot their conversation.

They offered to create a brand of clothing on MC Luka’s behalf. He politely explained that he and a partner already did that for themselves. Then, as if he were an employee of the store, he helped a young father and his pre-teen daughter buy a beanie. She was just realizing hip-hop was a viable fashion option, and MC Luka encouraged her. He put her money in the register, and she left, neon pink and cozy.

Pardoning himself from Kinto Sol, who had been quietly standing behind his table of merchandise, MC Luka invited me to the backroom to record an interview. I was weary since my interviews often lasted hours but grateful for any time he could offer. We went to the emptied

50 See “Kinto Sol - Hijos De Malinche Feat. Pato Machete [Video Oficial]” on YouTube.

195 backroom to lean on the old display cases. I set up my mic and began asking my basic interview questions. Though the interview was informative about his relationship with record labels throughout his career, it was not engaging. The interview started with almost an apology. He said he had been rapping for almost twenty years, but had only recorded a few albums. He marked his career uncomfortably with those projects, because the real point of his career was doing concerts, doing in-stores, being present in the scene, and reflecting the streets. Fans asking for his autograph continually interrupted us. After forty minutes, we turned off the microphone and stepped out to the street for a cigarette.

On the cobbled and busy Avenida Isabel la Católica, a different group of aspiring rappers excitedly joined us. MC Luka looked out on a street he had been walking for a decade and was struck with the urge to talk more. One youth complained about a passing brigade of police officers. They were heading towards El Zócalo. MC Luka explained that the police should realize that they too were from el barrio and they were only protecting the people in power that oppressed them. He believed that if the police were to join their voice with that of the people, there would be a true revolutionary change in México. The young ones appreciated the thought. I wondered what Kolmillo would think.

His cigarette burned out, but with that spark of a conversation, MC Luka invited me to run an errand with him and to continue chatting. We walked to his car and began driving south. He told me he drew comics as a kid. He went to workshops to learn how. The teachers told him that to create comics you must know how to draw panels and, more importantly, the story you want to tell. MC Luka never excelled at drawing, but the lesson inspired him. When he got a bit older,

MC Luka wanted to write about the Cholos and Chicanos of the United States. So he read

196 everything he could find about them. He even moved to San Diego, California to work and to understand their lifestyle. Once there, he realized two things: First, he loved rap. Groups like

Delinquent Habits, Cypress Hill, 2 Live Crew and Lighter Shade of Brown were popular in

Mexican American communities at the time. Second, he learned that being cholo was having a connection to a set and a neighborhood. Outside that place, it was not something one could be authentically. It was more than fashion. He added that the iconic Khaki Dickies Pants, the most fashionable clothing item worn by Cholos of the West Coast US, sold for hundreds of Euros in

France.

MC Luka pointed at my own outfit—my black and white Chuck Taylor Converse shoes, cut- off jean shorts, and plain white T-shirt—and said he could have guessed I was from Southern

California. As he was discussing fashion, he realized he had forgotten his own sunglasses, cellphone, and cigarettes at TT Caps. We would have to turn around and fight traffic back toward

El Centro to recover his items. Fortunately, because I could run in, he would not have to pay for parking, just circle the block. He said a car distanced him from the streets, but it had plenty of benefits.

After I recovered his gear, he continued telling me his story. When he returned to México in

1996, he had a passion to rap. He entered into the valley’s scene and over a few years linked up with the rappers that would become Vieja Guardia. He would host parties with them in his mother’s house. As a posse, they held concerts and recorded mixtapes and albums.

We soon arrived at an apartment building near Metro Nativitas. We climbed the stairs to the top floor and found an apartment that reeked of stale cigarettes and marijuana. Banda Norteña blasted from inside. MC Luka entered first, greeted the apartment’s resident, and demanded he

197 stop playing that genre of music. He said he liked most music, but Norteño put him in a bad mood. MC Luka introduced me to our host, Alex, his drug dealer. I said hello, sat in a folding chair, and stuffed my microphone back in my backpack.

Our conversation over the next few hours was more insightful than the formal interview I had conducted at TT Caps, especially because we were helped along by YouTube. Alex, whose age I could never guess sat with us while MC Luka guided me through a gallery of his inspirations, showing me examples of Mexican humor, word-play, barrio archetypes, and a lineage of artistic representation. First, though, we talked about the breaking news event from Nice, France, where

Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had killed 86 people and injured dozens more by driving over them with his car. MC Luka said due to the internet, we could witness mass death too easily. On the other hand, due to the internet covering up mass death and disappearance had become impossible, as was proved by the case of Los 43. MC Luka confirmed this by showing the viral video of teenager Emiliano Morales criticizing the politician Miguel Angél Mancera.51 Morales offered a perfectly respectful but politically incendiary remonstration of the corruption and fascist practices of the Mexican State to the out-of-touch demagogue. MC Luka was far more inspired by the young man’s educated and powerful voice than by any politician’s.

MC Luka then played Chava Flores’ “Sábado Distrito Federal.”52 The song is raucous and fun. It describes the different lives of México’s rich and poor. Released in 1957, the song highlights the traffic and desmadre of El Centro. As we listened, MC Luka lauded Chava Flores’ ability to describe the city in such a specific way familiar to everyone. I excitedly told MC Luka that Elemsiburrón had recently said the same thing about him. He humbly declined the

51 See “Estudiante mexicano llama calificó de fascista a la gestión de Mancera” on YouTube 52 See “Chava Flores - Sábado Distrito Federal” on YouTube

198 compliment, suggesting it was simply his age that gave him the ability to see and represent the city.

Next, MC Luka shared el Vulgarcito, a character played by Alejandro Suarez for the sketch- comedy television show Ensalada de Locos. In the tradition of Cantinflas and Tin-Tan, El

Vulgarcito is a pelado or stereotypically low-class denizen of the streets, marked by his quick wit and verbal creativity. In the clip, El Vulgarcito argues with a crooked police officer over a ticket he just placed on an illegally parked car.53 The cop proposes, not too slyly, that El Vulgarcito should simply pay the cop directly, but El Vulgarcito refuses to pay. He says he prefers the legal path. Then through a series of humorous turns, El Vulgarcito pushes the cop to add more fines to the ticket, naming the infractions himself. He points out that the sticker registration has lapsed.

The officer adds the charge. He asks whether disrespect for authority is a fineable offense, when the officer concurs, El Vulgarcito gently kicks the cop. The officer adds charge after charge, hands El Vulgarcito the ticket, and walks off stage in frustration. Just then, the actual owner of the car approaches. El Vulgarcito compliments the beauty of the new car but apologizes to the man for his unfortunate luck, handing him the exorbitant fine left to him by the authorities. The skit ends with the two actors breaking character and sparring with a series of improvised insults.

“¿Voy a tener a pagar 570 pesos?” (I have to pay $570?)

“Simón qüey, pero no te preocupes güey. Es una calentadita, le dijo. Algunos, mi querido…” (Yes, but don’t worry. It’s just a little heat. Some, my friend…

¿Que?” (What?)

¿Quixote?” (Quixote)

53 See “Vulgarcito Infraccionado” on YouTube.

199 “¿Por que Quixote?” (Why Quixote”)

“Porque es el nombre de la mancha.” (Because it’s the name of the mark.)

“Adios, Sancho.” (Goodbye, Sancho.)

“¿Que Sancho?” (Why Sancho?)

“Por la Panza.” (For the gut.)

We laughed at the quick, clever exchange. We laughed at the fact that corruption had already become a joke by the 1970s. We also noted how funky El Vulgarcito’s theme music was, wishing someone could sample it properly. As we listened a few more times, MC Luka pulled the corner of a centimeter square of paper and dropped it on his tongue. I hardly noticed.

We then watched a series of videos, which he said represented common characters encountered in urban life. El Simpatias was another character created by Alejandro Suarez.54 He tells joke after joke to unwilling audiences then does all the laughing himself. Los Polivoces dressed up and mocked an Indigenous married couple who are fresh from the countryside and spending money wildly and foolishly in the metropolis.55 Chava Flores sang a version of

“Llegaron los Gorrónes,” a song about the opportunists and freeloaders that show up to parties and beg entry based on distant familial or professional relationship. I told him that I had met quite a few of these at concerts.

We then watched “La Chabelita y el Padre Otero” a sketch created by Héctor Suárez y

Alejandro Licona, highlighting the humor of doble sentido, double meaning or innuendo.56

Chabelita, a guilt-ridden Catholic woman visits Father Otero to confess her sins. While Chabelita

54 See “El Simpatias con Alejandro Suarez” on YouTube. 55 See “Los Polivoces 1972 - sketch en la vecindad del Chavo” on YouTube. 56 See “La Chabelita y el padre Otero 10” on YouTube.

200 confesses to minor sins like lifting her skirt to cross a river, eating sweets, or having a molar removed, the filthy minded Priest interprets her as confessing to disrobing and having sex with strange men from behind. As we laughed, I thanked MC Luka for showing me the reference. I admitted to having an interest in el albur. He explained that although the video was a great representation of doble sentido it was not an example el albur. Though los albures are otherwise polite phrases filled with double meaning and innuendo, they are more a type of word-play where a chain of syllables can have two meanings depending on how they are parsed or pronounced (Anaya and Cózar Angulo 2014). By the time MC Luka showed me the confessions of Chabelita, many of my friends in México had explained the basic humor of albur to me. And, in fact, I grew up with a similar kind of humor, approximated in English. My grandfather from

Michoacán would often say, “I saw her, as she passed the window.” Except for those who were listening closely to the subtleties of his pronunciation and prosody, he was actually saying, “I saw her ass. She passed the window.” He would also have unsuspecting victims read aloud the phrase “Hoof Hearted, Ice Melted.” My grandmother was attuned to such subtleties. Even if she was napping two rooms down the hall, she would hear him whispering the jokes and reprimand him for it. Despite my familiarity with the concept of el albur, I still could not catch them in natural discourse in México.

As we watched these videos, Luka laughed, explained, and recited the choruses and catchphrases he remembered. I laughed, scribbled notes, and asked questions. After a few hours, we were both tired and overwhelmed. We decided to leave. We made plans with our host to meet at Nedman Guerrero’s upcoming show at a bar called Los Hijos de Burro (an event I will

201 describe in the following chapter).57 MC Luka and I walked to his car. He began driving north back towards El Centro. He asked where I lived, promising to drop me off near a Metro after one more stop. He would take me to his mother’s apartment in la Roma Sur, the apartment where

Vieja Guardia used to meet and talk hip-hop. I thanked him for the opportunity. As we drove there, he swerved then laughed, suddenly remembering he had dropped LSD.

Like a sampling producer, rappers take from their experiences of popular culture to make new meaning. As much as they echo the poetics of rap, they echo long traditions of verbal play in the city. In this section, I have demonstrated how MC Luka’s voice resonates. Before encountering Chicano Rap, before his travels to San Diego influenced him, a television, a record player, and a tradition of verbal performance influenced MC Luka. He echoed these not only as literature and text but also as sonic culture. In the next section, I will show how MC Luka’s voice resonates his lived experiences traveling, echoing the voices of the streets.

The Performance of Different Registers

There are many accents in México. They reflect the valley’s history as a diversely inhabited and colonized metropolitan zone. There has always been new waves of immigrants and

Indigenous populations. These demographic changes were a source of tension and a wellspring of cultural expression. Each community maintains its diverse styling, using different grammars, vocabulary, and idioms, but “infectious” linguistic trends catch on and travel. Different communities also rely on “linguistic registers in which the primary marker is an acoustic quality of the voice layered on a stretch of talk and used in speech situations to stereotypically define social roles, stances, and activities. These qualities can include phonational (laryngeal) settings

57 See “Nedman Guerrero Ft. Spia104 - Ocio Nocturno” on YouTube.

202 of falsetto, creak, whisper, breathy voice, and other (non-phonational) prosodic means for framing speech such as nasality and stylized pitch levels, pitch ranges and intonational melodies” (Sicoli 2013: 105).

There is one register (or perhaps family of registers) that is everywhere present in the streets.

I cannot say I heard it often, because not every rapper speaks in it. But it was always at the edge of audition. I heard it most when it was being mimicked as in the skits of El Vulgarcito or on the radio. My non-hip-hop friends would raise into the register when boasting that they knew the street and its slang as well as any stereotypical rapper. Female friends would perfectly mock the voice when they told stories of men’s persistent and clumsy sexual advances. They would tighten their larynx a bit and let their voice flow freely throughout their sinuses. All the vocal action would take place behind the nose than drop back deep into the throat. Phrases were short, practically iambic. Certain vowels would drop in volume, while others increased in pitch. A variety of melodies rang out. Though not everyone in the city speaks in the register, everyone voices it when they utter the all pervasive phrase no mames, güey, a more vulgar version of ¡no manches! Both conveying “don’t tell me!” or “no way!” but actually translating as “don’t suck” and “don’t stain!” Speakers touch on the register as they constrict their glottis and extend that first long /a/ to sound more like an /æ/. The voice seemed to convey disbelief and urgency. For me, the sound was as grating as it was captivating. Despite hearing it continually for a year, I could never fully reproduce it in my own throat and, in some cases, I could hardly make sense of it.

If you were in the city, you might hear it when riding the bus—not necessarily from a passenger, but from the driver and el cacharpo, the driver’s assistant sitting on the dash next to

203 the open door. If you were to listen to those two chat, perhaps overhearing them complain about some authority figure, you would notice the sounds. Then mid-conversation, el cacharpo would shift quickly away from the register as he hopped out of the ever-rolling vehicle to shout the bus’s heading and to take fares from entering passengers. That other shout would come from deep in his chest and would roll as continuously as the bus itself. The register of the vendor selling snacks directly from the center lane of traffic, handing cough drops or cereal bars to the driver, or the voice of the person hopping on the bus to ask for salvation army donations between stops—those would be different still, respectively more melodic and exhausted, but no less familiar, and meant for their own particular task in transit.

I first heard the register in the lobby of Hotel La Selva, the hourly hotel and long term renter’s house where I lived. It was my custom in the early days of research after returning from the field to huddle next to the faulty wireless router, write up my notes, plan the next day’s route, and correspond with people back home. I encountered many characters like me, in need of a cheap, convenient place to stay in the city for one night or for months at a time. Despite my earnest intention to work, I would socialize, or the hotel owner would ask me to act as a translator. I listened to many autobiographies in the city that way. I met a pilot who was always hungry and rude, a Russian widower with two young daughters, a Cuban man whose home I later visited in Cienfuegos, Cuba. I met Molina Y Los Cosmicos, an Uruguayan alternative-folk band on their way to perform in the US, and two Somali-Canadians seeking fertility services in

México.58 Mostly, though, I met young men who were overworked, overtired, and stuck in the city hours or days after it made sense for them to return home.

58 See “Molina y Los Cósmicos - En el Camino del Sol” on YouTube.

204 Our conversations would start when they questioned my journal. I would explain that I was in the city to write about hip-hop. Some would laugh, telling me that Tupac and Notorious BIG had nothing to do with México. Others would tell me how much more street they were than

Control Machete. Others would tell me they had a friend who was the best rapper in the state that nobody had heard of. Most would commandeer my notebook, promise to teach me the real slang of the city, then scribble vulgarities in it. If I listened to them intently and asked questions—and I always did—they would demand I accept a beer from them then suggest I get the next round and perhaps the next after that while we talked. On more than one occasion, I was told that if I were to understand México completely, I would need to have a Mexican girlfriend. They promised they would have no problem finding me one, or two. If I were to go only by my experience there at Hotel La Selva, I would say that theirs was the register of toxic masculinity and sexism. And, in fact, the voice is often demonized as such in popular culture and scholarship (Aguilar 2003).

Though MC Luka’s natural speaking voice did not always fall into the register, he could mock it and those other voices of transit quite well. In his album DFMXVG, MC Luka performs as various characters who are caught in conflict while in transit.59 In each skit, he masterfully controls various acoustic features of his voice to not only mock the accent but to differentiate various characters and index several other street-related identity categories. The first skit

“Conecta” starts quietly. Someone whistles in the distance. It is a simple melody, not a hailing or a look-out signal. A speeding car passes. Someone approaches the microphone. He says in a high and nasal tone, “¿Que transa? Barrio” (What moves, homeboy?)

There is a slap of hands. Somebody with a low, gravelly voice positioned right next to the

59 Listen to the complete album at “Mc Luka - DFMXVG [Disco Completo]” on YouTube.

205 mic says, ¿Que transa? Mi barrio.”

There is a slight click of the cheek and the first character asks for little bit of coffee. It is quite clear he is asking to buy marijuana as he begins to beg for a reduced price and a reduced quantity. The customer and the vendor go back and forth haggling. The customer is outraged at the seller’s “gringo,” “international” style of selling. The vendor is unimpressed and adamant.

There is no sale.

The second skit is set in a tianguis. MC Luka designs another common sensorium. Far in the distance, cumbia plays, a crowd murmurs, and a massive loud-speaker blasts the sales pitch of a pharmacy. A mobile vendor approaches the mic and starts in with his own full-volume, melodic pitch selling MC Luka’s album, “Llevelo, llevelo. Empresa libre en su * le ponen en sus manos al mejor del dia, * El abuelito. El pionero. A la leyenda. Al mito. El mismo MC Luka. Llevelo, llevelo. Llevelo.” (Take one, take one. Free business. Put one in your hands. The best of the day.

The pioneer. The legend. The myth. The very same MC Luka. Take one, take one.)

He continues with two more single-breath stanzas, filled with a dynamic prosody that always returns to the sound of llevelo. A youth approaches the vendor. In a higher pitched voice, he asks

“¿Que transa? Barrio.”

The vendor asks back, “Que transita por tus venas * chingo. Que ya tienas el nuevo CD de

MC Luka.” (What’s moving through your veins, man. I hope you already have MC Luka’s new album.)

“¿De quien?” (Who?)

“Del MC Luka.” (MC Luka.)

“No lo conozco.” (I don’t know him.)

206 “¿Que? ¿Como no le conoce?” (How do you not know him?).

The youth does not know who MC Luka is. The vendor becomes irate. He calls in a gang with a whistle (the same whistle El Vulgarcito used to introduce his entrance at the start of every skit), and in a chaotic montage of overlapping shouts, hits, and yelps they educate the youth.

In “D.F. Skit,” there is the noise of traffic. Car horns blare repeatedly. Some cars are stuck in place while others speed past. A man with a speaking voice most similar to MC Luka’s own calls for a taxi. None stop. He clicks his cheek and mutters to himself, vitriolic. He is forced to take a pesero microbus. One approaches. It is heralded by el cacharpo shouting its direction. The traveler catches his attention, shouting “¡Suben, suben!” (Coming up! Coming up!)

The bus slams on its breaks, and the traveler jumps on. From here, the traveler begins a series of frustrating interactions navigating towards his final destination. He is continually rerouted, redirected and held back in conflictive exchanges. First, no one lets him sit. Then, the bus goes nowhere due to traffic. When he decides to abandon the bus, the driver refuses to give him his money back. He begins walking, deciding against the Metro since he would likely be locked in or locked out at the end of the night. A car nearly hits him. The driver yells at him. They cuss back and forth to no avail. He walks on, dejectedly muttering about desmadre and the worthlessness of El Distrito Federal.

Though all characters are played by MC Luka, the voices are quite distinct. With these skits,

MC Luka becomes like Chava Flores and Alejandro Suarez before him. He represents every corner in México, indexing various social roles, stances, and activities with his voice and creativity. Though far younger than MC Luka, most of the rappers I met still aimed for this kind of participant-observatory awareness of their streets.

207 In this section, I expanded on the notion of the resonant city, focusing on the way artists sample more than the sounds they find previously recorded on records. They take up the voices of their city, echoing linguistic traditions, and indexing particular experiences through their command of specific vocal registers. In the final part of this chapter, I tie together the two previous parts exploring how an artist’s commitment to existing in a single loop of sound and to mastering a particular vocal register leads to the formation of a special ritual space.

Part Three: Deep México, Deep Sound

Misunderstanding Kolmillo

As shown before, familiarity solidifies quickly in hip-hop. Chance, mutual taste, a general amicability, and perhaps a desire for safety in caravan brings the culture together. Hip-hop is solidified in bonds built while rushing to beat the nightly closure of public transportation. In this section, I take a deeper look at that process and admit that sometimes friendships in hip-hop can precede a complete mutual understanding. This had consequences for me the anthropologist whose method overlapped with hip-hop artists but who did not have the same cultural knowledge or linguistic abilities as artists.

I met Kolmillo in Tonanitla, at Heticko’s Festival Ololli. Jerry Funk introduced us as if we were already old friends. Jerry Funk and I had actually just met days before, unexpectedly.

PerroZW had spotted him on the Metro and introduced us. We quickly established Heticko as a mutual friend and promised to link up the following day outside the city. Heticko and I had also met only recently when I recklessly followed him down a dark alley in a famously dangerous neighborhood because he looked hip-hop enough to trust.

At the concert, Jerry Funk gave Kolmillo my name. Kolmillo aimed his opaque sunglasses in

208 my direction, presumably looking at me. He offered me his hand for the standard palm slap and fist bump greeting. He looked back at the stage. Then Jerry Funk explained my project: that I was chicano, that I came from el gabacho, or the north, and that I studied hip-hop. Kolmillo stepped back and looked at me again. He then uttered his first and practically last words that I ever completely understood.

“No mames, güey!” he said, extending his hand again.

From that moment on, I rarely completely understood what he uttered. The words that came out of Komillo’s mouth simply mystified me. Kolmillo and I spent hours chatting and laughing with one another. At Festival Ololli, he talked at me by the stage. I nodded feigning understanding. On the long trip home, when we were not running to catch combis and Metros, he regaled the crew with stories and jokes. I laughed at them all. One long night at Fiesta Bar, way up Vasco Quiroga, we talked on a street corner while smoking then during the entire bus ride back to Metro Lazaro Cardénas. Once in a while, I would catch a word and parrot it back to him.

I would imply some question in my tone. He would clarify then carry on talking, but I would be no more clear of the meaning or context. In every conversation, he oscillated between describing some urgent situation that he experienced a street or two over and telling me about someone that

I did not know. When his utterance would resolve, I would mirror his affect, laughing or responding “no mames, güey!” That never felt like a lie. Giggling and disbelief were the only responses he seemed to need of his audience. I felt bad I could not understand most what he shared, but I always had a great time with him, and we always arrived at our destination safely; considering the late night hours we kept, there was no need to expect more.

In the final part of this chapter, I admit that Kolmillo’s voice remained inscrutable to me for

209 three reasons. First, Kolmillo spoke in a basilectal form of that street-specific register that I described in the previous part. When I interviewed him at the library, Kolmillo code switched in response to place and context. He spoke to me as an outsider. When we were on the street, when we were where he was most comfortable, he spoke to me as if I were a hip-hop artists. Second, as I described in the second chapter, Kolmillo placed highest value on presence and the relationships he built across the scene; his dedication to the streets and the chronotope of the underground made him hard to track. I could not follow the names and places about which he spoke. And finally, Kolmillo’s voice represented a deep, unfinalizable dialogism that exists in the city. It resonated between the state-hegemonic discourse on the meaning of Indigeneity and race and local-precolonial representations of space. Despite these difficulties and several untranslatable moments, I finally came to understand Kolmillo in the studio in a moment of ritual communication. In a few moments extended across a few hours of looped time, Kolmillo clarified the meaning of his list of names, his definition of raza, and his relationship to mestizaje as aural sensorium (Krieger 2011).

From Mictlān to Mic Clan

Weeks after my interview with Kolmillo, I met up with him and Jerry Funk. We were going to the studio of Fuera de Control, Tony Tonz. By that time in my study, I knew that no rhythm of punctuality existed in México. Being early never paid off. Being late never paid off. Being on time was never possible. That day, I procrastinated before leaving Hotel La Selva. I was fifteen minutes late to Metro Lazaro Cardénas. At the moment I exited the train, I heard a familiar and urgent whistle from across the platform. It was Jerry Funk three cars down. He gestured for me to rush back into the train before its doors closed. Kolmillo and another friend had already

210 reentered. Jerry Funk and I ducked back in at the final tone. The doors slammed behind us. When we met again at Tacubaya, they said they had waited for 20 minutes, meaning they were actually five minutes early. I felt terrible.

We rushed up the subterranean floors of the station. I fell to my hands while climbing up the slick-worn and always damp concrete stairs at the exit. Kolmillo muttered aguas (water) but was unconcerned. He was busy removing his oversized jacket, revealing his tall, rail-thin frame. He adjusted his thick dreadlocks, which reached below his waist. He was wearing a t-shirt with his own face on it. On the street, Jerry Funk and Kolmillo argued about which mode of transportation we should take next. I could not understand what Kolmillo was insisting, until

Jerry explained that splitting a taxi would be just a little more money since taking a bus would require us to transfer. Their friend settled the argument by voting to take the taxi on account of the lateness. The route would be quick and comfortable. I offered to ride in the back middle seat as penance. We hailed a taxi which stopped for us in the middle lane of traffic. We climbed in just as a pesero bus began honking at us.

Jerry was excited that I would get to see another neighborhood in the city, an old one, and meet his 55 crew, the Master Builders. The members were not Free Masons but named themselves after them, because each hand has five fingers with which to work. He showed me his fists. 55 was also the major area code of México. The taxi ascended Vasco de Quiroga. We turned left, driving another thirty minutes into Las Colinas del Sur. I had inspected the delegation from the windows of the high-rise buildings of Santa Fe, the financial district where I taught

English. I had also partially crossed the area on foot months before when I was wandering about searching for a concert venue. Now in a cab, the streets came to look like every other in México.

211 It was just the same gray interspersed with the white and neon murals of political and musical propaganda and crisscrossed with yellow and orange tarps. I started to over-recognize the streets.

I was struck with the feeling that I had been there before but was absolutely lost at the same time.

The rest of the car ride was otherwise silent. I was confused. Kolmillo was in a foul mood. Jerry was quietly arguing with the driver as to the best route.

Finally, Jerry told the taxi driver to let us out. Again we were in the middle lane of traffic and still had a ways to walk. We weaved through the congested cross traffic to find the side walk and our cross street. We descended further into the valley, walking down street after street, down steep and uneven stairwells. Fortunately, Kolmillo loved dogs. As we walked, his mood changed when he saw dogs standing on apartment roofs. He pointed joyfully at each but especially at the pit-bulls. We started to talk about dogs. Though, I can only assume that was the topic. Most of what he said was still a mystery.

Around another intersection, we felt a familiar vibration before we heard it. It was throbbing from an apartment building down the street. The foundation was practically shaking from the boom-bap of a rap track. Across the street, there was a bodega called El Escondido. Jerry went to the windowless hopper window and whistled in. A chorus of men chanting pacheceando sounded back. Jerry whistled again until Tony Tonz poked his head out, smiled, and shouted pacheceando one last time with the chorus. He let us in the garage and ushered us down a stairwell into a thick pool of smoke and sound. Pacheceando was one more way of saying smoking mota; mota was marijuana,

Tony Tonz home studio was beautiful—not new but clean. There were no piles of trash, no stink of tobacco, marijuana or stale, spilt beer. Instead there was a comfortable couch, with

212 plenty of space to lounge and work out. The walls were thoughtfully crowded with decorations, framed posters, and paintings. The centerpiece was an airbrushed painting of Tony Tonz praying while handcuffed. He was standing outside a prison wall that was itself painted with the Sun

Stone, or Aztec calendar. The room was well lit, with two 100-watt bulbs in Chinese paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling and a tricolor light-array spinning in the corner. Tonz production desk was filled with older but well cared for production equipment and three large, powerful cabinet speakers. There were even large swaths of acoustic foam on the ceiling above the engineering desk and throughout a doorless recording alcove, which did well to dampen the echoes of the room.

We greeted the crew. They all started to work, and conversation became all but impossible during the next four hours. Instead of talking, we listened in gluttonous consumption—passing alcohol, tobacco, mota, snacks, and soda—and organic production. The moment we finished one aliment we opened, sparked, or crunched upon another. The room would burst into dialogue and camaraderie after each verse or chorus was recorded and re-listened to, but it would soon fall back into the rhythm of collaboration then silence during recording.

Work began as we reviewed the song “Pacheceando.” Tony Tonz played the song a few times, until we all began shouting the chorus together, and he playfully scratched a turntable to add a final layer to the track. After this, our energy was high. It was time to record a new song.

From that moment forward, the night became hazy. It passed like many previous recording sessions. Everyone set themselves to quiet little tasks. Tony Tonz, the acting engineer, sat at the computer with his back turned to the room. He started to loop a sample. Jerry, Kolmillo, and the others began muttering possible flows and scribbling in their notebooks. When someone would

213 encounter writer’s block they would snack, drink, smoke, or lift a set of free-weights. As the newcomer, they tasked me with breaking down buds of marijuana. To my embarrassment, I did not know how to carry out the next task of rolling it up into paper. I tried and ruined the thin paper. My fingers did not work that way.

When the artists were ready to record their verses to the track, the room went silent. Because there was no door to protect the recording alcove, all monitoring happened in headphones.

Everyone stayed silent while the red light on Tonz’s software flashed, lest the sensitive condenser microphone pick up a sibilant whisper. The unaccompanied rapper’s voice boomed as they shaped their verse in breath. After he recorded his verse, Jerry Funk gave me a short explanation on Aztec religion and mythology. He shouted over the looped song to explain how they had turned an old unrelated sample into something Mexican. He said the song was about the Aztec realm of death. I missed most of what he said. It was too loud.

At the end of the night, Kolmillo recorded his verse and the chorus. I stopped taking notes, closed my eyes, and just listened. By that time, only the tri-color array, the computer monitors, and a small lamp in booth lit the room. Kolmillo struggled to record the chorus. He repeated it over and over, trying to get the flow just right. He was repeatedly tripped up by a sound too complex for the rhythm of the track. At first, I could not parse his words, much less assemble meaning from the context. Then suddenly, loops later in a moment of repetitive sound, I could finally hear Kolmillo’s voice. He was chanting the complex names of Aztec gods and places:

Mictlāntēcutli, Tenochtitlán, names I had only read in books. He was struggling to get his tongue, glottis, and lungs to sample one language into the next, but when he finally completed his recording, a brilliant doble sentido rang out. In the song Camino al Mic - Lan, the rappers

214 identify themselves as not just from Tenochtitlán, but as being on the road to the realm of

Mictlān. In Aztec mythology, this was a long and arduous journey the dead had after life.

Simultaneously, the rappers proclaimed themselves to be on the streets and part of the microphone clan. This was the delicate sound of the city that Kolmillo dedicated his lungs and body to represent. He was chanting, always chanting. In the interview as in the studio, these were the names and the places of his hip-hop, la raza cósmica.

Walking back to the main road from Tonz’s house was silent. Some dogs still barked from their roof. Otherwise, the only sounds were the exhausted huffs of out of shape and over-tired rappers and anthropologists. We were all coming down from intoxicants and struggling against the terribly deleterious effects of smoke, alcohol, and salty foods. We were coming down from a ritual state. One or two taxis passed us without stopping. I could not imagine what the others were thinking about. My own thoughts were empty after enduring the oppressive sounds of study. I took a moment to enjoy the quiet of a finally sleeping city, the city I could name.

Conclusion: Apophenia in Ritual Space

Discussing humans and their relationship to sound and space, Schafer (2011) suggests, “the final question will be: is the soundscape of the world an indeterminate composition over which we have no control, or are we its composers and performers, responsible for giving it form and beauty?” (96). For Hip-hop artists, the question of control must be answered in the negative.

Artists have no control over desmadre: the chaotic morphology of the city was solidified many years ago; the nation’s culture and economy are far too complex and have left a great majority of peoples too far behind; and at least at the scale of the long durée, individuals are absolutely powerless to have consequence in their lifetime. And yet, in responding to Schafer’s second

215 question the answer is decidedly positive. Hip-hop artists are absolutely performers of their soundscape, through their ritual acts they layer and remix the sounds of their city, from its traffic, its culture, its ancient names.

Hip-hop artists relate to and through sound in innumerable ways. In earlier chapters, I have shown rappers mocking the cry of Bubu Lubu vendors to unify themselves and simply saying güaü to express their understanding of hip-hop. I mentioned how Spia104 used vinyl records to represent his life and how Müelas was drawn to the city’s noise. In this chapter, I introduced the practice of sampling in the production and reception of rap music. Early entrants into the culture learn to write rap by exploring these moments of sonic meaning; more senior artists can collaborate to create densely layered sentiments. PerroZW and his crew made a chorus that was simultaneously romantic, violent, and humorous. I then argued that MC Luka’s voice was itself looping, a sample of a long tradition of verbal performance and of his many years in the street.

Finally, in the third part, I looked at hip-hop and the studio experience as ritual communication, defined in looped dialogism. Kolmillo inscrutability resonated with notions of a deep México and a deep hip-hop (Bonfil Batalla 1996; Lomnitz 2001).

Artists’ ability to reach such a virtuosic level of verbal technical skill and focus—their poetics, their vocal musicality, and their command of dialogic cultural references that make them meaningful—is nothing short of amazing. Though I cannot describe this virtuosic flow in terms of cognition as Cross and Fujioka (2019) have, at the very least, I hope this dissertation has made it fully evident through ethnography. And through this ethnography, I hope to have related the flow of artists in the street to the flow of artists in the studio. Like a percussive beat in the rhythm of daily life, the studio experience is a spike of acoustic, organizational energy. Artists

216 cut away from one type of desmadre to collaborate and create within a single moment of time.

But like a percussive beat, the studio experience quickly decays. The studio is a heady, symbolically rich space, but it is always temporary. Rappers may revel intellectually and creatively in the studio, but to be hip-hop they must continually return to the desmadre of the streets. They must flow again to expand their network and authenticate themselves en la calle escuela.

Unfortunately, the streets are not a playground. In fact, beyond my interview with Müelas, I rarely captured the sounds of carefree children laughing. Although rappers positively value the street, they know it can be dangerous. In the next chapter, I return my study to the streets and tie together various threads I have weaved throughout this dissertation, namely how does street life secure authenticity through proximity to danger and how does the dialogic, choral voice secure safety in desmadre?

217 CHAPTER 6: LEARNING ON A TRIP

I dropped by Plaza Peyote. MC Luka was there, hosting an open mic and advertising his upcoming show. I had met him only once two weeks before and would not interview him (as described in the last chapter) for another two months still, but he recognized me through the sparse crowd. He nodded to say hello, lifting his chin just an inch, dropping it back to level. I reflected the motion. After he finished motivating the participants, he passed the microphone to the first nervous teenager waiting to freestyle over whatever beat the DJ would play next. MC

Luka crossed the sidewalk, approached me, and said in English, “You smoke, right? Ya, you do, because the bathroom at La Fiesta on Vasco Quiroga. I remember.”

I nodded in agreement. He was right. We had met at La Fiesta Bar, a three-story, graffiti- filled music club and defunct restaurant at the frontier between old and new Santa Fe. It was about 20 minutes beyond Metro Tacubaya by bus. Jerry Funk had introduced MC Luka and I there. He actually locked us in the flooded bathroom to smoke and talk hip-hop.

At Plaza Peyote, MC Luka beckoned me to follow. He led me a few steps down the walkway.

He stopped with his heels on the curb, his back to the busy street. He pulled out a perfectly hand- rolled cigarette, fat and somewhat greenish. mota showed through the thin zig-zag paper. From his other pocket he pulled out a simple Bic lighter. He began sparking the joint, getting it warm, pulling air gently through with puffs of his cheeks. He ignited it without charing half the paper or leaving the butt soggy with saliva; he was not a novice. He breathed in deeply—but not greedily

—to fill his lungs and hold the smoke in for a moment longer than one might hold tobacco. He nodded again and passed the joint to me. Passing a just-lit joint is far easier than passing one

218 after it has been burned down to smaller than two finger-width’s length. So, as our fingers easily managed the transaction, he turned his back to Plaza Peyote to look down the long, wide thoroughfare. I pulled the joint to my lips and repeated his actions—inhaling, holding, exhaling slowly—but I did not pass the joint back just yet. I waited a beat and rested my hip on the green- painted cast-iron fence set into the sidewalk behind us. I followed his gaze down Eje 1, Norte to enjoy the rare sight of a mostly empty road, trees, and a soft blue sky. The street was not deafening. A few cars passed, but no trucks with grinding gears or busses with tired, squealing breaks did. Behind us, the boom-bap of hip-hop sounded out but faded quickly; the sound’s only acoustics were the improvised walls of cotton shirts, sweaters, fitted sports caps, and the bodies of browsers. Under that, a familiar bass line with a pronounced offbeat rhythm sounded from further across the road. At the gateway of El Chopo proper, several stalls sold Jamaican styles and reggae riddims. They had far larger speakers, but due to their distance only the lowest frequencies reached us. It was an idyllic day. I took another slow hit. I held the fragrant, almost- sweet smoke in my lungs, and passed the joint back.

Luka took the joint and sighed, “It’s good to stay a little bit paranoid out here.”

I exhaled slowly and smoothly, nodding, understanding exactly what he meant.

Desmadre, Danger, and Drug Use

This chapter is about paranoia and risk. It is also about stories, perceived danger, and overcoming the fear from which “sociedad cuadrada” suffers.

In previous chapters I have shown that a key aspect of artist’s identification as hip-hop is their commitment to the streets, navigating through desmadre and being known through looped interconnectedness. The streets, however, are dangerous. Despite rappers confronting so much

219 danger in their daily lives; despite a long national tradition romanticizing death in México (Paz

1985, Lomnitz 2005)—hip-hop celebrates life and survival on the streets as a kind of authenticating process. There is joy in this, but it is joy made resonant through danger.60 Artists happily put their lives at stake as they navigate through desmadre to not only gain access to audiences, but because the dangerous practice authenticates their voice and allows them to chant their autobiography in unison (Campos 2018). In this chapter, I show how hip-hop artists assess risk and responsibility through paranoia; how they embrace fear and authenticate their autobiography through stories of danger, lecture, and laughter; and how they ultimately rely on one another for security and for recognition that they are not anonymous in desmadre through their transgredient echo.

Scholars have demonstrated that songs become vessels of intimacy as “histories, places, and voices become stacked one upon another, this excess [being] made emotionally salient through musical sound and aesthetic form” (Gray 2013: 18). Studies of hip-hop, however, have been so focused on the ideological and political (read intellectual) content of its lyrics they have largely ignored the felt, emotional, affective function of the lived culture. Within this chapter I contend with subjective terms like paranoia, fear, danger, addiction, and all that I felt in ethnography and heard in rappers stories; I struggle to make that all relevant even though I do not believe other’s states-of-mind are directly accessible (Bilmes 1986; Edwards 1997). To overcome this, I turn to affect theory.

Cultural anthropologists define affect as “felt bodily intensity, the feeling of having a feeling, a potential that emerges in the gap between movement and rest” (Rutherford 2016: 287). Unlike

60 Dr. Christine Yano is owed much credit and my gratitude for adding particular nuance to this chapter.

220 emotions—which are culturally recognized ways of encoding such embodied experiences— affect “provides a resource for anthropologists who are seeking to ground their accounts of the political in something that feels real” (ibid: 292) but that does not necessarily imply one specific way the world works or feels. “To the degree that cultural anthropologists approach institutions as emergent, not given, they have long been operating with a set of tacit assumptions about what makes people tick. Studies deploying affect theory open these tacit assumptions to scrutiny and possible revision” (ibid).

In chapter four, I considered the “quality” of interviews I collected with los HDP, and the ways my ethnography allowed me to hear (or intuit, as Arno called it) qualities of voice and layers of meaning that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Though I did not describe the sounds qualitatively, I did aim to compare these voice that I heard in the streets against those that

I heard in certain interviews. That is, because I developed a range of relationships in the scene, I accomplished a range of interview styles. I interviewed quite a few rappers after traveling with them. Others agreed to an interview immediately after meeting me. This kind of interview often felt shallow as artists relied upon the interview conventions of entertainment journalism to answer my questions. They sounded more like their stage persona rather than their emotionally complex, authentic selves. Obviously, my making such a distinction is far from objective (Koven

2014) and no such authentic face exists underneath the many masks of performance (Goffman

1982); nevertheless, I argue that through ethnography, through being hip-hop and through all the affective qualities shared between, I gained access to qualities of voice and body that solidified relationships.

Rutherford argues, “attention to affect is encouraging cultural anthropologists to think hard

221 about the ways that passions pass between bodies” (Rutherford 2016: 287). I therefore draw on the concept of affect to explore the felt link between the others’ voices and others’ bodies, rappers and my own. Similar to this, and the primary means by which I link voice to affect, is the concept of qualia. The pragmatic concept of qualia—practically emergent sensuous indexes regimented across modalities by cultural processes—destabilizes the polarity between “material bodies” and “abstract symbols… Qualia, as a type of index, are as salient in language and other forms of communicative practice as they are in the forging and management of social relations; they are as salient in the engagement with the “thinginess” of external entities as they are in the incorporation of such entities into proprioceptive experiences of body-focal practice. Ethnographic studies of the human voice as a nexus of phonic and sonic practice provide evidence for this point. (Harkness 2015: 581)

Specifically, I analyze the concept of carnalismo as a type of affective relationship which links individuals to their posses in hip-hop. Throughout this dissertation, I have slowly introduced words (and sounds like Bubu Lubu and güaü) common to the hip-hop community. It has never been my claim that these words are used by all hip-hop artists as part of some exclusive, cohesive argot. The point of hip-hop is linguistic creativity. Various regions of the city had their own styles of talking, and different posses had their own inside sociolects. The word carnal, however, is widely used (and not only across México but also in the US) between friends.

The word translates as “of the flesh” or “by blood,” but colloquially translates as brother or sister. My goal in this chapter, then, is to show how carnalismo develops over time, through shared experiences in desmadre and how it results in not a singular response or a singular emotional state, but a “feeling of feeling” nonetheless.

In the first part, I show how because the concept of danger partially defines the streets and

222 makes flowing through them so exhilarating it becomes an important tool in socialization. Risks were always present in the streets of México; danger always possible. But more than actually experienced, danger is taken up in stories to be lectured with or laughed at. PerroZW once told me that the initials of hip-hop, H.H., actually stand for haciendo histories, actively making history or doing stories. Many artists agreed with this formulation. For example, Spia104 stated that traveling and having experiences in the street was his primary goal in life. Lirika Inverza, who I will introduce below, told me the world was not made of atoms but of stories. In this chapter, I introduce a genre of talking hip-hop wherein artists tell stories about the craziest, most violent, anarchic, sexually explicit, or terrifying aspects of the city that they have experienced.

Artists continually trade these stories en route to events, after concerts, or while in the studio.

When rappers describe their relationships to other rappers, they often do so with the story of incredible, shared experiences. The stories can entertain, caution, upset, or exhilarate. E-Track loved these kinds of stories and called their archetypal hero, lo más rapero, or the most rapper- like. Pavel told me some of his stories, but he did not celebrate them; nor did Presunto another victim of the carceral state. Regardless of how they were evaluated, the stories were real, la neta, the absolute truth. They differed from the lecture-based warnings that I often received because the narrator had actually experienced them. These stories became especially important because it is through them that hip hop artists got a sense of one another, their past experiences and their feelings about them.

In the second part, I tell of drug use in hip-hop. Marijuana is a commonly consumed intoxicant within hip-hop. It is also illegal in México and dangerous to acquire. I tell of drug use not because it is the greatest danger that others encounter, but because it was my own. I use these

223 stories about my own experiences, when I realized the full danger of drugs, partially to resolve my introductory comment to about understanding paranoia, but also as a way to reveal how experiences in hip hop, facing the dangers of desmadre, responding to “the forces that move people, forces that attract, repel, and provoke,” leads to complex affect (Rutherford 2016: 286).

In the final part, I turn away from the discussion of marijuana specifically (though drug use remains relevant) and return to a discussion of the voice. I argue that it is not simply artist’s survival of danger that authenticates their autobiography, but their relationship with others and other’s transgredient echo of their own voice that secures their identity in hip-hop. I introduce the concept of choral voice to theorize the way singular voices become “infectious” through affective relationships and thereby made meaningful through their resonance by a group of bodies. I define the choral voice as a special kind of transgredience. The choral voice represents the dialogic complexities of the posse and place. It represents the relativity of any one autobiography, identity, or voice to the entirety of the musical scene. Every speaker that contributes to the choral sound—whether they are repeating the written verse of one writer or the democratically produced chorus—ultimately does so having travelled along very different routes in the city and in their autobiography) to find themselves in a resounding moment of sound. In this part, I discuss my friendship with El Pinche Pastok, whose life might be best defined as precarious, at-risk, or marginalized, but whose tears and voice must be defined as empowered, defiant, and joyful.

Part One: Lectures and Laughter on Risk

In México there are at least three traffic-related deaths every day, the majority of which are pedestrian. There are at least three homicides every day as well (Fernández 2018), and armed

224 robberies, kidnappings, car thefts, credit card fraud, and various forms of residential/street crime are a daily concern. Simply breathing and drinking in the city can be harmful (Hollander 2012,

Roberts 2017). The corrupt state and militarized police force regularly exert their sovereignty as arbiters of death and disappearance (Hernandéz and Smith 2008, Lomnitz 2005). For all the celebrations of desmadre, there is a sad validity to Mike Davis’s representation of the valley of

México as not a metropolis or megacity, but a megaslum (Davis 2006). And although most of the violence related to drug cartels occurs outside the capital, the “Drug War Zone” is expansive and effects everyone in the nation (Campbell 2014). Every newsstand promises that danger and violence are everywhere, displaying newspapers, tabloids, and magazine covers with images of violent traffic deaths, beheading by the cartels, and the objectified female body for all passers-by to see. Faced with these dangers, undocumented migration to the racist United States still seems worth the risk (Holmes 2013, Chavez 2012).

I received lectures about these dangers from the moment I landed in México, mostly from the night manager of my building. I had to bang on the building’s steel gate every time I would leave or enter the building after sundown, and that was often. I had to startle him awake if he fell asleep at the desk. The first real lecture he gave came after I returned from a concert at 1:00AM, which in the long run could be considered an early night for me.

“Where did you come from? How did you get here?” he asked.

I explained, “I came by Metro.” But that had closed an hour before.

He asked again, “But then where did you go? How did you get here?”

“I went for tacos. Then I needed yogurt. The OXXO on this side was closed, so I crossed over to the other,” I said.

225 He shook his head, “You know multiple residents that have stayed in this hotel have been bashed, bloodied, and robbed in this very neighborhood. Buy a taser, a bat, a damn sword, but don’t count on your luck.”

He was right. The neighborhood was dangerous. While I was there, my friend in the neighborhood, the owner of a trendy pizzeria, was robbed at gun point for his wallet and cell phone. There was also a murder in the neighborhood, supposedly fratricide. And one night, as I was walking from La Chinampa with my best friend from Xochimilco, heading towards that pizzeria, she fell silent and quivered. I asked what was wrong?

She said, “I know where we are now. This is south of la Merced, right?”

I nodded.

She said, “This is where they have been kidnapping young girls for prostitution. Why do you walk through here?”

I shrugged dumbly.

She later introduced me to a friend by describing me as someone without any sense of danger. She did not mean it as a compliment though as some of my male friends in the scene might have. Despite my goal from the outset to study both men and woman in hip-hop; despite most of the woman in my study rejecting the notion that hip-hop was inherently sexists and tempering my questions about their differential experience in the streets, my study in desmadre was nevertheless gendered. My “lack of sense” was certainly a privilege garnered by my cisgendered, heterosexual identity.

The lectures I received from my caretakers at the hotel and my upper middle-class clients in

Santa Fe became more severe when I would mention that I was regularly visiting places like

226 Ecatepec, Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, Iztapalapa, and beyond. These places were, according to them, far more dangerous than was worth the risk; the people there were simply not worth learning about.

I never bought a weapon. I just continued to count on luck. However, in all my time and travel in the streets of México, I experienced no robbery, no violence, no actual threats to my life. Nevertheless, I learned plenty about danger. PerroZW always seemed to be my teacher.61 He taught me to listen for it. When walking with a friend or when watching out for other pedestrians, you should mutter, “aguas, aguas, aguas,” in a low, hushed tone that cuts through the ambient frequencies of desmadre to warn them. Some say the idiomatic warning came from pedestrians warning others about the ever-present puddles, potholes, and perhaps chinampa edges of México under Spanish colonial rule. Now, it is mostly said as a warning of dog shit or chemical spills on the sidewalk or that barreling traffic approaches. Very quickly, after walking with friends, I learned to respond to the word physically, stopping in my tracks. I associated “aguas” with a general danger not “water.”

PerroZW’s most poignant lesson in listening for danger came disguised in a beloved language game. Throughout my fieldwork, rappers would ask me for the literal translation of idiomatic expressions or Metro stations, then replace their terms for the English. For instance,

“No mames” quickly became “No suck” or “don’t suck”; the Metro Salto de Agua, became

“jump of water.”

One evening in El Centro Historica, El Punto Streetwear Shop held an in-store event for La

Caravana Respeta. PerroZW, Azcino, Lirika Inverza, T-Killa, El Siete, a few other rappers, and

61 See “La Noche De Los Poetas Muertos / Lirika Inverza Ft Perro ZW” on YouTube.

227 at least three hundred fans crowded themselves into the six hundred square foot store. The line wound down four flights of the building’s atrium stairwell and trailed out onto the sidewalk. An hour after the event started, PerroZW and I fought the crowd out to walk to a nearby convenient store. We purchased snacks, yogurt, and canned malt liquor.

On the way to the bodega we talked, laughed, and dodged traffic easily. On the way back, however, the sun had set on the valley. My eyes had not yet adjusted to dusk, but cars had not yet put on their headlights. I was lifting my foot into the street to begin crossing, slowly shifting my weight to take my step. My head was turned away from oncoming traffic. In English, PerroZW whispered, “waters, waters, waters,” and flashed his hand to mark some boundary of safety. My ear caught the tone and my body reacted, but with the change of language I expected an actual puddle. I caught my balance, pulled my body back but put my head down to look for the water.

Just then a six-ton truck clambered past a rush of hot wind and grinding metal; its over-wide load hung dangerously into the sidewalk just inches from my down-turned head. There was no water, just danger. PerroZW started laughing. I started laughing. We did not stop laughing the rest of the evening as we returned to the event and told the story again and again.

Scholarly attention to humor and laughter, its motivations and its consequences, and its relation to social relationships has shown it to be a complex sociocultural phenomenon (Apte

1985, Labrador 2004; Petrovic 2018). Decoding any one moment of laughter might reveal it as inspired by ruptures of perceived hierarchies, as in the carnivalesque, or as functioning to relieve stress, inspire communality or (as is often the case in Mexican politics) critique through sarcasm and cynicism (Egan 2001; Gutmann 2002). The laughter ZW and I shared was no less complex and was certainly polyphonic and linked to politics. In a critique of laughter and humor, Michael

228 Billig (2005) noted that “ridicule lies at the core of social life, for the possibility of ridicule ensures that members of society routinely comply with the customs and habits of their social milieu” (2). At least for the men in the scene, laughter was a basic part of hip-hop’s process of socialization into street life. Unlike the lectures I received from my clients and the laughter attached to them—which were evaluative of social distance and amounted to a negative judgement of the streets and those populations that lived in the margins—the laughter from rappers was mostly about me and my role in the streets as hip-hop. I was learning the hard way.

The cruelty of ZW’s humor was not lost on me, nor was the work my own laughter accomplished to show me in a positive light. Beyond its interpersonal relevance, laughing at a near-death experiences has more political implications and is related to both paranoia and the way that danger authenticates and brings out the joy of la calle vida. If safety and danger, pleasure and pain, are continually at stake in the street and these possibilities remain in an ambiguous, ambivalent relationship for those dedicated to desmadre, then “humors’s ambiguity offers a suitable tool for modern political subjects to deal with contradictions that shape their social world and their own incapability to take up a position of clear opposition to the objective of their critique” (Petrovic 2018: 204). For PerroZW and myself, laughter was all we could do in the face of the constant threats of the street, something we could not control.

In the next part, I focus less on the random violences or accidents one might experience on the street and more on the self-elected dangers of drug use in hip-hop. The next part is less about laughter and more about silence and utter fear.

Part Two: Between Danger and Delinquency

Although, there are “several ways to die in Mexico City” (Hollander 2012), each with its

229 own meaning, I center my conversation of danger around marijuana. I do so for a number of reasons: first, because it represents my primary experiences of risk in México. I did not experience violent crime or personal injury while navigating the “dangerous” streets; however, on multiple occasions, due to my proximity with and use of marijuana, I came to fear for my personal safety. I also experienced the dizzying joy of life in desmadre.

Second, although smoking marijuana is illegal, life threatening, and largely rejected by la sociedad cuadrada, or mainstream “square” society, smoking is common and communal in the hip-hop scene. The majority of rappers I met consumed it when they were at events, smoking in small groups in bathrooms, back alleys, and studios. Not everyone smoked it, but no one rejected being around it. Some individuals consumed it multiple times every day outside of hip-hop sociality. A few even sold it. Finally, I tell of marijuana because this communal use of marijuana implicates artists (and anthropologists) in the reproduction of the contemporary North American

“Drug War” (a complex term I will fully define later); therefore, the subject of marijuana reveals how we actively performed and stylized ourselves as we discussed the bounds of risk, responsibility, control, and power in México.

Within this part, I contextualize the risk of marijuana in three ways. I recount how artists ambivalently discussed marijuana and its socially alienating consequences in discourse. Then, I show how beyond talk, because they use illegal drugs rappers necessarily encounter real danger and delinquency and straddle a line between “cartel terrorism” and imprisonment by the state. It is because of this line that MC Luka suggested that paranoia was healthy.

The Ambivalent Role of Marijuana in Hip-hop

In México and the US, the Drug War Zone surpasses the international borderlands and the

230 agricultural states where drugs are grown and produced. Rather than a specific location, the Drug

War Zone is a series of economic and social relations between producers, sellers, users, officers of the law, officials of the State, cartel bosses, and the media (Campbell 2009). Almost everyone is implicated; almost everyone is endangered.

For rappers, marijuana holds an ambivalent status in hip-hop both personally and historically.

Some artists that do smoke swear there is no necessary connection between the culture and the drug. Some artists that do not smoke claim yes, there is an essential connection. For Khampa, this association had consequences on his family life. He told me, “Hip-hop is a form of life, but the moment you start you remove yourself from who you knew before. Because you had a life in the past, but hip-hop moves you away from that. My mom became distant, saying, ‘you can’t talk like that, or listen to that, or watch the explicit videos.’ My Dad was a bit more brutal. ‘You can’t dress like that! Or break the scheme more.’ My dad is a cop. He has seen and caught graffiti writers and people smoking marijuana. He knows how I could go. My friends listen to a lot of pop and Justin Bieber. So I stopped encountering them at parties. It becomes a life without sociality. But then I met friends that skate, friends that beatbox, and friends like Slack, Baster and Khäf. I’ve only known them a little time and made a few plans with them, but they’re becoming some good friends.”

Khampa’s story exemplifies the close metonymy between the street, drugs, and criminality.

This association is as much the result of the media and North American Drug War policies as it is the responsibility of rapper’s own representations of the genre.

One day, rapper Jezzy P posted a meme arguing against any association between hip-hop and

231 marijuana.62 The next week at her home in Ecatepec, during our interview, she proudly showed me her freshly budding marijuana plant. She offered to share a joint with me while we talked. I asked her to clarify her position on marijuana.

I said, “I have read on your Facebook that there is no relationship between hip-hop and mota.

I agree, but I have also smoked with almost every rapper here, and you have your song Los

Efectos (The Effects).63 Tell me about drugs, marijuana, and hip-hop. Because it is complex right?

She laughed and agreed, “Yes. I think it’s something that came with rap. Suddenly, we felt, us rappers saw Snoop and Dre—the ones that were influencing us at the time—that they smoked.

We said, ‘that’s the way it is.’ I also smoked from way before, but when I came to rap, it felt stronger. Every movement has its drug. Electronic dance music and raves had tacha (MDMA) and cuadros (LCD). In ska, there was a bit of weed because it was cheap and coca (cocaine). In rock too, there was coca. Marijuana was what was in, what was part of the movement in rap and reggae since they are like siblings. You say, ‘well I am here, I have to smoke weed’ so I started smoking more weed with Vieja Guardia, MC Luka and them, at all the events and their house. It was commonly accepted inside that circle. You see the videos of Snoop and Dre. It’s natural. We adopted it as common. It was an accepted mentality. There was not any kind of problem with it.

It has continued like that.”

She continued, “Then there was the fight for marijuana rights, with other big rappers who were big smokers from that time. You think, ‘well we are going to support this fight, marching, performing on behalf of it, allying ourselves with the struggle.’ It was common. It was common

62 See “Jezzy P | Superhéroes | One Shot - Plumas Atómicas” on YouTube. 63 See “‘Los Efectos’ (2Phase, Don Konstante, Jezzy P, Yper)” on YouTube.

232 behavior like smoking the peace pipe. Whenever a rapper would come from out of state, it was the same. Other groups were very linked with marijuana, Gente Loca from Taumalipas. El

Cranio, was super marijuano.”

I laughed. She said, “It is true, almost every time we met. They were part of the same scene.

We were in the fight for making hip-hop a movement and we felt because marijuana was a part of that we were compelled to fight for marijuana too—as much for the movement itself as for marijuana. We felt the two were illegal. Because marijuana and hip-hop were illegal, we had to help them come out from the underground. Make it more visible and not seen negatively.”

Similarly, when other artists and government allies reflected on the earliest days of hip-hop in México, they noted how the draconian anti-youth policies of New York’s then mayor Rudy

Giuliani directly inspired the instatement of a corrupt anti-graffiti task force in México, which resulted in the death of more than one young artist.

I asked Jezzy, “Is there a relationship between marijuana and El Narco.”

“How do you mean?” she asked back.

“Well, the problems of El Narco here in México are linked to the United States and our consumption. It is terrible and violent, but can you smoke marijuana here without supporting this industry?”

She responded, “Well, I think that is a question of growing it yourself. What many of us are fighting for is that: growing our own, or a small, legal, sustainable industry that would not affect others like it does with narco-traffic. For some, they can only get marijuana by intermediaries, who come from that. They are part of all that violence. For example, one of my friend that supports self-growing is from Guerrero. We know that it is all part of nature and we fight for this

233 nature. We try to not be a part of the War. The plant is not at fault. It is not what does the damage.

It is the War. And it is also not even the drug of marijuana, it is cocaine and other chemically processed drugs. The problem is the mixture of marijuana in this more turbulent economy, being next to drugs that generate a lot more money. So we want to take marijuana out of this fight. It does not have any reason. You should read the book Los de Abajo by Mariana Azuela and you will see. It speaks about the revolutionaries and how they all smoked marijuana. There was an entire century where marijuana was smoked legally in México, like you could smoke tobacco. So you say, why did they disallow this plant that did no damage to humans? It is because of the textile industry. These industries were gringo, and they put up the block. They said marijuana is not going to be allowed because it will affect our industry. When you don’t understand ‘the why’ of prohibition, you don’t understand why it’s unjust. It was created by third parties, against hemp.”

Here Jezzy explained that reggae and rap music entered into the counter cultural scene at about the same time—both appended to the periphery of el Chopo—and were stereotypically associated with marijuana. However, marijuana was part of larger social and political struggle.

Kolmillo interpreted marijuana with similar complexity. In our interview, after he finished telling me that hip-hop saved lives, I asked him about the culture’s relationship to drugs.

Although he problematized the category of what a drug is, he did not deny the culture’s relationship to them.

He said, “Drugs are very present in México. It is a part of the economy that we cannot deny.

It is part of narco-traffic. For that reason, it is very accessible. People do not have many resources, so kids have to dedicate themselves to transporting the drug. Everyone is consuming.

234 Hip-hop was born in los barrios, poor neighborhoods, black neighborhoods. And poverty is always related to drug addiction. If a kid is here cleaning windows and has nothing to eat, he will use the little money he has to take three hits of mona and he won’t have a problem.”

Mona is a kind of PVC glue which is inhaled. It causes euphoria but also quells the appetite, helps with sleep, and takes away the pains of the body. Mona was not commonly used in the hip- hop scene and, in fact, was severely criticized by artists for the damage it caused to the brain.

Kolmillo continued, “Poverty is very influential in this way. Drugs take part in the culture, because hip-hop is born in poor neighborhoods, and in poor neighborhoods drugs are easily assessable, on every corner. I think this is really important. People are trying to eliminate these spiritual toxins. They are seeking a refuge in the wrong place, looking for a false portal. So yes hip-hop is related to all that—to guns, drugs, prostitution—because all that is related to the lowest barrios. But we are contaminated by everything. We are all doing drugs. You can have addictions to many things: adrenaline, risk, television, food. But it depends on what you are talking about, because if you are talking about smoking a plant, I do not think that is a drug. I think that is another portal for spirituality. And it depends on every person.”

Like Kolmillo, many rappers in the musical genre celebrate marijuana for its effects on consciousness, the experience of sound, and the perception of interconnectedness of the world.

Though he was one of the few that spoke of marijuana use as a spiritual rite. They differentiate marijuana from “unnatural” chemical drugs like cocaine, heroin, or mona, which detract from reality and say that the “natural” plant helps them move their thoughts and think more expansively. Remember, PerroZW felt no contradiction in beginning his set at an anti-addiction concert with a celebration of marijuana use. In these scenarios artists use the talk of drugs to

235 discuss power in a cultural, institutional, historical, economic sense. When pressed, though, they knew the overlap between unnatural and dangerous drugs like methamphetamine and marijuana is not so definitive.

During my interview with Müelas, he offered me Hennessy, an alcohol that came to be associated with hip-hop after 2Pac, Snoop Dogg and several other rappers made songs featuring the product.64 I joked that our interview was a real hip-hop interview now. Apparently understanding my implied association of hip-hop and the conspicuous consumption of certain intoxicants, Müelas laughed, agreed, then explained he had not smoked marijuana for about a year. He smoked for years beforehand, then suddenly stopped enjoying it. He began to have panic attacks, which he interpreted as his body telling him it was enough. He still loved the smell and held nothing against others who smoked, but now he did not want to be addicted to anything, not even sugar.

I told him I was conflicted. I liked to smoke but could not justify the drug’s relationship with the violent narco-economy. He said, “Yes, there is definitely blood on the marijuana. There is not much consciousness about that. People smoke and they do not care. I personally think this is affecting our brothers and friends in the industry, los de abajo. It is a strategy of the government.

I think it is a mechanism of control, having a drug war. I think all drugs should be legal, and there should exist a lot of information on the street and rehabilitation clinics. That is where funding should go instead of towards more soldiers killing more people for a plant, for a product.

There should be rehab clinics and a mountain of information in the street for kids about what cocaine, LSD, and marijuana do to you. The war has everything to do with economics. That is

64 See “La Banda Bastön - Barriobajeros Ft. Yoga Fire & Alemán (Official Video)” on YouTube.

236 the truth.”

Then, in a scathing interpretation of globalism and neoliberalism Müelas related the drug economy to the tobacco economy, child labor, and Nike making shoes for the US Navy. He concluded, “everything is fucked. The system is perfect, but it does not work for you. It works for itself.”

The previous dialogues represent the larger social context of marijuana and its ambivalent status in hip-hop. Khampa admits the strain the association of drugs, hip-hop, and the street placed on his life. Jezzy P explains the link was formed through historical associations of the genre and the plant with corrupt policies of the US and México. She nevertheless imagines a better, sustainable future. Kolmillo also recognizes the association between hip-hop and drugs but argues that is a matter of poverty and place. Müelas sees the association as the result of direct control and hegemony. While it might seem that the risks of marijuana use are about personal decision and responsibility alone, the larger narrative surrounding drugs is more complex than any individual’s choice.

In the following section, I move from a discursive analysis of drugs in hip-hop to tell of how my proximity to drugs led to actual terrifying confrontations with the police and threats of death.

Again, these narratives are submerged within my larger discussion of danger in México and the way danger authenticates one’s voice in hip-hop.

Pulled Over with PerroZW

PerroZW sold marijuana.65 At every concert, he carried a backpack full of a dozen burned copies of his album and a dozen small 1/8 ounce bags of marijuana. If he met his goal of selling

65 See “4:20 - Perro Zw” on YouTube.

237 at least 10 of each at every show, he could cover his rent for the month. I never considered the dangers of spending time with PerroZW until we crossed state lines on tour and were nearly arrested twice in one day.

One morning, after an all night birthday party for another scholar of hip-hop held at my friend’s pizza parlor—where the owner refused to play anything other than alternative rock and never at a slightly tolerable volume—and with only four hours of sleep, I left to meet PerroZW in Iztapalapa. We were going by bus to Puebla for his performance with Santa Grifa, Lirika

Inverza, T-Killa, and a few others. After bagging two dozen CDs, we made our way to the bus depot and secured our passage.

Since we were already drained from our respective nights-before and finding the proper bus out of the city took its own toll, the trip to Puebla was quiet and restful. Leaving the city and seeing fields, hills, and sky was beautiful and refreshing. PerroZW plugged his phone into an external speakers and shared the songs he was currently working on. He played the unfinished tracks, rapped the verses and bars he had written, and partially free-styled where he had not. He explained where he might put a bridge and imagined how a woman singing or a DJ scratching might fill out the track. As he talked, he scribbled new notes on top of an old page of the song’s lyrics. The margins were already filled with previous edits. I let him work, pulling myself to the other side of the rear bench where we sat. I looked out the window again.

Before I could doze off, I heard the familiar spark of PerroZW’s lighter. I thought nothing of it. The bus was mostly empty. So he thought the smell would go unnoticed, especially once covered by a mist of Axe brand body-spray. He seemed to be right the first time he took a hit, but moments after his second hit, a massive man wearing khakis, an athletic polo shirt, thick

238 mustache, and dark sunglasses stepped out of his seat mid-bus and walked back to the rear. In hushed tones, he yelled at us—we were idiots; he was an off-duty officer; we should respect others on the bus; he should call ahead to the precinct. PerroZW did his best to dissemble the situation—he was a rapper; he smoked before he got on the bus; he still smelled of it. I did my best to stay out of it—I was just a writer from the US; my little notebook and pencil proved that.

Unconvinced, the cop cussed at us more, shook his head, and went back to his seat.

Once the bus reached Puebla, PerroZW told me to collect my gear quickly and exit the bus with him at once. He grabbed our backpacks from under the cargo hold, threw me mine, then briskly pushed his way through the crowd away from the bus depot and into the labyrinthine tianguis and produce market. It was a close call, but after the adrenaline had run its course through our systems, we laughed about it.

The rest of the afternoon was uneventful, though it was filled with talk, travel, and performance. First, we settled at a restaurant a safe distance from the bus system, ate, and finished putting his CDs in cases. Before we returned to the street, he called his daughter. He raised his otherwise low and rugged voice to sound sweet and melodic. He told her he would visit her soon. I listened, wondering how many people in the hip-hop scene had ever heard ZW’s paternal voice. Rappers were always more complex persons than even their artistic voice could portray.

After lunch, we took a taxi to the final event. Like most taxi rides, it was terrifying. The driver sped and weaved through traffic. There were no seat belts. The driver looked at us more than the road. Once we arrived, ZW switched into performance mode, and I into ethnographer mode. The concert itself passed as so many others. PerroZW perfectly executed his performance,

239 compelling the crowd to laugh and cheer. As usual, the crowd’s favorite was a song he only performed live. It not only rhymed perfectly, but drew from the aztequismo vocabulary of

Mexico’s central valley and alliterated entire verses with /ch/ words. After the concert, the artists signed merchandise.

By the time the signing finished, it was well after dark. When our ride arrived, I did not know the driver or where we were going, but I was not feeling worried. Lirika Inverza climbed in the passenger seat.66 PerroZW and I climbed in the back of the camper-covered truck bed.

Surprisingly, we found Rapozt Mortem and Ven Saac already in the back.67 I had not met them yet, but I was a fan of their dark, almost gothic style. They were crossing through Puebla on their way back from an event further out in the state and decided to link with Lirika and ZW. Our after-party officially began.

The driver sped off into the quiet city. Despite the fact that Puebla is one of the few urban developments in central México designed in a grid system, our driver could not find our final address. He kept missing the important turns in the network of one-way streets, unable to figure out the system of consecutive address. So we navigated by a series of confused left turns. We talked loudly and laughed, sliding around at every turn. PerroZW had done well at the event. He would be able to afford his share of the hotel room, part of his rent, and food until at least the end of the month. He opened his backpack to find one of his many small pipes and a remaining dime- bag of mota. He took a pinch and stuffed it in the chamber. The car came to a stop at a dark intersection. He sparked the lighter, puffed his cheeks until the marijuana glowed brightly through the blown glass pipe. He inhaled deeply. Suddenly, blue and red lights began flashing

66 See “Lirika Inverza | Notre Dame | Videoclip Oficial ( Prod.Gilbert Hyde)” on YouTube. 67 See “Rapozt Mortem / Underground Ft Proof” and “Ven Saac - Desabrido Prod. H-Ham” on YouTube.

240 outside directly next to us. The truck cab fell silent. PerroZW coughed and exhaled. A cloud of dank smoke filled the cab.

There had been a municipal police cruiser next to us. We could not see it from inside the cab.

They, however, saw us perfectly once we were lit up by PerroZW’s spark. The voice of an officer shouted for us to pull ahead around another corner. PerroZW started to panic, muttering and pleading to himself, “¡No mames! ¡No mames! ¡No me hagas!” (No way! no way! do not do this to me!). He began emptying the contraband from his backpack, stuffing it under the fabric lining the truck bed. Two flashlights lit up our space.

The next hour of interrogation and negotiation was terrifying. I sat in silence, paranoid that I would never see the US embassy. PerroZW again tried to dissemble the situation, attempting to prove he was a rapper not a drug dealer, convincing the police they had no need to further search the vehicle. To do so he gave them copies of his album. Fortunately, they were more interested in the extra $200 pesos they found in each jewel case than the album’s track list, because that featured PerroZW’s song “Pinche Policía” (Fucking Police). Once bribed, all questions of the supposed legal process were satisfactorily resolved, and we drove off unscathed.

During dinner, we recounted the tense event from each of our perspectives. PerroZW admitted to the other rappers that he had put himself and I in a similar predicament only hours before on the bus. Lirika, Ven, and Proof told similar stories of close calls with the law. I told them about my experience with Los Beat Brothers, when the police pulled us over without cause and demanded a bribe.68 We laughed that in this instance the corruption of México’s police benefited us. On the drive back to the hotel, PerroZW and I again sat in the bed of the truck.

68 See “Taqueria Lupita Ayuuk - (by. Beat Brothers)” on YouTube.

241 Unfazed by any lingering fear, he and I hysterically laughed together, singing “The Bird is the

Word” by The Ruffled Feathers at full volume. Something about the repetition of that song was hilarious. Intermittently, he shouted “¡Pipope Policía!” from the window—Pipope being short for pinche poblano pendejo, a derogatory epithet for the people of Puebla.

Another Night After Another Night

Weeks after the trip to Puebla and the day after my talking hip-hop with MC Luka in his dealer’s home, I contacted Ese-O.69 He was a major producer and sometimes-rapper in the scene in his middle twenties, but he did not perform often and was hard to track down. Fortunately, by that time in my study I was sufficiently networked. So another rapper, Afromega, who was in her early twenties and his partner, had given me Ese-O’s direct number during our interview, telling me that talking to him would be helpful.70 I called ESE-O to see if he was available. He said he was already scheduled to shoot a video with Lirika Inverza. Since Lirika and I had recently made stories in Puebla, I messaged him to secure my own invite to the shoot.

An hour later, I met ESE-O and Faruz Feet at Tacubaya. We walked to meet Akusado and

Gwarumo of the media company Titanium The Cypher MX at a nearby park.71 We waited for

Lirika Inverza there. Lirika was late though because he did not yet know where the park was.

Once he arrived, we teased him, saying he still needed to learn from la calle. We then headed into the surrounding neighborhood to find a visually appealing but quiet corner—which was quite a difficult task in desmadre.

Filming led to a meal, which led to a longer recorded interview in a nearby park. Most of that

69 See “Ese-O Produce (Parte1) Feat Malva.Afromega,Jota Ache, Sidu,Zalme, Hispana & Nefftys.” on YouTube. 70 See “Afromega - Titán ()” on YouTube. 71 See their Channel “Titanium The Cypher MX” on YouTube.

242 time was filled with conversations about their early inspirations, evaluations of other artists’ abilities, and story after story of the crazy and dangerous moments they had experienced in their life of hip-hop. After the interview, Lirika Inverza and I promised to meet at Nedman Guerrero’s show later that night. I mentioned that MC Luka was supposed to be there. He said T-Killa might come as well.

A few hours later, Lirika and I met at Los Hijos del Burro, another concert hall that had supposedly been permanently closed. It was just north of the Carpa Astros Circus, where I was once confused as a drug dealer. Los Hijos del Burro was only 30-minutes walk from where I lived. It served cold draught beer and gringas, one of the rare dishes in México to use flour tortilla. The bar was not exclusive to hip-hop fans though. Many in the audience were pedestrians that wanted a drink and entertainment.

Despite Lirika not having the habit of drinking beer, and me not being especially thirsty for one, we ordered a round while we waited. We talked about family life. He and his partner had enjoyed many years of platonic friendship together. Once they began a romantic relationship, they were pregnant within four months. This led to a drastic change in their lives as a couple, especially because he moved in with her family. His mother-in-law disliked his career as a rapper. This was understandable, he admitted, since before his son was born, he drank and took drugs too often. Unlike most rappers I interviewed who said hip-hop saved their lives, Lirika said fatherhood had saved him from hip-hop. Fatherhood set him on a more tranquil and responsible path. He smiled, took a deep drink of beer, then said he would exclude tonight.

Nedman Guerrero soon arrived for the show, then T-Killa and Eriak Fiesko too. Eriak’s arrival was a surprise. He had been a well known slam poet, who had suddenly left the scene

243 three years earlier when he fell deathly ill due to some environmental disease. He now had to wear airtight googles at all times to protect his permanently damaged eyes from all airborne toxins. MC Luka did not attend, but his dealer, who I will call Alex, did. Alex bought our drinks for the night.

It was raining outside, thundering too. Police sirens screamed past the doorway. Inside it was loud, damp, and increasingly sweaty. The opening acts began, but we remained far from the stage where we could continue talking. Alex and Lirika became fast friends, discussing business, concert organization, and the monetization of rap.

As they talked, I felt increasingly unsettled as I overheard a problem developing at the door.

An already intoxicated man was hassling the security guards at the front-door to let him enter.

Despite his already belligerent condition, security acquiesced. For the next hour, the man drank more, smoked more, and wobbled from table to table hassling patrons. He engaged in aggressive conversation with anybody that caught his eye and would grab their drinks, supposedly by accident. I avoided his gaze but also felt uncomfortable turning my back to him. I had experienced aggressive, drunk gorrónes in places before. But this man was different. I was also unsettled by the spending habits of Alex, our new friend, who was buying our drinks and sharing bumps of cocaine with Lirika.

Suddenly the aggressive stranger approached our table. He focused entirely on Lirika and

Alex, putting his back and shoulder to my face. The two acted as politely as they could, looking at me around the interloper’s back, tightening their brow, shaking their head, and expressing their annoyance. I remained out of the stranger’s peripheral view as best I could, missing most of the conversation, and happy to do so. He only noticed me after he took my beer, and Alex stopped

244 him. The stranger aggressively denied the beer was mine. I begged Alex to ignore the rudeness.

At some point, the stranger began soliciting Lirika to help him accomplish some scheme related to drug trafficking. He appealed to the fact that he was a “bad ass motherfucker,” promising that was reason enough for Lirika to join him. He kept lifting his shirt and pulling at the strings of colored beads and shells, slung over his right shoulder and under his left arm. They were Santería beads—Santería being an Afro-Cuban and Yoruban religion now associated with certain cartels in México. He then became more aggressive and braggadocios. He claimed he was, in fact, cartel related. At that, Alex became especially angry. He took another hit of cocaine from his house key and began yelling at the stranger, criticizing his rudeness and questioning his claims of importance. Alex said he too was cartel related. The argument exploded into shouting and shoving. Finally, the bouncers grabbed the stranger and dragged him towards the door. The stranger promised he would come back and kill us. Alex ignored the threats and yelled at the bouncers for letting the guy enter in the first place.

After we all calmed down, Alex said goodbye and left abruptly. The show ended. Lirika

Inverza came down too. Since the Metro had already closed, Lirika asked if he could stay at my place for the night. I agreed that was a good idea. We walked the two metro stops of distance together. On the way, he explained that the world is not made of atoms. It is made of stories.

The stories I made with PerroZW and Lirika represent the self-elected dangers of hip-hop.

They also exemplify how rapper’s ambivalent position on drugs is lived out actually in experience. They live somewhere between the State’s arguably oppressive stance, mainstream society’s stereotypes, and the realities of narcoterrorism. However, these stories also represent the euphoria of being irresponsible and being truly present in the street. As I imbricated myself in

245 the hip-hop scene I had more and more dangerous experiences with artists, I collected more stories to tell. Through these stories, I authenticated my commitment to hip-hop and la vida calle. Just as smoking in the bathroom at La Fiesta Bar started my relationship with MC Luka and then his drug dealer, my near arrest with PerroZW and Lirika reinforced my friendship with both of them and allowed me access to other parts of their life.

In the final part of this chapter, I return to discuss risk in a wider sense. As noted in part one, not all danger is self-elected or even avoidable. The city is always dangerous and often toxic. I tell the story of El Pinche Pastok, a rapper from Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl.72 My stories with him allow me to finalize what paranoia meant for me in the city, to discuss how rappers use their voice to find their balance, to show how they double their voice with others to overcome silence, and most importantly to introduce the meaningfulness of tears in hip-hop.

Part Three: El Pinche Pastok

When I saw one of them pull out a blackened glass bulb, I got nervous and began to plan my exit. Crystal Meth, PCP, Crack Cocaine, anything that has to be freebased is not something I can be comfortable around. Like mona, I do not understand it; I do not want to understand it.

Leaving would not have been that great a loss in terms of my project; before that moment, everything had been too energetic and too disorienting to amount to data. Trying to define any logic between my interview questions and his answers was all but impossible. There were just too many people and too much noise and distraction. Then there was the terrifying glass bulb. But I stayed. I stayed because it was hip-hop: the realest hip-hop I could ever expect to encounter.

I dedicate this final part of the chapter on danger to El Pinche Pastok. El Pinche Pastok lived

72 See “El Pinche Pastok -En Las Calles Donde Creci. FT- THC Lokote / Licho One / Karso / Par D Rap” on YouTube.

246 in la Oriente, a very dangerous place.73 He and his crews La Nota Cruda and Pulcilga Rec faced constant threats against their life, if not by random acts of violence, then by homelessness, starvation, drug overdose, and natural disease. Despite all that impending danger, Pastok lived joyfully and artfully. And through hip-hop, he made the streets an inviting place.

Pastok was entirely committed to crafting his voice, dedicating himself to lyricism and flow.

Throughout my time in México, I witnessed dozens of phenomenal rappers, and I had dozens of conversations like the one I had with Elemsiburron. According to most everyone’s standards of what makes a good rapper and real hip-hop, Pastok would rank highly. To understand his skills and what Pastok can voice in just one breath, one must witness his 65-bar single-take performance of “El Real Verso Del Masacre”.74

Despite his considerable skill and his certain dedication to hip-hop, Pastok was truly underground. He rarely organized concerts with México’s more mainstream scene like La

Caravana Respeta. He did not monetize his performances or his produced tracks. He did not advertise himself beyond his Facebook page. Though he was hard to encounter, his voice mattered greatly for those he was around. His performances were accessible only by invite, by accident, or by gift. In fact, I did not see him perform el “Real Verso Del Masacre” until my final night in México. Few others had. He gave me, my best friend, and the owners of the trendy pizzeria a private and heartfelt performance. He had been working on the song for nearly three years, and that night was one of the first times he had performed the song for anyone. The performance brought me to tears.

Like my previous story of Pavel in La Chinampa, these stories of Pastok in Ciudad

73 See “Un Solo Barrio - El Pinche Pastok” on YouTube. 74 See “El Pinche Pastok Ensayando el Real Verso del Masacre” on YouTube.

247 Nezahualcóyotl represent presence in hip-hop and a dedication to la calle. In the following vignettes, I tell of how I met Pastok, how I did exactly what everyone told me not to do in their lectures on danger, and how I dove headlong into the destiny of hip-hop. To get past my fear, to befriend Pastok, and enter into his crew, I had to take foolhardy and potentially life-threatening risks. By the time Pastok pulled out that glass bulb, I had already survived far too many earlier poor decisions to judgmentally cut ties with him for one of his own. By the time I heard his final performance at the pizzeria, I understood his voice intuitively—one breath, one moment, one performance. I understood my own tears through his. And so, Pastok represents my deepest ethnography.

By telling these stories and investigating what I call choral voice, I attempt to answer Arjun

Appadurai’s (1988) basic questions about the multiplicity of voice:

How many voices are concealed beneath the generalizations of reported speech in much

ethnography? And how many voices clamor beneath the enquiries and interests of the

single ethnographer? How can we construct our voices so that they can represent the

diversity of voices we hear in the field? How can we construct in anthropology a dialogue

that captures the encounter of our own many voices with the voices we hear and purport

to represent? The problem of voice (‘speaking for’ and ‘speaking to’) intersects with the

problem of place (speaking ‘from’ and speaking ‘of’). (Appadurai 1988: 17)

Last Train Home

Rap Real México (RRMx) was another rap crew that formed out of El Siete’s workshops. It was made up of rappers from Roma Norte, El Centro, and Los Doctores. I had been following them since they first decided to call themselves RRMx. We spent many afternoons together at

248 Reyvax’s house or Cytero’s house, where they would rehearse, and we would eat, argue, and laugh. One afternoon early in my study, I invited them to attend a concert featuring Lirika

Inverza and Proof at a venue called La Mano Negra. I had not met Lirika Inverza or Proof yet, but I knew the members of RRMx were fans. The group considered going until Alex-O found out the event was to be held in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, La Oriente.75 He actually laughed at the idea of going, claiming they would kill him out there. I was exceedingly disappointed by the statement. I knew La Oriente was defined by its reputation, but I expected that the young rappers would see through the mala fama, or bad reputation of the place. Either way, his fear and laughter reminded me that despite my confidence in getting to and from the Nezahualcóyotl cultural center during the day to link with los Hijos de Poeta, I did not actually know the place after dark and desmadre assured getting there at night would be an entirely new experience. I was absolutely entering a dangerous neighborhood, but in the end, I convinced myself that fear was all the more a reason to forge ahead.

I left RRMx and returned to Hotel La Selva to prepare for my trip to Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl.

In my respite, I prepared myself psychologically for the trip, talking myself through my fear and dedication to ethnography. At dusk, I left to Metro Chabacano. It was dark by the time I caught my bus at Pantitlan. The trip took me past my familiar route then dropped me off on a surprisingly well-lit and tree-lined street. Believing the stereotypes, I had imagined pure urban decay. Instead, I found people eating at restaurants and walking with grocery bags full of fruit. I turned down a residential street and walked a quarter mile more. Although I saw elderly people strolling and children playing into the night, I was still paranoid, struggling to keep my

75 See “El Club del Rap One Shot: Alex-O” on YouTube.

249 composure. Fortunately, after a few blocks, I found the venue. I paid the cover, hurriedly entered, and felt immediately safer. As unfamiliar as the crowd was, I knew I could trust them. They were fans of rap and aspiring young artists.

La Mano Negra had once been an alley, but at some point someone constructed a fiberglass roof to bridge the buildings. The bottom floor was some twenty by sixty feet. There was no separate second floor, but there was a walk way along the right-side building that led to four small alcoves where a bar, a snack room, and a private room for the performing artists had been improvised. When I first arrived, I took advantage of the venue’s strange architecture to gain a bird’s-eye-view of the scenario. I sat at the top of the unguarded stairway at the back to overlook the cramped audience. They were talking, battling, cyphering, and waiting for the performance.

When a punk band arrived and began to set up on the landing, I descended into the crowd to get a different perspective of the scene. I moved around the crowd, until I finally sat along the left- side wall to take notes. A cypher started near me and I poked my head in to hear more clearly. A man wearing a baggy, dark-blue canvas jumpsuit took notice of me and my notebook.

He asked, “Are you a rapper? That is great that you are writing even here.”

I responded, “No. I am from the United States. I am here to learn about and write about hip- hop and rap.”

He introduced himself as El Pinche Pastok and sat down next to me. We started talking under the loud crowd and pounding music.

Pastok spoke in a rapid, slightly disjointed manner, punctuating his utterances continually by calling me carnal.76 Pastok outlined that hip-hop was active in the mid 90s in Ciudad

76 See “El Pinche Pastok, Masacre Liriko” on YouTube.

250 Nezahualcóyotl. It was dominated by gangs and cholos then, but the scene had changed since, especially after graffiti crews came to understand the culture. He said if I was interested in studying hip-hop, I had come to the right place. He said it was good I was down here with the crowd rather than up there with Lirika and Proof. They were good rappers, and it was good that they were working here, but they should be down here taking part in hip-hop. Pastok then mentioned I should meet his best friend also named Rubén. We were not only tocayos, sharing the same name, but both came from California. Rubén had lived there from age six until he was deported at 31. When Pastok introduced me to Rubén, the night took a surprising turn. Without fear, I agreed to leave the event to walk back to their house. They invited me. They seemed nice.

I took the chance.

On the walk, Rubén explained how terrible deportation had been. He had been raised in the

United States. He knew nothing of México and even less of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl where he ended up. His deceased parents still had claim on a self-built, cinder-block house there; so at least he was not homeless. In his first days back local youth constantly attacked Rubén, but he continually fought back. He earned their respect and his “hood pass.” He pointed out the corner where he had bled. Pastok laughed at the violent scenarios. He assured me the neighborhood was not so bad now, especially if you were part of the hip-hop scene and had a velador, or caretaker.

Finally, we arrived at Rubén’s and Pastok’s house.

We entered the big gate and crossed the courtyard. They introduced me to the downstairs neighbor. He suffered from some debilitating illness of the stomach, like an ulcer, only worse. He did not leave the house much. Pastok introduced me to a kitten that had taken residence under the stairwell. Rubén ran ahead to lock up his own pit-bull. We climbed the stairs, lighting our way

251 with our cell phone screens. The second floor was another empty room, scattered with the remnants of the last party. Rubén and Pastok laughed. It was a big one, they said. Pastok pointed to a space on the floor space where he had to beat an uninvited and unwanted guest. Thy tolerated the presence of el gorrón, until he inappropriately disrespected Pastok in a rap battle. I mirrored their outrage, “I can’t believe he did that in your own house,” but my paranoia mounted.

Pastok’s bedroom was also mostly empty. There was a twin size mattress along the back wall.

Above the mattress, there was a painted over windowsill. The slats between the panes divided the wall into twenty rectangles. Each was filled with intricate graffiti. Along the wall across from the door was a sunken shelving unit, filled with assorted products like deodorant, cans of food, bottles of water, and a hot plate. Then there was Pastok’s studio to the right: crates, buckets, and shelves where Pastok had placed an old computer, an equalizer, and random stereo equipment.

He had a dynamic microphone clipped into a stand and a pop-cover made from a circular guard with an old sock pulled over.

Pastok sat me down on an old bucket and began showing me his music. He showed me his favorite American underground rappers like Jedi Mind Tricks, MF DOOM, and R.A. the Rugged

Man. He played me his own self-produced singles. He said he produced all his own instrumentals but did not consider himself a producer since he gave all his songs away for free for anyone to rap over. He explained he would rather hear other people do something with his music and do something for the culture than be payed.

We sat and listened to music, passing a joint (which I mostly feigned smoking) and enjoying the conversation until his crew returned. They had grown bored with the concert and were

252 already severely intoxicated. One of their friends began to yell at me, telling me he did not like white boys. He used the English word and kept repeating it. Rubén lectured him about being polite to guests. Rubén clarified that I was Mexican, that my grandfather was from Michoacán.

Rubén pointed out that his and my skin were equally white, guerro. In fact, his eyes were not even brown like mine. Their irate friend was not convinced, repeating himself. Rubén escorted him out. Pastok apologized and promised me that his friend’s behavior was not representative of his crew. He said I would always be welcome and safe with him. We continued listening to his music.

When Rubén returned, Pastok noticed the time and broke off our conversation. The Metro would close soon. He grabbed me and escorted me to Tucci Mollicone Avenue, a still busy and well-lit street south of where I had arrived initially. He found a cart selling freshly made potato chips, bought me a road snack, hailed a minivan, and sent me off to Metro Pantitlan. By the time

I arrived, the station’s entry gates were already closed. I was terrified to be locked out, but with encouragement from a vendor packing up her wares, I jumped the exit turnstiles and fought my way through the throngs of exiting commuters descending from the station platform. The stairs felt endless. I had to weave between dozens of people, shouting apologies to get their attention before they toppled over me. I cleared the desmadre just as the final whistle blew, and I entered the train just as the door slammed behind me. It was the last train of the night.

Safe on my way home, I laughed out loud hearing my own strange echo. I wondered how many people in México were ever alone in a Metro car.

Huérfanos de la Calle

The day after MC Luka and I talked at Plaza Peyote, when we mutually understood the

253 importance of staying paranoid, I found myself walking through the countryside outside Ciudad

México, alone, an hour from the safety of urbanity in either direction, and not entirely sure the direction I was heading. I understood him, but had not learned from him. I had planned to meet

Pastok and his crew, La Nota Cruda, in Chalco de Díaz Covarrubias. From there, we would travel to La Cantina Familiar La Avenida in Valle de Chalco Solidaridad. That did not happen: I was late; they found a more direct route at the last minute; none of us had fully functioning cellular phones. When I realized we would not be meeting, I had to improvise. I took a metro to the end of its line. I asked around to find the general area where a bus headed that direction might stop. I waited and watched until I saw a bus with a neon placard in its window that hinted its destination and route, but which gave no specifics. I asked the driver if he would pass by where I was headed. He simply nodded yes, though he certainly did not hear my question.

When the bus driver kicked me off at the end of the line in a place I was not supposed to be, I asked around to get my bearings. Finally realizing my error, I decided to walk the rest of the way.

I had downloaded a semi-functional map to my unintelligent phone, so I knew that I had to walk west. Unfortunately, the map did not show me that Xicotencatl, a massive collapsed volcanic cone would stop me from making a direct route. So I set out walking for miles. After the fresh air cleared my mind and the clear blue sky and piercing sun unsullied by smog woke me from my city-borne stupor, I realized how isolated I truly was. I was so focused on finding hip-hop and intrigued by the strange geology and bucolic landscape that I forgot that nobody knew where I was or where I was supposed to be. In fact, nobody would notice if I did not check in for days.

Somehow after months in the city, desmadre seemed safe and natural. I spent the second hour of my two-hour hike lying to myself about the commonality of disappearances in México. Instead, I

254 focussed on the stray dogs I saw, the family swimming in an agricultural slough, and the incredibly out-of-place van selling ocean shellfish along the country road. I helped a family with a flat tire and allowed some old man to help me cross the street as if I were his juvenile grandson.

At four in the afternoon, I finally reached the venue and just in time. I was terribly dehydrated and slightly sunburnt. Pastok noticed. He handed me a styrofoam cup of pulque and told me to finish it. He took the microphone from the host who was calling him to the stage and, without any introduction, began his energetic performance. Like many venues, there was no stage, only a small area that Pastok had to aggressively defend from the ever encroaching audience. The bar was already packed tight, and the air quality made it even more claustrophobic. It smelled of body odor, pulque, spilled beer, cigarettes, marijuana, and mona. It was overwhelming and chaotic, but it was familiar. I relaxed and felt at once rejuvenated from my trek.

After performing his songs and acting as backup for another rapper, Pastok returned. He suggested we should go to the attached warehouse to cool down. There he introduced me to a few local friends and rappers, who in turn introduced me to their friends. The event proceeded like any other. Pastok and I split up, reunited, and split up again. I met new people, chatted with them, then would take my leave to watch some group perform or to catch a battle series

By that time in my study, I was already at the point of diminishing returns. I was involved in more hip-hop than one dissertation would ever need. I could have continued chasing Ollín, moving with artists to further scenes, but my time was running short. So, I stopped introducing myself as an anthropologist research hip-hop. I simply introduced myself as a friend of Pastok.

255 That did not change our talk, though. These new rappers and fans talked me like others had.

They commended me for coming out to their corner of hip-hop. They authenticated their scene as more real because it had less resources than the hip-hop in El Centro. They told more stories of lo más rapero. I still always had my notebook and pencil on me—not so much to take notes for myself but to give to anyone that wanted to scribble their name, alias, contact information, or favored albur inside.

At one point, an obviously not-hip-hop older man sidled next to me and nudged me. Nothing indexed him as being hip-hop: neither his fashion, nor his comportment. His complete lack of rhythm nodding to the stage performance gave him away especially. Judging from the nystagmic waver in his eyes, he was quite drunk. He nudged me again and whispered, “Are you a fly?”

“What?” I asked—not for ignorance of the idiom, but for the ridiculousness of his question.

“You’re a fly, a cop.” He nodded toward my notebook.

“No.” I looked away. I had been confused as a rapper and even a drug dealer at previous events, but never an undercover cop. He was obviously bullying me. He was not worth my time.

He nudged me again.

“I am. I am a cop,” he said and pulled his index finger to his lips and slowly looked around the room, scowling. “Don’t tell anyone, or else…” He made a clumsy threatening gesture at me.

“Ok.” I said. I turned to face the stage. He tried to explain more about his undercover work, but I ignored him until he became bored with his own talk and just stared at me. I had played the conversation dispassionately, but it spun me into paranoia. Was this cop like the police I had encountered with the rap group Los Beat Brothers? Was this cop like one of those that had falsely incriminated the rapper Presunto? Was he not a cop at all? Of course he was not a cop.

256 What was he? Why was he there? Why was he watching them? Why was he watching me watch them? I slowly, nervously, allowed more and more cramped individuals to fill the space between us.

Suddenly, Espejo appeared at my side, scaring me more, asking me if I remembered him. At first, I did not, but he opened my notebook to show me his name inside. He had signed it months prior in Iztapalapa, at the Victoria Emergente event. He had given me his number, but I never followed through in calling. I was now in his neighborhood. He said he was happy to see me so far outside the city and began introducing me to his friends in the crowd. They were hip-hop producers, rockabilly photographers, folkloric dancers, and ska musicians. All were there to check out the rap event. Espejo suggested I follow him to another house party nearby. There, he promised, we would meet even more people that deserved to be in my study.

I was tempted, and he was urgent, but I knew my study had nothing to gain from following. I humbly declined. He persisted. Pastok suddenly pulled me away. He warned me not to follow, that Los Heroes was not a safe place, and that I should never follow strangers from events. He did not see the irony of his concern; I had followed him from the La Mano Negra through the dark streets of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl just weeks prior. Espejo, a bit drunk, began to lobby

Pastok himself, promising him a chance to meet other artists and organizers. Their negotiation reached a level of intensity that I could not entirely follow, so I put on my dark sunglasses and receded back into the crowd.

Espejo soon left, and Pastok came to find me. He lectured me a bit more, making sure I understood that not everyone could be trusted. I agreed that was very true, adding that I had not considered following Espejo in the first place because loyalty meant leaving a place with those

257 with whom you had arrived, your veladores. He accepted that and decided it was time for us all to leave as well.

We collected the crew from throughout the crowd and reconvened outside. We began walking north, heading toward the main thoroughfare where busses back to the city passed. We navigated the unpaved streets and cracked and sinking sidewalks carefully, warning each other—aguas! aguas! The suburb was quiet, but we chatted loudly. We talked about the different acts we saw and the people we had met. We stopped at a tortillería to count the last of our moneys. We first pooled it to insure everyone had enough for the bus-fare and bought salsa and tortillas with the rest. None of us had eaten for hours; only the calories of beer and pulque and the energy of the event had sustained us. The salsa upset our empty stomachs. One crew member declined to have any, worrying about his ulcer. Another practically gulped it, accepting that his nose would be running and his stomach would burn for the next hour. Pastok laughed, “Look at us. We are orphans of the street, aren’t we?”

He threw his arm around my shoulder, “Come on carnales, let’s go.”

We laughed and carried on to the bus, talking and enjoying our walk. The bus ride itself, however, was quiet. Most of the crew fell asleep. Pastok and I looked out the window, watching faded graffiti along the median. He spoke to me slowly, quietly, and in a flat tone, reciting a lineage of rappers and crews from before even Cartel de Santa, MC Luka, Sombras Urbanos, and

Sociedad Café had recorded. He connected the names to neighborhoods and smiled gently. He had seen it all. Suddenly, blood began to stream from his nose. He apologized, explaining this happened from time to time, and he just had to wait for it to stop. I understood, he had told me about his illness previously. He should not have survived, but he did. He tilted his head back, and

258 we fell silent.

Traffic back was slow, but finally we made it to familiar territory. Pastok began to stir.

Through his blocked nose, he asked if I could get the rest of the way home safely, apologizing that he could not escort me further into Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl. He explained that he no longer lived there. He had a fight with Rubén. Rubén had kicked Pastok out of the house. Pastok had to spend a few days homeless but had since found a spot in La Paz. He also had resolved the fight enough with Rubén, so that Rubén allowed him to retrieve his belongings—his computer, his mic, and the photo album of his crew’s graffiti. That was all that mattered to him. He said goodbye and ambled to the door. The driver momentarily slowed, and Pastok jumped out.

Hip-Hop, Transgredience, and the Choral Voice

Despite my dedication to following Pastok, and despite my own judgement that he might be the realest emcee in México, I never completed an interview with him. When we attempted to talk formally, Pastok fell quiet, and in a culture where silence is uncommon our lack of an interview probably speaks louder than any of those I did complete. “¿Por que callar, si nacimos gritando?” Why do you fall silent if you were born screaming? This is that story.

After the first night I met Pastok, I attended his birthday party weeks later. It was then that he pulled out the glass bulb. In our third meeting, the meeting before our trip to Chalco, I attempted to hold an interview with him. When I arrived to his house on the day of our proposed but unconfirmed interview, Pastok was happily making his bed, adjusting the one blanket he owned, rapping hard to his own songs, performing intensely for a still-immobile party crasher from the night before who was sitting in the corner. Neither of them noticed me in the doorway, so I just stared and watched the full sixteen bars of his verse. It somehow took that long to adjust that one

259 blanket. When he finally saw me, he was surprised and near speechless. In a fluster, he sat me on the freshly made bed, excusing the desmadre of his own room, blaming the party the night before. He refilled a bottle of water for me and dashed out of the room. He soon bounded back in, dragging my unshaven and sleepy-eyed tocayo behind him. A few other crew members followed. Rubén sat down and explained that Pastok had asked him to come and help translate anything too complex for me to understand. Pastok added that he knew my Spanish was decent, but he did not want me to miss anything about his life. And that is when he began to cry. His lips quivered, and tears streamed down his cheeks. When he tried to sputter out a few more words, his voice cracked. He looked at Rubén. He looked at his crew. He smiled, and they knowingly patted his back and guided him to an overturned bucket. He sat, looked at me, tears still streaming, and I turned away, uncomfortable with the rapper’s tears.

Before his tears dried, though, Pastok stood up, turned up his speakers and began rapping at me. He took no questions, but provided all the answers. Although Pastok and I could not complete any formal interview, our time together was far from silent. The failure of that interview, I argue, speaks to the great difference between anthropology and hip-hop. Sometimes the story that needs to be told is expressible only in song, and the only way Pastok wanted or needed to be heard was through the depth of his hip-hop. He always had more to express than what an interview could exact. The interview is pre-determined to be “abstractly sequential, classificatory, [and] explanatory” (Ong 1982: 8). That was a limit to what he might express, and so rather than choking back tears and forcing his spoken voice through his constricting larynx, he rapped at me. In that medium, his voice was practiced and powerful. His words and emotion flowed. Just as importantly, as he began rapping, his crew began to back him, doubling his voice.

260 Pastok’s voice was immediately echoed and authenticated by his posse. What he said, they said.

What he experienced, they felt.

As shown in earlier chapters, during stage performances of hip-hop, it is quite common for rappers to have a partner double their voice, strengthening rhymes, responding to lyrics as if it were a dialogue, and adding a texture otherwise impossible. When PerroZW had discussed this in the workshop, he explained it was simply more entertaining that way and added legitimacy to a performance. It proved that you were good enough to have the support of another rapper. But he warned when backing others, you should not overpower the lead’s voice nor rhyme along the entire time. You should only fill out certain bars, adding punch. Pastok’s posse, on the other hand, responded to the cracks in his speaking voice and followed none of that common stage knowledge. They rapped along passionately, word for word, draping their arms around Pastok’s shoulders, pulling each other back and forth, anticipating their favored lyrics and looking directly into my face and his while shouting into my microphone. Their body, lungs, breath, and voice became one. They were Pastok’s words, but the posse told their story together through hip-hop.

Pastok’s tears dried, and I got another small story in carnalismo.

It was Easter Sunday.

Conclusion: Voices Echoed Back Natural scientists are constrained by standards of evidence that limit their ability to make broad claims. Cultural anthropologists produce a more ambitious, if less self-assured kind of knowledge: Instead of telling people this is how the world is, we invite them to imagine how the world might look, feel, or sound if experienced by an actor situated in a particular place and time. (Rutherford 2016: 286)

The ground in México is unstable. At any moment, it might give out. In hip-hop, where being

261 there and talking about it is the culture itself, taking trust falls into desmadre becomes the method. Luck becomes the safety net. The stories I heard from countless rappers and even my own reckless abandon following anyone that was interested in talking hip-hop was key to la vida calle. It was dangerous work, but it pushed me deeper into the culture and became an addicting, adrenaline-pumping jump into desmadre.

As noted in the introduction of this dissertation, several studies of hip-hop evaluate the positive role rap music holds in the world for its ability to give voice to marginalized youth.

While I do not deny the validity of this, I want to argue there are more immediate benefits for the lives of rappers living in desmadre, including an awareness of the streets tinged with a proper amount of paranoia. The value of the voice is not just that it is heard or understood by the academic, but that it makes sense of desmadre and that it is echoed back by a feeling posse if only fleetingly.

In this chapter, I have exemplified the more paranoiac edges of hip-hop. When MC Luka and

I were looking out on the street, smoking an illegal drug in a toxic city, we were talking within a specific context defined by dominant political and economic conditions and noting our vulnerability within it.77 However, we were also talking about our command of the streets and taking responsibility for our perspective within it. When Lirika Inverza, PerroZW, and I were facing life and stress, we were choosing risk for ourselves and authenticating our autobiographies through our stories of lo más rapero. We were pushing the boundaries of good sense and experiencing the dangers that so many could only lecture about in fear. In the end, we came out laughing.

77 See “MC Luka - Orgullo Nacional (Video Oficial)” on YouTube.

262 For all the positive value I want to associate with these stories, though, it was my time with

Pastok that put everything into perspective and revealed the importance of the transgredient voice in hip-hop. There are far more “huérfanos de la calle” in México than any statistic might make sensible. There are millions of inhabitants left behind by the modernist projects of the state.

They have no access to the formal economy. They must secure their own food, water, income, and physical health in an incredibly inhospitable urban environment. Their voices are unaccounted for in the political process. They are anonymous. And yet, through hip-hop, artists not only secure their safety but find their voice echoed back. They experience their existence and value in what Bakhtin called transgredience, that moment in dialogism when the individual recognizes their unique perspective through the reflected perspective of another (Gardiner 1996).

Pastok cried, but with the support of his crew, he did not fall silent.

Throughout the entirety of this dissertation, I have focused on rappers. Here I want to displace them for a moment and follow their voice as it spreads out across their posse. For instance, in the case of Pastok, his previous experiences, his joy, pain, and education in the streets informed his initial utterances in rap, inspiring his writing, recording, and performance process. At the same time, the members of his posse (myself included) were equally enrolled in this creative process, experiencing their (our) own movements to-, through-, and from the scene.

His posse attached stories, memories, and affect to his sound and, in their own creative, improvised way (Gray 2013). So, as they shouted Pastok’s words for him, filling in for the gaps and cracks in his voice, they projected themselves into the sound, performed their identities through them, and recognized their existence (as individuals, as a posse) by them. This is the choral voice, the affect of carnalismo.

263 CHAPTER 7: CONFESSIONS OF A CULTURAL APPROPRIATOR

I know that some people will think that a diary is of a basically private nature and that it

should not be published; and those who hold this point of view will probably be severely

critical of my decision to publish my husband’s diaries. But after seriously weighing the

matter, I reached the conclusion that it is of greater importance to give to the present and

future students and readers of Malinowski’s anthropological writings this direct insight

into his inner personality, and his way of living and thinking during the period of his most

important work in the field, rather than to leave these brief diaries shut away in an

archive. I am, therefore, solely responsible for the decision to publish this book.

(Valleta Malinowski, 1966)

This chapter is an ethnography of encounter, exploring how culture is made in “everyday encounters among members of two or more groups with different cultural backgrounds and unequally positioned states in their relationship” (Faier and Rofel 2014: 364). In this case, the encounter is between myself (an academic with delusions of being hip-hop) and activist rappers.

In this it is my goal to demonstrate how power is not unidirectional but develops in unexpected responses and improvised actions between ethnographer and subject (ibid).

In earlier chapters, I explored how the hip hop artist obtains their voice and makes it convincing. Within this chapter, I explore how the anthropologist struggles to do the same.

Before arriving in México, I assumed that my entry into the hip-hop community would be unrestricted and that establishing rapport would be easy. I was absolutely right. For over a year and all throughout the city, artists gave me immediate access and even thanked me for

264 conducting my study. Even in the most marginalized, supposedly dangerous zones, rappers welcomed me and treated me as if I belonged there. They noted that I was an outsider, that I was a lighter-skinned, Chicano, academic, male of a stable socio-economic status. And, they knew my identity afforded me power and privilege in the world—rappers everywhere critique those structural inequalities from which I benefit—but they did not hold that against me. When rappers would draw attention to my outsider status, they would make a little vocal squawk and put their arm around my shoulder to let me know they were only teasing. Some would mention my difference only to compliment me on my commitment to study in their streets. Others would assume I was Mexican, a rapper, or, more than once, a drug dealer, and would commend me for it. Others would not question my identity at all and would simply agree to be interviewed as if I were a journalist. Despite rappers’ allowing me to perform my self on a case-by-case basis, I did regularly struggle with my own identity as an academic outsider. As embedded in the scene as I became, I always had my notebook to remind me of my ultimate goal as a researcher. I always had hours of downtime between fieldwork in the streets and teaching English in Santa Fe to reflect and write my ethnographic distance into existence.

To show this process, I share two journal entries and critique them from the perspective of discourse analysis. I show this behind-the-scenes work, publishing my own diaries as it were, to highlight the difference between the processual knowledge and dialogism of hip-hop and the final production of anthropology. These journals are not cathartic self-confessions alone.

Although my short-term intention was to vent my internal world and to express my personal frustration, fear, and loneliness in the field, it was also my long-term goal to write more objective, less self-absorbed field notes thereafter and to represent Mexican hip-hop as a whole

265 through those secondary writings. It was always my goal to return to that bird’s-eye view. As a part of anthropology’s process of translating experience into knowledge, or ethnographic practice into discourse, these journal entries became my space to decide how I would later construe troubling events. I share the journals now to critique my performance as a scholar of and in hip- hop, to question power and representation, and to give an example of my enrollment in the discursive construction of inequality. I show how in attempting to write my catharses, I framed myself as the victim of misrepresentation, created an insurmountable divide between anthropology and hip-hop, Self and Other, and predicted that my later success in writing a dissertation would necessitate silence and the closure of dialogism.

In the following journal entries, I exemplify this struggle and introduce the contradictions of studying hip-hop from an academic perspective.

February 28, 2016 at 9:33 PM

I just got my feelings hurt. Terribly. Today I was excited to visit La XXXVII Feria

Internacional del Libro del Palacio de Minería. It is in the Palace across from Museo Bellas

Artes in El Centro Histórico. It is an exciting event. There are hundreds of thousands of books and thousands of book-minded people just milling about, browsing, anticipating author’s talks.

I had first learned about the event a year ago, on accident. I had been sitting downstairs eating breakfast when another long-term guest at Hotel La Selva came bounding down the stairs asking, “you’re going to the presentation on hip-hop at the fair right?”

“Um, yes, now that I know it exists. What, where, and when is it?” I sputtered back.

“It’s in 40 minutes at el Palacio de Minería, I’ll write the directions while you get ready.”

I thanked her, and we laughed at my luck (or ineptitude) at ethnography. I had been so

266 focused on the streets. I hadn’t thought to check the museums and libraries.

I made it to the event with plenty of time. The presentation was excellent. The book they wrote was better. El Pulso de la Tribu: Vacilaciones Sobre Hip-hop y Literatura (Romero

Chumacero 2015) is a collection of essays discussing the inherent literary value of hip-hop and rap music. The five contributors connected the linguistic artistry and creativity of rap to the classical greats and modern innovators of Western and Eastern literature. They claimed that what rappers do with words, metaphors, and structure is what authors did in important literature, only to music. So that makes it important, right? Either way, I loved the book and followed the crew to another of their presentations a week later. I remained good friends with

Eduardo Medina, one of the authors. Just the other night, in fact, we watched Somos Lengua, a documentary on Mexican rap, together at UNAM. RRMx came too.

So today, a year later, I returned to the book fair to browse for the latest releases in hip-hop studies. I watched a book presentation for a different book entitled La Ecosistema de Música.

Though it was a bit unacademic and far afield from the study of hip-hop, I enjoyed it. I was excited that people out there do care about music, take it seriously, and want to see artists prosper even if the publishing industry doesn’t.

After that, I visited every book seller, searching. At each of the larger university presses, the ones that were too big to browse, I asked, “Is there a book on hip-hop here.”

At each stall, the vendor would bow, think on the collection, then shake their head, saying,

“no, no such book is here.”

I thanked them all, smiled, and moved on. I did find a book on the local metal scene though.

It was the last copy. I bought it, figuring that if hip-hop is unpopular here, I might as well learn

267 why metal is.

I can’t say I was saddened by the lack of hip-hop literature. One of the reasons I am here in

México is to rectify that imbalance. I won’t say I’m cutting edge, but I will say I know an important group of people when I encounter them, and all I’ve seen here in México and in

Hawai'i, throughout the hundreds of events I’ve attended, the dozens of interviews I’ve conducted, and the couple of workshops I joined are important young people worthy of recognition, respect, and a far larger fandom. Hip-hop is filled with important people. Serious people.

On the third and final floor of the fair, there was one last university publishing house that I had to visit: La Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, a pretty big school. As the book fair was already coming to a close, I forewent browsing for myself and walked directly to a group of badge wearing custodians of knowledge. There were four or five of them, leaning, chatting, unwinding after what must have been a long day fielding questions and finding books across their extensive collection. Apologetically I approached and asked, “Are there any books on hip- hop here?”

The oldest man of the bunch, in his forties, looked at me for just a moment, looked away toward the stacks of books, and said dryly, “No, here we only have literature… serious literature.”

He began to laugh. The other workers laughed with him. They laughed at me for actually thinking that hip-hop was worth the pressed fibers, ink, and glue that makes up a book.

I sheepishly responded that I hoped to write a book on hip-hop and that his statement was hurtful, but nobody heard me over the laughter and added comments they were making to each

268 other. I walked out. Actually I ran, scuttling down the flights of stairs, trying to escape from the embarrassment I couldn’t help but feel.

So now I am here left with nothing but the swirling words I should’ve said to him. My feeling of shame has been replaced by anger and resentment for the whole affair. I sit writing, realizing the hard work my friend and his coauthors accomplished last year is practically meaningless this year in a palace like that. At the same time, I am ready to share one of the critiques I held about my friend’s book: hip-hop doesn’t need literature to be important. Hip-hop doesn’t need any kind of academic historian (or anthropologist) to find its legitimation for it. It doesn’t need any of us.

At all. So, to reference a pro-graffiti t-shirt I saw, “This ain’t street art; just good old-fashioned vandalism,” I now say “fuck literature, burn books, and kick down whatever stack of paper that doesn’t recognize you for doing what you’re doing for your own damn self.”

Ya I know that makes me a hypocrite, a book-hating author of the ivory tower, but fuck it. I’m going to write my book and let it gather dust behind the hallowed shelves of serious literary works. I’m going to get mine from that, but what am I going to give? I am going to give my everything to the actual culture, to the actual youth, to the real important people doing amazing things, doing hip-hop outside the damn palace.

The narrative of the previous journal entry is clear. I went to a book fair, found no books on hip-hop, and was laughed at by booksellers. However, it is important to note the internal struggle that this writing reveals. In my first review of El Pulso de la Tribu, I leave an open question about the importance of hip-hop as a reflection of literary traditions. Then, in my review of the

La Ecosistema de Música I critique the presentation as not academic enough and patronize the author as, at least, committed to valuing music outside capitalism. As I recall, the book was a

269 self-published history of one community organization and how musicians contributed to their activism. Finally, a year later, after I am laughed out of UAM’s book stall, I write something of a tantrum. I claim hip-hop does not need formal literature or academia to make it important. I point out the contradictions of my own goals, though I do not critique my own guilt in judging La

Ecosistema de Música as less-than academic. I leave off promising that despite the self-serving nature of my project, I will give back to the culture and people I study. Of course, what it means to “give everything” is left undefined, and this journal entry remains solipsistic.

In the following entry, I show how these adversarial questions of identity actually played out between artists and myself.

Ubuntu

As shown throughout this dissertation, my entry into hip-hop was mostly unproblematic.

Only once did rappers use my identity to define an interactional boundary and prohibit me from entering into their hip-hop. The following journal entry was written after that interaction. The exchange that inspired the writing was embarrassing. It undermined my conception of self, of hip-hop and anthropology, and of my process to learn through ethnography. I never intended to share the writing and would rather avoid discussing the event entirely, justifying its occlusion by pleading it was only one experience in a year, only one failed interaction out of dozens; but I cannot. Regardless of my mostly uncontentious entry into México’s hip-hop scene, regardless of the friendships I otherwise built in hip-hop, this one interaction and the journal entry that followed reveal how difference, power, and a problematic politics of listening undergirded even my successful interactions. I was always an anthropologist in the process of becoming.

The following nine paragraphs of journal writing are not necessarily scattered, but they do

270 assume a background context, and each utterance implies a wider dialogue. One evening, I attended an event at a small communist cafe a few miles from my home. Eight activist- organizers from around the State and country of México were there to hold a symposium and discuss their organizations’ different struggles and common oppressors. Topics included labor struggles, land rights, gentrification, cartel violence, and the disappearance of Los 43. After their lively panel discussion, a majority of the audience left, and the rap group Ubuntu performed. For those of us remaining, Ubuntu’s lyrics were a perfect summation of the night, adding passion and poetry to an otherwise depressing résumé of Mexico’s societal problems.

The event organizers invited everyone that remained to stay and eat along with the panelists and the artists. With a plate of tacos in hand, I sat down at a table with the group and their DJ,

Van-T. I quite arrogantly asked when they would want to be interviewed by me. I was confident they would respond like every other artist I had encountered and immediately agree. They did not.

Ubuntu asked back who I was to ask for an interview in the first place. Not yet humbled, I laughed and explained my basic interest in Mexican hip-hop. I described my project, my dedication to the culture, and my accomplishments in the scene so far. I shared my excitement in finding their group so they might represent hip-hop as a more revolutionary political art-form within my dissertation. They were not impressed.

At that point, my memory of the interaction is less clear. I do recall that my facade of confidence crumbled, and my doubt and frustration intensified. Over the next thirty-minute eternity, Ubuntu questioned my identity as an anthropologists and within hip-hop. They reproached me for my project. Their words were polite but cutting. I failed to defend myself or

271 convince them they were wrong. I only sat and sputtered back soft counter-arguments and deferential statements that I understood their position. I remained polite, but I was seething. I walked home and wrote.

June 9, 2016 at 11:25 PM

I was denied the interview for all the right reasons. Ubuntu, a group of four rappers under the charge of Van-T held me accountable for the historical robberies of anthropology and the academic world. They explained they wouldn’t take part in any project left so undefined. They explained that the project seemed more about accomplishing something for me personally than it did anything else. They explained that all documents made on the culture of hip-hop (especially

Somos Lengua) left unexplored the true nature of hip-hop. They called my project cultural appropriation. As I said, those are all the right reasons. Only I couldn’t help but be left with a lump in my throat, because tonight the communicative world of hip-hop failed. I was not only unable to defend myself, but I was left unable to express much of anything. Time was cut short, and they were fine with leaving me unheard. I did my best to stay friendly and respectful of their decision, but a massive part of me simply wants to yell, cuss, and unfairly deny the validity of their arguments. It is truly a shame that my work, which, of course, will still happen, will lack their voices.

Van, gracias por todo. La experiencia era increíble. Me gusta ver comunidades fuertes luchando por sus derechos, y Hip Hoperos luchando juntos con ellos. Aunque respeto completamente que me negaron una entrevista, estoy muy triste por la falta de comunicación, especialmente después de un evento del Hip Hop y la unificación de movimientos sociales. Es difícil expresarme, especialmente cuando hay mucha prisa. No pude explicar quien soy, y por

272 eso lo siento. Yo Prefiero más un cypher abierto que una mesa official. Aunque antropología y academia occidental tienen sus historias terribles, yo había pensado que la negociación de representación sería mejor en mi comunidad del Hip Hop global. Pero ustedes tienen razón, representación es complejo, y yo no tengo ningún cosa que puedo ofrecer a ustedes. Deseo que mi presencia no fuera una molestia. Y deseo que ustedes sigan luchando, y creciendo. Yo seguiré como fan de Magisterio y tu carrera solo. Afuera de mi papel en Academia, voy a compartir tu música y la música de Ubuntu con mi comunidad Hip Hop de Hawaiʻi.

The difficulty of communicating here is terribly frustrating. As I was walking home from

Metro Xola to Chabacano, dodging the aggressive prostitutes, I was just rambling in my head, repeating over and over my feelings, my missed words, my planned response. At times, it became its own rhythm. At times, I accidentally rhymed a few bars. It was something I didn’t want to happen, and I feel sorry that it did; but if I was talented at it, I could have spat at them. I could have simply jumped into some kind of cypher, defending myself, provoking them. Unfortunately, I am not talented like that. I’m talented in the formal debates of academic discussion. I have a voice in official discourse (I actually think they do too, but) in general rappers do not. Here it was so hard to hear and understand words (and ideas that I myself constantly ponder) being used against me, but not be able to say a single thing against them, or even to agree and expand upon them. There was simply no dialogue tonight, only a stern lecturing.

I am sure I will have trouble sleeping tonight. I have been on such a rollercoaster of emotions today: from leaving breakfast at Chilakillers with the worst indigestion I’ve ever had, to walking around El Centro in search of a hat to cover my silly hair cut; from deciding to bail on the important meeting between Miicherry and PerroZW to witnessing a truly amazing convocation

273 of community activists; from eating delicious tacos to being eviscerated for simply taking interest in the voice of others. I have a well of intellectual energy, and no bucket to pull it up with.

Writing is absolutely the most important aspect of my academic career, but the truth is, I am not absolutely an academic. I dislike the confines of this page. I prefer the freedom of dialogue. I need it actually. I need to argue, but not to win, to learn, to watch others ponder, to build. I feel so lonely in this page. There are no voices. There is no humor or warmth here. There is only space being filled by silent words, silent grumbles, and screams.

The fact that tonight I learned nothing is sort of bothering me. I can’t disagree with a single thing they said, because it’s all things I’ve worried about. I can’t even scoff pettily at the fact that a Mexican rapper called me an appropriator of culture. I can’t ignore that because the dynamics of power would reveal very quickly that he was closer to the truth than I was. My position leaves me with little recourse to defend myself. I am a white-passing, upper middle-class, Western

Academic studying a marginalized art form born from the struggle of America’s peoples of color.

I am here in México, studying the transculturation of that by further marginalized global citizens.

I know power and positionality are by no means so simple once dissected, but only the academic has the privilege of doing that. The fact on the street is, I am an asshole for simply being here, taking interest in “others.”

Tonight was my first real struggle as an anthropologist. I am not sure how I should interpret that. Is my ease of access simply because the people I study aren’t otherwise aware of anthropology’s history of appropriation? Is it because they do understand the politics of it, but don’t care? Is it because I myself have been a good and honest individual, and have regularly shown my friends here my intentions as a scholar? Were these guys simply arrogant assholes? (I

274 really hate even mentioning that, because I know its just an excuse I hope for. I know I want to flip everything on them, and shout, “You learned that cute little discourse from your own damn college anthropology class. So fuck off with your high and mighty attitude, you Ubuntu- appropriating fools.”)

So I am left here no smarter for the experience. I sadly have to leave their voices out of this book. That will be an absence that I will always feel, and either explain away or fault them for. I am trapped in a bind between “I didn’t talk to any activist rappers” versus “those damn activist rappers were too good to talk to me.” I will sadly have to endure that discontent from them either way. They will one day (hopefully) steal a copy of my book, and complain about the fact that it didn’t include enough about what they were doing with hip-hop in 2016. There will be some better scholar that comes along one day, and points out that my study of hip-hop completely ignored what really counts about the culture, what it can actually do for the community; that my study simply appropriated the mouths and minds of Mexicans, and furthered only my career in the corrupt American academic system.

Last night, I went to bed smiling, because my father told me something very special. He told me that my grandfather, who was from Michoacán, would be very proud of me, because I was his only grandchild to learn Spanish. What a powerful realization. Tonight, I will go to bed, tossing, turning, and fretting over the heavy truth of not who I am as a third-generation Mexican

American, but what I am as a White American anthropologist. I am still split down the middle, unwanted by whatever group might have me, uncomfortable in whatever role I take.

And the worst part is, with all this whining, complaining, and self-reflective, emotional navel- gazing, I didn’t even get to talk about the incredible work the speakers of tonight are doing for

275 their community, for México, and for the world. I hate the white space of this page.

Self Critical Discourse Analysis

As has been noted throughout this dissertation, humans are continuously engaged in semiosis, or “meaning-making as an element of social process” (Fairclough 2001: 162–163). We talk and make meaning. We move our bodies and make meaning. Some grab mics. Others grab paper and pen. It is through this discursive work that we construct “reality” or, at least, make the non-discursive world apprehensible. It is quite clear that relaying the actual event and describing reality in detail was not my goal in writing that night. I wrote only for the sake of catharsis and to describe my inner world, and yet the journal entry shows the anthropologist in his process of semiosis—having an interaction in the field then committing to writing the Self and the Other into being. John Fiske (1991), explains that when ethnographers put their observational or investigative moments into discourse, they necessarily change the ontological status of their objects of study. He explains:

This ontological change from practice into discourse, the graphos of “ethnography,” is

accompanied by an equivalent change in its ethnos, its “other nation.” In putting the

practice of the other into our discourse we change the status of its otherness. The process

does not destroy this otherness, however much it changes it, for traces of the otherness

always remain to challenge the domesticity of “our” discourse…Which traces remain and

therefore which challenges they offer is a function of which discourses are used to

domesticate the practices of the other into “our” knowledge. The value of the extra-

discursive object of ethnographic discourse is that it can always be put into discourse

differently; it can, however, never be both extra-discursive and the investigated object,

276 for investigation is a discursive act not an objective one; it consists of categorization,

selection and combination—the core process of any discursive system (Fiske 1991: 330)

The field of Discourse Analysis is concerned with all modalities of semiosis and how they relate to other social elements such as political institutions, business organizations, and citizens’ lives within a nation-state (Fairclough 2001). The field is well suited to investigate how anthropology functions as a discursive practice: categorizing, selecting and combining investigative moments to change otherness into something understandable. Critical Discourse

Analysis, on the other hand, is concerned with how certain processes of semiosis establish and reproduce injustice and inequality, because when some talk—or in this case, write anthropology

—they also dominate, marginalize, and exclude. Norman Fairclough (2001) sets out a productive vocabulary to help do the critical work of addressing such social wrongs “by analyzing their sources and causes, resistance to them and possibilities for overcoming them” (163).

Fairclough’s methodology consists of four stages, which proceed from one to the next, but should loop back in light of ongoing findings. Stage one focuses upon the semiotic aspect of a social wrong. Stage two identifies obstacles to addressing the social wrong. Stage three considers whether the social order needs the social wrong. Stage four identifies possible ways past the obstacles.

CDA’s recursive stages are well suited for analyzing my fragmented, tangent filled and conflictive journal entry, which from here on I refer to as the text. If I were to read the text uncritically, I might settle on the idea that I experienced unfair treatment that night. However, with Fairclough’s vocabulary, I reread the text as the semiotic aspect of those social wrongs that

Ubuntu spelled out quite clearly for me during our interaction. The text does not simply describe

277 my experience; it functioned (or failed) to secure authority in anthropological representation. To accomplish this (mis)representation, I construed myself as the victim, and operationalize hip-hop as a pluralist order of discourse. I relied on various rhetorical tools, but most specifically on what is called footing, or shifts in alignment I took to myself, others, and the information presented and thereby denied Ubuntu their validity and authenticity in the culture.

Erving Goffman saw everyday life as complex performance, where utterances, gestures, and other semiotic displays all do the work of expressing the individual and their relationship to the world. He too offers a rich vocabulary for understanding the discursive practices of the anthropologist. Goffman (1982) called the patterns of verbal and non-verbal acts that individuals employ to express their view of a situation and its participants a line. He explained that:

a person may be said to have or be in, or maintain face when the line he effectively takes

presents an image of him that is internally consistent, that is supported by judgements and

evidence conveyed by other participants, and that is confirmed by evidence conveyed

through impersonal agencies in the situation. At such times the person’s face clearly is

something that is not lodged in or on his body, but rather something that is diffusely

located in the flow of events in the encounter and becomes manifest only when these

events are read and interpreted for the appraisals expressed in them. (Goffman 1982: 299)

I was in wrong face when Ubuntu brought to bear a line I could not sustain or integrate during our encounter, and my journal was an attempt to suppress and conceal my shamefacedness after the fact. In my own texts, moments of face work are cued by changes in passive and active sentence structures, the use of emotional talk, and Goffman’s (1981) concept of footing which ”implies a change in the alignment we take up to ourselves and the others

278 present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance” (128). In every strip of interaction, speakers will signify various participation statuses, production formats, and participatory roles through their language. These shifts functioned to pit Ubuntu’s authenticity and authority of voice against my own and worked to secure monologism.

Discussion

In the process of denying the me an interview, Ubuntu intuitively conducted their own critical discourse analysis. They focused on the my request as a social wrong, identified five obstacles to further interaction, considered the wrong as inherent to his research project, and identified a way past the obstacles by simply refusing to take any part in an interview.

Specifically, the five obstacles Ubuntu suggested were my field of study, my project, my privilege, representation in general, and the threat of appropriation in culture. Although in my journal I construed Ubuntu’s critique as a personal attack in order to regain rhetorical control of the situation, I admitted that Ubuntu had indexed problematic social realities. The following section expands on each of these five obstacles and asks whether they are in fact necessary to anthropology as an order of discourse.

First, “Ubuntu held me accountable for the historical robberies of anthropology and the academic world.” In a general sense, the class foundations and intellectual productivity of

Western scholarship stem from colonial relationships (Fabian 1983; Galeano 1973; Said 1978;

Young 1995). Thus, the field of anthropology has a dialectic relationship to global structures of inequality. Until postcolonial scholarship intervened, this anthropological gaze was assumed to be unproblematic. The scholarly exploitation of research subjects was seen as the natural order of scientific study. Since this turn, Américo Paredés has held folklorists accountable (Paredés 1958;

279 Briggs 2012), Jose Limón (1994) has held anthropologists and military scholars accountable, and many more have held Oscar Lewis accountable (Rigdon 1988) for their representations of

Mexicans.

Current scholarship on México has learned from this tradition. Scholars now critique their own history and dedicate themselves to more critical work. Instead of writing about The Mexican per se, they write about the oppressive economic, political and cultural institutions that continue to structure lives within Mexico and beyond its borders (Alvarez 1995). Hip-hop scholars of

Latin America, for instance, have pledged their allegiance to an emancipatory Indigenous hip- hop politics (McFarland and Ball 2016).

Determining the efficacy of this work in subverting anthropology’s long tradition of misrepresentation and actual structural inequality, however, might be difficult. For all its semiotic work, such scholarship has yet to successfully intervene in the racist stereotypes that were regularly revealed throughout my time in México by the North American presidential candidacy of Donald Trump78.

It is evident that the field of anthropology has failed to intervene in the ethnocentric representations and other systems of knowledge it once helped construct. Regardless of my

78 Compare the following uttered in 1935: “Without disparagement, it may be said that there is a cruel streak in the Mexican nature, or so the history of Texas would lead one to believe. This cruelty may be a heritage from the Spanish of the Inquisition; it may, and doubtless should, the attributed partly to the Indian blood…The Mexican warrior… was, on the whole, inferior to the Comanche and wholly unequal to the Texan. The whine of the leaden slugs stirred in him an irresistible impulse to travel with rather than against the music. He won more victories over the Texans by parlay than by force of arms. For making promises—and for breaking them—had had no peer.” (Walter Prescott Webb [1935], as quoted by Paredes [1958]) to this uttered in 2015: “They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people.” (Donald Trump 2015)

280 politics and personage within México’s greater hip-hop scene, I nevertheless represented this social wrong to Ubuntu. As a stranger, whatever face I sought to take up, I could not erase that real history of misrepresentation. As their following critique points out, my study may have reproduced the trope of criminality in both hip-hop and Mexican lives.

Second, Ubuntu “explained that they wouldn’t take part in any project left so undefined.”

Institutional Review Boards (IRB) precede all social-scientific, behavioral, and biomedical research. Before a researcher can begin a study that involves other humans, they must define their study’s parameters and forecast possible consequences. The demands of IRBs are meant to protect research subjects from the side-effects of experimentation. For social scientists—whose method does not include human experimentation in the sense that drug trials might—the IRB process can only require assurances that research subjects are aware of the study’s objectives and how the researcher plans to use subjects’ personal information. This is meant to minimize transient harm and psychological discomfort. Researchers must explain to subjects their rights; namely that subjects can abandon the study at any time and will remain anonymous should they so choose. Participants, must sign their informed consent to take part, and the researcher must keep these forms as evidence of the interchange. Although the bureaucratic requirements of the

IRB process put more focus on the letter of the law; the spirit of the thing is well worth the hassle. Especially when one considers that these institutional requirements grew out of the

Belmont Reports, which themselves grew out of the Nuremberg Reports that documented Nazi scientists’ inhumane experimentation practices (Plattner 2003).

Before I was released to study in México, the University of Hawaiʻi system required me to write a strict proposal of my study, outlining who and what I intended to study, how invasive my

281 study would be, and what significance it might offer to my subjects and humanity in general. I took the process seriously and recognized it as a necessary consequence of the problematic histories of the academic world. However, because I was to study hip-hop—which, I was confident would be a willing community of artists—through ethnography—which I assumed was only minimally invasive for capable and intelligent subjects—I decided to leave my project quite undefined. I satisfied the IRB by proposing to hold informal interviews concerning the failure of

State-Nationalism in México, focusing on what Bartra (2002) called the Post-Mexican

Condition. I knew I would abandon those questions if they were not relevant to actual subjects. I knew I would follow whatever insightful or inflammatory lead I encountered in the field. I was not concerned with this lack of definition because I knew I would attend closely to the spirit of the IRB process and negotiate ethical relationships directly with my subjects.

The members of Ubuntu were right in calling my project undefined, but I was generally right in assuming a grounded and improvisatory methodology would be most successful for entering and learning from an exceedingly diverse community of artists. However, by under-thinking the scope of my study and by underestimating the seriousness of Ubuntu’s position as activists artists, I ignored a key fact about our respective relationship to place and power.

For all my on-the-spot negotiations of interpersonal ethics and the overlap between hip-hop and ethnography, I was always in the act of becoming an anthropologist. As Arjun Appadurai states that ethnography “reflects the circumstantial encounter of the voluntarily displaced anthropologist and the involuntarily localized “Other” (Appadurai 1988). I elected to exist as a stranger to that place. It was always my intention to arrive, study rap, track its relationship to whatever seemed compelling, and then leave back to my home institution.

282 I failed to read into the deeper meaning of the night’s preceding symposium and Ubuntu’s performance within it. Ubuntu were educated, vocally critical of the state, and living off an informal and communal artistic economy. They were under threat of much more than the transient risk of an ethnographer’s gaze and may have experienced a rightful paranoia within

Mexico’s context, where 43 student activists and countless others remained disappeared. My undefined project could not account for the specificity of their own. I arrogantly assumed that by relying on hip-hop’s openness and laxity of entry, I could ignore the seriousness of the request I was making as a temporary anthropologist. I was researching politically resistant citizens of

México, after all. But I was failing to take power seriously. I mistook my identity as hip-hop as implying a priori permission to gaze as a scholar of the Mexican as a political being.

Third, Ubuntu “explained that my project seemed more about accomplishing something for me personally.” Though this critique was directed at me personally, it nevertheless indexes a greater negotiation of values inherent to the anthropological process (Borofsky 2019).

Anthropology as a field of study contributes to a greater understanding of the cultural, social and political varieties of human experience, past and present. It makes the world better when it translates difference and ameliorates ethnocentrism. Anthropology can thus better define social inequality and imagine otherwise ignored solutions.

However, ethnographers—the actual social beings conducting fieldwork—need not aim for such lofty goals at the time of data collection. They can simply work toward completing their doctoral degrees, not contributing to the lives of others in any immediate sense. In fact, many

IRB Informed Consent templates include a proviso that subjects should not expect immediate benefit for their participation. My own form included just this statement, and I, perhaps

283 sarcastically, called attention to that fact in my letter to Van-T reducing the relationship to a monetary exchange.

Asking others to endure anthropological study, then, is asking them to put stock in the deferred value of progressive humanism. So despite my ultimate belief in my field of study, I nevertheless asked Ubuntu to engage in a project that would result in my completed dissertation and upward mobility within an arcane and privileged society before it would result in any positive social change for their immediate, selfless project.

I am not arguing that Ubuntu disagreed with the basic value of knowledge; nor with the general belief that communication across difference can foster creative solutions—the night’s symposium had been proof against any such argument. In fact, I have previously argued quite the opposite, suggesting that anthropology and hip-hop as semiotic practices are based on similar methodologies in the creation of authoritative texts. Hip-hop artists absolutely engage in ethnographic research. To become hip-hop they seek first-hand knowledge, putting high value in the direct experiences they have with others. With that experiential knowledge, they construct their voice and carry out cultural critique directly.

Anthropologists, on the other hand, construct their order of discourse and take up their role in it by asking others to sign documents and give their informed consent to have their voice scrutinized and used in wider interpretation. Ethnographers tied to formal and hegemonic state institutions must necessarily ask others to perform as monologic subjects.

Fourth, Ubuntu “explained that all documents made on the culture (especially Somos

Lengua) left unexplored the true nature of hip-hop.” Throughout my stay in México, the documentary film Somos Lengua was touring the city, playing in select theaters, art houses, and

284 college campuses once or twice a month.79 I saw the film three times with different groups of friends and had conversations about it with nearly everyone else. Opinions varied. Some artist approved of the film absolutely. Others appreciated the film’s style but claimed it had barely scratched the surface of hip-hop in México. Or they disapproved of the film-makers’ choice to include subjects based on their popularity rather than on their level of talent or importance to the underground. Still others, like Ubuntu, severely critiqued the film, claiming it ignored “the true nature of hip-hop.” In all these conversations about the film and other media portrayals of hip- hop, the question of representation was always at stake and some essential hip-hop was implied.

As a general rule, Mexican hip-hop artists understand their lack of objectivity when defining hip-hop. In interviews and informal conversation, artists would give their opinion of the culture, provide some definition of it, or critique a document like Somos Lengua. They would also take up the topic of representation itself and argue that authenticity is a relative concept. When I spoke with Feli Davelos—one of the producers of the documentary and a long-time organizer in

México’s hip-hop scene—even he suggested the film’s limitations and that its reception would be determined by an artist’s own style and interpretation of the culture.80 When I asked artists questions about who could become hip-hop and how, they would define the process as open and entailing nothing more than a proclamation. Claiming “Yo soy hip-hop” was enough. Some would add that practicing one or more of the elements was a requirement, but would also cede that “consciousness” and dedication to the scene were important.

On the other hand, artists also lobbied that they, more than anyone else in the scene,

79 See “Somos Lengua - Documental Rap Mexicano” on YouTube. 80 See “Feli Dávalos Vs Rojo Córdova - Secretos de Socrates México” on YouTube. As a sidenote, watch the third round where the two rappers discuss Machismo. I attended this event and was absolutely floored by the conclusion. They Kiss!

285 understood the essence of the culture and fully represented it in their music. They would then argue that some era, region, or style of rap was exemplary and align themselves with that essence. This process of framing hip-hop had a temporal, social, and spatial dimension to it, and reproduced ideologies of authenticity. So when I first began interviewing artists in Hawaiʻi around 2010 many non-black, male rappers referred to the Detroit-born battle-rapper Eminem as inspirational. In their formative years, they had watched his 2002 movie “Eight Mile.” They realized that one did not have to be black to rap and that one could turn hard work, cutting words, and a thick-skin into a lucrative career. Not surprisingly, as I studied in México around the release of “Straight Out Of Compton,” a biopic based on the Compton-based rap group

NWA, many young men (and a few young women) referred to that group as essential to their hip- hop because their lifestyle tied them to similarly dangerous streets. More often though, Mexican artists, regardless of gender, would point to Latin American rappers like Cypress Hill, or Spanish and South American rappers like STFU, Anna Puello, or Canserbero to define their style, culture, and authenticity within hip-hop.

Ubuntu’s critique was similar to these artists interpretations in that it was a process of framing and alignment. They took up the term hip-hop, operationalized it in a perlocutionary act, and reestablished the culture to include some styles and not others. However, when they lumped my project in with Somos Lengua as a way to deny my entry, they implied a different form of authenticity: that any kind of outside representation failed to capture the culture’s essence (an esoterica they did not further define for me). Throughout this dissertation, I have argued that hip- hop is like an academic institution or process of socialization in which artists and organizers enroll as both learners and educators to refine their voice. Hip-hop is, of course, also an artistic

286 practice which produces rap music for the sake of self-representation. Although I have eschewed analyzing the content of lyrics in my study of hip-hop in Mexico, the content of lyrics do count for plenty. Recorded lyrics are the primary source of artists’ voice and hardly require mediation.

Rappers are far from subaltern subjects and perform their identities quite publicly. So as a cultural entity, hip-hop already defines itself explicitly in its music, and its practitioners work to secure representational authority over their selves and their (often marginalized) community. Yet film makers, authors, and anthropologist, study the art and artists, make new interpretations, and frame the culture for their own purposes. Geoffrey Baker (2011) has found this to be the case for hip-hop in Cuba, where scholars continually seek to locate authentic, politically resistant rap, free of the trappings of commercialism. In the process, these scholars ignore the culture’s ambivalent relationship with the state and capitalism. Baker reminds scholars of confirmation bias. Whether this is what Ubuntu meant, I cannot say, but it is a relevant barrier to representation in hip-hop.

After years studying hip-hop, listening to an endless amounts of music, meeting countless unique emcees with vastly different styles, and witnessing time and time again artists engaging in deep dialogue, I developed a belief that hip-hop as absolutely pluralist and open to anyone who was willing to claim “yo soy hip hop.” At the time of writing, I had been mulling over the idea that hip-hop everywhere reflected the cypher and functioned as a circular, non-hierarchical and impermanent system of interaction. I wanted to argue that hip-hop always allowed for more a dialogic system of communication. In the first three paragraphs of my journal, I implied this ideology and urged that the basic essence of hip-hop was to foster communication. While I still believe that is the case, operationalizing this definition of hip-hop functioned more to silence

287 Ubuntu and secure my authority as an anthropologist than it did secure dialogism within hip-hop.

So though both Ubuntu and I sought to define hip-hop as a way to authenticate our own participation and called the other’s authenticity into question in the process, we did so from vastly different social locations and for very different reasons. As indicated by their previous three interpolations of my identity, as an anthropologist I was writing toward an order of discourse with a violent history of misrepresentation, with a questionable intentionality and system of values. They were declining to take part in that process while protecting their sovereignty over representation. These vastly different positions added up to support their final accusation against me and my project; that I was engaging in cultural appropriation.

Fifth, Ubuntu called my project cultural appropriation. Appropriation is “the use of one culture’s symbols, artifacts, genres, ritual, or technologies by member of another culture— regardless of intent, ethics, function, or outcome” (Rogers 2006: 476). Although critical literatures often use the notion of appropriation to critique the representation and commodification of marginalized and/or colonized cultures, few scholars discuss what they actually mean by the term. Especially in studies of global hip-hop, where non-black and non-

USAmericans claim their authenticity through African American linguistic practices, these discussions of cultural exchange and cultural exploitation are common but less than definitive.

Rogers (2006), reviewing critical media and communication studies, finds four types of appropriation assumed by the literature.

The first type, cultural exchange, is defined as reciprocal and egalitarian. This understanding of appropriation disregards differences in power, access, and representation, and is a somewhat naïve ideal form; however, it functions as a necessary ground upon which analysts can build

288 more critical theorizations. The notion of cultural exchange is often used within the popular music industry as new artists reproduce old songs and genres, sidestepping any discussion of translation and inequality by recourse to a universalist discourse of music. Even in more critical studies of hip-hop, the notion of cultural exchange exists as musical culture becomes tied to blackness. Histories of hip-hop, for instance, often define the culture as growing organically out of the West African Diaspora, Jamaican cultural practices, and the African American linguistic tradition (Chang 2005). Analysts describe the practices of signifying and sampling as if they were tied to some cultural DNA rather than explicating the actual process by which cultural transmission has occurred across the American landscape. Even at the transnational scale, the aesthetics of James Brown, Bob Marley, and Public Enemy are exchanged throughout the Black diaspora with little critical attention. Pardue (2008) and Dennis (2008), for instance, analyze how the Black and marginalized youth of Brazil and Columbia use hip-hop to strategically racialize their identities and stand against their marginalization by the dominant nationalist narratives of mestizaje. Though because they inhabit marginalized positions, their use of Black USAmerican culture is not necessarily defined as exploitive of Black American sovereignty.

The second type of appropriation, called cultural dominance, is “the use of elements of a dominant culture by members of a subordinated culture in a context in which the dominant culture has been imposed onto the subordinated culture, including appropriations that enact resistance.” The notion of cultural dominance reflects more the condition in which appropriation occurs, and subdivides the act of appropriation as assimilation, integration, intransigence, mimicry, or resistance. Understanding appropriation as resistance to dominant culture, is also common in studies of hip-hop. These studies assume this to be the function of hip-hop’s practice

289 of sampling. Potter (1995), for instance, argues that as Black artists playfully reference and renew otherwise commodified popular music they are practicing a postmodern resistance to the dominant structures of capitalism and cultural norms.

Cultural exploitation, the third type of appropriation, and the type likely implied in Ubuntu’s critique of my project, focuses on how dominant cultures use elements of a subordinated culture

“without substantive reciprocity, permission, and/or compensation” (Rogers 2006: 477). Within popular discussions of hip-hop, the notion of cultural exploitation is often at the forefront. When white artists like Vanilla Ice and Eminem and the record labels and radio stations that funded their success began popularizing rap and turning massive profit in a market that otherwise marginalized Black artists and Black media outlets, exploitation was the intent, function, and outcome. The notion of cultural exploitation is of special concern when it contributes to cultural degradation and undermines cultural preservation or when it deprives originators of material advantage or prohibits them from claims of sovereignty.

Although these three understandings of appropriation are common and important because they highlight resistance and critique exploitation, from the perspective of critical discourse analysis they are problematic. Cultural dominance, for instance, assumes that the use of a dominant culture’s media changes “subordinate” cultures. It assumes that a culture ought to be pure in the first place and that change is fatal to the structure. This portrayal delegitimizes colonized peoples and reproduces the idea that non-dominant cultures are stuck in time.

Similarly, to argue that the use of a culture’s symbols is exploitive, one must define culture as something essential and bounded. Roger’s finds such a definition of culture problematic, itself

“complicit in essentializing culture and Western discourses of the primitive” (ibid:5).

290 The fourth type of appropriation, transculturation, turns from these assumptions, highlighting how “cultural elements are always created from and/or by multiple cultures” (ibid: 477) Within the context of globalization and transnational capitalism, the “identification of a single originating culture is problematic” and often reproduces understandings of culture as essential, bounded, and organic. Transculturation describes cultural exchange and appropriation as cultural interaction and conjuncture. Transculturation assumes that multiple cultures and multiple acts of appropriation are always at work. Rogers (2006) uses hip-hop as a direct example, claiming

“musical forms appropriated by the cultural industry from urban African American culture (e.g.

Hip Hop), forms already structured in multiple cultural traditions and matrices of power, are in turn appropriated and localized by Native American youth living on real reservations” (491).

Hip-hop indeed represents transculturation. Ubuntu’s name is quite exemplary of this fact.

Calling this transcultural process exploitive would be less than explanatory. Certainly, calling

Mexican rap exploitive of Black American hip-hop would be equally reductive and would not account for how hip-hop artists like Scarface, Migos, and HoodRich Pablo Juan have themselves misrepresented Mexicans and Latin America and used stereotypes of violent drug economies and

Latinos as inspiration for their gangster personas. Considering the dominance of American media and rap music, Mexican’s use of rap could equally be considered the appropriation of a dominant form of culture to resist representation. At least as a theoretical concept, transculturation is capable of capturing all this.

Unlike previous terms, transculturation contributes to a pluralist conception of power, as if postmodern subjects make their decisions to appropriate within a power vacuum. Although the concept of transculturation moves away from essentialism, it undermines any groups authority to

291 represent itself. That is to say, if hip-hop has no race or class-based essence, and it is built on endlessly complex history of borrowing and admixture no one can have a final say.

Rogers, however, values the strategic use of the terms “cultural exchange”, “cultural dominance,” and “cultural exploitation” in critical work. Although the terms might reinforce definitions of culture and identity as pure, bounded, and organic things rather than processes, and although the terms imply an untenable definition of power, they do allow critical scholars to maintain their focus on inequality and to remain politically relevant against injustice. Another way of interpreting this is to say that these terms disallow me from escaping culpability for the appropriation of artist’s voice, by calling attention to Ubuntu’s and my different relationships to power.

The artists of Ubuntu were absolutely engaged in appropriation. As non-black, non-Zulu

Mexicans, the moment they called themselves Ubuntu and performed hip-hop, they were putting their idea of someone else’s culture to their own ends. Within my journal, I used their claims of an essence and their suggestion that my appropriation differed their own as a way discount them in general. I construed hip-hop as open and pluralist to argue that my entry into it was no did not differ from their own and even pointed out that their education and access to anthropology’s self- critical discourse equalized our outsiderness. Even though transculturation offers a better understanding of Mexican hip-hop and culture in general, using it to unseat Ubuntu from their authentic positions is problematic, especially because what is at stake in my journal is not the representation of Mexican’s use of Black American’s culture, but a Western liberal academic’s use of Mexican culture.

292 Conclusion: A Dialogic Ethics

Since their release, anthropologists have interpreted Branislov Malinowski’s personal journals widely. Raymond Firth wrote the first introduction to the released diary and a second introduction twenty years later. In the meantime, a community of anthropologists had read and reviewed Malinowski’s work. Some, took offense at the invasion of privacy. Some saw it as a powerful, problematic, and necessary revelation about anthropological fieldwork and its role as a source of knowledge. Some, who I do not agree with, took the stance that Malinowski’s racist and sexist “unconscious” were innocent and inconsequential for anthropology’s legacy. Anthony

Forge, for instance, offered sympathy to “the lonely anthropologist” who wrote his dark catharsis to “spew up [his] spleen” and therefore “start afresh.” (As quoted by Frith in Malinowski 1989).

Reviewing Malinowski’s journal writings, however, can only be so relevant to ethnographic analysis in general. A single text—even the diary of our methodological forefather—cannot stand for the complexity of the anthropologists’ moral performance. It would be impossible to construct a categorical imperative that could decide our moral authority in the field once and for all. Geertz’s reading seems relevant though. He argues that, “the value of Malinowski’s embarrassing example is that, if one takes it seriously, it makes difficult to defend the sentimental view of rapport as depending on the unfolding of anthropologist and informant into a single moral and emotional universe” (ibid). As ethnographers we are dynamic, beings unfolding along with our equally complex informants across a vast web of moral meaning. Positioning ourselves once at the outset of our anthropological work is as inadequate as writing our subjects as one monolithic cultural group. Such preemptory positioning assumes that we can understand our difference from our subjects beforehand, and that we can view our subjects only from this

293 position. It is for this reason, that I have left this chapter for the last.

This chapter opened with an uncomfortable moment wherein book sellers negated the importance of hip-hop and its study. However, in that same journal entry, I mildly critique one author’s work for not being academic enough and then question a collective of academic’s evaluation of hip-hop as classic literature. In the second part, I discussed how, after being denied an interview by Ubuntu, I strategically ignored serious accusations against my project. Rather than simply muting the event, I interrogated my writing to show how I retroactively framed my encounter with Ubuntu as a personal attack against myself and as a failure on their part to live up to hip-hop’s communicative potential. This framing allowed me to ignore not only my personal failures, but the structural failures of anthropology as a semiotic practice. It allowed me to justify monologism within my ethnography. Ultimately, I found myself at fault for reproducing a common social wrong: the exploitive use of “native” voices to secure authority over discourse.

Fiske (1991) argues that in ethnographic interaction and communicative practice, unequal power relations are always relevant. Koven (2014) says: Attention to practices of decontextualization and re-entextualization can show precisely how interview texts appear to move across communicative events, with particular consequences for differently positioned participants. Power is thus at issue not only in the interview encounter itself, but also through its re-entextualizations…People are not equally in control of or affected by the production and circulation of such entextualizations.” (512)

Discussions of appropriation in hip-hop usually negotiate whether one artist’s use of the sound or style of the culture is authentic or simply mimetic. Whether scholarship is itself appropriative is less discussed. Considering the similarity between hip-hop and anthropology as methodologically-driven cultural critique, this dissertation has partially argued that the rapper’s

294 voice and the ethnographer’s voice are not that different; they are formed by very similar practices. And in anthropology, rap is exactly the kind of archive we wish it to be, both in a positive and negative sense. A scholar with an ear for “conscious” music can find lyrics perfectly suited to their own politically-minded projects. At the other end, a scholar with an eye for criticism can find representatives of commercialism, sexism, and violence in every other rap music video. Both these archives would presumably be based upon the first-hand, street-centric perspectives of the rapper.

What the Ubuntu affair forces me to question, though, is whether I have the basic right to take rapper’s research, their cultural and intellectual property, and use it as the basis of my own discovery of Mexican society? How might my own representation and replication of their voice degrade, constrain, or fetishize hip-hop? This dissertation has partially argued that, at the individual level, there might be no real line between the academic and the artist. In fact, there are many artists who become scholars, and likely plenty of scholars who become hip-hop:

Elemsiburrón, Khäf Vocablo, El Siete, and Tiosha deserve special mention in this regard. More specifically though, I have argued that as participants of a discursive genre, academics and hip- hop artists discuss similar topics and rely on similarly complex theories of representation and ethnographic rhetoric. Although the determination between the sameness and difference between hip-hop and Anthropology is something that will be worked out locally, in face to face interaction, and in transgredience between scholars and rappers, a major difference remains. A discussion about the meaning of marginalization occurring in a library is very different from the one that occurs on a dark street, miles from home after the state’s safety net has evacuated the area. A discussion about the relationship between drugs, hip-hop, and México occurring on a

295 panel at a conference is very different from the one occurring while passing a joint in an artist’s smokey studio. If content is taken as less important than context, than these difference are not only examples of imbalances in authenticity, but are imbalances in power and privilege.

Writing myself as exempt from the postcolonial critique was problematic; especially because this critique was made directly by my research subjects. Ignoring Ubuntu’s critique and ignoring my response to it would avoid responsibility for either. Whether I was conscious of my position or not, whether I was apologetic for the impropriety of my privileges, cannot justify my total relationship to power in the text. Individually, I might be excused from whatever vestiges of the colonial gaze still pervade the anthropological project; however, to claim any such exoneration would fall in line more with the neoliberal discourse that power is pluralistic and oppression is a personal problem rather than something part and parcel of social structure. To position myself once at the outset of writing, like a researcher marking what microscope they used, would be to assume that once power and difference are admitted they no longer have consequence on the results of the experiment.

Against this, it seems only fair to end this dissertation with this chapter of critically reflexive anthropology—one that contributes to a kind of dialogic ethics and methodology (Gardiner 1996;

Frank 2005); one that pleads of its readers not to take my written word for the final truth, but to actually go out and listen to artists themselves.

296 CONCLUSION: ¿POR QUE CALLAR SI NACIMOS GRITANDO?

Part One: Enter the Summary

This dissertation has been about sound, movement through the city, and the social relationships that are built through hip-hop. It began with the story of a train ride. I was following PerroZW as he crossed the city from a Cultural Center in Neza to a garage studio in

Tacubaya. We left behind his students, the members of Los HDP, and met Jerry Funk along the way. The rappers agreed that it was destiny that we would met. This chance encounter hinted at the various themes that ran throughout my dissertation and what constitutes hip-hop—namely desmadre, movement, the aural sensorium, dialogism, and the choral voice. The basic questions I introduced were: (1) how does one become hip-hop in México; (2) how does one speak for

México as hip-hop; (3) how does one become convincing in this speech; and finally (4) how does one come to hear all of this. Artists answer the first of these questions by claiming, “Yo soy hip- hop.” However, I explored this utterance as part of a longer, more complex process involving a street-centric lifestyle, tracking their process and their voice. I defined the voice as a phonosonic nexus, which links the individual body with sound and cultural meaning. To speak hip-hop, artists must learn how to shape their bodies in a particular way—learning how to breathe again and how to move in the city—and how to echo their social horizon—their immediate environment and the city’s diverse history of language and culture. This labor is strenuous, especially considering the loud and chaotic nature of Anáhuac, the Valley of México. However, the products of this labor are well worth the struggle, as artists gain an embodied knowledge of the city, an awareness of the interconnections between culture and place, and an opportunity to

297 overcome anonymity through transgredience.

To confront the inherent difficulty of representing México, I find sound to be a useful framework, I contextualize the city and hip-hop within desmadre, the (over)abundance of urban life, by following the history of music and the music of history as made relevant by artists. I define these as two different chronotopes. I start with pre-Colombian history because that is where artists begin in their self-mythologizing, negotiating the notions of mestizaje and malinchismo. I then move throughout the revolutionary and post revolutionary periods because that is when the state structured the resounding city, starting projects of nationalism and modernity and investing heavily in popular culture as a means of making lo mexicano legible and harmonious. I then turn to the troubled era spanning 1968 until at least 1994, when the nationalist teleology crumbled, and the country fell disillusioned. Hip-hop became self-aware thereafter, meeting at larger festivals and on the set of global music videos to represent themselves as a scene and recording more and finding more venues in which to perform. Kolmillo exemplifies a different perspective all together. He denied the importance of traditional, nationalistic history

(that chronotope favored by most academics) and centralized his lived experience connecting with a litany of other artists in looped interconnectedness across the city.

To understand looped interconnectedness, I take a deeper look at methodology and how it relates to movement and voice. In anthropology, in situ ethnography and participant-observation confer value upon its practitioners and their writings. As it turned out my method for studying hip-hop largely overlapped with artists’ own process for becoming hip-hop. We both had to find new venues where artists could perform. However, because stage performances are not actually what makes artists hip-hop, only the background to their actual social life, I focused more on the

298 mobile encounter rather than a rigid geography. Pavel at La Chinampa tempers my finding on movement and place though. Showing that even when in one location, it is still the relationships that people from different places build that is hip-hop.

With the setting, scene, and my role in hip-hop fully described, I turn to the actual development of artist’s voices. Because the voice is a nexus between a body and its social horizon, the process by which Los Hijos de Poeta learned to control their breath, to hold the mic properly, and to move their bodies to better mediate their voice and maximize their performance is important. Their learning did not occur in the classroom alone, though. It occurred on the road as they travelled to distant places and reproduced the scene through their own looped interconnectedness. It is this work crossing the sonic landscape that ultimately leads to the formation of a choral voice. Artists come to speak dialogically, echoing the voice of their teachers and their experiences as a posse crossing the city. This learning through travel and connectivity, voice and dialogism is not something that occurs once. Generations of artists have and continue to engage in it to define the hip-hop scene.

Sound, therefore, becomes convincing in hip-hop. Artists learn to include modal assurances of truth to their voice, be it a particular timber or the recitation of mythic names. Müelas de

Gallo, MC Luka, and Kolmillo, for instance, contextualized themselves, their life, and their city as constituting a constellation of sound. They contextualized the city and themselves through music. They referenced familiar sounds, studied talk, and indexed the movement through the resounding city. As talking hip-hop demands presence and attention to the details of sound, desmadre comes to shape a rapper’s ear and inform their voice. This is most evident in the time spent in a looped moment of sound, in the ritual space of the studio, where artists listen to one

299 another and voice the city itself.

The street-centric life of hip-hop puts artist in proximity to danger. Although I limit my discussion of danger to personal stories of drug use and the risks of disappearance, it was my overall goal to show how artists themselves use these stories of risk, and “lo más rapero” generally, as both personal authentication of their own dedication to la calle vida and as a kind of socialization into the culture of hip-hop. El Pinche Pastok and his huérfanos de la calle exemplify this affective connection. My experience with Pastok should remind us that for all the fun that can be had in hip-hop, life in the streets of México is not always a laughing matter. Survival is very much dependent on sociality and the care offered by others, on carnalismo, and everything exemplified by the transgredient, dialogic voice of the posse. This is what I have called choral voice.

Considering the steps I took in this dissertation to blur the boundary between hip-hop and anthropology—focusing on shared methodologies, dialogism in communication, and the shared risk of being in the street—it is important to investigate difference. Though ethnographers are like hip-hop artists, defining their voice through presence and becoming convincing through a process of participant-observation, they ultimately translate their voice from field journals to textual anthropological knowledge. Due to these necessary changes that I made, I commit to a dialogic ethics and methodology—one that questions the final word of literature and begs readers to listen for themselves.

Part Two: Exit The Chambers

The following sections are both related to the dissertation and self-sufficient concluding thoughts demonstrating the value of hip-hop. I therefore call them chambers in a nod to the

300 classic kung-fu film and the Wu-Tang Clan’s album. First, I will review how rappers, through their expressive culture, represent space by rendering the aural sensorium and thereby contribute to the task of theorizing the city in all its complexity. Next, I will compare hip-hop as a culture, or specific system of language, knowledge and rhetoric, to other cultures including anthropology and traditional musics. In this, I will relate how the project of hip-hop has much to do with explicating various ideological and political stances through affective language in contemporary

Mexico but as yet has no power to change society. I conclude the dissertation with one final vignette.

The Chamber of Lefebvre

One of the major problems I introduced early in this dissertation is the difficulty authors experience when attempting to represent México as anything but desmadre (Gallo 2004). This might be every urban ethnographer’s biggest problem. Henri Lefebvre is often cited as demonstrating the importance and complexity of place and inspiring the difficult work of social science in urban settings. His work parallels what anthropologists and hip-hop artists often presume to be true by way of their methodology: knowledge is situated; place is socially produced.

In this dissertation, I have been more inspired by Lefebvre’s later work when he appeals for what I think hip-hop already accomplishes. In his posthumously published Rhythmanalysis,

Lefebvre (2004) argues that time is socially produced and that cities are rhythmic places. They are defined by the repetitive urgencies of their economic markets, state-national institutions, and the movement of creative citizen. He proposes a methodology that studies such rhythms. It begins with the body, taking note of it, feeling it, recognizing that it is itself made up of natural

301 rhythms and affected by the city itself. He says:

The rhythmanalyst will be attentive, but not only to words or pieces of information, the

confessions and confidences of a partner or client. He will listen to the world, and above

all to what are disdainfully called noise, which are said without meaning, and to murmurs

full of meaning and finally he will listen to silences. (29)

The rhythmanalyst can never be a passive recipient of cultural knowledge, but can attempt to be childlike in learning, viewing the sensory world anew, refusing whatever neutralizing effect society, time, or distance has had upon the body. The point, he claims, is not to form a science, only to form knowledge. He says:

The rhythmanalyst could, in the long term, attempt something analogous. Works

[oeuvres] might return to and intervene in the everyday. Without claiming to change life,

but by fully reinstating the sensible in consciousness and in thought, he would

accomplish a tiny part of the revolutionary transformation of this world and this society

in decline. Without any declared political position. (35)

It is a wonder that Lefebvre never entered the cypher of hip-hop. His lyrical writing style might have worked well within it. Lefebvre predicted works (oeuvres indeed) that already existed on the streets around him in France in its nascent hip-hop scene. Certainly in Mexico, where artists spend so much time crossing through desmadre, rhythmanalysts exist and contribute to revolutionary transformation. Hip-hop artists carry out their work and represent their findings on the city to attentive audiences.

The Chamber of Ethno-rhetoric

At the start of this dissertation, I promised to explore four question. The third and fourth of

302 which were, how does one become convincing and how does anyone come to hear it as such? To answer this in hip-hop, I explained that although stating “yo soy hip-hop” is the only supposed requirement, artists actually secure their authenticity methodologically, by being known in looped interconnectedness in the greater scene. I then demonstrated how the most convincing artist’s manipulate their bodies as phonosonic nexus, to echo their movements in the streets, popular culture knowledge, and the aural sensorium. Finally, I showed how the choral voice beyond the individual artist fortifies identities as it indexes their posse’s commitment to a street- centric life, their confrontation with danger, and their communal survival through carnalismo.

Though it is certainly artists’ presence in the street and their ability to describe common experience within it that makes them convincing, the question deserves more analysis.

Andrew Arno (1985) says, “communication plays different roles in the political process of groups depending upon the ways power is distributed within them” (124). Thus, depending on the nature of hierarchical social structures, individual’s will rely upon various kinds of speech to accomplish their goals. This might propose a larger project in anthropology dedicated to comparing the ethno-rhetoric of speech communities and at different scales of discourse. In this case, asking the question of how do individual rappers become convincing in hip-hop in comparison to others is part of a larger project in anthropology. How do their voices differ in terms of authenticity, authority, persuasiveness, and impressiveness? What are the rhetorical technologies that hip-hop artists rely upon? How do hip-hop artists compare to journalists, scholars, marketers, or politicians in their respective world?

While describing ethno-rhetorical differences, it is necessary to temper comparative study, drawing attention to the performative and repetitive means by which any institution emerges

303 (Butler 2010). Future studies in critical discourse analysis should look to the differences between governments, economic institutions, and hip-hop as only performative, noting how specific grammatical, rhetorical devices index ideology and reify structure. I imagine this would help answer question about hegemony, or how it is possible that listening citizens can hear more truth and value in musician’s voices than in politician’s voices and yet continually agree to reproduce a system where only the latter group retains the power to speak for them?

As a start to this work, within this dissertation I have shown how anthropology and hip-hop are both specific orders of discourse founded on the methodic production of empirical knowledge. Their authority to speak and their impressiveness as rhetoric is largely contingent on participant-observation and presence in the scene. To be sure, they are both students of sound in desmadre (Sterne 2012; Monsiváis 2003).

Despite these similarities, though, there are differences between the institutions of anthropology and hip-hop, having different relations to globalizing power, capital, and knowledge. Anthropologists rely upon deep analysis and complex theories to become persuasive, but they also owe their results to funding agencies, publishing houses, and Universities.

Moreover, they rely upon literature and the filled white page to represent desmadre. Written from a birds-eye view, anthropologists can pinpoint many general social movements, economic, political, and sociological trends that determine the lives of hip-hop artists. Anthropologists can represent how abstractions like capitalism, media, cultural production, and ideology are logically related in discourse and reified. This is not desmadre.

As noted, desmadre is not chaos (in the Western-sense) because it fully recognizes life before creation. There is no void or gap between any two points on the map. There is always previous

304 life, other strategies and tactics to account for (de Certeau 1984). Desmadre, in this sense, is an undefinable interconnectedness between everyone in the city. It is only sensible in an apophenic sort of way and only from the ground, because any connections are transistors and temporary.

Hip-hop artists, especially in México, do just this and become convincing in street-centric orality, perfectly representing desmadre through sound. Speaking from the perspective of the streets, artists can pinpoint exact moments in looped interconnectedness when certain persons met in certain spaces and certain contexts (as Kolmillo did); or they might represent deep cultural performances through their YouTube watchlist or their voicing of the city (as MC Luka did); or they might represent it all with a simple güaü. Artists, through sound, represent desmadre perfectly as feeling like destiny, like something that is fated to happen despite everything else occurring in the megalopolis, which is somehow far more convincing when it is actually heard out loud and in place.

In Acoustic Territories, Brandon LaBelle (2010) uses metaphors and histories of sound, architecture, music and legal policy to understand life in contemporary urban environments.

Sound, he argues:

is promiscuous. It exists as a network that teaches us how to belong, to find place, as well

as how not to belong, to drift. To be out of place, and still to search for new connection,

for proximity. Auditory knowledge is non-dualistic. It is based on empathy and

divergence, allowing for careful understanding and deep involvement in the present while

connecting to the dynamics of mediation, displacement, and virtuality. (xviii)

Sound and aural experience, voice and dialogism, then, allow individuals to better understand and communicate the relationship between concrete places and the energetic, flexible, and

305 organizational flows of global economic markets, migration, culture, and ideology. But it all depends upon their politics or position in listening. LaBelle’s cultural studies project explores underground territories, streets and neighborhoods, and the movement of cars and of transmission towers. Each of these sonorities tie individuals into a social fabric, and make and unmake private and public life.

Walter Ong argued that with literacy comes a new form of consciousness. Once a person becomes lettered, they can never perceive the world as unlettered. Without getting too carried away into the phenomenological aspects of his claim, Ong’s work does suggests one shortcoming of academia is its inability to fully account for oral literature, or “voicing”; that is its position in respect to listening and mediating what is heard. The basic problem is that while both oral and written texts can be analytical, only writing and reading can provide “abstractly sequential, classificatory, explanatory examination of phenomena or of stated truths” (Ong 1982: 8).

Scholars have come to prefer this way of knowing and have partially abandoned orality in the process. The knowledge we ultimately use to communicate as academics is the filled up white page rather than the dialogic voice. The knowledge produced by anthropology and hip-hop, though based on similar methods and experiences in the street, differ specifically in this way.

Telecommunications play an important role in how people come to know the world. Cassette tapes and compact discs, VHS tapes and broadcast television, and now the internet have spread the culture of hip-hop across the globe, fostering the feeling that no borders exists. PerroZW and his students all agreed that hip-hop was infinite and universal. Rap music especially, when it is entextualized in recorded music, music-videos, journalism, and biopic films, when it is caught up in the circuits and feedback loops of globalized telecommunications, also play an important role

306 in how people displace their corporeal existence onto virtual worlds (LaBelle 2010). Of course, virtual worlds are no less real and no less meaningful, emotionally or socially, than the world

IRL (in real life). Nevertheless, literacy, telecommunications, and the internet effect consciousness because they distance human experience from presence (Ong 1982). This dissertation has been less a study of rap and more of hip-hop.

Hip-hop, with its focus on presence and dedication to learning in place, assumes that experiencing conversation in person is most important and assumes a very particular “interplay of raw (multi)sensory data, perceptual-motor activity and various cognitive and emotional processes” (Ijsselsteijn and Harper 2001: 3). In hip-hop, there is value in being in the same time and place, trapped in the same cascade of time, sound, euphoria, and rhythm as another. Hip-hop, at its core, highlights these kinds of moments over and above those that are more distanced, abstractly sequential, classificatory (Ong 1982). If my time with Pastok and other huérfanos de la calle taught me anything, it is that hip-hop helps men and women to hear their voice—their own echo of embodied desmadre—valued in and through the bodies of other’s, taken up in affect, carnalismo, and the choral voice.

The Chamber of Tears

As noted in the last section, the academic voice differs from hip-hop as representation. The difference is not only in the cultures’ access to economic or social capital, its rhetoric or its orality but in the way the text relates to emotion. Aside from a few key texts, anthropology is not meant to break the heart (Behar 1997). Unlike the ordering, sequential analysis that anthropology can offer through textual representation, hip-hop is about sound in the city and how the voice feels in the body. In this chamber, I extend my discussion of how hip-hop becomes persuasive by

307 reference to literatures in the anthropology of music. Here, I do not intend to reify a difference between spoken language and music; this dissertation has regularly refused the validity of that distinction. Instead I look to the stickiness, or contagiousness (as Bakhtin called it) of spoken poetic and musical genres and the way hip-hop’s rhythmanalytic knowledge infects the body.

Though poetry and music are always culturally relative, producing different affects in different ways and with different intentions, I recognize tears as equally complex as the voice.

Tears represent a nexus between subjective embodied experience and socially recognizable signs of affect. They are an analytically rich metaphor for belonging. As Lila Ellen Gray (2013) explains:

Tears index both a private emotional and aesthetic experience and a moment of shared

sociality; they point to the power of musical experience to be felt simultaneously as

intensely subjective and social. Aesthetic appreciation merges with heightened feeling in

a moment of sound, and the soulfulness of the aural is made visibly public, thus social,

the form of the tear. (42)

Tears, then, are important objects (or events) in research. Before discussing them in hip-hop,

I want to reiterate the link between place, affect, and sound and how music urges tears. Again,

Gray (2013) is indicative, showing how fado music shapes affective cartographies in urban

Portugal; that is, the way it accretes memory and affect and how with every hearing and musical experience it becomes saturated with people, places, stories, and histories. Specifically, she takes interest in:

How musical genre in its excessive formal repetitions and improvisations, along with its

stereotypical affective and sonic registers, might shape feeling that becomes shared

308 sentiment while opening new possibilities for the experience of place and subjectivity. I

have granted genre some agency to try to understand it in an inter-dynamic relation both

with how individuals and communities experience senses of place and with the shaping

of wider representations and affective topographies that are both socially and

geopolitically situated. (137)

Similarly, Christine Yano (2002) finds enka music in Japan to be the patterned sound and performance of collective (though highly gendered) remembering, indexing the memories of pain and desire associated with a never extant, but nevertheless real, homeland. She says:

The enticement of enka is that it suggests a forum for collective nostalgia, which actively

appropriates and shapes the past, thereby binding the group together. Enka encodes

within nostalgia a historical moment of self-reflexivity, establishing a particular

relationship with the temporal past that distances it from, while also placing it firmly in,

the present. (15)

Enka, then, is emotion talk, reproducing an emotional style embedded within a structure of feeling and within ideological, political, and economic forces. Through tears it become

“contagious” (ibid: 120).

Each of these examples, which study singers (and their backing instrumentalists) and there role in commoditized musical genres, reveal the power that sound has in rendering affect in or about place, urging tears. They explore the “powerful inter-dynamism between particular musical genres, specific cities, and the poetics and politics of place making” (Gray 2013: 137). At the same time, each focuses on the entanglement of their respective genre with national chronotopes through nostalgia and longing (or saudade in Portugal). There is certainly something similar

309 occurring in hip-hop, where not only listening to the music and voices of rap but actually walking through the streets of México conditions the habits and embodied memory of individuals and thereby shapes their sociopolitical life.

In comparison though, hip-hop (at least as I have shown it in this dissertation) is a-historic or myopic in its resonance. Though it samples histories of sound, language, and myth, it ultimately sequesters itself to the chronotope of the looped moment, not the national epoch. Artists, in their talk, continually refer to the national or global scale, but the culture is ultimately reproduced in presence and in the limited and liminal context of the ritual space of the studio. Rappers, unlike the singers of fado and enka, recycle old sounds rather than recreating a canon of already meaningful cultural scores. Whatever affect is inspired by the music, whatever tears well up in its listening, originate from some other source.

In both enka and fado, singers and instrumentalists purposefully evoke sadness by employing multiple icons of crying. They reproduce features of voice and instrument, gestures of body, and familiar poetic structures. And yet as performance, they must ultimately maintain their composure, refusing to cry, as actually weeping might rupture their vocal form. Hip-hop on the other hand does not have a tradition of performing sadness on stage. Its lyrics can of course be emotional and inspire longing and sadness; however, rappers generally place these kinds of songs strategically in their setlist (or sequester them to the D side of their albums) so as to stimulate rather than depress audiences. Despite this, I argue that hip-hop as a genre of music and as a communal lifestyle is especially charged with emotion because the performances of hip-hop occurs off-stage and therefore erase the boundary between performer and audience, artist and posse. As I showed across chapter six, hip-hop is something to cry about.

310 The Chamber of Being Found in Being Lost

One of the most compelling questions I heard asked while talking hip-hop in Mexico was

“what have you lost to be part of this culture?” When asked, the question cut through the room.

The six artists fell silent, taking another hit or swigging from the shared bottle, meditating on their losses. The question struck me deeply too. It reaffirmed my earlier decision to stuff my interview guide back into my bag and to just let the dialogue flow naturally, but in the silence I felt compelled to retrieve it. I stared at the empty page of my notebook, not sure whether to journal about myself or wait and listen to the others. In that moment, I thought of all the losses I had suffered in my personal life during that year in the field and the decade spent abandoning myself to a career studying hip-hop. It all seemed to come to that very moment. Perhaps it was within that moment of silence when I first asked whether my work was the work of anthropology or the work of hip-hop itself; perhaps I considered whether my work was actually about hip-hop or about my own mexicandad. The moment certainly lead me to ask, what’s the difference and what does it matter?

Castillo-Garsow and Jason Nichols (2016) point out that every hip-hop found throughout the continent represents a separate Latinx identity. They speak of hip-hop latinidades in the plural so as to account for this diversity. My own study finds this to be true even within México, where a very diverse community of individuals, each intersecting with innumerable emergent identities categories meet to make many hip-hops. When conducting ethnography, subjects were quick to point out there are many Mexicos, and that to speak of anything beyond their scope of experience would have to be qualified by the subjunctive. My own dissertation, however, is global in its aspirations and attempts to define a hip-hop that exists in all places even within the

311 halls of academia, a hip-hop with revolutionary potential, though one limited to the chronotope and scale of looped interconnectedness in the streets. Go out, introduce yourself to a rapper, follow them and their posse into a dark ally, you will hear them all a lot more clearly there.

Identity formation (and its hegemonic interpolation) is a determining factor in behavior, social status, and access to power; recognizing this, hip-hop scholars Pancho McFarland and

Jared Ball (2016) argue against Western Euro-American imperial designations of difference between Black/African and Latinx/Indigenous peoples. They explain:

Colonial identities such as “Black,” “Latino,” and “Indian” are themselves extensions of

larger processes and mythologies. Attendant to the construction of these identities are the

national myths to which they are attached. These identities become ideological moorings

that fasten the consciousness to the mythology of a linear advance from precolonial, pre-

civilization to post-colonial, civilized, post-racial. (43)

Hip-hop, according to the scholars, already contributes to the re-africanization and re- indigenization of identity; that is, as an oral practice and a system of knowledge production, hip- hop affirms self images and community development beyond those established by imperialism, colonization, enslavement, and genocide. It rejects the social order and hierarchization that States impose with brutal force and/or benign neglect. McFarland and Ball are careful to point out that hip-hop in and of itself has not paved the way for a post-racial America or a utopia of gender equity; nor does it entirely divorce itself from progressive, liberal state celebrations of upward- mobility and multiculturalism; however, hip-hop does do well to reveal institutional inequality, including poverty, mass incarceration, police violence, and systemic racism without the support of formal commercial media industries. McFarland and Ball might put too much stock in hip-hop

312 as a “decolonial method,” as they reduce decolonization to being a metaphor rather than an actual commitment to the repatriation of Indigenous lands (Tuck and Yang 2012); nevertheless, I find their work to be an important reminder that despite the differences between hip-hop artists and academics, we both must allow ourselves to be lost in desmadre, giving up our control of knowledge and our determination to speak with only one voice. We both must disturb the supposedly harmonious status quo.

El Sub, The Final Echo Chamber

It was silent as we walked down the street. The group Rap Reál de México (RRMx), myself, we were all exhausted and fairly overwhelmed. No one had anything else to say. We had heard enough from each other and enough from the street. We wanted silence. But we walked on.

Despite their general absence throughout this dissertation, RRMx played an integral part of my ethnographic experience and my eventually understanding of resounding México City. I had met Rap Reál de México months earlier. They were recording with El Siete in El Sub. El Sub is a space and gallery for youth art. It is in a narrow passage running under the glorieta (traffic circle) at Fray Servando and el 20 de Noviembre, near Metro Pino Suarez. Visually the muraled and graffitied walls of the space depict a serene, imaginative environment, but aurally they echo every chaotic sound of the city. Cars, busses, and industrial trucks pass overhead. Their blaring music, grinding gears, and creaking suspensions all boom deep vibrations through the tunnel.

Pedestrians cut through to cross the intersection, talking, laughing, and filling the space with sibilance.

As they recorded, a nearby group talked and laughed loudly. Another group at the far end of the hall banged pieces of scrap metal together. The cars above seemed to honk and grind their

313 gears at exactly the worst moments in recording. For all the distractions, the artist did not change their behavior or their dedication to record. They tried and tried again to capture a single take. In their ad-libs, the self-hyping phrases and responses they added to their own lyrics, the word “Yo” was quite popular. It did not much matter whether they were saying the first- person pronoun in Spanish or the greeting and expressive common in USAmerican rap.

Recording at El Sub was not optimal. In all recording venues, engineers had to compete with environmental sounds, unbalanced acoustics, and a rapper’s overpowering voice. PerroZW, for instance, placed his microphone at the back of a bookshelf cubby. El Pinche Pastok stretched a sock around an eight inch ring and placed it in front of his dynamic mic. These measures helped cut decibels of sound that might otherwise interfere with the rapper’s voice, but there was always the underlying din of the room. Even the professionally constructed cabinet at Victoria

Emergente rattled and shook in response to the highway overhead. But engineers did their best physically and digitally in the mix, cutting all frequencies lower than 85Hz and higher than

255Hz to highlight the human voice, then compressing it so the dynamic range was flatter and therefore seemed louder in the mix. In El Sub, both tactics failed. El Siete used a portable concave acoustic shell that protected his condenser microphone from room noise; he used a pop filter that limited vocal plosives; and finally, he shelved the vocals as tightly as he could.

Unfortunately, El Sub was all but deafening. The final mix of RRMx recording was crowded with noise, and the rapper’s voices sounded hollow and distant.

After that first meeting watching them record, I regularly spent afternoons with the crew in

Reyvax’s parent’s house or Cyteros’ and her Brother’s apartments. They would practice their latest songs. We would argue and tease one another. They would watch music videos by their

314 favorite Latin American Artists. I would doze and nap in preparation for whatever event I had planned for the night. We would also attend concerts, album release parties, open mics, and film showings together. Whenever we hung out outside their homes, it was always for hours on end and sometimes included a trek across the city.

On the night we fell silent, we lulled to a stop near Torré Latinoamericano in the causeway of the Bellas Artes Museum. We paused to breath, and before anyone spoke, we already knew there would be a consensus: the night was over. As we began moving to say goodbye and began thanking each other for the day, I tried to explain to them that because our time had been so full of people, sights and sound, laughter and learning that I simply could not think anymore. We had chatted while we waited for a concert that never began. We had talk and walked from El Centro to Roma then back to Bellas Artes. We had sat and rapped and watched all the people multiple parks. It was just another day in desmadre.

I explained that even though I had enjoyed every second, I was through. I was feeling weakened and tired by it all. In explaining this, I was searching for a translation of the English word for being “overwhelmed,” but in linguistic fatigue, I was not entirely sure I made any sense at all. Apparently I did. Someone said engentado, but I missed it. Someone else said it again.

Then I heard it.

“Engentado? Engentado…En..gent..ado!” I broke down laughing. Its morphology struck my ears— engentado; gente meaning people; engentado meaning “enpeopled.” It was a word so perfectly relevant. I understood everything in it, and I felt understood by it. Yes, I was engentado.

They were too. We each needed our own silence.

At the end of a day spent in hip-hop and desmadre, I longed for quiet and solitude. I would

315 often replace one leg of my return journey, skipping the bus-ride or Metro-ride to take one last long walk between stops. The quiet, dark streets were both calming and invigorating; somehow the silence still echoed my day’s apophenic experiences and reverberated with new layers (or tracks) of meaning in place (Campos 2018). In many ways, this dissertation has been an attempt to represent and analyze the experience of a quiet (but never silent) city.

As an anthropologist, in each of the stories I told throughout the last seven chapters I attempted to highlight the feeling of desmadre. I attempted to bridge the gap between the birds- eye view and the calle escuela. Though I have mostly focused on the artists themselves—their talk, their mobility, their relationships, their performances—I have tried to write desmadre as if it were itself agentive, a creative force in its own right. My descriptions of details in performance, dialogues, and crossings in the city and in features of the voice have supported this.

El Sub, then, stands as metaphor for this force of desmadre and for hip-hop artist’s reaction to it. My time with RRMx wavered between noisy studio sessions, lively arguments around a table, and a few relaxing naps on a fluffy couch, but mostly wild and noisy tours through the city. Each experience with RRMx felt like being in El Sub again; it felt like an echo chamber where new information, new encounters in the city, new experiences with too many people all funneled into a hard moment of sound. Desmadre was always pushing us this way or that. It was always bleeding into the room and calling us back to its streets. This all was exhausting and left us engentado, but it was addicting just the same. I hope that feeling still resonates.

316 GLOSSARY

Agua Fresca. Fruit blended with water and sugar.

Aguas. Literally water or waters; however, in Mexico it is often used as a call to attention or warning while in movement.

Albur. A form of linguistic subterfuge and humor where phrases have multiple meanings depending on how they are parsed.

Los 43. On September 26, 2014, 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teacher’s College disappeared from Iguala,

Guerrero. Over 100 students left their school in three busses heading to Mexico City to join demonstrations in remembrance of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre. When they passed through Iguala, two of the busses were detained by police at a road block. The police began firing on the bus killing a bus driver and one student. The remaining details of the roadblock, murder, and disappearance remain unclear; however, much has been pieced together from the cell phone videos of the students. Whether the final disappearance was ordered and executed by the police chief or by members of the Guerreros Unidos Cartel is unknown. Regardless, the disappearance sparked massive protests across the nation calling for the return of los 43 that continue to this day.

Barrio. A residential neighborhood, usually a working class one. It can also be used to refer to an individual, like homeboy

Bubu Lubu. A marshmallow treat with strawberry jelly covered in chocolate. They’re one of the many treats sold by ambulant vendors on busses and the Metro. As noted all vendors sing out their products, usually adding their own particular style to a common motif. So despite variations, all vendors in the city emphasize and elongate the /u/ sound, especially the final.

Cacahuetes Enchiladas. Peanuts in chili, often bought pre-made with a powder or homemade with either dried peppers or various hot sauces and lime.

Cacharpo. On many busses, the driver has an assistant who shouts from the open door as the bus approaches the stop. He tells those waiting there of the bus’s destination and route. I never saw a woman performing this role.

Cafe de Olla. Literally coffee from the pot; however it is specially prepared with cinnamon and a raw dark sugar

317 sugar called pilloncillo.

Caguama. Literally a large turtle; however, used Mexico to refer to a 40oz glass bottle of beer.

Calle Escuela/Calle Vida. Street School/Street Life

Caló/Jerga. Slang or counter-cultural sociolect.

Carnal/Carnalismo. Literally an adjective meaning carnal or sexual; however, used to denote a blood or extremely close relationship between unrelated peoples.

Casta. A complex system which tried to categorize the racial or ethnic admixture of the early colony.

Chicano. In the US, the term Chicano is usually reserved for US citizens of Mexican descent who have politicized their ethnic identities, refusing assimilation. In Mexico, the term refers to any Mexican born in the US.

Chilaquiles. Chips fried in salsa.

Combi. Originally a Volkswagen microbus converted for the commercial transport of people. A cable is rigged to the sliding door so he can open the door from his seat. Payment is passed through a small slot in a partition separating riders from the driver. The fee is determined by distance. Combis are mostly found in the outskirts of the city.

Coca. Cocaine, a stimulant.

Cronísta. The writer of la crónica genre commonly celebrated in Latin America that blends journalism, elements of fiction, cultural analysis, and autobiography.

Cuadros. LSD (Lysergic Acid Diethylamide), a powerful hallucinogen. So called for the small squares of paper by which it is ingested.

Desmadre. Literally to wean; however used to mean chaos, mess, or confusion.

Doble Sentido. Double Sense; Inuendo.

Eje. The cross-city multi-lane highways.

Engentado. Overwhelmed.

Faltoso. Unreliable; neglectful; disrespectful

318 Fresa. Literally strawberry; however used to mean stuck-up, rich, or snobbish.

Flojo. Loose; Lazy; Slack

Güey. Dude; pal; friend; used irrespective of gender or sex

Gabacho. Used in Spain as an epithet against the French and other foreigners. Used in Mexico and other parts of

Latin America to refer to the US as place and/or its citizens in a slightly disapproving way.

Gorrón. Freeloader

Gringa/o. Yankee or US American individual (mostly white)

Gringas. Layers of flour tortilla, meat, and melted cheese.

Hijos de Poeta. Children of the Poet.

Hora punta. Rush hour, the busiest time for traffic

Imperio del Ruido. Empire of Noisiness

Indigenismo. Government policies dedicated to categorizing and serving (or marginalizing) indigenous communities.

Mala Fama. A bad reputation

Malandro. A bad person or delinquent youth.

Malinchismo. Attraction to, or preference of foreign (usually Spanish or US American) culture. As noted, stems from the myth of Malinalli/Malintzin who acted as Hernán Cortés translator.

Manicomio. Mental hospital; Asylum

Marijuano. An individual that smokes marijuana regularly

Mestizaje. Of Mixed race or culture. Descent from Spanish and Indigenous (sometimes African and Chinese) peoples. The term was one of many used to categorized the mixed race castas of Mexico under Spanish rule.

Mexicanidad. The quality or degree of Mexicanness or Mexicanity

Micro. See Pesero

Mona. Any number of caustic chemicals inhaled as an intoxicant, usually paint thinners and PVC glues. Also called

319 activo, chemo, or tíner.

Mota. Marijuana, a psychoactive plant. Also called café, campechano, chátara, chíchara, churro, flor, grifa, hashís, hierba, maripepa, mierda, morita, mostaza, orégano, pasto verde, pechuga, porro, sagrada, verde, yerba buena, yerba bruja, yesca.

Mujeres Trabajando. Women Working.

Neta. Literally net; however, used to assert or acertain the truth value of a statement.

Naco. A racist term for indigenous persons in an urban setting, sometimes labeled delinquent, sometimes labeled as foolishly attempting to be modern.

Narco. In the noun form, refers to a drug dealer; however, can be used as a suffix to denote a relationship to the drug economy, thus narcocultura (drug culture), narcotraficante (drug trafficker), narcocorridos (a traditional genre of narrative poetry and music about rebellious peasants resisting and outsmarting oppressive forces, which now celebrates cartel victories), and finally narcoterrorism.

¡No Mames!/¡No Manches! Literally means do not suck/do not sully; however used as an expression of disbelief, the former crude, the latter relatively more polite.

Oriente/Poniente. The East side of Mexico City, includes Iztapalapa, Milpa Alta Tláhuac, and Xochimilco and

Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl, La Paz, and increasingly Chimalhuacan outside the official city. The West side includes

Azcapoltzalco, Álvaro Obregón, Cuajimalpa, Cuauhtémoc, and Miguel Hidalgo. Both these regions suffer from higher rates of crime, and are therefore more associated with the street and being hard in hip-hop. Artists that I interviewed from el Norte (the North), justified their enrollment in hip-hop by saying life there was just as hard and difficult. Artists from el Oriente and el Poniente would sometimes qualify the realness of those rappers from el Sur

(Sur) a more upper class area where there is the least amount of crime.

Pachecear. To smoke marijuana

Paletas. Ice Cream Cones

Pelado. As an adjective it means broke, bankrupt, or bald; however, it is used as a noun to refer to the urban proletariat and other slum dwellers.

Pesero. Another form of public transportation. A microbus larger than a Combi that charges a flat rate. They often

320 have a cacharpo assisting the driver. They often allow mobile venders to board and sell from one stop to the next.

Pulquería. A bar serving pulque, an alcoholic beverage made from the sap of maguey.

Puesto. A permanent shop.

Raza. Literally race or breed; however, used more often to refer to the community of a single barrio or of similar interests.

Riddim. The Jamaican Patois pronunciation of Rhythm used in both English and Spanish when referring to the instrumental tracks of reggae, dancehall, and reggaetón music.

Ruido. Noise

Sociedad Cuadrada. Literally square society; however, as in English square is a pejorative term for mainstream, conservative, or uncool. It is often considered the antonym of el Under.

Tacha. Ecstasy or MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine), a psychoactive chemical and stimulant.

Tianguis. A flea-market or farmers-market that travels to different neighborhoods throughout the week or month.

Tocayos. Two persons that share a name.

Under. Underground music is unrelated to major media corporations and commercialism. It might be only esoterically known or even well known and distributed; however, it still differentiates itself from mainstream culture. El Under refers to the (mostly youth) society who reject sociedad cuadrada and dedicates themselves to counter-cultural activities.

Vecindad. A building containing several housing units, usually surrounding a central quart yard.

Velador. Watchman or caretaker.

Vieja Guardia. The old guard.

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