Hip-Hop Guayaquil: culturas viajeras e identidades locales

This paper addresses how people selectively interpret images and sounds which circulate through the global media, investing politically-charged forms of popular culture with new, locally significant political meanings. Hip-hop is a genre of contemporary music characterized by the orchestration of rapped lyrics, fragments of music recorded in the past by other artists, and electronic instrumentation, all superimposed over a regular and steady beat. As a kind of music, accompanied by its own forms of dance and fashion, hip-hop is the product of the travel and transformation of a variety of black political ideologies, constituted in changing relations with one another and with the dominant cultures against which they struggle. Hip-hop, in its context of origin is linked to politics of identity defended by black youth. In this essay I explore the role that hip-hop plays in the formulation of an identity on the part of black and mestizo youth from the popular sectors of Guayaquil, Ecuador. This ethnographic case study illustrates the need to consider the political dimensions of the processes of translation between the global and the local