Reaffirming the Nation: Autogestión, Tradition and Technology in Mexican Political Hip-Hop

• In Event: Acordes de México y ell Caribe: Música, naciones y procesos sociales

Abstract

In La "invención" de la música indígena de México (2008), Marina Alonso Bolaños analyzes the invention and perpetuation of musical traditions by the post-revolutionary Mexican State in the twentieth century. During this period, the nationalist political project of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) promoted institutionalized versions of the country's "indigenous musics". However, in contemporary Mexico, where the PRI has been implementing neoliberal policies since the 1980s (and since its return to power in 2012), these Hobsbawmian musical "invented traditions" have been taken up by anti-State actors to undergird a very different type of nationalist politics. Based on ethnographic field research, I look at the ways that rap artists in the urban sprawl of Mexico City are utilizing musical traditions to undergird nostalgia for a pre-neoliberal age. In this context, the traditional music that the post-revolutionary state constructed as "national heritage" is reaffirmed, this time accompanying anti-State political nationalist ideologies (for instance, Zapatismo). Here, grassroots recording projects, using home studio technology, become perceived as key means through which musical tradition may be preserved, against a corrupt confluence of post-nationalist government and "Westernized" media. However, although some rap artists may be, in their own words, "preserving the roots of Mexican culture", to do so involves the uprooting of aural traditions from the vital social context in which they arise. This paper, then, examines the ways in which the goal to "preserve tradition" comes into latent and explicit conflict with the very technologies being used to fulfil it.

Author

• Andrew Green, University of London