Building worlds: religiosity and Hip Hop culture in Mexico

Abstract

This article shows the way in which the meaning of Hip Hop culture in Mexico has been configured as a worldview that is responsible for building the world. Starting from the definition of religion proposed by the sociologist Peter Berger, for whom it represents the company of building a worldview on the sacred, where the sacred refers to the mysterious power of a thing or person; It can be concluded that Hip Hop culture is a religion in the sense that it builds a significant configuration around the sacred idea of the party or the Block Party. Hip Hop culture is a proposal that emerged in the Bronx, in New York, at the beginning of the seventies and with the passing of time it has constituted a worldview called Planet Rock (product of the neighborhood party). From Planet Rock four artistic practices were configured: rap (singing), breaking (dance), graffiti (painting) and Djing (music); made knowledge (knowledge) the engine for the transformation and dynamism of all its elements; generated a FreeStyle method, which is playful and not gradual; he set up activities ranging from street fashion, street language, beat box and street market; built an ethical proposal that contemplates peace, love, unity and healthy recreation. This world built by Hip Hop is the product of a utopia that became a heterotopia, which is why it brings together the real and symbolic need to configure spaces where difference lives without colliding. This approximation to Hip Hop culture as a religion, which is presented in the following lines, is the product of multiple interviews conducted from 2014 to the present –especially with male and female rappers– mainly from Mexico City. The first approaches to the field allowed us to understand that the Hip Hop community in Mexico is making great efforts to try to understand and conceptualize the culture of the Bronx. This research tries to offer clues about how Hip Hop culture is currently conceived, starting from a foundational sense. In summary, Hip Hop culture is the construction of a world that can be expressed from a religious sense in Mexico.