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Accepted Paper:

Pachakuti punto net: Hip-Hop, territoriality and mass-mediatized spheres of sociality among Andean youth  
Karl Swinehart (University of Louisville)

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the mediation of belonging among Aymara youth in Bolivia with their diasporic counterparts abroad through online fan sites of Bolivian Hip-Hop groups, and questions the relevance of territory within a discourse community simultaneously oriented to indigeneity and diaspora.

Paper long abstract:

In Bolivia, the city of El Alto is alternately characterized as the fastest growing, the most densely Indigenous, the most politically militant and, the superlative favored by its promoters, the youngest city, referring both to its recent founding and to demographic fact. The youth of El Alto are overwhelmingly the children of Aymara migrants from the surrounding Andean high plain and are often migrants themselves. Many continue to migrate to other cities in Latin America and Europe. For many youth across these locales, Hip-Hop cultures provide productive sites for self-expression and identity formation, establishing urban belonging but also ties to home.

This paper explores the mediation of belonging among predominantly Aymara youth in the city of El Alto, Bolivia with their diasporic counterparts in other Latin American, European and U.S. cities through online fan sites of El Alto based Hip-Hop groups, drawing on both ethnographic work in Bolivia and discourse analysis of online discussions. These Bolivian artists are committed to Indigenous political movements where territory is paramount, yet how might territory become reconfigured within the deterritorialized networks comprising the discourse community of their fans? Particularly within such a selfconsciously transnational framework as Hip-Hop, how may Bolivia, Qullasuyu, Aymara nationhood, or indigeneity more generally, be reconfigured, reinscribed or rejected by Bolivian migrant youth participating in these forums from locales as distant as São Paulo, Madrid and Washington, D.C?

Panel P225
Migrations, new media and contemporary policies of belonging
  Session 1