Date of Award

1-1-2023

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Latin American, Caribbean and U.S. Latino Studies

Content Description

1 online resource (xiii, 265 pages) : illustrations (some color)

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Johana Londoño

Committee Members

Alejandra Bronfman, Walter Little, Jason Nichols

Keywords

Dominican, Hip-Hop, New York City, The Dominican Republic, Transnationalism, Hip-hop

Subject Categories

Latin American Studies

Abstract

This dissertation explores and analyzes Dominicans in Hip-Hop culture, both in New York City and in the Dominican Republic, a population that has been overlooked in Hip-Hop scholarship, and whose relationship to blackness has always been used as an archetypal case study to highlight black denial and erasure in the Americas. I use Dominican Hip-Hop voices to challenge hegemonic narratives that depict blackness and latinidad as rigid and mutually exclusive categories in Hip-Hop and beyond. I theorize the transnational presence and experience of Dominicans in Hip-Hop using the concept of scratchin’. I refer to the scratching technique used by Hip-Hop DJs that consists of continuously moving vinyl records back and forth to deconstruct the original sonic flow of records in order to recreate a whole new pattern of rhythms and sounds. Therefore, I conceptualize “scratch” for Dominicans in Hip-Hop who first challenge the existing preconceptions that have historically marginalized them for not being black enough in New York Hip-Hop and for being associated with blackness and U.S. cultural imperialism in the transnational Dominican context, in order to recreate new narratives that disrupt these preconceptions. My dissertation prompts us to rethink ethno-racial, class and gender politics in New York City and in the Dominican Republic from the perspective of marginalized, invisibilized, and at times criminalized, Hip-Hop artists. This dissertation relies on six years of mixed-methods. I primarily utilize qualitative ethnography building on preliminary research done for a Master’s project on Hip-Hop and Dominican Transnationalism. I use participant observation as well as structured and semi-structured interviews. I have realized 60 one-time interviews lasting between 25 minutes and 3 hours between 2015 and 2022 with deejays, emcees, graffiti writers, breakers or dancers, and beatboxers, as well as record producers and sound engineers, in three different research sites, New York City, Santo Domingo and Santiago de Los Caballeros in the Dominican Republic. This represents around 90 hours of transcribed interviews that I complement with participant observation. I attended sixteen performances ranging from concerts, freestyles, formal and informal collective gatherings, graffiti activities and dance contests. Six of them in New York City and ten in the Dominican Republic. In addition to ethnographic work, this project is also informed by the analysis of secondary research. I did archival research to analyze press coverage in New York City through the digital archive of The New York Times, and The New York Post. In the Dominican Republic, I visited the Prensa Diaria Dominicana press section of the Archivo General de la Nación to consult Dominican newspapers such as El Caribe, Hoy, Listín Diario and El Nacional. I also include an analysis of music industry magazines such as Billboard, as well as the writings of music journalism such as The Source and Vibe Magazine in the United States, as well as Cultura Urbana Mag in the Dominican Republic. Finally, I also utilize content ananlysis of government documents, photographic catalogs such as the Henry Chalfant Personal Archive on graffiti writing housed at the Eric Firestone Gallery in New York City, flyers’ collections such as the Johan Kugelberg Hip Hop Collection at Cornell University, and music and lyrical analysis of Hip-Hop music productions.

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