Archive for September, 2008
Welcome!
Welcome to my Fulbright mtvU-blog! For the next nine months, I will live in Paris and use this site to post photos, video, interviews, and various updates on French hip-hop culture and its relationship to politics, social activism, and a growing multicultural French identity.
To give you some background on my project, I first became interested in French hip-hop after meeting a Parisian college student and rapper named Allan (he will pop up on my blog from time to time) while on vacation in France in 2005. It was through Allan’s explanation of his music that I started to learn about some of the problems that multicultural French young people (particularly from the French suburbs, or the banlieue) faced, including: discrimination, unemployment and balancing the cultural expectations of French society and those of their countries of origin. Although there are many affluent banlieues in France, these city outskirts often have the same connotation of what someone in the U.S. might describe as the “inner city,” yet they are extremely diverse as many banlieusards (suburbanites) have origins in North and West Africa, Asia, or other parts of Europe.
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Errand
I have a new guitar! I bought it yesterday at La Ciudadela, a craft market in downtown Mexico City. After visiting stall after stall, pulling down guitars and trying them out, I wasn’t particularly drawn to any of them. It didn’t help that the shopkeepers were hovering over me, eager to make a deal with the gringa tourist who was making quite a spectacle of herself by trying to hammer out the chords to Cielito Lindo. So when I eventually came upon these guys, hard at work carving and brushing sawdust off of a pair of guitars, I was intrigued.
Hi everybody!
Hi everybody! I just got back to California. I spent the last two months in New York getting ready for my trip by working with the awesome people at Afropop Worldwide, a nonprofit organization devoted to African music. They do some great stuff, so if you get a chance, check them out online at www.afropop.org and look for their show on your local public radio station.
But why was I at Afropop? While I was getting my mtvU-Fulbright application together, I did a lot of research on Mali at the library. The Senior Editor of Afropop, Banning Eyre (more about him www.banningeyre.com), wrote a book called In Griot Time that tells a lot about his own experiences in Mali as a guitarist in 1995. I decided that rather than leave earlier for Mali, it would be much more beneficial for me to work with him and with Afropop for a couple of months first. I’m glad I did it, as now I have many more contacts and a lot more knowledge about Mali and its music scene!
I take off for Mali on November 10, which means that I get to be around for both Halloween and the election. I’m spending the next few weeks visiting friends and family as well as familiarizing myself with my audio recording equipment.
Well, I’ll keep it short since this is my first post. The next few weeks are going to be pretty crazy for me, so I’ll just say nice to meet all of you I’ll post more from Mali!
Mex-mix
Whew! It’s taken me 10 days in Mexico City to finally sit down for long enough to write about it. Ever since arriving to Benito Juarez airport last week, I’ve been zooming from one place to another in a series of taxis, subways, buses, and my new favorite thing, peseros, a.k.a. microbuses, which squeeze passengers like sardines into a space the size of an ice cream truck and cart them around town for 3 pesos, or 30 cents, a ride.
I spent my first three days in orientation meeting the other Fulbrighters, whose projects range from studying diabetes to boxing to lizard mating habits. We took a crash course in Mexican etiquette, which includes kissing hello and goodbye (I can definitely get used to this) and uttering provecho, (“bon apetit”) to anyone whenever you feel like it, even if you’re just passing by someone digging into a plate of quesadillas on the street.
We got a big dose of Mexican history during a visit to the 2,000 year-old pyramid-like structures of Teotihuacan, and later a tour of Diego Rivera’s sprawling murals in the Palacio Nacional. As we craned our necks to take in Rivera’s images of warriors, slaves, priests, and politicians, our guide kept emphasizing a point that would later come up again (much to my geeked-out excitement) in my Mexican music classes.
Mexico is a country where mestizaje, or the mixture of Spanish, Indian, and African blood and beliefs, is everywhere. Everything from the street names to the staple food ingredients (corn, cows, sugar, and cactus are just a few) reflect the fact that modern Mexico grew out of one of the most intense cultural collisions in human history. The result is a mind-blowingly diverse mestizo culture, cuisine, and music scene like no other in the world.
The Aztecs relied on several varieties of corn and beans before the Spanish arrived in 1519, introducing pigs, cows, and chickens to the New World diet.
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