Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

On March 20th 2018, outside Guadalajara, México, Christian Omar Palma Gutiérrez disposed of three bodies for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Unbeknownst to him, the corpses he dissolved in barrels of acid were those of three film students, unrelated to the drug economy. Aside from his work for the cartel, Omar was a hardworking and successful musician and rapper, known to hundreds of thousands of fans as QBA. On May 24th, 2018, soon after the authorities apprehended Omar, and he confessed, major Mexican and international news media linked Omar’s two careers, and reproduced a common stereotype, which defines rap musicians by way of criminality. This study investigates the relationships between news media, narcoterrorism and Hip Hop, the culture associated with rap music. Through ethnographic interviews with artists and government functionaries in the nation’s capital, I aim to understand what consequences the media’s representation of QBA as a narco-rapper might have on individual artists in their daily life, and on government-sponsored cultural programs. I frame this study as an anthropology of media, and seek to understand how the news functions as a conflict discourse within the negotiation of social identity and cultural politics. As such, I recount less of what occurred in Tonalá, and more about the how mediated narratives have constituted a wider Drug War Zone spanning from Guadalajara to Ciudad México and to the United States. This paper, contributes to discussions of the relationship between musical cultures, global capitalism, governance, and resistance.