Mala vida: Representations of the Violences in Malandro Style Rappers at the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area

Abstract

The objective of this article is to understand the representations of violence highlighted by rappers belonging to the “malandro” style in the Metropolitan Area of Guadalajara (mag). I start from the assumption that the representations of rappers are constituted by a set of social disadvantages that accumulate in the trajectories of the subjects, which affects the appropriation of lifestyles plagued by violence, both suffered and in which they are part of, and that in general the exponents name this social condition as “mala vida”. In this section I highlight some theoretical aspects, as well as certain important elements of the Mexican and mag context, some of the rappers’ accounts of the structural violence they have had to experience, and then I express some accounts of extreme violence generated by paralegal actors who control the mag localities. Likewise, I highlight the representations that the rappers constitute from the appropriation that they carry out around the violence and the risks they have had to go through from their adscription to the “malandro” style. At the end of the text I integrate the analysis of the representations of violence in the video clips of the exponents, since they express some meanings in their musical productions. This set of sections allows me to develop some explanations about the violence experienced by the rappers, as well as to understand the meanings that the exponents express in their representations and the meanings they give them within their musical practices, aspects that we will deepen in the course of the article.