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Venezuelan Youth Street Culture Festival.

Article Excerpt
The brim of a young hip-hop artist's beige beanie hides a quarter of his face as his peers observe cross-legged from the concrete below. His cheek and lips grip the microphone intensely. The timid posture of his thinly adolescent frame can barely contain the newly found power and energy budding from each stomp he plants on the rickety stage in a weedy university parking lot in Merida, Venezuela.

To the beatboxed rhythms laid down by his "panas" (a slang term that means pals), he grumbles, almost defensively, some of the most profound lyricism uttered on this grayish day: "With Latin blood I am proud to be a third-worldist. For us what is valuable in life is what we've got here. We walk the streets talking to ourselves. But we ain't crazy, we just know ourselves better."

The gathering is one of a series of "Youth Street Culture Festivals" that take place each month in a different neighborhood of this rapidly transforming, explosively overcrowded, historically agricultural town at the Northern tip of the Andes Mountain range. The purpose, according to Jose Miguel Jimenez, one of the festival organizers, is "to rescue, bolster, and redefine what is the cultural identity of Venezuela, in which the young have been called once again by history to play an important role."

Cultural Proposal

Jimenez works at the National Youth Institute (IN J) created in 2002 with the passage of the National Youth Law, which complies with the new constitution approved by popular referendum shortly after the election of President Hugo Chavez. The institute links up with a multitude of young leftist organizations in the community to compel young people's protagonistic participation in Venezuela's radically changing democracy. Jimenez clarifies that "much more than simply an opportunity to listen to good music, the street culture festival is a cultural proposal, that young people reclaim public spaces in order to express the autonomous culture of our generation, in the unique context of our localities."

One of the many kids around the disc changer stokes a reggae mix of Pink Floyd's "Time." Quasifamiliar electric guitar simulations mix with lyrics pronounced in an unabashedly colloquial Spanglish accent. A twenty-something-year-old member of Utopia 78, an organization which constructs in theory and practice a uniquely Latin American-style utopia, injects his commentary: "The idea is culture in the street. Not for money. Not for fame. For the people. Our generation in the street."

We listeners are hovering among cultures, fashions, generations, and national borders. And something new.

That youth are participating now, more than ever, in Venezuelan politics, is widely acknowledged. Many at the festival attribute this to the increased opportunities for youth participation created during what is called "el proceso", or...

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