From Cervantes, Rappers Draw Poetic Inspiration
CIUDAD REAL, Spain — Jesús Camacho, 28, a schoolteacher, recalled a time in his youth when he refused to read “Don Quixote,” the most famous work by Miguel de Cervantes. “I saw that it was the same size as the Bible,” he said, “so I got scared.”
But in July, Mr. Camacho, who is also a rapper known as Camaccho, found himself enthralled by the themes in the Spanish writer’s works as he prepared to participate in the Rap in Cervantes competition here. Contestants improvised lyrics based on a phrase or a character from “Don Quixote” or other works by the author.
Mr. Camacho said he had been surprised to discover that Cervantes dealt with many themes that lie at the heart of his own rap compositions. “Cervantes tells us that you can’t live without having hopes, without dreaming of something beyond your everyday reality — whether things then work out as you hoped or not — and that is exactly what I believe,” he said.
Rap in Cervantes is among the more i nnovative celebrations being held this year to mark the 400th anniversary of the author’s death. It is a trans-Atlantic occasion, coordinated between two annual theater events: the Almagro International Festival of Classical Theater in central Spain, and the Festival Internacional Cervantino in Guanajuato in central Mexico. An international competition was held here on July 14, and Guanajuato will repeat it in October, drawing on the same group of six finalists.
The winner at each gets about $2,200. But many artists said they viewed the event as an opportunity to bridge street culture and high culture. “We’ve been too separated, often stigmatized by society for being at a lower level culturally,” said Alfredo Martínez, 30, who comes from Tijuana and calls himself Danger.
While Cervantes gained fame with his Don Quixote of La Mancha, he also suffered major setbacks, particularly with his plays, which were mostly flops. Some draw parallels between Cervant- es’s efforts and rap. As a cultural expression, “hip-hop and rap have not been properly appreciated, which is what also happened to Cervantes,” said Natalia Menéndez, the director of the Almagro festival. She suggested that you could also link Cervantes to rap because of his focus on social issues, like the rights of the working class.
Mr. Martínez had won a preliminary contest to select Mexico’s three representatives to the international final. In Mexico, 87 rappers entered, compared with 104 in Spain.
In the jury’s vote in the final, the Spanish rappers came out on top. The audience “could probably understand more easily what we were talking about,” said José Miguel Manzano Bazalo, 26, who is from Valencia in eastern Spain and calls himself Skone. The winner was a Spaniard, Alfonso Campos Yuste, who goes by the name BTA.
So while Cervantes provided a starting point, the rappers came up with lyrics that focused on issues like political corruption in Spain or drug violence in Mexico.
Skone said: “We wanted to create something based on Cervantes but also connect with our audience — and that means finding a balance and talking to the public about things everybody knows and understands.’’