Hip‐hop culture's force as part of globalization in the fields of economics, popular aesthetics, and identity politics has been well documented. However, its articulation to educational practices has received less attention. This article draws upon fieldwork conducted in 1999 and 2002 in a youth correctional facility to analyze how state institutional practices mediate hip‐hop's educational project in São Paulo, Brazil. This analysis historicizes culture and education as they pertain to popular culture and the state in urban Brazil, and evaluates hip‐hop's pedagogical force in the local workshop setting.

This article investigates the blurry intersection between the state and civil society in the fields of popular education and citizenship. In Brazil most performers of hip hop (rappers, DJs, graffiti artists, and street dancers) make their living as educators remunerated by state agencies and NGOs. The significance of such labor can be understood in terms of a historical relationship between agents of popular culture and the state regarding the parameters of citizenship. From the pragmatic perspective of most hip hoppers, their employment status is part of a long-standing objective to make hip hop more visible and "take over" more public space. To this end, the following text examines events in the CEU (United Educational Centers) and the Hip Hop House as differentiated examples of hip hop pedagogy.

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In this essay I posit that the stylistic divergences in Brazilian hip hop reveal a set of social and geographical dynamics related to São Paulo, the country's largest city and supposed beacon of modernity. The case of São Paulo hip hop speaks beyond Brazil and potentially contributes to larger discussions of the contemporary city complex including the role of the working-class periphery sprawls on urbanism. This text focuses on the primacy of periferia (periphery) as an ideological and spatial concept rooted in the artistic expressions of the "marginal." In their activities, hip hoppers articulate "periphery" as not only a place but also as an epistemology, which in turn works to change the meaning of the city for the historically disenfranchised. Not without its limitations and internal critics, marginality secretes a "magic" or at least retains a pull as hip hoppers and urban, working-class Brazilians, in general, look to convince others of their value in exchange for respect. [