CONTANDO CONTIGO:
 Yohamna Depestre Corcho (Zona Franca)
 and African-Cuban Hip Hop Fiction

 Edith VAzquez

ip Hop is the most vibrant and ubiquitous genre of

 contemporary culture. Its scope is monumental, traversing
 visual and musical media globally. Hip hop has stimulated
leagues of artists, critics, and scholars who engage in its continual
regeneration. It is a unique epistemology of our present cultural age,
replete with critical methodologies and poetics that speak to current
cultural contexts and developments. My interest in the literary forms
of Cuban hip hop was piqued by a trip I made to Cuba last year, and
further pollinated by email exchanges with poets and writers in Cuba
which are ongoing. This paper attempts to theoretically braid together
a contemporary feminist Latin American genre-the short story- with
the metagenre of hip hop. What proceeds from this formalistic "mix" is
a hip hop cuento.
 To document my critical inquiry of Cuban hip hop literature, I bring
together several forms of writing to better represent the work of the
contemporary Cuban woman short story writer and performance artist,
Yohamna Depestre Corcho, currently working under the name Yohamna
Zona Franca. While in Cuba, I visited her neighborhood Alamar, known
as the birthplace of Cuban rap. Alamar is reportedly one of the largest
housing projects in the world. In approaching the work of La China (as