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From Break Dancing to Heavy Metal

Navajo Youth, Resistance, and Identity

University of Utah

This article is about a small group of Navajo youth and the messages they expressed through both break dancing and heavy metal. Their break-dancing performances spoke loudly against racial discrimination in their community and echoed the hope of achieving equity. Over their years in high school, they traded the optimistically rebellious music of break dancing for the somewhat fatalistic complaint music of heavy metal. The construction of these youth's identities is framed within a critique of the "living between two worlds" metaphor—the Indian world and the Anglo world—as a deficit model. The traditional world of their grandparents no longer exists, and, due to racism in the community, the Anglo world is not available to them. Instead, we need to look at the complex, conflictual world in which these youth live to make sense of their performances of resistance as expressed in their music choices.

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