What leads young people to engage in political activism, creating or participating in interest groups? This question is discussed in the light of results obtained from a research on a group of rappers involved with the hip-hop movement in the city of Campinas, São Paulo. Their dispositions toward activism are analyzed as a result of the objective and subjective conditions under which they were socialized, apprehended through a study of their family's social trajectory. In turn, their concrete engagement in political activities is seen as the never-permanent result of meetings and interactions developed inside networks of different kinds, including the affective ones, located in a social space that is made concrete through institutions and collective ways of acting and thinking that guide everyday micro-decisions, including those relative to political action.
socialization; youth; politics; activism; hip-hop