Ito Ogamy, born Francisco Antonio Pérez, is a Dominican rapper, beatboxer and b-boy. He led Alcapón Rap, one of the first groups to rap in Spanish in the Dominican Republic, and he is still recording.

Alcapón Rap

He dates the group to 1988, which puts it at the very beginning. Dominican rap did not exist as an industry then — there was no label, no radio slot and no audience that had asked for it, and what a group had instead was a street corner, a boombox and whoever could hold a beat with his mouth.

He worked all three of the disciplines the culture actually consisted of: he rapped, he danced, and he was among the best beatboxers on the island. That combination is what a Dominican in the late eighties had to be, because there was nobody else to be it for him.

The group was Ito Ogamy with Figurín and Ulises, and it reached a real audience in the early nineties. Dominican hip-hop histories record that Alcapón Rap turned up in television commercials — one account has them building a jingle out of a track called Raploncesto, a rap about basketball — which was how a rapper got heard in a country whose radio would not play him.

Santo Domingo Clan

The S.D.C. that follows his name is Santo Domingo Clan. He is a registered member of ASCAP and holds membership number forty-nine in SGACEDOM, the Dominican authors’ and composers’ society — a low number, and evidence that he was doing the paperwork of authorship at a time when almost nobody in the genre was.

Still on the record

He has kept releasing. El Pionero states the position in a title. Dominican Legends was made with Alex X, Lápida with Radel Rap, and El Pichirry put him on the same record as Kiko el Crazy, Yomel el Meloso and El Cherry Scom — thirty years of Dominican rap on one track, which is not a common thing to arrange.

The younger generation knows what he is. Lápiz Conciente stopped what he was doing to honour him publicly when he turned up unannounced, and footage of it circulated widely.

Almost nothing about him is written down in any newspaper. The record of the first years of Dominican rap lives on Facebook history pages and in the memory of the people who were there, and this is one of the entries where that is the whole documentary situation.