Forthcoming
from SDSU Press Open
  Funded by SDSU Press & the Swiss National Science Foundation DOI [Digital Object Identifier] https://doi.org/10.65964/k8ac- This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ click to expand  Barrio Rap in Los Angeles American Made with a Mexican Flow Dianne Violeta Mausfeld Born in the barrios of Los Angeles and circulating across streets, studios, and platforms, barrio rap has always been hypervisible and under-theorized. In this immersive, field-driven study, Dianne Violeta Mausfeld brings together ethnography, cultural studies, and critical race analysis to trace a music culture shaped by Mexican American life, transnational flows, digital mediation, and urban precarity. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, oral history, and close readings of lyrics, performances, and social media, Mausfeld reframes barrio rap not as a derivative subgenre but as a site of cultural production where identity is negotiated through sound, style, and place. Engaging concepts of hybridity, flow, mediascapes, and affect, the book tracks how artists move between the local and the global, the analog and the digital, the archive and the feed. From DIY studios and informal economies to Instagram as living archive, Barrio Rap in Los Angeles shows how music operates as spatial practice, counter-archive, and mode of belonging in a city structured by racial capitalism, surveillance, and displacement. Mausfeld’s reflexive methodology foregrounds positionality, collaboration, and ethical ethnography, offering a model for research conducted with communities rather than merely about them. At once theoretically agile and narratively alive, Barrio Rap in Los Angeles speaks to scholars of hip-hop studies, Latinx and Chicanx studies, urban studies, media studies, and ethnomusicology. It insists that the barrio is not marginal to American culture—but central to how culture is made, circulated, and felt in the twenty-first century. |