Barrio Rap in Los
Angeles
American Made with a Mexican Flow
Dianne Violeta
Mausfeld
Forthcoming
from SDSU Press, SDSU Press Open
Funded by the National Science Foundation of
Switzerland & SDSU Press
DOI [Digital Object Identifier] https://doi.org/10.65964/k8ac-qa75
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.
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