SNF Project “Hip-Hop as a Transcultural Phenomenon: Jamaican and Latin American cultural signifiers in US Hip-Hop (New York and Los Angeles, c.1970s – 1990s)”

To provide a deeper insight into these processes, this research project analyses the role of Jamaican, Puerto Rican and Mexican musical traditions and cultural representations in Hip-Hop and the creation of different strands of Hip Hop music from the 1970s to the 1990s in two urban areas, New York and Los Angeles. The project will track the (trans-) cultural flows (Appadurai) that have played an important role in the creation of these musical forms and symbolic expressions regarding musical patterns, lyrics, costume and performance. Special attention will be paid to see how members of the Jamaican, Puerto Rican and Mexican diaspora communities in the US have been able to remain connected to the music of their original countries or the original countries of their ancestors, how new musical forms have been created through new contacts, and how local and sometimes dying symbols have emerged in new musical forms and have thus been recreated. Drawing from the two case studies of New York and Los Angeles and expanding research to the heyday of “Jamaicaness” and Latin(o) Rap during the 1990s in US Hip-Hop, the project will also address the representation of Jamaican and Latin American cultural signifiers in mainstream Hip-Hop videos.

The interdisciplinary project combines approaches from cultural studies (e.g. Appadurai, Marcus, García Canclini), sociology (e.g. Brubaker, Robertson), ethnomusicology (e.g. Rabaka, Nettl) and diaspora studies (e.g. Motley/Henderson). The research combines the analyses of audio and video material as well as print media with fieldwork, particularly interviews with experts and musicians.

Project Leaders

• Prof. Dr. Christian Büschges
• Prof. Dr. Britta Sweers

Scientific Staff

• M.A. James Barber
• Dr. Dianne Violeta Mausfeld

Former Employee

• Céline Arnold

«American made with a Mexican Flow!»

Dissertation thesis Dianne Violeta Mausfeld

Chicano hip-hop was created in the late 1980s in the sphere of West Coast hip-hop, Los Angeles emerging as its epicenter. Mexican-American and Latino DJs and rappers distinctively translated their culture into music: beats were highly influenced by African-American funk and soul, as well as Chicano rock, Latin jazz and Mexican folk music. The multilingual lyrics in English, Spanish, and Caló dealt with gang violence, police brutality and street life in the varrio (‘hood), expressing the artists’ cultural roots and proclaiming Brown pride. The history of Chicano hip-hop must be considered in the context of the political climate of the 1980s and ‘90s, when Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and all the state of California faced policies of anti-immigration, racial profiling and language discrimination. The emergence and relevance of the subgenre’s ethnic label ‘Chicano rap’ is central to the question of self-representation and categorization through the music industry, for it is being perceived by artists as both empowering and limiting. Reconstructing the rise of early commercially successful Chicano hip-hop, this project aims to explore the agency and hidden histories of Mexican American hip-hop artists that so far have been widely overlooked.

In Los Angeles, “the city dubbed the gang capital of America” (Metcalf 2009), Chicano hip-hop uniquely merged with street gang culture and many of the artists were gang members. The innate turf mentality and profound relationship to place is mirrored in artist names, lyrics, and beats that entail geographical identifiers, claims to neighborhoods or gangs, and narratives about the varrio. At the same time, spaces of cultural rooting and “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983) such as Mexico or Aztlán are omnipresent. Hence, artists forge “extreme local” (Forman 2002) identities, while simultaneously promoting pan-Latino pride across city-, state- and country borders. In consequence, tracing the micro-history of Chicano hip-hop in Los Angeles includes regarding the “transcultural flows” (Appadurai) between Mexico and the United States. Central questions are how Mexican Americans have been able to stay connected to the music of their ancestors, how new musical forms have been created through “cultural hybridization” (Canclini) in the Black and Brown communities of Los Angeles, and how local and transnational symbols have been recreated and maintained in Chicano hip-hop.

Focusing on cultural signifiers, this study explores how transculturality, space, ethnicity, and identity are being negotiated in Chicano hip-hop. How do signifiers of space reflect the artists’ individual identity? How are common identities created that transcend locality and ethnicity through music? Methodologically, this interdisciplinary project brings together ethnography (qualitative interviews, participant observation), critical source evaluation (music, lyrics, and music videos), and the analysis of secondary sources (music magazines, newspapers, footage). Building upon Cross (1993), Kelley (1994), Pérez-Torres (2006), McFarland (2008), and Baker (2018), among others, this project aims to contribute to a new perspective on the history of Chicano and West Coast hip-hop.

KEYWORDS: Los Angeles, Chicano Rap, Mexican American, Transculturality, West Coast Hip-Hop.

The Historical Circularity of Jamaican and African+/American Cultural Practice
Re-framing the Jamaican Influence on Hip-Hop in New York

Dissertation Thesis (James Barber)

Hybridity debates regarding hip-hop’s origins, have hitherto occupied a difficult position in the field of hip-hop studies, in part owing to some “strange claims” of hip-hop’s “ownership” by hybridity theorists. Moving beyond the stasis of framing these influences in terms of originalism, I address the case of the Jamaican influence on hip-hop in New York, where I advance calls for new ways of seeing and “hearing” reggae and hip-hop’s relationship.

I highlight the existing paradox concerning the Jamaican and Caribbean influence on hip-hop in the United States, which has principally been (under)acknowledged in the context of hip-hop’s origins, while overlooking the role of these influences on hip-hop’s subsequent evolution in its birthplace, where Jamaican cultural practice in particular increasingly permeated hip-hop’s practices and aesthetics during the genre’s golden age from the mid-1980s to mid-‘90s. I illustrate the significant demographic, and in-turn growing cultural presence of Jamaicans in New York after 1965, while also highlighting the height of reggae and hip-hop fusion in New York with the emergence of the raggamuffin hip-hop subgenre (1987-1995). I draw on primary interviews conducted in New York from 2019 until present, which highlight the oral histories of many of the artists, producers, DJs and promoters who were instrumental in facilitating reggae and hip-hop’s aesthetic merging during its heyday. Both reggae and hip-hop’s shared historical dialogue, and the subsequent emergence of raggamuffin hip-hop in New York, are generally underrepresented in the existing literature. Nonetheless, as a handful of commentators have rightfully noted, the emergence of raggamuffin hip-hop signified the establishment of a bridge of translocal and transnational musical dialogue between reggae and hip-hop in New York. It’s emerging resonance was both informed by, and likewise further proliferated, connections, collaborations and innovations with other centres of musical and cultural production globally. In particular, the by now well-established Jamaican and Caribbean communities and cultural hubs in London, whose sounds, styles and innovations were already emanating far and wide.

The thesis is also illustrated with reference to musical examples from raggamuffin hip-hop’s underacknowledged discography, a great deal of which is informed by my research participants. These, and other musical phenomena, emerging both before and after the principle period of focus in New York, are drawn upon in order to highlight the reciprocal historical dialogue between reggae and hip-hop, and more generally Jamaican and African+/American cultural practice, beginning with the birth of Jamaican popular music, or reggae, during the Second World War.

Building on the notion of the circularity of Jamaican and African+/American cultural practice, I orient my exploration of the influence of Jamaican culture on hip-hop in New York from the point of view of the global “roots” and “routes” of Jamaican culture. Here, I highlight arguably the central catalyst and global conduit of Jamaican popular music culture, the Jamaican dancehall and sound system ‘nexus’. This configuration has historically indigenized and creolized hybrid cultural and musical influences since reggae’s beginnings, in its development as a technological, musical, social – and eventually global – sphere.

Keywords: New York, Hip-Hop, Raggamuffin Hip-Hop, Reggae, Jamaica, Transculturality, East Coast

James Barber/Christian Büschges/ Dianne Violeta Mausfeld/ Britta Sweers (eds.). 2024. Remixing the Hip Hop Narrative: Between Local Expressions and Global Connections. Bielefeld: transcript.

Mausfeld, Dianne Violeta. 2024. “Aging Gang-Members in Southern California: A Review of The Marvelous Ones by Randol Contreras.” The Metropole. The Official Blog of the Urban History Association, 16. Dezember.

Barber, James. 2024. "Chronicling New York Reggae and Hip Hop’s Crossroads, and Community Media as Historical Archives from the Ground Up." In: Remixing the Hip-Hop Narrative: Between Local Origins and Global Margins, edited by James Barber, Christian Büschges, Dianne Violeta Mausfeld, and Britta Sweers, 289–322. Bielefeld: transcript.

Mausfeld, Dianne Violeta. 2024. “’Double the Struggle’: Latino/Chicano Hip-Hop in The Source Magazine.” Remixing the Hip-Hop Narrative: Between Local Origins and Global Margins, edited by James Barber, Christian Büschges, Dianne Violeta Mausfeld, and Britta Sweers, 105–132. Bielefeld: transcript.

Barber, James. 2024. “Shinehead’s ‘Jamaican in New York’: The Circularity of Jamaican and African American Cultural Practice and Reggae’s Resonance in Hip Hop from The Bronx to Brooklyn and Beyond.” In From Broadway to The Bronx: New York City’s History through Song, edited by Veronika Keller and Sabrina Mittermeier, 126–139. Bristol: Intellect.

Mausfeld, Dianne Violeta. 2022. “’American Made with a Mexican Flow!’ Chicano Hip-Hop in Los Angeles, 1987–2001.” Berner Historische Mitteilungen 39: 10–11.

Mausfeld, Dianne Violeta. 2021. “’Brown and Proud!‘ Die Ästhetik von Chicano Rap im Südwesten der USA.“ In Yearbook ‘Song and Popular Culture’ of the Center for Popular Culture and Music, Vol. 66 (2021), edited by Julius Greve and Knut Holtsträter (Special Issue ‘Musical Regions and Regionalisms in the USA’), 89–106. Münster/New York: Waxmann Verlag.

Mausfeld, Dianne Violeta. 2021. “A Matter of Style Appropriation.” Norient. The Now In Sound, February 22.

Mausfeld, Dianne Violeta. 2019. “’These Stories have to be told’: Chicano Rap as Historical Source.” Popular Music History 12 (2): 174–193.

2025

Book Launch & Apéro: 16 April 2025 |18:00-20:00 | Forschungspool, Walter Benjamin Kolleg | Muesmattstrasse 45

• Remixing the Hip Hop Narrative: Between Local Expressions and Global Connections (transcript, 2024), edited by James Barber, Christian Büschges, Dianne Violeta Mausfeld, and Britta Sweers.

Panel discussion and Q&A with the editors and special guest, rapper Tommy Vercetti (Bern), followed by a listening session & discussion, and Aperó.

Conference: PopCon & International Association for the Study of Popular Music – US Branch Joint Annual Conference, Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, March 13–15, 2025.

• Mausfeld, Dianne Violeta. “’Cholo Style’: Origin, Commercialization, and Appropriation of Urban Chicano Hip-Hop Fashion in Los Angeles.”

Conference: Biennial Conference of the International Association of Inter-American Studies, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, February 17–19, 2025.

• Mausfeld, Dianne Violeta. “From ‘Chicano gang bangers’ to ‘Mexican Narcos’: The Representation of Mexican Americans in Chicano Rap and Cinema.”

2024

Conference: IASPM UK & Ireland Biennial Conference 2024. Place, Perspective and Popular Music. International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University, 4–6 September 2024.
Paper:    

• Mausfeld, Dianne Violeta. "Music Places and Research Spaces: Reflections on an Ethnographic Study of Chicano Rap in Los Angeles.”

Conference: 70th Meeting of the German Association for American Studies. American Soundscapes, Workshop ‘Beyond “Black CNN”’: Hip-Hop Soundscapes between Lifeworld and Art World,’ organized by Anthony Obst and Michael L. Thomas [invited], Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, May 23–25, 2024.
Paper:    

• Mausfeld, Dianne Violeta. “Sounds of the Barrio: The Spatiality of Chicano Rap in TV & Film.” (invited)

The 8th Global Reggae Conference + Sound System Outernational #10: “A Century of Sound: Technology, Culture and Performance.” The University of the West Indies, Jamaica, February 14-17, 2024.
Paper:    

• Barber, James. “Mapping and Soundtracking Reggae’s Reception, Intersections and Fusion with Hip Hop Culture in New York.”

2023

Conference “HipHop im 21. Jahrhundert. Narrative, Mythen und Brüche. Zur Produktion von Mannigfaltigkeit,” Pädagogische Hochschule Ludwigsburg, December 8–9, 2023.
Paper:    

• Mausfeld, Dianne Violeta. “Rivalisierende Narrative und Geschichtsschreibungen im Chicano Rap.”

Conference "Annual Meeting of the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs," San Diego, CA, October 19–21, 2023.
Paper:    

• Mausfeld, Dianne Violeta. “’Don’t let the Palm Trees fool you’: Visions of California in Chicano Hip-Hop.” 

San Diego State University, College of Arts and Letters, SDSU Center for Comics Studies/ Department of English & CompLit., October 17, 2023.
Guest lecture: 

• Mausfeld, Dianne Violeta. “Ay Caramba?! The Transcultural Politics of West Coast Hip-Hop,” (invitation by William A. Nericcio)

Conference: Annual Meeting of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, University of Edinburgh, April 13-16, 2023 (hybrid).
Paper:

• Mausfeld, Dianne Violeta. “American Spaces, Mexican Flows: The Chicano Hip-Hop Movement in Los Angeles & Beyond.” 

Research Colloquium for Iberian and Latin American History, Prof. Dr. Silke Hensel, University of Cologne, January 25, 2023.
Paper:

• Mausfeld, Dianne Violeta. “Chicano Hip-Hop in Los Angeles: Evolution, Spaces, Dialogues.” (invited)

2022

Conference: 68th Meeting of the German Association for American Studies, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, June 9-11, 2022, Workshop ‘Hip Hop and/as Political Education’ (organized by Stefan Benz und Stefan Danter)
Paper:

• Mausfeld, Dianne Violeta. "Chicano Hip-Hop at the Crossroads of Gangster Rap and Activism.” (invited)

2021

Conference „Hip-Hop Transcultural: Constructing and Contesting Identity, Space, and Place in the Americas and Beyond“, University of Bern, October 28-30 (Organizers: James Barber, Christian Büschges, Dianne Violeta Mausfeld, Britta Sweers):
Papers:

• James Barber: "The Historical Circularity of Jamaican and African+/American Cultural Practice: Re-Framing the Jamaican Influence on Hip-Hop in New York"
• Dianne Violeta Mausfeld: “'Double the Struggle': Latino/Chicano Hip-Hop and the East Coast-West Coast Dialectic"

29th Conference of the Latin American Studies Association, Virtual Congress, May 26 - 29, 2021.
Paper:

• Dianne Violeta Mausfeld: “'We’re Hip-Hop’s Minority!' Transcultural Collaboration and the Chicano Struggle for Recognition in Los Angeles Hip-Hop"

Spring Academy of the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, March 22-26, 2021 (virtual event).
Papers:

• Dianne Violeta Mausfeld: "'American Made with a Mexican Flow!' Chicano Hip-Hop, Space, and Identity in Los Angeles, 1987-2001"
• James Barber: “‘United Ghettos of America’: The Aesthetics of Intercultural Exchange and Bricolage in New York City and the Case of the Jamaican Influence on Hip-Hop (1987-1995)” 

2020

Groove the City 2020 Conference. Constructing and Deconstructing Urban Spaces through Music, Leuphana University Lüneburg, February 13-15 2020
Paper:

• Dianne Violeta Mausfeld “'The radio won’t play you, but the neighborhood will' – Chicano Rap, Space & Identity in L.A., 1980s & 1990s"

2019

Workshop “Music and Society in the Americas / Música y sociedad en las Américas” of the Swiss School of Latin American Studies (SSLAS), University of Bern, October 4-5 2019 (organizer: Christian Büschges)
Papers:

• James Barber "Negotiating nationalism(s): the construction of “traditional narratives” and their impact on transcultural readings of reggae and hip-hop, 1970 to 1995." 
• Dianne Violeta Mausfeld - “I’m from the varrio – East Los – Aztlán”: Place, Space & Identity in L.A. Chicano Rap (1980s & 1990s)

Workshop „Sound in Motion“, University of Bern, September 20-21 (Organizers: James Barber, Dianne Violeta Mausfeld, Victor da Souza Soares, Andrin Uetz)

27th Conference of the Latin American Studies Association, Boston Marriott Copley Place/ Boston Sheraton Hotel, Boston, May 24-27, 2019
Papers:

• Panel: “Performing identities. Representations of ethnicity, class, and gender in contemporary popular music in the Americas” (Organizer: Christian Büschges)
• James Barber: "Negotiating nationalism(s): the construction of “traditional narratives” and their impact on transcultural readings of reggae and hip-hop, 1970 to 1995."
• Dianne Violeta Mausfeld: “Mexican-American Cultural Signifiers in West Coast Hip-Hop during the 1980s & 1990s”

Doctoral Conference "Constructing and Contesting Community", University of Bern, May 9-10, 2019
Paper:

• James Barber: "Negotiating nationalism(s): the construction of “traditional narratives” and their impact on transcultural readings of reggae and hip-hop, 1970 to 1995."

Balancing The Mix: A Conference On Popular Music And Social Justice, University of Memphis, March 30, 2019
Paper:

• Dianne Violeta Mausfeld: “Chicano Rap & Chicano Cinema during the early 1990s. Narratives of Social Struggle and (in-) Justice”

2018

Doctoral Conference on Latin American History, University of Bern, May 4-5, 2018
Paper:

• Dianne Violeta Mausfeld: “Hip-Hop as a transcultural phenomenon. Mexican-American cultural signifiers in US-Hip-Hop”

Hip-Hop Transcultural: Constructing and Contesting Identity, Space, and Place in the Americas and beyond

University of Bern, Switzerland, October 28 – 30, 2021   *Virtual Conference*

Almost fifty years after its birth, hip-hop is considered a truly global phenomenon that combines elements of uniformity with local symbols and expressions regarding musical forms, lyrics, performances, and social content. It can be said that within the US context, hip-hop emerged during the 1970s as an African American subculture.

However, from its very beginning hip-hop has been a highly transcultural and hybrid phenomenon that integrates various musical elements and forms of cultural expression. In addition to African American popular culture, for example, Caribbean and Latin American music styles, language and dance played a vital role in the formation and development of hip-hop on both coasts of the US. The entanglement of diverse cultures and diasporas on the evolution of hip-hop as a music and as a movement, in the urban settings of New York and Los Angeles, for example, encourages us to think of these different musical, cultural, and social traits in more fluid or hybrid terms. Furthermore, diasporic identity in the multicultural neighborhoods where hip-hop first emerged is also fluid concerning the interaction between diasporic “peripheries” and their centers of origin. This conference aims to focus on the transcultural, inter-ethnic and diasporic exchanges that created hip-hop and helped to spread it within the US and beyond. The conference asks how identity markers bound by ethnic, cultural, and spatial categories are being negotiated in hip-hop. While concentrating on the Americas, the conference will also include papers that focus on other world regions and on transregional entanglements.

Welcoming scholars from different disciplinary and geographic backgrounds, the conference aims to offer a space for debate and discussion among academics, artists and hip-hop enthusiasts interested in the transculturality of hip-hop in the Americas and beyond.