What Is an MC If He Can't Rap to Banda? Making Music in Nuevo L.A.

This essay focuses on one song—Akwid's "No Hay Manera"—and what it tells us about the changing racial and cultural profiles of contemporary Los Angeles. In examining the "congealed history" of this hip hop-meets-banda composition from two immigrant brothers from Michoacan, I highlight the following main issues: the ongoing Mexicanization of Southeast and South Central Los Angeles in the context of economic globalization and de-industrialization, the subsequent centrality of Mexican migrant identity to the social structures and economic circuits of contemporary Los Angeles; the ongoing transformation of Mexican migrant cultural expressions from banda and norteno forms to new urban hybrids based in genre mixing, bilingualism, and generational re-invention; and the extent to which the creation of local musical forms in Los Angeles is both the product of the global flows of commercial popular culture and the producer of them.