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In:Interdisciplinary Approaches to Romance Linguistics: In honor of Barbara E. Bullock and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio
Edited by Mark Amengual and Amanda Dalola
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 45] 2025
► pp. 211–239

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Chapter 9
D-Smoke’s, El Rey

An interdisciplinary approach toward a Blaxican soundscape

 | University of Tennessee Knoxville
 | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
 | Baruch College
Published online: 2 September 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.45.09cle
Abstract
Drawing on the work of social, political, and linguistic theorists, we disrupt traditional approaches to mapping a contact variety of Spanish used by Black, Mexican, and Blaxican communities in Southern California. Instead, we consider how the Black Mexican soundscape of Inglewood, California represents an unruly entrance into the possibility for a distinct Blaxican Spanish variety through phonetic and syntactic translanguaging, as well as visual and representational semiotic flows. We posit interdisciplinary incursions into sociolinguistic analysis to contest colonial framed ontologies and argue for a human centered approach to Romance Linguistics. Through a cultural and linguistic case-study analysis of the 2022 D-Smoke song El Rey — representative of a uniquely Black and Mexican soundscape — we both argue that D-Smoke creates a space for ethnoracial solidarity while contesting identity regimes and set the stage for future empirical research on Blaxican varieties.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Blaxican soundscape in the greater Los Angeles region
  • 4.Situating El Rey within sociolinguistic and cultural theory
    • Methodological note
  • 5.Methodology
    • 5.1Song description (data)
    • 5.2Procedure
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Disrupting boundaries through a Blaxican soundscape
    • 6.2Sociophonetics
    • 6.3Translanguaging
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
References (56)
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