Transnational Rap as Cultural Resistance: Diaspora Youth, Urban Marginality, and Networks of Solidarity in Southern Europe

Rap has emerged as a central cultural practice for migrant and racialized youth in Southern Europe, particularly in Spain, where artists from diasporic backgrounds navigate urban peripheries, social exclusion, and invisibilization. This project examines how their musical productions and visual aesthetics act as forms of symbolic and everyday resistance, challenging dominant narratives of marginality, constrained mobility, and cultural recognition. Drawing on mobility studies, translocalism, and critical urban theory, the study frames rap as a strategic practice of identity-making and cultural agency, enabling diasporic youth to assert presence, solidarity, and resilience in socially and institutionally constrained spaces. Concepts such as “Ser de la L” are employed to analyze how these artists construct shared identities and transnational networks that connect urban scenes across Southern Europe, highlighting the circulation of resistance beyond national borders. Methodologically, the project combines critical discourse analysis of lyrics and music videos, digital ethnography of social media platforms, and cultural cartography to trace the spatial, symbolic, and relational dimensions of resistance. This approach illuminates narratives of exclusion and discrimination while revealing strategies for countering media marginalization and asserting cultural legitimacy. By conceptualizing diasporic rap as a form of cultural and symbolic resistance, the project contributes to Resistance Studies by showing how artistic and everyday practices contest structural oppression—including racialization, urban marginality, and social invisibilization—and build networks of solidarity and collective agency. It also demonstrates the transnational potential of urban culture to resist dominant power structures and advance counter-hegemonic imaginaries, offering insights into how resistance can operate under repressive or exclusionary conditions. Keywords: diasporic youth, rap, cultural resistance, everyday resistance, transnational networks, urban marginality, mobility, symbolic agency, media exclusion, Southern Europe.