This dissertation examines La Contra Cultura (the Counter Culture), a musical movement centered in East Los Angeles which utilizes art as a cultural weapon. I use a theoretical framework that incorporates inequalities, social movements, and sociology of culture/popular culture, to do grounded, qualitative, analytic work focusing on oppositional consciousness, decolonization, and identity and community-building within the area of ethno-cultural music, art, and performance. Stemming from my fieldwork, I describe in detail the Contra Cultura, a mix of musicians, artists, vendors, organizers, and urban sacred sites, which examine native and indigenous history, challenge 500 years of colonization, and promotes an urban indigenous identity to challenge systems of racial oppression and white privilege. I then analyze the lyrics of over 400 songs to construct a decolonial pedagogy.

The messages contained within the song lyrics address the legacies of colonization by building indigenous history, expressing a self conscious challenge to Eurocentric domination, and promotes the reclaiming of indigenous cultural thought to construct an urban indigenous identity. The dissertation then uses ethnographic data to understand live performance as ceremonies of resistance. At these urban ceremonies, musical performance is geared at creating autonomous communities by allowing participants to think critically about their lives while creating community history through a shared relationship to oppression. The concepts of Decolonial Imagination and Wombyn Warriors are then developed. Using case studies and in depth interviews, I explore the decolonial imagination through the work of Aztlan Underground and Olmeca.

These two artists combine critical pedagogy and the Sociological Imagination to help their audiences understand their subjective realities within the objective conditions of capitalism and neo colonialism. The concept of the wombyn warrior is constructed by looking at the work of In Lak Ech, Cihuatl Ce, and the Guerrilla Queenz. These femc's use music as a tool to construct new visions of femininity, challenge colonized views of traditional womanhood, and promote cultural affirmation through the birthing of art, poetry, music, and teatro.