"La Coreañera" plays cumbia : reimagining "Asianness" in Latin American visual social media cultures

This article examines how Asian diasporic identities are performed, remixed, and made legible in Latin American visual social media cultures, through the case study of Abigail Pak, better known as La Coreañera. A Korean American musician who moves between the United States and Mexico, Pak fuses cumbia performance, Mexican barrio aesthetics, and Korean heritage into a microcelebrity persona that circulates on Instagram and TikTok videos mostly shot in Mexico City. We analyse how her content navigates class-coded vernaculars, musical subcultures, and racialised imaginaries of Asianness in contemporary Mexico, raising complex questions around authenticity, digital representation, and class mobility. We draw on Arjun Appadurai’s framework of global cultural flows, Néstor García Canclini’s concept of hybrid and border cultures, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope—as adapted for social media by Kozharinova and Manovich—to explore how Pak performs a digitally mediated, narratively coherent identity across time and space. Methodologically, our multimodal analysis focuses on her strategic use of linguistic play, the DJ-driven urban style cumbiatón sonidero, and visual aesthetics, situating these within broader South-to-South circuits of cultural production. Pak’s performances not only destabilise normative frameworks of race and class in Mexico but also offer new insights into how East Asian identities are being reframed outside traditional centres of Hallyu (the Korean Wave) and the Global North. In doing so, this article contributes to contemporary Inter-Asian cultural theory, foregrounding the translocal rhythms through which diasporic subjectivities are performed, circulated, and contested in the age of intensive and extensive digital media production.