The American Dream in Country Rhythm
“Because my parents came from Egypt, there, you know, Arabs were not really warmly welcome,” Rita de Los Angeles explains in her In the Key of Q interview. “My parents wanted so desperately to seem more American to the point that they refused to speak Arabic with my sister and I.”
For her Egyptian parents arriving in 1970s America amidst the oil crisis and Iranian hostage situation, embracing Country music wasn’t just about musical preference; it was a strategic performance of Americanness in a time of heightened suspicion toward Arabs. Country music—that most “authentically American” of genres—became a sonic shield against xenophobia.
The irony, of course, is that Country music’s self-mythology as uniquely, purely American obscures its own multicultural origins—the African banjo, the European fiddle, the Mexican influences in Texas Country. The genre that Rita’s parents adopted as a badge of assimilation is itself a product of cultural mixing and boundary-crossing.
Inherited Contradictions
What’s striking about Rita’s narrative is how her relationship with country music contains echoes of her parents’ contradictory positioning. As a young lesbian in Los Angeles, Rita rejected the country soundtrack of her childhood: “I couldn’t stand it. I just hated it! I liked AC/DC and Led Zeppelin.”
This rejection mirrors the classic immigrant child’s rebellion—distancing herself from her parents’ attempts at assimilation while seeking her own authentic self-expression. Yet decades later, after her mother’s passing in 2020, Rita found herself drawn back to Country music precisely because of its family connection.
“I discovered that I like Country music because it made me feel so close to my mum,” she explains. “She loved Country music and it just kind of grabbed me.”
This return contains layers of meaning. It’s both a grief-driven reconnection with her mother and a reclamation of a genre that her parents had adopted as a survival strategy. Where they had used Country music to perform Americanness, Rita now uses it to perform a complex queer identity that challenges the genre’s conservative reputation.
Curiously just hours after the death of my own father, following years of watching him decline, I found myself in the bath just trying to connect the moments of the previous traumatic hours. Stumbling I put on the radio on the local Exmoor radio station. And this song came on, providing a comfort to me that I still don’t understand today. Listening to it again for writing this I’m taken back to that moment of contradiction: chaos and calm, blending together thanks to music.
Multiple Migrations
Rita’s musical journey parallels her physical migrations. Born in LA to parents who fled Egypt, she later found herself forced to leave America for Germany when immigration laws wouldn’t recognize her same-sex relationship.
“I’ve constantly had this sort of immigrant feeling in myself that I don’t quite feel at home,” she reflects. “My home has to be within myself, wherever I am.”
This sense of belonging nowhere and everywhere might explain her current success performing Country music in rural Germany. As someone who has always existed at cultural crossroads, she brings a natural fluidity to a traditionally rigid genre. She describes her Pride anthem “Not Even a Little” as “Country Disco” with hip-hop rhythm and bluesy vocals—a fusion that reflects her multiply-migrated identity.
The Queer Immigrant Inheritance
There’s something rather queer about the immigrant experience—the necessity of code-switching, the habitation of in-between spaces, the constant navigation of belonging and un-belonging. For many LGBTQ+ individuals from immigrant families, this creates a double displacement, with queerness adding another layer of complexity to an already complicated relationship with home and heritage.
Rita embodies this intersection. Her Egyptian parents left their homeland seeking safety and opportunity; decades later, she would leave America for similar reasons, though the danger she fled was legal discrimination rather than war. There’s a generational echo in these forced migrations, a pattern of displacement that shapes her artistic expression.
When Rita performs Country music as an openly lesbian Arab-American in rural Germany, she’s enacting multiple border crossings simultaneously. She’s challenging the whiteness and heteronormativity of Country music while also expanding notions of what counts as “authentic” queer cultural expression.
The Sounds of Belonging
Music often serves as a repository for diasporic memory and connection. For Rita, Country music initially represented her parents’ assimilation efforts, then became a source of rebellion, and finally emerged as a channel for grief and reconnection.
“Anytime I play live, it’s like my mom’s in the audience and I just feel so close to her,” she says. The music that once embodied her parents’ attempt to prove their Americanness now serves as Rita’s emotional bridge to her mother.
Authenticity Beyond Origins
Country music has long been obsessed with questions of who can claim “real” connection to the genre, with gatekeepers often excluding those who don’t fit narrow demographic profiles.
As a Los Angeles-born, German-residing lesbian from Egyptian immigrant parents, Rita challenges these exclusionary definitions. She approaches Country not as a birthright but as an emotional inheritance—one transformed through her own experiences of displacement, connection, and loss.
“Today’s Country music, you can find some really great sounds, a lot of fusion because now you’re hearing Hip Hop, meeting Country music, you know, there’s Country Pop, there’s even Country Punk,” she observes. “It is fun. It is a fun time right now to be in Country music.”
This embrace of hybridity seems fitting for someone whose life has been defined by cultural crossings. Rather than worrying about whether she’s “Country enough,” Rita uses the genre as a vehicle for expressing her complex identity, creating music that refuses neat categorization just as her own story resists simplistic narratives.
Rita’s current musical identity doesn’t erase or resolve any tensions but inhabits them fully. Her “Country Disco” sound, her performances in rural Germany, her recent embracing of a genre she once rejected—all speak to a life lived at cultural crossroads. In making these contradictions audible, she offers both a personal reconciliation and a broader vision of how multicultural, queer identities might sound when given voice.
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