About
hiphiphapa is a collection of various written and audio recorded projects by Victoria Kraus. Her projects explore race, mixed-race, Asian American identity, heritage and citizenship in America, socioeconomic disparities and inequities, working class struggles, and other topics.
Victoria is a half Japanese and half Jewish American (in that order) and grew up in predominantly working-class immigrant Latino communities in the 1980s and 1990s in the East Los Angeles area. As a mixed-race second-generation American, Victoria identifies as Japanese first, being a Japanese immigrant’s daughter; then as a working-class American raised primarily among her Latino peers who were also children of working-class immigrants; and finally (but hardly) as a privileged white Jewish American with very little connection to the Jewish culture or faith outside of her surname.
Victoria was born, raised, and still lives in Los Angeles. The longest she spent outside of LA was for 3.5 years in Orange County for college, and six months in Seville, Spain while a student. hiphiphapa is one of Victoria’s many exercises toward finding “the meaning of life”; others might call it “the truth.”