The New Yorker: It Should Happen To You.
The New Yorker tracks the YouTube phenom via the video posts of litlleloca.
"The Oscar was delivered rather unceremoniously—not in March, at the Academy Awards, but in August, three and a half minutes into a sketch Ryan was filming, while she was still in character as Cynthia, an eighteen-year-old Latina from East L.A. who is better known as Little Loca, after the handle Ryan uses when she uploads some of her homemade sketches onto the video-sharing site YouTube. This was about the fortieth in a series of short Little Loca videos that had by then attracted over a million viewings, thanks to Loca’s “big old mouth” (both literally—her heavily outlined lips command attention—and figuratively) and her irreverent putdowns (“You better watch out, fool, because God’s gonna come around and strike you down with some lightning if you don’t be careful”). Loca was wearing a bandanna and hoop earrings, and sitting on a sofa, against a plain white wall, between two women who were known to regular viewers as Smiley (a friend of Ryan’s) and Silent Girl (Ryan’s cousin). Rap music was playing in the background."
“Damn, this shit is heavy,” Loca said, in a pronounced Hispanic accent, after accepting the gold statuette from Smiley and waving it around. “I could knock somebody out with this.” Then she launched into an earnest acceptance speech. “I want to thank YouTube,” she said. “You’re so important in my life right now. And without YouTube there’s no way in hell Loca could have, you know, got something like this.” - Ben McGrath, The New Yorker
To see how life imitates art, check out 2003's William Gibson novel Pattern Recognition. Viral video as uber-marketing tool. Sound familiar?
