The performing arts, specifically the Mexican balladry called corridos, can offer new vistas for what constitutes civic inclusion, poetics, and worldmaking for racially and linguistically minoritized youth. This paper provides a textual analysis of “El Llanto de El Paso,” a corrido (ballad) written by youth balladeer, Josué Rodríguez, that went viral shortly after the deadly mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, that targeted Mexican patrons. Implications for practice encourage the rethinking of literacy studies in ways that are attuned with bi/multilingual youth's folkloric and arts‐based civic participation, especially in moments of heightened rhetoric of White nationalism and xenophobia.
For many Mexican-origin bi/multilingual children, Mexican music education begins early in their home. Music is inextricably linked with the sociocultural context in which it is produced, consumed, and taught and the interrelationship between music, society, and culture. Using ethnographic methods, this article examines a small group of bilingual and emergent bilingual Mexican-origin students who regularly congregated in their English teacher’s classroom at lunchtime to recite and perform romance ballads, or what we refer to as baladas románticas, on a weekly basis. We use participant observation, plática-inspired interviews, focus groups, and video recordings to present ethnographic knowledge about how, for these young people, music was a way of being and a deliberate act to build community. Our findings describe the ways the bilingual students found themselves at the margins of their K–12 schooling experiences and, in turn, agentically fostered their own space for translingual expression and solace. This manifested in two primary ways: (a) how they collectively fostered their own form of convivencia (humanizing coexistence) anchored in their ancestral and cultural knowledge through their music-making and (b) how their music-making allowed them to release translingual and transmodal play and creativity that might have otherwise been suppressed at school. We end with a call for literacy researchers and educators to continue to recognize and honor students’ lived translingual experiences, identities, and musical gifts as resources for learning.
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