Critical Worldmaking Through Balladry: Youth Corrido Literacies as a Lived Civic Poetic

Abstract

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.

Exploring (r)evolutionary college-going literacies with immigrant youth in a youth participatory action research (YPAR) seminar

“…While the Hip-Hop workshop was “not [her] way […], that’s not who [she] is” and she would “rather have a conversation and talk to people rather than rap about it,” whether in school or in CFJ when they “do a lot of team working exercises and stuff” she feels like “even though we’re all so different, actually doing something together, all together, like a team” brings them all together. The call to engage in literacy practices outside her comfort zone to work with others contributes to her experience of worldmaking in the context of critical participation made possible in the YPAR community of the College Now course (de los Ríos et al , 2022).…”

“…In this final example, two years after the initial tableau activity, Joweria’s probing questions illustrated some of the ways in which YPAR can catalyze critical hope and support critical college-going literacies. Beyond the boundaries of class activities or a particular YPAR inquiry, we argue that Joweria’s multimodal literacy experiences supported her worldmaking by “call[ing] attention to the creative nature of understanding the world and the conscientious act of remaking it” (de los Ríos et al , 2022, p. 56). As she grappled with generative questions about her own identities and participation in social action, Joweria was able to draw upon those YPAR experiences to take on increasingly critical and agentic roles in analyzing and disrupting restrictive definitions of success, making connections to her broader sociopolitical contexts and forging new identities grounded in the familial, cultural and historical knowledges that her inquiries surfaced (Mirra et al , 2013; Marciano, 2017).…”

“…To begin, we articulate our conception of (r)evolutionary literacies, as informed by the concepts of critical hope (Duncan-Andrade, 2009;Freire, 1994) and worldmaking (de los Ríos et al, 2022;Goodman, 1978), placing these frames in conversation with literature on postsecondary identities and literacies. We then contextualize our study and move into an analysis of youths' leveraging of (r)evolutionary literacies to negotiate discourses of academic success and achievement, concluding with implications for literacy researchers and educators.…”

Case Studies of Effective Learning Climates for Civic Reasoning and Discussion

“…For example, in their critique of traditional conceptualizations of youth civic participation, Garcia et al (2021) contend, “From reading news articles and publications about current events to voting and participating in local community groups from churches to volunteer organizations, civic participation has traditionally funneled individual agency toward participating in existing organizations” (643). As they argue, youth are expected to conform to sanctioned forms of civic expression that often overlook their own understandings of what it means to participate politically (Anderson et al 2021; Cohen, Kahne, and Marshall 2018; de los Ríos and Molina 2020; de los Ríos, Portillo, and Cantero 2022; Ginwright 2008; Ginwright and Cammarota 2009; Mirra and Garcia 2017).…”

Delinking to Learn From Youth Expressive Practitioners of the Everyday: A Commentary on “Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics”

“…My conversations and thinking with youth labeled “long‐term English learners” in California high schools have pointed me toward delinking, unlearning, relearning, and documenting their creative spaces for expressivity and resistance. Youth corridistas—readers, writers, orators, and performers—privilege the storytelling of ordinary young people and their right to self‐directed representation (de los Ríos, 2018; de los Ríos et al., 2022). As such, a youth corridista consciousness (de los Ríos, 2018, 2019) elevates a relationality that grounds non‐Western ancestral knowledge, worldviews, and life practices that demonstrate a different mode of living, knowing, and being in and with the world.…”