Making music, making language

Abstract

This article reframes how the making of music by minoritized bilingual Latinxchildren is interrelated to their languaging and their literacies’ performances.Taking a translanguaging approach, musicking/languaging/performing literacies are described here as holistic critical meaning-making processes. Focusing on the process by which students make meaning of texts, and not simply on the output or product of such meaning-making, this article shows how a music education programme based on El Sistema and designed for social change transforms minoritized children’s critical sense of their positions and subjectivities as producers of language and literacies. Through music education, long considered only an enrichment activity from which language minoritized students are often excluded, bilingual Latinx children are able to crack open a vision for themselves and others as competent, dignified, and valid meaning-makers—as performers of complex acts of language and literacies.