Toward aCorridistaConsciousness: Learning From One Transnational Youth's Critical Reading, Writing, and Performance of Mexican Corridos

Abstract

This article examines instances of a U.S.–Mexican transnational youth honing his critical translingual literacy skills through his engagement with corridos, Mexican balladry in Spanish that often emphasizes injustice and border strife. The author relies on ethnographic classroom observations, the student's journals, and semistructured interviews to provide a glimpse into the complexities and sophistication of the bilingual youth's everyday language and literacy practices in an era of vehement anti‐immigrant rhetoric. This inquiry asks, (a) What do literacy practices deeply rooted in corridos look like? (b) How does one youth read and engage with the Mexican musical genre of corridos to make sense of his social and political world? and (c) What are the environments and educational settings that supported this literacy development? Findings detail a transnational youth's corridista (balladeer) consciousness and its concomitant language and literacy practices that shape and are shaped by his participation in both his Tijuana communities of origin and his Los Angeles communities. Specifically, this study showcases a student's uses of literary devices, including allegory, to describe myriad forms of oppression and resistance found in corrido lyrics and throughout the lives of U.S.–Mexican transnational youths. Attention to literary genres that are often unsanctioned in traditional English‐medium classrooms and recognizing the complex cognitive abilities of bilinguals can harvest critical insight about literacy education in and out of school. Implications from this study highlight meaningful learning contexts for transnational adolescents’ literacies and how engagement of these literacies might be (re)conceptualized through an ethnic studies and Chicanx/Latinx Studies lens.

“Los Músicos”: Mexican Corridos, the Aural Border, and the Evocative Musical Renderings of Transnational Youth

“…Moreover, leveraging youths' translocal literacies of power dynamics remains especially promising in secondary ethnic studies classrooms, academic courses that are rapidly expanding across the US-though not yet in all school districts-and often explicitly foreground understandings of overlapping colonialisms, globalization, racism, and racialization processes in literacy instruction (Buenavista, 2016;de los Ríos, López, & Morrell, 2016;de los Ríos, 2017de los Ríos, , 2018Pulido, 2018). The story of los músicos can be used to push educators to take seriously the epistemic promise of ethnic studies orientations to literacy instruction that are not always afforded in dominant English language arts and English as a second language settings.…”

“…Critical frameworks are beginning to catch up with the transnational historical realities that have produced many of the youth popular cultural products and practices that researchers and literary critics seek to interpret (Alim, 2011;de los Ríos, 2018;Morrell, 2004, Skerrett, 2015. The following bodies of literature centering transnationalism, youth resistance practices, migrant imaginaries, and communicative repertoires provide an analytic lens to my research with the focal students.…”

Writing Oneself Into the Curriculum: Photovoice Journaling in a Secondary Ethnic Studies Course

“…While ethnic studies courses have been taught in secondary school settings since the late 1960s, there remains a lacuna of qualitative research on the literacy activities and curricular nature of these courses (de los Ríos et al, 2015). Recent classroom studies engaging critical ethnic studies frameworks have pointed to the power of language arts units that center racial counter-storytelling in elementary classrooms (Valdez, 2017), the civic nature of ethnic studies that position youth as coresearchers examining social problems (Cammarota, 2015; de los Ríos, 2017b; Kwon & de los Ríos, 2019; Tintiangco-Cubales et al, 2016), and the anticolonial literary genres centered in ethnic studies literacy instruction that emphasize students’ critiques of linguistic racism, immigration, and racial oppression (de los Ríos, 2018b; de los Ríos & Seltzer, 2017; Thomas, 2017). Less research, however, has focused explicitly on students’ writing in these courses.…”

Literacies of Refuge: “Pidiendo Posada” as Ritual of Justice

“…Literacy researchers anchored in critical and sociocultural perspectives have documented the dynamic nature of Latinx adolescents and immigrant family literacies as social practice (Brooks, 2017; de los Ríos, 2018; Flores, 2018; Gallo & Link, 2015; Ghiso, 2016; Orellana, 2009). Rather than regard literacy as simply a neutral and consumable skill, scholars aligned with critical and sociocultural traditions understand reading and writing as recursive processes that are grounded in social actions and view literacy as inextricably linked with power relations (Freire, 1970; B.…”