Toward a Transnational Pedagogy: Hip-Hop and Mexican Corridos as Protest and Possibility

• In Event: Popular Media Culture, Hip-Hop, and Mexican Corridos: Honoring Young People’s Multiple Literacies

Abstract

At a time when K-12 schooling is increasingly routinized, test-driven, and school curriculum promotes the de-indigenization of our youth—Chican@ students continue to drop out of high school at overwhelming rates (Yosso, 2006). Consequently, a surging number of educators across California have pushed for culturally relevant English Language Arts instruction, including A-G Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies courses. This paper draws from a critical teacher inquiry into a college preparatory Chicana/o-Latina/o Literature course in California that served a primarily Mexican@ and Chican@ student population. Specifically, the curriculum unit under study elucidates the affordances of a hip-hop and Mexican corridos unit exploring issues of globalization, im/migration, and borders.

While access to media and digital literacies is continually increasing, it is still unevenly distributed across communities, especially for youth from non-dominant communities (Mills, 2010). This situation needs to be addressed as English language learners (ELL) “must be provided with an equal opportunity to acquire the same content and high-level skills that school reform movements advocate for all students” (Working Group on ELL Policy, 2010, p. 2), which now includes the development of multiliteracies (e.g., biliteracy, digital literacies). Thus, grounded within in a larger borderlands framework (Anzaldúa, 1987), the study draws from critical media pedagogies (Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2005) and culturally affirming pedagogies (Ladson-Billings, 1994). The unit drew on ELL students' hip-hop and corridista popular cultures, bilingualism, exposed students to Chicana feminist poetry and literature (e.g. Gloria Anzaldúa, Pat Mora) on the borderlands, while cultivating critical media literacies.

Auto/ethnographic in intent, this study built from a set of interpretive strategies such as ethnography, self-reflection, and interviews, in understanding my own classroom practice. Data were collected from January-May 2012. Ethnographic research methods were used to ensure triangulation of data. Data sources include audio, student journals, rap and corridos created by youth, field notes from weekly classes, and in-depth interviews with students.

Student-generated narratives through both the creation of rap and corrido lyrics and their final comparative essays were considered cultural resources used to validate lived experiences of students negotiating meanings in the borderlands (Anzaldúa, 1987). Mexican@/Chican@ youth in this study had multiple types of consciousness due to their social navigation of a monolingual society, their indigenous and ancestral ties to the Southwest, and existing in a predominantly Black and White binary. Because hip-hop alone may not always speak to their entire racialized experience in the borderlands, this study builds upon the foundations of critical hip-hop pedagogy by further engaging an ethnic identity through the incorporation of Mexican corridos. Both Hip-hop and corrido popular culture can be utilized in the classroom to forge a common and critical discourse that is centered upon the lives of the students in ways that promote academic literacy and critical consciousness. This study has major implications for literacy pedagogy regarding how educators can incorporate transnational popular cultural and literacy practices into their critical media pedagogical practices and classrooms.

Author

• Cati V. de los Rios, Teachers College, Columbia University