Transnational Youth's Critical and Intellectual Engagement With Narco/corridos

• In Event: 18.021 - Critical Issues in Adolescent Literacy Research: Practices, Pedagogies, and Possibilities

Abstract

This paper examines U.S.-Mexican transnational youth’s critical and intellectual engagement with the Mexican regional musical genre, corridos, and specifically its subgenre, narcocorridos, which are ballads that illuminate border strife, exploitation, elements of the transnational drug trade, and often offer glamorized portraits of drug cartel leaders (Paredes, 1958; Simonette, 2001). Specifically, I examine the ways that youth engagement with narco/corridos mediates a variety of social, cultural, linguistic, and educational processes that impact transnational youth. Despite the popularity of corridos, there have been very few investigations of the adolescents who read and perform corridos as a literacy practice. Informed by the theoretical contributions of transnational literacies, dynamic bilingualism, and ethnic studies, this inquiry asks: 1) How are the messages found in narco/corridos decoded, appropriated, and reframed by youth musicians?

Methods/Data Sources
Using a respondent-driven sampling approach, I identified four adolescents (ages 15-17) who self-identify as “músicos” (musicians) and/or “corridistas” (balladeers) in a city where I (the researcher) have engaged in prolonged research for ten years. All of the focal students are from immigrant households, bilingual, of Mexican descent, and at different points of the bilingual continua (Hornberger, 2003). Using ethnographic methods over twenty-six months in Southern California, I draw from weekly participant observation (documented through analytic memos and detailed field notes), two semi-structured interviews with each focal student, and two focus group interviews to provide a glimpse into four youth musicians’ critical and close readings of corridos both in and outside of school.

Results
Taking a transnational approach, the findings argue that rather than simply a “deviant” activity, youth engage intellectually with narco/corridos as a popular culture practice that offers sociopolitical lessons about transnational life and include resistive qualities of transnational drug trafficking, corruption, and the political unrest that are tied to the capitalist relationship between Mexico and the United States. According to students, narco/corridos serve as the literary soundscapes of their lives at a time of heightened anti-immigrant sentiments and all noted the ways in which their performances of narco/corridos during school lunchtime serve as a cultural form of resistance to ongoing anti-Mexican rhetoric.

Significance
In these dire moments of the Trump administration, Ali (2017) urges scholars to “conduct research and [develop] analysis to address, elucidate, and understand issues and tensions felt on the ground by people living within the crucible of American empire” (p. 390). In response to Ali’s call, I argue that attention to unsanctioned literary genres, like corridos, and recognizing the cultural resistance practices and sophisticated cognitive abilities of transnational bi/multilingual youth can harvest salient insight about literacy education. Lastly, this research contributes to the paucity of studies on the affordances of corridos as critical textual practice in the lives of marginalized transnational youth (AuthorD, 2017).

Author

• Cati V. de los Rios, University of California - Davis