Guitarras on the Rise: Framing Youth Sierreño Bands as Translingual Ingenuity

• In Event: Disrupting Power and Dreaming Liberatory Worlds Through Multimodalities

Abstract

Objectives: Popular music and youth popular culture permeate the lives of young people and remain important sites for identity formation, literacy learning, and ingenuity. As Mexican Regional music —particularly norteño, corridos, and banda — continues to rise in transnational popularity, it is often an indelible part of US-Mexican transnational childhoods (Author, 2019). While music, youth and culture are inseparable and vital, music making is often overlooked in the lives of working-class youth of color (Delgado, 2018) and emergent bilinguals (Author, 2018). Researchers have called for more scholarship to examine more deeply the literate lives of bi-/multilingual students and to highlight the complexities and fluidity that are a part of their everyday literacy practices (Brooks, 2019; Flores, Kleyn, & Menken, 2015). Toward that end, this paper explores a sierreño-style band of translingual youth artists—all emergent bilinguals—and their appropriation of norteño music in their designing of new forms of cultural expression.

Theoretical Framework: Conceptually, this paper draws on the theoretical contributions of translingual literacy (Canagarajah, 2013), translanguaging (García & Wei, 2014), and communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to describe how youth musicians moved fluidly across languages, regional dialects, and modalities in their everyday joint activity of music making and performance.

Methods, Techniques, Data Sources: This paper asks: What is the nature of participation, literacy, and languaging in this band? To answer this question I relied on participant observation, field notes, photographs, video recording, and semi-structured interviews across 25 months in California with three boy musicians of Mexican-origin ranging 14-16 years old. Inductive and deductive approaches were used throughout the iterative data collection and analysis processes (Maxwell, 2013).

Results: For this youth grupo (band), the movement toward the core of their practice included, but was not limited to, learning and mastering language practices and honing one’s instrumental skills, style, and techniques across modalities. By working with and observing one another, musicians exchanged and attained new knowledge, articulated new and specialized vocabulary, and employed empowered identities. Findings detail the ways that these musicians made meaning of norteño and its subgenre sierreño music, appropriated these cultural practices through creative translingual literacies, and how this initial “hobby” transformed into a steady source of income for the youths’ working-class immigrant families. Through legitimate participation, the youth musicians and their sociopolitical worlds were tied into their actions, thoughts, literacy and language practices, and learning.

Scholarly Significance: This paper ultimately invites teachers to learn from the creative economies, multimodalities, and musical landscapes of these youth artists. Attending to the musicality of young people can help educators better understand them as agentic constructors of their own creative capacities, skills, knowledge, literacies, and cultural lifeworlds.

Author

• Cati de los Rios, University of California - Berkeley