"Son Jarocho Literacies": The Multimodal, Translingual, and Intergenerational Literacies of Latinx Immigrants' Human Rights Organizing

• In Event: Multiliteracies in Diverse Contexts: New Possibilities for School and Community Collaboration

Abstract

Every day, Latinx immigrants in the U.S. rise up intergenerationally against their oppression in ways that reflect their complex literacy practices and pedagogies of resistance (Authors, in press). Exploring these practices, this practitioner inquiry (PI) study (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) examines the musical literacy practices of a Son Jarocho -- an “Afro-Mexican music of resistance and rebellion with roots in Veracruz, Mexico” (de los Ríos et al., 2022) -- musical group, composed of an intergenerational group of Latinx immigrant activists involved in the #ShutDownBerks Campaign to close the Berks Family Detention Center (Berks) in Pennsylvania.

This paper asks, “How do Latinx immigrants organize against a local family detention center?” And “What role does multimodal literacy, and specifically musical literacy practice, play in this organizing?” To answer these questions, we -- two Latina immigrants involved in the campaign -- analyze ethnographic data drawn from a larger year-long PI project, including observant participant fieldnotes, analytical memos, photographs, artifacts, open-ended interviews and member-checks, with three undocumented and documented fellow Latinx immigrants, including a Son Jarocho musician and immigrant rights activist who was twelve years old at the time of this study, his Indigenous, undocumented mother, and a second-generation Latina immigrant and Son Jarocho teacher (who is also the first author of this paper), all of whom organized, alongside this paper’s second author, with others.

Our analysis is anchored on conceptualizations of literacy as critical sociocultural practice (Lewis et al, 2007), particularly on “multimodal” (Kress, 2010) and “translingual literacy” (de los Ríos, 2021), and on understanding the everyday pedagogies of Latinx immigrants’ Chicana/Latina education (Delgado Bernal et al., 2006). Our findings show that the mobilization of what we call “Son Jarocho literacies” -- meaning the critical intergenerational, translingual and multimodal literacies embedded in the communal musical practice of learning, teaching and co-creating Son Jarocho sones and décimas - are fundamental to the intergenerational political mobilization of Latinx immigrants within and beyond the #ShutDownBerks Campaign. Our findings highlight how the Son Jarocho literacies of undocumented, documented, young and older Latinx immigrants effectively transgress the imposed border between activists (which include Son Jarocho musicians) and incarcerated immigrant children and parents at Berks. Findings also show how Son Jarocho literacies move people to join in and enact their agency within and beyond the #ShutDownBerks Campaign, and how PI can be a methodology to resist coloniality (Patel, 2015).

Implications include the need for K-16 educators to greatly value, learn from, center and sustain these musical, communal and agentive musical literacy practices within their classrooms, as well as the need for educators to undo educational practices and policies that separate immigrant children from their parents, families, and wider culturally rich multimodal, translingual and transnational communal practices, such as Son Jarocho, particularly in the context of communal involvement in the movement for immigrant/human rights. Our work also calls for additional coloniality-resisting action research into the literacies of Latinx immigrant youth and adults together, reflecting the bi-directional nature of political mobilization in our immigrant rights movement (Pallares, 2014), and the power of research justice (Jolivette, 2015).

Authors

• Yared Portillo, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author

• Alicia Rusoja, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author