“Convivencia not Competencia”: Learning From an Elementary-Aged Girl Mariachi Ensemble

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Emancipatory Movements Toward Justice and Joy: The Role of Improvisation in Transformational Learning (Table 28)

Abstract

Music is inextricably linked with the sociocultural context in which it is produced, consumed, and taught and the interrelationship between music, society, and culture. This paper explores the language and cultural learning, translingual literacy, and identity-making of three third-generation Latina girl mariachi musicians. Mariachi, the historically male-dominated regional Mexican music, inspired the three focal young artists to learn to play the guitar and violin from elders in their community, and eventually to initiate their own elementary-aged Mariachi girl band. In literacy studies, researchers have called for close attention to the embodiment of racialized bi/multilingual youth’s musical practices in and across schools and how they shed light on power relations and are negotiated in the everyday lives of youth (Author, 2022; Skerrett, 2018). Less research within the emerging body of scholarship on racialized adolescent literacy and Mexican regional music education, however, focuses on the musicking of racialized bilingual girls.

This study draws from the theoretical contributions of translanguaging and musicking (García & Ortega, 2020), transnational literacy (Skerrett, 2018), and Chicana feminist sound studies (Casillas, 2011) to theorize how the girls saw their mariachi rehearsals, classes, and performances as spaces that were aware of patriarchy, named patriarchy, and also resisted several of the patriarchal teachings within Mariachi music while also making it their own cultural and linguistic space and phenomenon.

Using ethnographic methods, I examine how the girl mariachis drew on a diversity of linguistic and cultural resources to participate in improvisational performance practices and facilitate learning in the moment-to-moment of activities across their East Bay communities (Erickson, 2006). Data sources include two focus groups with the band, individual semi-structured interviews with each girl musician, and participant observation of rehearsals and performances over 14 months in California’s East Bay. Data analysis drew from both inductive and deductive approaches.

Findings highlight how the girls’ mariachi classes and band performances together fostered their sociopolitical development, the strengthening of their Spanish, and deeper ties with their Spanish-dominant family members and elders. A motto of this group of girl musicians was “convivencia not competencia” or “humanizing co-existence not competition.” As the girl mariachi band performed at public events across California's Bay Area, they were developing a conscious cultural politic that “seeks inclusion in the American mainstream by transforming it” (Lipsitz, 1990, p. 159).

As educators committed to racialized bi/multilingual youth, the students in our study push us to problematize dominant discourses and ideologies that circulate about bi/multilingual youth populations and call us to carefully attend to their unique and sophisticated cultural lifeworlds. For these students, their singing across community spaces and improvisational performance practices are part and parcel of the educational inheritances from their families, which foreground the pedagogical activities and affordances of Mexican regional music.

Author

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