Sonic Memories and Sonic Storytelling as Methodology: Multimodal Literacies & Mixtape Composing with Transnational Girls of Color

• In Event: Artist Salons as Sites of Unforgetting: Reimagining Liberatory-Education through Plays, Film, Poetry, Novella, and Collage

Abstract

Author 1 is a Texas-born Black American woman whose identity is rooted in her (em)bodied memories and lived experiences shaped by the Black South. Author 2 is a Chinese transnational woman who has traversed national borders as a migrant throughout her life. In June 2025, we hosted a day-long Mixtape Lab designed for nine transnational Girls of Color (TGOCs)—Indian, Filipina, Chinese, Pakistani, Latina, and Mexican—who gathered at Houston’s historic Eldorado Ballroom to share their im/migration (her)stories through sonic memory by co-composing a community mixtape. This immersive workshop was part of a broader study exploring the transnational literacies of TGOCs through multiliterate sista circles (Johnson, 2015), a culturally sustaining methodology rooted in care, collective dialogue, creativity, and relational knowledge-making.

Our performance in this salon centers on the co-created TGOC Mixtape, which will serve as a central artifact in a collaborative storytelling session between Authors 1 and 2. Interwoven with theory, memory, and sound, this dialogic performance will include curated clips of the mixtape music, as well as the TGOCs’ zines, journal reflections, translated lyrics, interview excerpts, and screenshots from group chats. We will foreground the voices, stories, and multimodal literacies of the TGOCs, and use sound and performance to disrupt dominant, print-centric epistemologies in educational and literacy research.

We ground our work in the framework of (re)membering (Dillard, 2012), an endarkened feminist epistemology centered on embodied knowledge, spiritual memory, and the reassembly of self and community fractured by colonization, migration, and racialization. (Re)membering is not just recollection, it is a liberatory practice of revaluing the knowledge that lives in our bodies, stories, and communities.

Music, with its translingual and transnational nature, serves as a medium for the work of (re)membering. Specifically, mixtape as a research method is flexible, culturally rooted, and creates space for creative self-expression. As a core element of Hip Hop culture, mixtapes resist capitalistic constraints, instead reflecting community-based artistry; mixtapes allow youth to remix and (re)claim their stories through sound and collaborative dialogue. Additionally, music transcends dominant literacies and languages through rhythm, lyrics, and affect. It co-creates loving communities. For example, the TGOCs in our Mixtape Lab curated songs, translated lyrics, reflected on meaning, and created accompanying zines. These multimodal practices represent an embodied literacy rooted in memory, language, and affect.

Moreover, the Eldorado Ballroom, a landmark of Black musical and cultural heritage, was an epistemological site of (re)membering. Like Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, the Eldorado holds histories of resistance and collective joy (Bieber, 2025; The Eldorado Ballroom, n.d.). Holding space there was an embodied act of unforgetting the past while dreaming toward a liberated future—through sound, storytelling, sisterhood, and communal presence.

Through our reflexive researcher dialogue, we will illuminate music as sonic memory and methodology, and invite participants to listen, (un)forget, and (re)imagine how sonic storytelling and mixtape-making can transform hegemonic understandings of literacy, research, and knowledge when centered on the lived experiences of TGOCs and by extension, all students navigating multiple identities and linguistic worlds.

Authors

• Jordyn Alyse Simmons, University of Houston

• Tairan Qiu, Stanford University