"Musicxs, Corridistas, Folkloristas: Learning from Youth Expressive Practitioners of the Everyday"

Cati V. de los Ríos, Associate Professor of Adolescent Literacy and Bi/Multilingual Education

Anthropologists and folklorists have long contended that expressive culture—including sermons, blues, poetry, music, dance, art, theatre, among others—can provide an analytic that allows for dynamic investigation into the style and expression of people’s everyday lives (Hurston, 1935; Limón, 2012; Nájera-Ramírez, 1989; Paredes, 1958). Cultural expressivity indexes identities, space, and time, and can adorn the body with gestures and artifacts to tell important stories (Nájera-Ramírez et al., 2009). This talk focuses on the cultural expressivity and critical translingual literacy of bilingual and emergent bilingual youth who are critical consumers, readers, orators, writers and/or performers of Mexican Regional Music. Learning from the expressive practices of immigrant-origin bi/multilingual youth can point us to rich—and often invisibilized—moments of transnational and translingual literacy, language, and identity development.