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

Cati V. de los Ríos

Assistant Professor of Literacy, Reading,
and Bi/Multilingual Education, Graduate School of Education

Music remains a fundamental aspect to sociocultural traditions and environments. In this paper, I explore a sierreño band of translingual youth artists and their appropriation of norteño music in their designing of new forms of expression. Employing the concept of communities of practice, this study examines three youth musicians’ experiences as members of a grupo sierreño (sierreño band) to highlight the nature of learning, sharing and collaborative cultural action taking place in the membership of this collective. I use translingual literacy and translanguaging as sociocultural frames for understanding how the focal bilingual youth leverage their full semiotic and linguistic repertoires for productive musical and cultural practice and literacy. Drawing from ethnographic methods, the findings highlight the translingual ingenuity and power of the focal youth musicians as active agents in the construction of their musical and linguistic lives and their families’ financial stability through the formation of their own creative translingual economy. Attending to these cultural activities can shed light on how transnational and translingual young people negotiate and make decisions, sophisticatedly employ literacies to communicate and solve problems, and come to make sense of their social worlds. Thoughtfully considering the musicality of young people can help educators better understand them as agentic constructors of their own creative capacities, skills, knowledge, and cultural lifeworlds.

Thursday, November 18, 2021

B‐4 Dwinelle & via Zoom (register here), 1‐2 pm

This lecture is co‐sponsored by the College of Letters and Science and the Townsend Center
Berkeley Language Center * B‐40 Dwinelle Hall #2640 * blc.berkeley.edu
Contact: Gabriella Licata (glicata@berkeley.edy) or Kimberly Vinall (kvinall@berkeley)