Translingual Youth Folklorists: Sustaining and Reinvigorating Expressive Cultures, Sounds, and Futures

Title: Translingual Youth Folklorists: Sustaining and Reinvigorating Expressive Cultures, Sounds, and Futures

Abstract: 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.

Bio: Cati de los Ríos is an associate professor of Adolescent Literacy and Bi/Multilingual Education at UC Berkeley’s School of Education. She taught Spanish, English language development (ELD), and Ethnic Studies in Massachusetts and California public schools. Her scholarship draws from ethnographic and participatory methodologies to 1) explore the nexus of ethnic studies curricula, translingual writing, and civic learning; and 2) examine how racially minoritized bi/multilingual youth build off of intergenerational cultural legacies while innovating new forms of creative political expression and civic engagement. de los Rios’s research has been recognized by The National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation (Dissertation and Postdoctoral Fellowships), National Academies of Science/Ford Foundation (Dissertation and Postdoctoral Fellowships), and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Cultivating New Voices Fellowship. de los Rios is the recipient of several awards including NCTE’s Promising Researcher Award, Alan C. Purvis Award, Janet Emig Award and Early Career Awards from Literacy Research Association (LRA), AERA’s Language and Social Processes SIG, and AERA’s Grassroots Community & Youth Organizing SIG.

Zoom link: https://middlebury.zoom.us/j/8316473547?pwd=aGwyZjJwQlBRbm9oVzVUQ3dHcFI5Zz09