“Hay que Cantar con Ternura”: Baladas Románticas as a Site for Translingual Youth Convivencia

“Glocalization” and Music on the Move

The concept of “glocalization” refers to the interplay of local–regional–global interactions produced by the current globalization process and involves the linking of localities of increasingly differentiated people. Just as the global shapes the local, the local also shapes the global. Robertson (1995) argues that glocalization is a global outlook adapted to local conditions and practices. In his work with global hip-hop cultures, Alim (2009) reminds us that scholars are turning to the study of youth’s glocalized musical cultures as a means toward both illuminating educators’ understanding of “abstract, discursive, popular cultural zone[s]” and how they allow researchers to “delv[e] deeper into the workings of complex processes such as transnationalism, cultural flow, syncretism…. (im)migration, and diaspora” (p. 4). Just as language practices “are not stuck in one place but are mobile” (Pennycook, 2012, p. 118), so is music. As such, popular music remains elevated as among the most visible transnational cultural commodities (Simonett, 2001).

As Kun (2005) reminds us, “music is always from somewhere else and always en route to somewhere else” (p. 20). The transnational flux of music—among other commodities, goods, ideas, and people—has challenged us to understand “location” as a heavily traversed crossroad rather than a fixed point (Lipsitz, 1999). Seeing music through the lens of glocalization situates it as a local phenomenon, and the global exchange and fusion of music is always done in local terms. Bi/multilingual youth as music-makers and as transnational consumers, creators, and circulators of lyrics and songs—those that they learn from family traditions as well as the commercialized ones—encourage literacy educators to attend to the mobility of young people’s literacies and translingual practices as important sites of situated study (de los Ríos, 2018; Skerrett, 2018; Stornaiuolo et al., 2017).

Translanguaging as Central to the Musical Lives of Youth

Translanguaging affords educators an alternative understanding of how bi/multilingual students leverage and deploy their full semiotic and linguistic repertoires from the perspective of the speaker (Otheguy et al., 2015; Wei, 2018). Translanguaging best represents “the linguistic realities of the 21st century, especially the fluid and dynamic practices that transcend the boundaries between named languages, language varieties, and language and other semiotic systems” (Wei, 2018, p. 9). Rather than viewing individual “named languages” as separate entities (Otheguy et al., 2015), translanguaging foregrounds the flexible social and semiotic actions of linguistically minoritized people (García, 2009), including “the unbounded dynamic and fluid use of multilinguals’ entire linguistic repertoire” (García & Kleifgen, 2020, p. 2) to communicate across various settings.

As a growing trend in literacy studies, translanguaging research documents the mobilization of people’s multiple semiotic resources for action and communication (Canagarajah, 2013). However, fewer studies have examined youth’s multimodal expression of their translanguaging practices, especially across musical performance (de los Ríos, 2019). García and Ortega (2020) contend that although less empirically documented, translanguaging is central to bi/multilingual youth’s music-making, and attending to young people’s musicalities could “enable us to consider the actions by which minoritized bilingual youth orchestrate the features of their communicative repertoire to make meaning” (p. 47). As youth translanguage, they also often engage in a range of semiotic modes of communication—beyond linguistic—within their communicative repertoire (Rymes, 2014). Rymes has noted that these semiotic modes of communication can include routines, cultural practices, accessories, body movement, style of dress—among others—to function effectively across various communities. These forms of communication as social action (Canagarajah, 2013) are imperative to understanding the complexity and depth of young people’s literate lives and embodied musical practices.

Positionality

Central to critical ethnography is that it begins with an ethical responsibility to amplify and/or “address processes of unfairness and injustice within a particular lived domain” (Madison, 2019, p. 4). As bilingual children attending California K–12 public schools, we too were designated harmful labels associated with Latinx children adding English to their linguistic repertoire. Through our scholarship, we feel a deep-seated commitment to provide alternative asset- and strength-based narratives about the literate lives of Mexican-origin bi/multilingual children. We also were apprenticed into listening to baladas románticas and other Mexican regional music from an early age; they were among our first family literacy practices. Moreover, we both have mothers who worked in the agricultural fields as farm workers prior to becoming educators and fathers who spent the majority of their lives as low-wage laborers. For our immigrant parents, music has been a vehicle through which to find joy and solace and endure the struggles of life. Mexican regional music—in all of its diversity and sophistication—has been one of the most important educational inheritances we have received from our families.

Furthermore, our experiences as community organizers, and Cati’s time as a high school teacher and Yared’s perspective as a community-based music teacher, have led us to attune our ears to the musicalities and sonic practices of Latinx youth communities. As we respectfully learn from and listen for young people’s musical lives, we are inspired by Patel (2014), who challenges educational researchers to see knowledge as relational rather than as property and pushes scholars from notions of ownership to answerability. Rather than seeing the focal students’ musical, literary, and linguistic gifts as simply stories or data that we “own,” these youth are among those we are most answerable to. This has been done not only through member checks but also ongoing communication and support of these students who are now entering young adulthood. We engage in consistent and critical introspective work individually and with one another when writing about communities that we care so deeply about (Delgado-Gaitan, 1993).

Context and Participants

Our analysis hails from a larger ethnographic study between 2014 and 2017 led by Cati at a California public high school. According to the California Department of Education data, student demographics at the time of the study were 85% Latinx, 12% African American, and 3% undisclosed; 81% qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. Approximately 42% of the student body was classified as an “English language learner.” Prior to leaving to graduate school, Cati previously taught at the school under study for 5 years and this research is in the city where she spent a significant portion of her childhood. This prolonged engagement with the school community helped Cati to more easily design the research project and follow the focal students over time at their high school.

For the purpose of this article, we anchor our analysis in the 2016 fall semester during the 2016–2017 school year to provide an in-depth, complex, and dynamic portrayal of bi/multilingual youth’s musical literacies, including those assigned the “English learner” label and those who were not. Cati used purposive sampling to cull four bilingual adolescents who most often gathered to play baladas románticas in Mrs. Lima’s classroom, a revered teacher in English language arts (ELA) and English language development (ELD). These youth are whom we refer to as José, Marco, Miguel, and Arturo and, at the time of the study, were all between the ages of 13 and 15. While we echo scholars (Brooks, 2020; García, 2009) who have appropriately critiqued labels like “English learner” and argued that these categories are not indicators of students’ actual abilities or experiences, for the purpose of transparency, we share that the students spanned the “English learner,” “long-term English learner,” and “reclassified fluent English proficient” labels. José, Miguel, and Arturo at the time were enrolled in one of Mrs. Lima’s ELA or ELD classes. Marco was not one of Mrs. Lima’s students but equally appreciated her welcoming and warm spirit. While Cati had done ethnographic fieldwork across several teachers’ classrooms that same year, once she found out about these lunchtime gatherings, and with the permission of Mrs. Lima and the students, Cati began visiting Mrs. Lima’s classroom two times a week during lunch time. Several of the students who congregated in Mrs. Lima’s class knew Cati because either she was a former teacher to one of their older siblings or cousins, or they had seen her in other classrooms, at school assemblies, or at other cultural school events during that year. Our data sources include participant observation (documented through analytic memos and field notes), video of musical performance, three plática-inspired interviews with focal students, and two focus groups to provide a glimpse into four youth musicians’ understandings of baladas románticas.

Cati was encouraged to draw from pláticas (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016) as they “move from method to methodology when they are embedded within the rich, analytical theory of Chicana feminism,” which privileges the translingual pedagogies, knowledge, and practices found in Latinx immigrant households, and “engage[s] contributors as knowledge creators essential to the meaning-making process” (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016, p. 115). The plática-inspired interviews and two focus groups with students were audio-recorded and lasted between 40 and 45 min. The three interviews respectively explored: (a) How and when did baladas románticas become a significant element of their life and identity? (b) When did students start performing and which songs are they most drawn to? (c) Why do they perform these songs? Students regularly translanguaged during the three focus groups which occurred on campus after school inside Mrs. Lima’s classroom. The first focused on how and why students practiced (collectively and individually) in Mrs. Lima’s classroom, the second on when and how they came to be known as a musical lunchtime collective on campus, and the last sought to understand how they understand their improvisational performances of románticas at lunchtime. The video data that were recorded on Cati’s smartphone were also analyzed with Yared, where Yared then contributed additional jottings and analytic memos.

We engaged a multi-step data analysis process where Cati first transcribed verbatim all of the interviews and focus group transcripts. Then during our first round of analysis, we individually reviewed the transcripts, field notes, and video data of the youth’s lunchtime performances for initial recurrent words, practices, and patterns (Luttrell, 2010). We met regularly for check-ins, exchanged notes and wrote individual analytic memos about the transcripts and video data, and listened to each other’s initial insights. The second round of analysis included inductive and deductive coding of the data, through which we developed a codebook that we then drew on to engage in further rounds of coding. Several of these codes included “translanguaging,” “transmodal creativity,” “transinstrumental literacies,” “extra-linguistic resources,” “community-building,” “sentimental literacies,” “identities,” “performance,” and “transgressive communication.” The third round of coding, drawing on our established codebook, included documentation of recurrent patterns, ideas, and tensions in the data which led to the development of key themes documented in an Excel spreadsheet (Miles et al., 2013). Throughout this third round of coding, we noted disparate interpretations and new insights and engaged in triangulation, particularly through member checks, all of which helped to justify our analysis. Following a systematic coding process and the constant reference back to our guiding research question, we developed major themes and sub-themes. We then collapsed several of the themes and sub-themes into two primary findings for the purpose of this article.

Performing Knowledge, Identities, and Memory: Baladas Románticas as a Site for Youth Convivencia

Students congregated in Mrs. Lima’s classroom several times per week to hang, connect, and perform Mexican music, particularly románticas. When focal students were asked why they tended to play the same set of songs—mostly old love songs like “Hay unos ojos” (“Those lovely eyes”) and “Por qué no vienes” (“Why won’t you come?”)—they often made reference to these songs as home literacy practices and that they were easy and fun to play. For example, Miguel described these ballads as “songs I learned when I was little” (interview, November 17, 2016). In a focus group, the students shared:

For these students, music education began with family members in their home (Gonzalez, 2017). Whether in the kitchen with their abuelita (grandma) or at home with their father, they were taking part in an educational practice through which their elders had apprenticed them into vital family literacies through music. In her work on the recitation and performance of Mexican music like rancheras, Broyles-González (2002) argues that Mexican music-making can be seen as a “living working-class social practice that variously enacts and rehearses social relations, locations, and meanings” (p. 194). The youth brought these romántica literacy practices with them to school, recreating and circulating the musical practices of their home to build their own glocalized community that transcended social location, relations, and borders.

Importantly, the students did not really refer to these lunch gatherings as “performances,” but rather, as Miguel noted, “para tocar juntos…en comunidad” (interview, November 17, 2016). Taylor (2016) defines performance as a way of “transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated actions” (p. 25). We argue that these youth musicians’ regular lunch gatherings to play baladas románticas served as a way to develop and transmit knowledge, identities, and memories beyond the linguistic. Rather than looking at their musical performance practices as a process focused on producing a musical commodity, we argue that they were participating in convivencia (humanizing coexistence; Gonzalez, 2017) through the medium of music-making which instead emphasizes being in community and focuses on “relationships…rather than sounds, outcomes, or product” (p. 270). Through collective music-making, the youth were partaking in musical performances that were not a concert for a given spectator but an act of convivencia that allowed them to create community on their own terms with one another. The relationships built through these lunchtime performances were bound together by shared musical and linguistic experiences, interests, and talents all anchored in their communicative repertoires. As Gonzalez (2017) notes, music is “the language of one’s community” (p. 273), and in regularly performing baladas románticas as a pastime at lunch, the youth were practicing familial sentimental translingual literacies that spoke to their intergenerational and transnational home experiences.

At the time of the study, three of the four boys shared in interviews and focus groups that they had never had a serious romantic partner before (field note, November 2, 2016). Despite this, all four regularly played and sang these songs of love and heartbreak with deep emotion, passion, and intensity. They shared that this Mexican genre of Spanish music was one that they had been apprenticed into through their abuelitas and/or fathers, and as José’s abuelita taught him, “hay que cantar[las] con ternura” [you must sing (them) with tenderness]. Students’ understanding of sentimental translingual literacies are best represented in a longer plática with José, who was 14 years old at the time of the interview. José noted, “Yo, personalmente, nunca he tenido una novia, pero claro me han gustado algunas chicas…Este tipo de cantar…hay que cantar con ternura. Porque así es como se cantan” [“I personally have never had a girlfriend, but of course I’ve had crushes. This type of singing…you have to sing it with tenderness. Because that’s how you sing these songs”] (interview, November 2, 2016). His grandmother’s musical teachings were technically “from somewhere else” (Kun, 2005, p. 20)—anchored in her life in Mexico—yet José had refashioned and made them his own through his collaborative music-making with his friends at his California public high school. José’s understanding of baladas románticas was informed and influenced by local practices and alongside his friends situating them in larger glocalized realities.

When the youth played these ballads, they were contributing to the process of keeping alive these learned practices of sentimentality and the narratives that are told, retold, and recreated through them. In playing instruments that were given and taught to them by their fathers, and invoking the ternura [tenderness] taught by their abuelas, the young musicians were performing forms of education that they had inherited from their families. Baladas románticas can be seen as a “living social practice” (Broyles-González, 2002, p. 194) that links the youths’ ancestral knowledge systems, identities, and memories of their elders and ancestors. As Marco alluded to in the focus group, for them it was also about playing songs that captured whatever feelings or memories they were trying to evoke in those moments. Moreover, while a number of students owned their own guitars, usually there weren’t more than one or two guitars present at a time (field note, November 11, 2016). Students would frequently share these guitars as they took turns playing songs, they noted. Similar to Fisher’s (2007) research documenting the collectivist practices of youth writing spoken word poetry, students’ docerola (12-string guitar) literacies were “act[s] of reciprocity” (p. 5). The guitars that the students played served as tools through which they performed and circulated intergenerational knowledge that spanned family language practices and modes. Moreover, as the students played their guitars and sang their ballads, they translanguaged by selectively and purposely deploying features associated with those practices as well as shared their musical ways of knowing and being with others through translingual practices.

La Guitarra Docerola (12-String Guitar) as a Site of Translingual and Transmodal Play

The meaning of music is located in the process of the music-makers, and during students’ music-making, their guitars—notably the docerola—took center stage in their translingual meaning-making. Of all the physical spaces and people with whom to spend their lunchtime, students actively chose to spend their 40-min break in Mrs. Lima’s class together. Mrs. Lima checked and responded to her emails and graded papers as she listened to students play their guitars while they all casually ate their lunch. In order to perform together, students regularly adapted across students’ unique styles and extra-linguistic resources in order to creatively accommodate what each participant had available to them in their larger linguistic and semiotic repertoire. In other words, as Elliott (1995) states succinctly, this common scene enacted a form of young people’s “non-verbal knowing-in-action” (p. 9).

During one of their lunchtime gatherings, Cati observed and video-recorded with their permission. In total, nine boys were present. Some students sat on top of their desks with their legs and feet hanging over the desk’s connected chair, while others sat directly in their desks. José, in the far back of the classroom, sat leaning on a desk and with both legs on the floors as he began to play—unannounced—“Por qué no vienes,” an old love ballad written in 1979 by Héctor Montemayor that remains a popular cover song performed by Mexican artists. As José started playing the song and sang through the first estrofa (stanza), he soon gestured to Marco and then Miguel and Arturo through eyebrow lifts and head nods. Eventually, each of them would join in to sing a different estrofa until all of them eventually sang in unison (field note, November 16, 2016). Students’ “production, circulation, and reception” of baladas románticas were “always mobile…[drew] from diverse languages, symbol systems and modalities of communication; and [involved] inter-community negotiations” (Canagarajah, 2013, p. 41). Upon watching this moment on the video recording, Yared wrote in an analytic memo:

They’re using the guitarra docerola to play melodies and rhythms in ways that I feel you might be more likely to see in el estilo campirano. This speaks to their level of skill and mastery of la docerola; they’re able to adapt across styles in order to accommodate what they have available to them. Because they often only have one instrument available to them at a time, they make la docerola fill many roles where the guitarra holds both melodies and harmonies; it’s a perfect site for translingual play, transintrumentality, and translingual-embodied practice. Students enact embodied cues to one another indicating “this is coming next,” through eyes and head nods, keying improvisation and creative transmodal play with one another through la docerola.

These students regularly (re)defined what it meant to be literate through the medium of these ballads. Miguel had previously mentioned that they also tend to play corridos sierreños (focus group, September 18, 2016), a musical style from Northern Mexico where the melodía (melody) is usually carried by the accordion while the guitar focuses on armonía (harmony and rhythm). However, in Mrs. Lima’s class, students demonstrated sophisticated skill and mastery playing the guitar in a style known as estilo campirano, another style from Northern Mexico in which the docerola is instead the instrument that holds the melodía, a skill that often requires more dexterity across the fretboard than playing armonía. As students adapted their playing of la docerola to fill both melodic and harmonic roles in their lunchtime playing, they were deploying their translingual literacies to create a flexible musical arrangement that met their given needs.

Whereas in a musical group where an accordion might play melodías, or a tuba might play bass lines, the students employed their multiple musical repertoires to play a full song where one instrument filled all the roles, participating in musical translingual ingenuity and play as they improvised on the docerola. As the students “translated” the role of the accordion or the tuba to the “language” of the docerola, they were enacting transmodal and transinstrumental literacies in which they fluidly used their melodic and harmonic instrumental repertoires to play a complete piece using only one instrument. We understand this transinstrumental practice as an extra-linguistic example of translanguaging in which the students are drawing from the entirety of their musical and semiotic linguistic repertoires simultaneously and interchangeably to adapt to the given musical situation that they are in.

As they sang, they further developed their improvised arreglos (arrangements) as other students sang along, harmonizing with one another. These moments of harmonizing were examples of the collaborative improvisation that took place as students signaled to one another when they wished for someone else to jump in using different communicative cues. Either through embodied cues, such as looks and head nods, or through musical cues, such as a bass line that indicates the song is returning to a particular verse, the students were again drawing from their translingual and transmodal musical practices to communicate the intentions of how they wanted others to join them in their music-making. In their playing of baladas románticas, and in the improvised execution of how they chose to play, students were playing with the various compositional tactics anchored in their larger semiotic repertoires and using their knowledge of these tactics to intuit when and how they were being asked to participate in the music-making of their fellow peers.

Taylor (2016) reminds us that “performance is a practice and an epistemology, a creative doing, a methodological lens, a way of transmitting memory and identity, and a way of understanding the world” (p. 39). For Arturo, singing and performing together “era comunidad” [was community] (interview, November 11, 2016) and reminds us of the important distinctions between how one plays for a community versus how one plays with a community. In their communal music-making, the students were engaging in this process of collectively transmitting their understanding of the world through convivial performance of baladas románticas on their docerolas. In order to accomplish this, students regularly drew from their transinstrumental and transmodal musical repertoires to join one another in the experience. Through the multiple ways these young musicians deployed specific features from their linguistic and semiotic repertoires to convey meaning and cocreate music, it was evident that through music-making they had created a community of shared understanding and experiences. For these young people, music-making in community was a deliberate act that fostered convivencia as well as complex literacy practices that were often overlooked in other school spaces. Furthermore, playing music together was a special way of connecting one another through ancestral knowledge, creativity, and play.