Critical Worldmaking Through Balladry: Youth Corrido Literacies as a Lived Civic Poetic

The performing arts, specifically the Mexican balladry called corridos, can offer new vistas for what constitutes civic inclusion, poetics, and worldmaking for racially and linguistically minoritized youth. This paper provides a textual analysis of “El Llanto de El Paso,” a corrido (ballad) written by youth balladeer, Josué Rodríguez, that went viral shortly after the deadly mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, that targeted Mexican patrons. Implications for practice encourage the rethinking of literacy studies in ways that are attuned with bi/multilingual youth's folkloric and arts‐based civic participation, especially in moments of heightened rhetoric of White nationalism and xenophobia.