Coyle Fellow Dr. Cati de los Rios Honored Twice at LRA Conference

Dr. Cati de los Rios, Assistant Professor of Literacy, Reading, and Bi/Multilingual Education at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education and a CLE Coyle Fellow, recently received the Early Career Achievement Award and the Arthur Applebee for Excellence in Research on Literacy Best Paper at the 2020 Literacy Research Association annual conference.

Her research article, “Los Musicos: Mexican corridos, the aural border, and the evocative musical renderings of transnational youth”, which was published in the Harvard Educational Review in 2019, “examines US-Mexican transnational youths' engagement with the Mexican musical genre corridos, border folk ballads, and its subgenre, narcocorridos, folk ballads that illuminate elements of the drug trade and often glamorize drug cartels.” By presenting the empirical knowledge of four young musicians’ critical readings of these genres, she was able to show how these young people “draw from their communicative practices to construct meaningful communities on their school campus and details how their evocative musical school performances serve as a cultural resistance to contemporary anti-migrant sentiments” (Abstract).

Given the language diversity and wide range of experiences of our K-12 students, it is absolutely imperative that all educators recognize and appreciate the rich literacy practices of our students both inside and outside of school.

We are grateful for Dr. de los Rios’s scholarship in this area and we are thankful to the Literacy Research Association for recognizing her as a scholar who is changing the way we think about literacy and youth.