Cordel Corrido: What Are the Implications of Creating a New Narrative Voice for Education?

Abstract

In this article the author proposes queering the teaching of Brazilian and Mexican popular poetry, cordel and corrido, for students in high school or freshmen in college engaging with a curriculum of the brown bodies and aesthetic currere. The author criticizes the teaching of canonic literature in classrooms usually written by white, straight, and middle-class men, and proposes teaching popular poetry from Latin America as a project to interrupt that canon. Teaching and encouraging students to write poetry is a way to oppose the epistemicide in classrooms, and students of color (African descendants, Native peoples, and with roots in Latin America) have “sacred truth spaces” to be who they are.

Keywords

• popular poetry
• cordel
• corrido
• queer
• currere
• brown body curriculum