It’s a question that doctoral student Yared Portillo was drawn to research more deeply after founding a fandango collective in Philadelphia that was also active in immigrant rights organizing. Portillo’s early findings have been illuminating.
“Learning happens in the fandango because teaching roles are widely held, and loosely defined,” says Portillo, who was awarded a 2025 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation dissertation fellowship.
“We have people who lead with the dancing. We have people who lead with the cooking. And we have biologists in the group who teach us about the animals that we sing about,” Portillo says. “We have all these different levels of expertise that come together. And so different people hold teaching roles in different moments and in different contexts.
“All of us are students in different ways. The educational work we do in our community contexts is so powerful and so necessary, especially in current times.”
Her research specifically examines the processes of collective meaning making and literacy practices that take place in the transnational musical repertoires of bilingual, intergenerational Latine fandango communities in the United States.
“Literacy is a social practice that goes beyond the standard reading and writing. Literacy is our way of navigating the world. Through the fandango we develop musical literacies, we develop political literacies, we develop community literacies,” she says.
Other important questions for Portillo are, how do you learn to sing a verse in Spanish when you don't even understand what you're saying yet? And what do teachers do to make sure that there's a deeper understanding there?
The deeper understanding is personal for Portillo, who grew up along the Central Coast of California and whose family is from Sinaloa, Mexico, not Veracruz, where son jarocho originated. One of Portillo’s professors described son jarocho as “a music of people on the move” that has been transnational since its origins.
Son jarocho took shape in the 1800s as Afro-diasporic and Indigenous peoples resisted violent Spanish practices of enslavement and colonialism across the Gulf Coast of Mexico.
“I've been one of those Chicano practitioners who has taken up son jarocho and has been forced to think about what it means to play this music as someone who's not from Veracruz. And what does it mean that the histories of resistance of this music — and the histories of movement and migration — is something that's really resonated with my own experiences and with my own practices?”
While the personal questions are part of the research, Portillo knows that what gives the research depth is the entire fandango community. It might be her name on the Gates Millennium Scholarship, or American Educational Research Association honors (Emerging Scholar Award, Language and Social Processes SIG), but she keeps the focus on the community.
“It's so important for me that this isn't recognized as my work. I'm just the one who happens to be approaching fandango from an educational researcher angle. But it's not all me, and it never has been,” Portillo says.
“The goal, first and foremost, is that my community is empowered to understand that we can still learn, we can still teach, still enact change in our communities, and that music is a great vehicle for all of those things.”