Yared Portillo

Yared Portillo is a Ph.D. candidate in Learning Sciences and Human Development at UC Berkeley’s School of Education with a focus on Language, Literacy, and Culture. She is a jaranera, leonera, guitarist, poet, and music teacher with over 15 years of experience. Raised in an agricultural Latine immigrant community in Santa María, California, her research interests sit at the intersection of music education, translanguaging pedagogies, and sociocultural approaches to learning. Yared’s research and teaching are influenced by her years as a grassroots immigrant rights community organizer in South Philadelphia fighting detention and deportation cases, developing “know your rights” trainings, teaching English, and creating politically-grounded son jarocho music classes for immigrant adults and children. Her interdisciplinary research examines the Mexican musical repertoires of a bilingual intergenerational Latine community that plays son jarocho music, and the relationship between those musical repertoires and learning.

Grounded in community-based and participatory approaches to research, Yared’s dissertation studies how son jarocho music and the arts can serve as agentive embodied practices that empower transnational and translingual individuals to make sense of and transform their social and political worlds. Her research focuses on sociocultural approaches to learning within the fandango, a gathering where participants play son jarocho, a popular music born out of Indigenous and Afrodiasporic movements of resistance in Veracruz, México. Focusing on the everyday musicking and learning of intergenerational fandango students in the U.S., she analyzes the role that folkloric literacies play in the lives of racialized bilingual learners. Through a participatory design research study with a fandango collective in California, her work analyzes how the cultural practice of the fandango engenders a range of opportunities for consequential learning, and how it affords opportunities to engage in and hone translingual practices. By examining the multimodal and embodied literacies (e.g. music, dance, gesture) that constitute translingual practices, Yared studies how emergent bilinguals and heritage language learners engage music classes to not only learn music, but also to learn and/or reclaim language in ways that empower them to more actively participate musically, socially, and civically in their communities.

Yared has published in TESOL Quarterly; Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy; International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education; and Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice. She holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College and an M.S.Ed. in Reading/Writing/Literacy from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation research has been supported by the National Academy of Education, Spencer Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Public Mellon Foundation.