American Sabor: Latino Contributions to American Popular Culture

Finding high quality bilingual teaching materials is a challenging task.  Thanks to a partnership between the Smithsonian Museum, the Experience Music Project in Seattle, and the University of Washington, this was made a little easier for my teaching team and me as we used some of their materials to design a robust first quarter unit about Latino contributions to the American cultural landscape.  Although we delivered the instruction completely in Spanish, as part of our Spanish Language Arts program, the materials are also available in English, and, therefore, could work in any classroom.

American Sabor is an online and traveling exhibit that highlights Latino contributions to American culture through music.  It is organized into five distinct regions:  San Antonio, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, and New York City, each with its own cultural influences, history, and music style.  The history of migration and Latino settlement, as well as political developments in the United States, has served to give each community its own unique flavor.  Much of the exhibit resources are found online at americansabor.org, including a running jukebox, musical clips, interactive maps of the cities, background readings, artist interviews, and various classroom activities that teach students about the diversity of Latinos in the United States and the myriad of influences Latinos have had on American popular culture.

Enhancing the materials found on this website with selected readings from literary works by Latina authors, Sandra Cisneros and Alma Flor Ada (both available in English or Spanish), I used the following framework to build an integrated Spanish literacy and culture unit:  

Each week, students would study a different city, rotating through thematic stations to develop a comprehensive understanding about how Latinos have contributed to popular culture in each area. They listened to Latino-influenced music from the region and heard interviews with artists from each place.  They read and analyzed vignettes from the Cisneros and Ada books, with attention to Common Core literacy standards, and they planned drafts of their own personal narratives connected to a theme drawn from one of their books, also aligned to Common Core writing standards. 

As the final product of the unit, students developed one of their drafts into a full personal narrative that demonstrated an element of their culture as Latinos living in Madison (We called it “Madison Sabor”).  We then turned these stories into cartoneras, which brought another element of artistic expression to the literacy unit.

Throughout the rest of the year, the students were empowered with this foundational knowledge of the diversity of Latinos in the U.S. as they built a more complex understanding of the historic experience of struggle and achievement of people from various Latin American countries in the United States.  They were also able to make meaningful connections to their learning in a fun and unique way.  As an added bonus, we spent the quarter listening to a lot of great music!