It was a Sunday when Julianna Echerivel Prieto wrote her corrido, an assignment for her advanced Spanish class. But that day was difficult because her maternal grandmother was sick in the hospital where Prieto and her family had gathered.
Prieto looked to a special place as a source of comfort while she conceived her corrido. She thought of the rancho outside of Tucson where the Echerivel family often frequently gathered to hold celebrate.
She called her corrido "El Rancho de los Pinos" and submitted it to her Sunnyside High School teacher.
What she didn't know, her teacher, Rosa Garcia, submitted Prieto's corrido to the annual University of Arizona Poetry Center's high school corrido writing contest.
Prieto, then a junior, won the contest in 2003.
Today, just months after graduating from Stanford University with a master's degree in policy organization and leadership, Prieto credits winning the corrido contest for much of her academic success. Writing the corrido gave her confidence, and introduced her to university life and mentors.
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"It encouraged me to pursue opportunities," said Prieto, 24, who earned her bachelor's degree at the U of A and currently lives in California.
Call it the power of the corrido, a traditional form of music which has been heard on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands for more than 100 years.
And for the past 10 years the UA Poetry Center has honored and preserved this unique cultural literary and musical form with its annual high school writing contest.
The students write their corridos in Spanish or English and in some cases in both languages. Most of the students are Latinos but non-Latino students have participated and won in the contests.
And the majority of the winning corridos were written by female students, noted Maribel Álvarez, associate professor of English and research social scientist for the Southwest Center at the UA , during a recent panel discussion about corridos at the poetry center.
She said the broader importance of the corrido contest is that it "affirms bilingualism and biculturalism as an important value" in this country.
This Saturday the Poetry Center will hold a benefit concert from 7 to 9 p.m. to raise funds for the contest. The corrido benefit is part of the center's 50th anniversary celebration.
In addition to the benefit, a book of the decade's winning 30 corridos has been published with an accompanying compact disc of the songs. Each corrido was put to music composed by local musicians. The corridos were judged by local poets, writers and UA professors.
The corrido contest is one of the poetry center's cornerstones and one of its most vibrant public outreach activities, said Celestino Fernández, a UA professor of sociology and corrido author, during the panel discussion which also included James Griffith, former UA professor with the Southwest Folklore Center an founder of the annual Tucson Meet Yourself festival.
The corrido contest began with the question: How can the poetry center recognize the corrido as a legitimate form of poetry. The answer was to invited high school students to write corridos which, Griffith called, "the people's editorial pages."
Like the typical corridos, the students have written about heroes, horses and family. But they have also written about immigration, living in a bilingual world, youthful anxieties and racism.
Frances Sjoberg, the poetry center's former literary director, organized the corrido contest in 1999. Since then, Renee Angle, the center's program director, has overseen the contest and Wendy Burk has translated the corridos.
Poetry Center's executive director is Gail Browne.
The Arizona Humanities Council and the UA College of Humanities have provided funds for the contest.
