The performing arts, specifically the Mexican balladry called corridos, can offer new vistas for what constitutes civic inclusion, poetics, and worldmaking for racially and linguistically minoritized youth. This paper provides a textual analysis of "El Llanto de El Paso," a corrido (ballad) written by youth balladeer, Josué Rodríguez, that went viral shortly after the deadly mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, that targeted Mexican patrons. Implications for practice encourage the rethinking of literacy studies in ways that are attuned with bi/multilingual youth's folkloric and arts-based civic participation, especially in moments of heightened rhetoric of White nationalism and xenophobia.