Grey Wing
Southern Poverty Law Center
Immigrant Songs
2019
(The main purpose of any media is to communicate with an audience to deliver information and entertainment.)
Music has always been the perfect media to share thoughts and emotions, as well as to bring joy and entertainment.
Immigrant Songs can do not only that, but also positively change how millions of U.S. immigrants live.
Immigrant Songs is the product of a collaboration between musicians, lawyers, and media, to reach legal immigrants living in isolated communities along the border, with practical easy-to-understand legal advice that can help them cope with civil rights violations.
Immigrant Songs is music that is true to culture, with carefully curated lyrics that aim to teach people about their most basic civil rights.
Background
Racial profiling. Unlawful arrests and incarcerations. Children separated from their families. Every day, legal immigrants living in isolated communities along the U.S. Southern border suffer civil rights violations that infringe the law.
Vulnerable and often uneducated, these immigrants don’t know the law or their rights, making them easy prey for a system caught between zero tolerance and a huge influx of illegal immigration.
Reaching them with information is complicated, since many don’t speak English, and live in remote and underdeveloped stretches of the desert, with limited cellphone reception and no data coverage.
The objective is to reach these unreachable communities with easy to understand legal advice that can help them deal with civil rights violations.
Creative idea
The only media able to reach 90% of all immigrants living in isolated communities along the U.S. Southern border is local radio.
For the first time, lawyers and musicians got together to translate complex immigration laws into easy to understand legal advice embedded into the lyrics of Corridos.
Corridos are the most popular music genre along the border, with lyrics that talk about real-life struggles. All local Hispanic radio stations transmit this genre of regional Mexican folk songs, on both sides of the border.
And so, music becomes the ideal format to deliver practical legal information in a way that can be memorized and repeated again and again.
Strategy
By partnering with regional folk-song musicians and immigration lawyers, songs with practical legal advice embedded in the lyrics are created, while staying true and relevant to culture.
The songs are released like any other song, through the customary music channels, and continue to gain traction on their own.
A PR campaign supports each release, aiming to gain the attention and support of national news media, and to boost the air-time given to the songs by local radio stations.
Each new song features a different legal topic, delivering specific legal advice for the most common civil rights infringement situations.
Execution
The first song was performed by the band Flor de Toloache, who are Grammy Latino winners. “El Corrido de David y Goliat” was released on 02/22/2019, and the launch was featured by Billboard. It continues to become more popular with the intended audience up to this day.
The launch was also supported by a PR campaign, which caught the attention of news media. Flor de Toloache were interviewed by CNN, Telemundo, and other local news. They continue to promote their Immigrant Song in all their live performances.
A second song was released soon after. Local bands across the border have already adopted the songs as their own, performing them in restaurants, bars, and weddings. Immigrant Songs is an ongoing initiative, the next three songs are currently in postproduction.
Although the intended media is local radio, all songs are also featured in mainstream music channels such as Spotify and YouTube.
Outcome
During the first week after the launch, the first Immigrant Song was aired throughout local radio stations in 13 states across the U.S., as well as 10 states across Mexico. The majority of local radio stations that aired the song are located near the U.S./Mexico border, where the Corridos music genre is most popular.
Some of the news media that covered the launch were Billboard, CNN, Telemundo and Univision, among many other local channels.
The band Flor de Toloache were interviewed by CNN and Telemundo and continue to promote their Immigrant Song in all their events.
Most important of all, local bands across the border have adopted the songs as their own, performing them in restaurants, bars, and weddings, delivering valuable legal advice to their audiences, time and again.