Song Analysis: Bailando

I wanna be contigo, and live contigo, and dance contigo, para have contigo, una noche loca”. This is the chorus to Enrique Iglesias’ billboard hit, Bailando. If you listen to the song you can hear the rhythm of reggae, hip hop, Spanish flamenco, reggaeton among a cacophony of other sound. I hear beauty, see color and feel joy when I listen to this song. The success of this song according to Gary Trust, associate director of charts is due to “the fact that a quarter of this country’s youths are Latino. He comments that the market is so diverse that Latino artists don’t have to pick just one language or two. He points out that Enrique Iglesias actually recorded four versions of Bailando, including (Brazil and Portugal) Portuguese. This is the one of the reasons that I am driven to pursue a Ph.D. in Bilingual Education on a full-time basis.
During the past 7 years I have had the opportunity to teach Students with Disabilities (SWD) at a high school level and also to train teachers, in my current position as a Special Education School Improvement Specialist with RSE-TASC (Regional Special Education Technical Assistance Center). Although the achievement gap is true for most student populations in NYC schools, the discrepancy is particularly daunting for the SWD and /ELL populations. In fact what we often find is that extraordinary numbers of ELL students are being referred to special education