Made of Music

Pig latin infuses Sanders’s poignant storytelling with familial flair.

Zhalarina Sanders ’15, MS’18 knows how to make people listen.

“Ouyay ooday [you do] hear ’em singing?” she asks in her first line on her record Pearls 2. Sanders wastes no time in capturing her audience’s attention, leading with pig latin before launching into verses laden with biblical imagery, extended metaphors, and ancestor veneration.

“It’s heaven in your house and grandma down for Easter weekend,” she continues. “Eshay aysay, ‘Ifay eway ouldcay otnay [She say, ‘If we could not] speak, rolled chitlin in our jaw, and talked that pork into the breeze.’ ”

Sanders, who records under the mononym Zhalarina, is a skilled rapper and master storyteller from Tampa, Florida. Her first two albums, Again (2021) and Perfect (2022), are odes to her hometown, her parents, and mental health. Her most recent records, Pearls and Pearls 2, draw upon her family’s history — and their penchant for pig latin — to process generational adversity.

“[Speaking pig latin] has always been a family thing, and it predates me by at least 60 or 70 years,” Sanders told the Wisconsin Alumni Association. Her grandmother, the daughter of sharecroppers in Adel, Georgia, learned pig latin from a popular Froot Loops commercial and spoke it with friends while working in the fields. Learning the language became a rite of passage in Sanders’s family, and it functions in Pearls 2 as an homage to her strong-willed lineage.

“[It’s] a love letter to the people who created me,” she says.

Sanders is a graduate of First Wave, the UW’s hip-hop and urban arts scholarship program, where she specialized in writing and theater arts while earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in counseling psychology. In 2020, she released her music-video series The Light in partnership with PBS Wisconsin. Sanders portrays both herself and her mother in the series, which tells her queer coming-of-age story and won a regional Emmy award for outstanding achievement in arts and entertainment programming.

“I want to do something that shows my heart,” Sanders says. “If I’m made of anything that’s not skin and bones, it’s probably music.”

Published in the Fall 2026 issue