LWRS June 2020 Volume 1, Issue 1

Inaugural Issue: Recovery and Transformation 

Latinx Writing and Rhetoric Studies 

Special Guest Editors 

Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa 

Isabel Baca 

Volume 1 Issue 1 June 2020

Latinx Writing and 

Rhetoric Studies 

Volume 1 Issue 1 June 2020 

Senior Editor: Iris D. Ruiz 

Special Guest Editors: Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa 

Isabel Baca 

Production Editor: Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa 

Copy Editors: Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa 

Isabel Baca 

Editorial Board: Sara P. Alvarez, Queens College, CUNY 

Damián P. Baca, University of Arizona 

Isabel Baca, University of Texas at El Paso 

Christina Cedillo, University of Houston – Clear Lake 

Candace de León-Zepeda, Our Lady of the Lake University 

Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa, Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi 

Cruz Medina, Santa Clara University 

Jaime Armin Mejía, Texas State University 

Iris D. Ruiz, University of California, Merced 

Raúl Sánchez, University of Florida 

Helen Sandoval, University of California, Merced 

Jasmine Villa, East Stroudsburg University

Journal of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus 

ISSN 2687-7198 

LWRS: Latinx Writing and Rhetoric Studies is an open-access, peer-reviewed scholarly 

journal published and supported by the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus. Articles are 

published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license (Attribution- 

Noncommercial-NoDerivs). Some material is used with permission. 

Copyright © 2020 LWRS Editors and/or the site’s authors, developers, and 

contributors. 

Publication website – https://latinxwritingandrhetoricstudies.com 

Permissions: All materials contained in this publication are property of LWRS 

Editors and/or the site’s authors, developers, and contributors. No parts of this 

publication may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher 

and/or contributors. 

Journal Cover: The crosses for the victims flowed with flowers that visitors watered 

consistently until the memorial was moved to Ponder Park. Photo taken by Antonio 

Villaseñor-Baca. Villaseñor-Baca (he/they) is a Xicanx bilingual multimedia journalist, 

photographer, and poet/writer. Born in the Sun City of El Paso, TX and on the border 

with Ciudad Juárez, he spends all his time listening to records and going to concerts. 

He has 16 tattoos, his favorite of which are of Chilean musician Mon Laferte and one 

of an axolotl- his favorite animal. He is currently pursuing his MFA in creative writing 

at the University of Texas at El Paso where is also a professor in the FYC program at 

UTEP. He has his own music magazine titled Con Safos, is the online editor for Minero 

Magazine, writes for YR Media, and has bylines in El Paso Inc. and Borderzine.com. 

Accurately reporting on the border is a priority for him because of the constant 

misnarratives about his hometowns. Other images captured by Villaseñor-Baca will 

appear throughout this issue. 

This issue also features photographs taken by Gaby Velasquez. 

See article by Elvira Carrizal-Dukes in this issue for more information on Velasquez.

Special Guest Editor Bios 

Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M 

University-Corpus Christi and co-editor of Open Words: Access and English Studies, a 

refereed scholarly journal. His scholarly contributions focus on the intersections 

between Chicana feminist theory and Writing Studies under the lenses of border 

theory, gender, sexuality, and race. His most recent work is Bordered Writers: Latinx 

Identities and Literacy Practices at Hispanic-Serving Institutions, a co-edited collection (with 

Isabel Baca and Susan Wolff Murphy) of testimonios and scholarly articles that 

examine innovated writing pedagogies and the experiences of Latinx student writers 

at Hispanic-Serving Institutions nationwide. Other related published works include: 

“Localizing the Body for Practitioners in Writing Studies” in El Mundo Zurdo 5 and 

“The Coyolxauhqui Imperative in Developing Comunidad-Situated Writing Curricula 

at Hispanic-Serving Institutions,” co-authored with Candance de Leon-Zepeda in El 

Mundo Zurdo 6. He is the recipient of the 2020 Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi 

University’s Excellence in Research and Scholarly Activity Award. 

Isabel Baca is Associate Professor of English, Director of the Community Writing 

Partners Program, and Director of the Bilingual Professional Writing Certificate 

Program at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is co-editor (with Yndalecio Isaac 

Hinojosa and Susan Wolff Murphy) of Bordered Writers: Latinx Identities and Literacy 

Practices at Hispanic-Serving Institutions. She edited also Service-Learning and Writing: Paving 

the way for Literacy(ies) through Community Engagement (2012) and Borders (2011). She is a 

2017 University of Texas System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award recipient and 

a 2018 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Initiatives at 

Presidentially Designated Institutions Grant recipient. Her research interests include 

service-learning in writing studies, bilingual professional writing, second-language 

writers, and community engagement in higher education. 

Latinx Writing and Rhetoric Studies is the professional journal for the college scholarteacher 

interested in both national and international literacy events dealing with Latinx 

Communities, Diaspora, and Identity and Cultural Practices. LWRS publishes articles 

about literature, rhetoric-composition, critical theory, creative writing theory and 

pedagogy, linguistics, literacy, reading theory, pedagogy, and professional issues related 

to the teaching and creation of Latinx epistemologies. Issues may also include review 

essays. Contributions may work across traditional field boundaries; authors represent 

the full range of institutional types.

Photographs – 2019 El Paso, Texas mass shooting memorial at Walmart 

Photo by Antonio Villaseñor-Baca 

A signed Walmart uniform hangs on the Gateway West among the makeshift 

memorial in El Paso, Texas outside of the Walmart. 

LWRS, 2020, 1(1) | vi


CONTENTS Volume 1 Issue 1 June 2020 

1 Editor’s Introduction: Honoring our Past, Living our Present, and 

Fighting for our Future – La Lucha Sigue 

Isabel Baca and Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa 

11 The Fourth Movement: Founder’s Letter for Latinx Writing and Rhetoric 

Studies 

Iris D. Ruiz 

19 Rhetorics of Translation in Tino Villanueva’s Cronica de mis años perores 

(Chronicle of My Worst Years) 

Aydé Enríquez-Loya 

49 Interview with the El Paso Strong Mural Artist Gabe Vasquez 

Elvira Carrizal-Dukes 

57 Pardon My Acento: Racioalphabet Ideologies and Rhetorical Recovery 

through Alternative Writing Systems 

Kelly Medina-López 

81 Mexican Food, Assimilation, and Middle-Class Mexican Americans or 

Chicanx 

Jaime Armin Mejía 

97 Inventing PLEA: A Social History of a College-Writing Initiative at a 

Chilean University 

Ana M. Cortés Lagos

121 Cont. Interview with the El Paso Strong Mural Artist Gabe Vasquez 


127 Poets in the Classroom: What We Do When We Teach Writing 

Laurie Ann Guerrero, with 

Sabrina San Miguel and Cecilia Amanda Macias 

135 Always Been “Inside” 

J. Paul Padilla 

161 Rhetorical Herencia: Writing Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Recovery and 

Transformation 

Cristina D. Ramírez 

179 Cont. Interview with the El Paso Strong Mural Artist Gabe Vasquez 


185 Review of Bordered Writers: Latinx Identities and Literacy Practices at Hispanic- 

Serving Institutions 

Juan C. Guerra 

191 Review of Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging 

Homework Literacies 

Marlene Galván 

196 Call for Submissions


Photo by Gaby Velasquez 

People gather outside the Walmart where the mass shooting took place 

and begin to place items to memorialize the victims. 

LWRS, 2020, 1(1) | ix



Woman brings a carnation for the memorial developing outside of the Walmart. 

LWRS, 2020, 1(1) | x


Vol. 1, No. 1, June 2020, 1–9 

Editor’s Introduction: Honoring our Past, Living our Present, 

and Fighting for our Future – La Lucha Sigue 

Isabel Baca 

University of Texas at El Paso, on land of the Tigua and Mescalero people. 1 

Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa 

Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi, on land of the Karankawan people. 2 

De nuestra gente, con nuestra gente y para la gente. 

We proudly introduce Latinx Writing and Rhetoric Studies (LWRS), a refereed 

academic journal sponsored by the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus. Founded by then 

caucus co-chair Iris D. Ruiz, LWRS will play an integral part for enacting the vision 

and mission of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus. LWRS is a venue to “exchange 

ideas,” a repository of information to “serve as a resource for members, the 

educational community and the general public,” and a network of writers to “support 

activities that promote the learning and advancement of students and teachers of 

color” (Latinx caucus, p. 1). Our platform is meant for the scholar-teacher (and we 

might add scholar-activist) whose interests include writing or rhetoric studies that 

center on Latinx communities, diaspora, identity, and cultural practices. As editors of 

LWRS, our primary goal will be to provide readers with a robust multimodal and 

dynamic publication that features articles about literature, rhetoric-composition, 

critical theory, creative writing theory, reading theory, border theory, applied 

linguistics, literacy, and professional issues related to the teaching and creation of 

Latinx epistemologies. To achieve this goal, we aim to publish authors and scholars 

that represent the full range of institutional types through their intellectual and 

community labor and whose contributions to LWRS will transcend the traditional 

LWRS: Latinx Writing and Rhetoric Studies ISSN 2687-7198 

https://latinxwritingandrhetoricstudies.com 

LWRS: Latinx Writing and Rhetoric Studies is an open-access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal published and supported by the 

NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus. Articles are published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license (Attribution- 

Noncommercial-NoDerivs) ISSN 2687-7198. Copyright © 2020 LWRS Editors and/or the site’s authors, developers, and 

contributors. Some material is used with permission.


boundaries of our disciplines to offer not only new knowledge but also shape existing 

knowledge. 

Indeed, it has been an honor to serve as the first guest editors for this inaugural 

issue, an issue we themed on recovery and transformation. Recovery as a way to make 

visible what may have been lost, and transformation to lead us into what may lie ahead 

for us all. From the moment we were appointed as editors, we strived to bring forth 

an issue that would embody the beauty of the diverse cultures and languages that make 

up Latinx peoples. Yes, we would like to place an emphasis on the plurality and diversity 

that is Latinx. At the same time, we also wanted to demonstrate the challenges that 

we, as Latinx, continue to face and the individual and collaborative efforts de nuestra 

lucha in and outside academia as well as in our respective fields of study. We made a 

commitment to one another to establish LWRS as an instrument that could carve out 

a new discursive space, where the places made within that space are done so by nuestra 

gente, con nuestra gente y para la gente. We envisioned LWRS to serve as national and 

international voices that could cut across disciplinary and geopolitical borders. For this 

issue, we felt that the contributions selected will add, through forms of recovery and 

transformation, to our Latinx history, experience, and identity; for the range and depth 

of each piece speaks to the heart, spirit, and intellectual vigor of our gente and of our 

work as editors. 

Our Work as Editors 

There’s work to be done for our profession, for people of color in our profession and in our 

classrooms, work to be done for Latinos. 

– Victor Villanueva, Jr. 

In 2018, we began our work to produce the first issue of LWRS, but we must 

acknowledge that this work is built upon the work of others in our community. LWRS 

extends a legacy that first began with the Capirotada newsletter, founded and first edited 

by Alfredo Celedon Lujan for NCTE’s Latino Caucus. Published in the summer of 

1994, this first newsletter, made as a one-page trifold, featured a column by then caucus 

co-chair Victor Villanueva Jr. 3 In his column, Villanueva calls us to action: “[t]here’s 

work to be done…”. Cecilia Rodriquez Milanes, who was later charged with producing 

and editing the newsletter, told us that Capirotada was “important work,” important 

because it “gave folks who couldn’t make it to the conferences a sense of ‘who we 

were,’” an expression she directly tied back to Lujan’s “¿Quién somos?” question that 

LWRS, 2020, 1(1) | 2


he first posed to readers in that first newsletter. Now, almost twenty-five years later, 

as editors we recognized that there is still much more “work to be done” as Villanueva 

put it back then, and that that work can begin by designating LWRS as a discursive 

space where we as Latinx can express and define quién somos on our own terms. So, 

we set out to form LWRS in ways that can support our profession, our people of 

color, and our gente. 

To begin, we were charged by Senior Editor Iris D. Ruiz to develop and create 

LWRS for our rhetoric and composition / writing studies profession, and to do so 

with the vision and mission of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus in mind. This meant 

that we needed to ensure LWRS was a refereed academic publication, first and 

foremost. We needed a publication that would serve not only as a venue to exchange 

ideas but also as a resource for learning and as a vehicle that could provide 

opportunities for our Latinx caucus members to advance, both in their profession or 

comunidades. So, with that in mind, we set out to produce the first issue and sent out 

a call for submissions to various listservs, including our own Latinx caucus listserv, on 

January 24, 2019. 4 In our call for submissions, we asked contributors to consider the 

following questions: 

1. What do transformative modes of leadership look like for Latinx, our gente? 

2. What are possible transformative pedagogies that can be effective when 

teaching Latinx populations? 

3. What transformative modes of engagement best serve or embrace 

interconnectivity for identity formation, theorizing, or social change? 

4. In terms of recovery, how can activism play a role for Latinx communities? 

5. What cultural or pedagogical practices aid rhetorical recovery? 

6. How can Latinx develop rhetorical concepts or approaches in and out of the 

classroom to account for rhetors who are excluded from traditional rhetoric? 

We received numerous submissions by our March 25, 2019 deadline, and we called 

then upon the LWRS Editorial Board to blindly review submissions. 5 For further 

assistance and where appropriate expertise was necessary, we sent other submissions 

to the Editorial Board of Open Words: Access and English Studies, a refereed publication 

co-edited also by Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa (with Sue Hum and Kristina Gutierrez). 

When it came to the peer review process, we made it our priority to break away from 

what seems to be the norm in publication processes, oppressive methodologies in 

the rituals and editorial practices found throughout the profession. To set us apart, 

we set a priority to offer LWRS contributors something we felt publication processes 

within the field lacked, mentorship. 



As editors, we set into place editorial practices for mentoring writers, 

especially young scholars – young Latinx scholars emerging in the field. First, we 

voiced our goal to mentor writers in our invitation to peer-reviewers: “Part of our 

mission as co-editors at LWRS is to provide mentorship, especially if a manuscript 

has the potential to make a significant contribution to the field, so we encourage not 

only constructive but also ‘productive’ feedback in ways that can strengthen 

manuscripts.” 5 In the review process, we called for productive feedback from our 

reviewers. Often, as is the case with blind reviews, criticism and/or constructive 

comments over the work may leave authors with little to no clear path on how best 

to strengthen their work. To solicit productive feedback from reviewers is to ask 

reviewers to go above and beyond and provide ways for how best authors can 

improve their manuscripts. Second, we performed additional editorial reviews after 

authors submitted revised manuscripts that underwent a revise and resubmit process. 

That means that any contribution to LWRS will go through at least four reviews: two 

blind reviews and two editor reviews. During our editorial reviews, we reached out to 

several authors to discuss the status of the manuscript, options for making the work 

more accessible to readers, thoughts on how best to further strengthen areas, and/or 

the significance of their contribution to LWRS, especially for our Latinx audience. 

Thus, in most cases, our editorial review called for an additional set of revisions. 

Some minor. Some major. But all revisions performed were done so as part of our 

process to work with our contributors closely. Together, we engaged in mentored 

writing. 

We learned early on that mentoring writers also required providing writers 

with resources, especially if those resources were to play an instrumental role to 

further develop the quality of submissions. So, as editors, we extended our editorial 

practices to include, at times, supportive measures, such as intellectual labor in 

locating resources and expenditures at our own expense. These measures were, in a 

small way, our opportunity to support scholars, especially scholars of color in our 

profession. When institutional and financial support is limited, as one of our 

contributors put it, that limitation can be “another barrier of research” for scholars 

of color. To aid contributors, when necessary, we provided much needed resources 

at the direction of our reviewers’ comments or our editorial feedback. We sent 

various books to some of our contributors (when access or resources to that material 

was limited) directly from Amazon.com or other web ordering services. In addition 

to books, we sent book chapters or articles in PDF to some of our contributors too. 

Our supportive measures took place not only to provide access to such material but 

also to strengthen our contributors’ arguments or to connect their work further with 

current scholarship in the field. 

Lastly, as previously mentioned, LWRS carves out a new discursive space in 

our profession, but to support that space, we need to align that space with structures 

that promote success and retention for scholars of color in our profession, especially 

in terms of promotion and tenure. We met several times with founder Iris D. Ruiz to 



discuss how (in moving forward) this journal could offer our gente 

acknowledgement, accomplishment, and advancement. Our discussions led us to 

consider several ways on how to meet these goals. 

First, we placed land acknowledgements into the design of our publication. 

All institutional affiliations associated with contributors are designated a land 

acknowledgement. The acknowledgements serve to remind readers of our ongoing 

responsibilities to the Indigenous peoples of these lands. As editors, we recognize 

the criticisms and the performativity engendered by this practice, but in the end, such 

acknowledgements as our practice provide readers the opportunity to be unsettled or 

disrupted to know that la lucha sigue. 

Second, we committed to develop LWRS into a top tier journal in the field. 

We applied for an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) designation with the 

Library of Congress. Our designation helps to acknowledge LWRS as an official 

academic publication on record. The ISSN distinguishes this publication from other 

publications and records our issues with the Library of Congress. In addition to our 

official status, we hope that our laborious review process and our editorial practices 

(all aimed at providing support and mentorship in the publication process) pave the 

path forward to establish LWRS as the sought-out venue to publish. We want 

practitioners and scholars in our field to recognize LWRS publications as noteworthy 

contributions to the field and/or vigorous accomplishments from our contributors. 

Third, we decided to organize the editorial management structure in such a 

way to provide editorial mentorship and extend the professionalization merits de 

nuestra gente. Much like the work that began with Capirotada, our work at LWRS is a 

community effort, and such work is done so in the spirit of helping to advance our 

communities. At LWRS, Senior Editors will administrate and oversee the journal and 

provide a final review of copy for publication. Procedures for soliciting submissions, 

assigning blind peer-reviews, conducting editorial reviews, and producing annual 

issues shall fall to our appointed Guest Editors. On a two-year appointment, our 

Guest Editors are charged with the responsibility, production, and release of two 

consecutive issues. We will stagger their appointment schedule so that there is a oneyear 

overlap between editors. The benefit for this overlap is twofold: (1) to maintain 

a level of congruency in our editorial practices and in our issues and (2) to establish a 

rotation where the incumbent guest editor mentors the newly appointed guest editor 

throughout the publication processes. Whereas Senior Editors are accredited with 

service to the profession in academia, appointed Guest editors are accredited with 

the publication of an edited journal issue. Our management structure offers Guest 

Editors not only mentorship in editorial work for LWRS but also activity in scholarly 

work for promotion and tenure. In some small way, this journal and its editors and 

contributors encompass altogether the work to be done for Latinx. 



Our Contributors’ Work in this Issue 

We are excited to present the 2020 inaugural issue of Latinx Writing and Rhetoric 

Studies (LWRS), and we are grateful for the scholars, practitioners, students, poets and 

artists who contributed scholarship or creative work that centered on recovery and 

transformation themes. A letter from Iris D. Ruiz, founder of the LWRS journal and 

long-time member and former co-chair of the NCTE/CCC Latinx Caucus, opens our 

issue. In her letter, Ruiz reminds us of the importance of self-representing and 

advocating for publication venues within the field of Rhetoric and Composition. With 

the publication of this issue, we are closer to this goal, closer to a transformative 

change. 

Throughout the pages in this issue, you will find images by photographers 

Antonio Villaseῆor-Baca and Gaby Velasquez. These images depict the memorial 

honoring the victims (listed below) from the Walmart mass shooting in El Paso, Texas 

on August 3, 2019. 

Jordan Anchondo 

Andre Anchondo 

Arturo Benavides 

Jorge Calvillo García 

Leo Campos 

Maribel Hernandez 

Adolfo Cerros Hernández 

Sara Esther Regalado 

Angelina Englisbee 

Raul Flores 

Maria Flores 

Guillermo “Memo” Garcia 

Alexander Gerhard Hoffmann 

David Johnson 

Luis Juarez 

Maria Eugenia Legarreta 

Ivan Filiberto Manzano 

Gloria Irma Márquez 

Elsa Mendoza 

Margie Reckard 



Javier Amir Rodriquez 

Teresa Sanchez 

Juan de Dios Velázquez 

The Walmart shooting in El Paso urged us to address this tragedy. We witnessed how 

it brought our gente together; how it transformed a border community; and how 

together people worked toward recovery, an ongoing process and journey. In addition 

to the images, the article “Interview with El Paso Strong Mural Artist Gabe Vasquez” 

provides readers excerpts (both in texts and video form) from an interview with Gabe 

Vasquez. Vasquez, the artist responsible for creating the El Paso Strong mural, was 

interviewed by Elvira Carrizal-Dukes, who recounts her lived experience of that day 

as she discusses and presents her interview with the artist. We hope the images and 

excerpts allow you, as reader, to pause and reflect on recovery and transformation as 

you read longer articles found in this issue. 

For this issue, our lead article, “Rhetorics of Translation in Tino Villanueva’s 

Cronica de mis aῆos peores (Chronicle of My Worst Years),” is by Aydé Enríquez-Loya. By 

examining translations, including her own, Enríquez-Loya recovers Villanueva’s work 

and demonstrates how this work becomes a story suppressed by translation informed 

from various influences, such as migrant worker history or her own background as a 

Texas Chicana. What her examination shows is that translations are a reinterpretation 

of a text filtered through a translator’s ideological, rhetorical, and cultural 

understandings. 

Next, we present work by Kelly Medina-López, who exposes the Western 

colonial alphabet as a sustained and systematic technology of colonial oppression in 

“Pardon My Acento: Racioalphabetic Ideologies and Rhetorical Recovery through 

Alternative Writing Systems.” By using testimonio to support her argument, Medina- 

López explores processes of naming and disnaming and proposes using alternative 

writing systems to provide a method for reclaiming agency and autonomy. She calls 

on readers to consider alternative writing systems as a tool for marking difference. To 

underscore her argument, she utilizes emoticons throughout the text to engage and 

exemplify an alternative writing system. 

Found also in this issue is Jaime Armin Mejía, who offers his essay titled 

“Mexican Food, Assimilation, and Middle-Class Mexican Americans or Chicanxs.” In 

this essay, Mejía addresses the field of Rhetoric and Composition by exploring how 

teaching a course on Mexican food may allow us to address many of the rhetorical 

dimensions we use in our writing classes. In his essay, Mejía simultaneously highlights 



the deeply rooted issues of assimilation and our identities as middle-class Mexican 

Americans or Chicanxs. 

Addressing a college-writing initiative, doctoral student Ana M. Cortés Lagos 

describes the creation and development of a first writing program in a Chilean 

university in her article, “Inventing PLEA. A Social History of a College-Writing 

Initiative at a Chilean University.” Her work is of significance because she stresses the 

importance and necessity of historicizing projects like this in order for local traditions 

to develop disciplinary awareness and enter a dialogue with other writing studies 

traditions on a global scale. 

“Poets in the Classroom: What We Do When We Teach Writing” features 

Laurie Ann Guerrero, with students Sabrina San Miguel and Cecilia Amanda Macias. 

Guerrero held consecutive positions as Poet Laureate of the city of San Antonio (2014- 

2016) and the State of Texas (2016-2017). In the spirit of reaching out to the 

community, Guerrero, the Writer-in-Residence at Texas A&M University-San 

Antonio, introduces two up and coming student poets. Guerrero shares their work 

with our readers because of “their persevering commitment to their education, to their 

art, and to their brave and difficult emotional / physical / spiritual work.” We are 

happy to showcase Guerrero and her students in this issue for our readers. 

Switching gears, in the essay “Always Been ‘Inside,’” J. Paul Padilla offers 

readers a form of alternative rhetoric by stringing together vignettes as a way to 

meditate on rhetorical recovery and transformation. These vignettes offer readers an 

opportunity to see how writers, like Padilla, can engage in critical analysis through 

personal meditation. His work explores the dynamics of doxa and kairos and delinks 

readers from the genre of traditional scholarly writing. His meditations relate to 

cultural definitions of, and self-definitions for, Latinx communities. 

In our final article, “Rhetorical Herencia: Writing toward a Theory of Rhetorical 

Recovery and Transformation,” Cristina D. Ramírez explores how Latinx scholars can 

develop rhetorical concepts and/or approaches in and out of the classroom to account 

for rhetors who are excluded from traditional rhetoric. Ramírez does this by 

introducing and defining the concept of rhetorical herencia (heritage) while focusing on 

her grandmother’s recovery work. 

We conclude our issue with two book reviews. Juan C. Guerra examines the 

scholarly collection Bordered Writers: Latinx Identities and Literacy Practices at Hispanic- 

Serving Institutions edited by Isabel Baca, Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa, and Susan Wolf- 

Murphy. Marlene Galván assesses Steven Alvarez’s Brokeing Tareas: Mexican Immigrant 

Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies. 



We are breaking ground with LWRS, the first journal in the field with an all 

Latinx editorial board and with a focus on solely Latinx writing and rhetoric. We are 

grateful for the opportunity to guest edit this inaugural issue. This issue and all 

subsequent issues can be found online at https://latinxwritingandrhetoricstudies.com, 

a website initiated by Christian Rivera. It is with hope that we look onto the future. It 

is with courage and determination that we continue our work. Our lucha is far from 

over. Let LWRS be a space of expression, opportunity, and dialogue. 

Con respeto a todos y gratitud, 

Isabel y Isaac 

Endnotes 

1. Land acknowledgement – Shepherd, J. P. (2019, March). "Indigenous El PASO": 

How the Humanities help us SEE El Paso as a native place. Retrieved March 21, 

2020, from https://humanitiescollaborative.utep.edu/project-blog/indigenousel-paso-how-the-humanities-help-us-see-el-paso-as-a-native-place 

2. Land acknowledgement – Lipscomb, C. A. (2016, May). “Karankawa Indians.” 

Retrieved June 9, 2020, from 

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/bmk05 

3. The first newsletter (and a few others) can be found under the archive section on 

the LWRS website. 

4. The call for submission for our inaugural issue can be found in the archive on 

the LWRS website. 

5. The invitation for review can be found in the archive on the LWRS website. 

References 

Latinx caucus. (n.d.). Retrieved June 7, 2020, from 

https://ncte.org/groups/caucuses/latinx-caucus/ 

Villanueva, V., Jr. (1994). Abrazos. Capirotada: NCTE’s Latino Caucus Newsletter, 1, 

1. 






contributors. Some material is used with permission. 




A flag made up of both the Mexican and the US flags 

displayed at the memorial at the Walmart in El Paso, Texas. 




The Fourth Movement: Founder’s Letter for Latinx Writing and 

Rhetoric Studies 

Iris D. Ruiz 

University of California Merced, on land of the Yokuts and Miwuk native 

people. 1 

Writing this introductory letter as a founding member of this journal gives me 

wondrous and chontzin feelings of gratification. This first issue of Latinx Writing and 

Rhetoric Studies (LWRS) has special significance in that the inaugural issue is guest edited 

by Drs. Isabel Baca and Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa, fellow NCTE/CCCC Latinx 

Caucus members. 

From the perspective of a former member of twenty years and a co-chair of 

the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus (2015-18), I must say that getting to this point has 

proven to have been a journey of camaraderie, self-reflection, activism, and 

transformation. Often, Caucus members would discuss in listserv discussions and at 

CCCC meetings the politics of citation. We noticed that while we were playing fairly; 

we were also playing on an unequal playing field, and through past leaders, like Felipe 

de Ortega y Gasca, we understood that these citation politics had a history that was at 

least fifty years old. I won’t go into too much detail about this history, but I will say 

that the publication of the first issue of LWRS is timely in that it accompanies a 

recently published historical book about and by the Caucus: Viva Nuestra Caucus: 

Rewriting the Forgotten Pages of our Caucus (2019), now available through Parlor Press with 

the help of Dr. Stephen Parks, a longtime advocate for the Latinx Caucus. This 

historical record documents how we engaged deeply to recover these matters, and in 

doing so, we pursued the documentation of our archival presence in the field since at 

least 1968. I encourage our readers to check out that history. This issue also includes 







Iris D. Ruiz 

some very important history in the introduction that was shared with us by Cecelia 

Milanes, former co-chair of the CCCC Latinx Caucus and lead editor of “Capirotada.” 

Milanes provides our audience a glimpse of what the Caucus has been up to for the 

past few decades as we have celebrated each other’s accomplishments even while 

we’ve been underrepresented. 

Still, today, it is very important for the Caucus to continue to self-represent 

and advocate for publication venues within the field of Rhet/Comp. Notable about 

this journal is that it is the first one in the field to possess an all Latinx editorial board 

and to concentrate solely on Latinx issues related to literacy, writing studies, rhetoric, 

and pedagogy through various means of aesthetic and creative expression. We are in 

the midst of a political climate, for example, that has painted a very negative picture 

of Latinx identities within the United States while the Latinx population is growing as 

the largest minoritized ethnic group in the United States. This journal is meant to be 

seen as providing a counter-vision to these negative cultural images in service to 

creating a better-informed “cultural imaginary.” It is meant to serve as a space where 

we, as engaged and informed citizens, can speak back with scholarly inquiry and 

creative expression to the current political backlash against Latinxs and to matters that 

are important to Latinxs. 

There are many examples that the editorial group and contributors could cite 

to demonstrate this necessity to highlight and showcase our work and the progress 

that is yet to come with the help of an accomplished Latinx scholars editorial board. 

Since 2008, the battle for Mexican American Studies and HB 2281, has shown 

conservative school board officials possess an unfounded fear toward consciousness 

raising curricula and pedagogy. Barrio Pedagogy, for example, laid the critical 

foundation for Mexican American Studies in Tucson, Arizona but was rejected by John 

Huppenthal and Tom Horne. Our history with struggle for cultural knowledge goes 

back much further than 2008, however. For example, Latinx civil rights student 

organizations, such as MEChA and even our Caucus, have been partially predicated 

upon a reclamation of MesoAmerican culture and history. Like other activist groups, 

such as The Black Panther Party seeking to claim a nationalist identity, MEChA 

demanded a recognition of the southwestern United States as their ancestral 

homeland, “Aztlán,” 2 since 1969, and an end to the inferior and demeaning 

perceptions commonly held about them by xenophobic, racist white people. 

Today, many “identity” based political groups, such as MEChA and our Latinx 

Caucus, are thought of by some as being unnecessary “safe spaces” that claim 

“victimhood” status and who do not want to play a part in American meritocratic 

culture and/or the “pull-yourself up by your own bootstraps” mentality. Stephen 


The Fourth Movement 

Miller, current Senior Advisor for Policy for the Trump Administration, for example, 

advises the president on important matters related to immigration policy, the Dream 

Act, DACA, and Latinx, Aztlan-seeking and dwelling populations. There is 

documentation that illustrates his disdain for student activist groups, such as MEChA, 

UNIDOS, the Black Student Unions, and other identity-based groups, and for those 

who identified as Mexican, Mexican-American, and/or Chicana/o/x (Gumble, 2018). 

However, what people like Miller need to accept and become open to is that Latinx 

gente have a culture that departs from settler-colonial cultural understandings, and 

white people also have a culture that needs to be reclaimed (Dutch, Irish, Welsh, 

Danish, and English, among many others). The historical and cultural dismissal is still 

evident today in that settler-colonial schools have failed to account for MesoAmerican 

cultural accomplishments, memories, epistemologies, ways of knowing, writing, 

reading, healing, and other cultural attributes in a much-needed Ethnic Studies 

curriculum. Without highlighting or at least teaching these attributes, forms, or 

experiences, there continues to be a clear disregard for those who have suffered from 

colonial trauma and a resistance to allowing colonized populations to re-discover their 

history, humanity, and existence within the North American, South American, and 

Central American imaginary, or as José Martí would call it, “Nuestra América.” It 

seems to be faulty reasoning to assume that Latinx’ attempts at cultural reclamation 

and sustainability is in inherent dialogue with and opposition to the “American” 

culture and that it is anti-American propaganda. 

Building from the Naui Ollin (four movement) Mexica philosophy as a 

foundation for Barrio Pedagogy, I’d like to briefly consider how one learns resilience 

while experiencing political angst through activism and community. When I began my 

service as co-chair, I immediately began the process of deep self-reflection about my 

role, about the Caucus membership, about the civil rights struggle, about OUR place 

within the academy, and about my being a colonized Latina, now representative of 

many other gente with colonial pasts. I began to reflect on what all of this meant to 

me and about how intimidation and crass behavior would be obstacles to overcome. 

The precious knowledge I gained from these self-reflections manifested into a vision 

for the Caucus: greater representation, greater visibility, and a visibly greater group 

identity both offline and online. We set out to increase our precious knowledge as a 

collective, so on a path toward further knowledge attainment, we began to study what 

had happened in the past, where we were headed, and how NCTE and CCCC 

represented us and valued us. With that goal in mind, the Caucus went to Oregon in 

2017 and held another spectacular workshop, “Latinxs Taking Action In and Out of 

the Academy,” with local activists, poets, writers, peers, and artists, musicians who 


Iris D. Ruiz 

performed culturally conscious rhetorics. We wanted to celebrate and showcase the 

Latinx voice and presence in Portland, Oregon. 

The lesson gained in Portland was something I documented and wrote about 

in Latino Rebels (2017). In a nutshell, there were clear examples, which I videotaped, of 

a continued distance between the Latinx Caucus workshop and the broader CCCC 

conference proceedings. “Latinxs Taking Action In and Out of the Academy” 

showcased local activists, poets, writers, peers, and even musicians performing 

culturally conscious rhetorics to showcase the Latinx voice and presence in Portland, 

Oregon. I think as a more seasoned Caucus leader, I was compelled to start 

decolonizing this divide--the way I saw how it affected members, myself, and those 

not present. In short, I tried to call attention to this divide in a conference review that 

I wrote and published “rogue” through Latino Rebels. 

I began to seriously work with decolonial theory and practice in 2015, roughly 

the same year that I was voted in as the Latinx Caucus co-chair along with Raúl 

Sánchez. I became interested in this work when I wanted to problematize what it 

meant to occupy the problematic trope of the “student of color.” Doing so was the 

early stage for creating our edited collection Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition: New 

Latinx Keywords for Theory and Pedagogy (2016), a collection of “decolonized keywords” 

to mentor emerging scholars and provide a venue to publish and expose more of our 

Latinx “gente.” We were invited to present at the Conference on Community Writing 

in the fall of 2017, where Steven Alvarez, Candace de Leon-Zepeda, and Jose Cortez 

spoke about the empowering process of being able to write for this collection from a 

decolonial lens. In addition, we saw the Caucus continue to grow. We gained and were 

sharing precious knowledge, the second movement. 

In 1968, the Caucus was only a handful of people struggling with many of the 

same issues we experience today. Now, we have over 100 members, and we are 

experiencing a Latinx literary and scholarly renaissance that I will refer to as the third 

movement of the Nahui Ollin: Huitzilopochtli. Within the past decade, it is apparent 

that we’ve discovered our “will to act” in addition to our previous moments of deep 

self-reflection (Tezcatlipoca), gaining precious knowledge (Quetzalcoatl). I predict that 

as with the fourth movement of the Nahui Ollin, our Caucus is now moving into the 

fourth state of transformation (Xipe Totec) (Arce, 2016). 

More recently our activism has been visible through our work on anti-racism 

and against white supremacy. In 2018, we voted to boycott CCCC 2018 in Kansas 

City, Missouri. We initiated what became the Joint Caucus Statement on the NAACP 

Travel Advisory, and we contributed to the Joint Caucus Response as well. Without 

going into too much detail with these documents, because they speak for themselves, 


The Fourth Movement 

we witnessed our initial will to act and to speak about the CCCC organization’s 

responses to our concerns with the creation of the Social Justice Action Committee 

(SJAC) and the SJAC all-conference event that we feel emulates our regular 

Wednesday workshops where we invite local activists, writers, poets, musicians, and 

scholars. We also recently added our joint bibliography to CompPile. LWRS is the 

continuance of our transformative potential, our Xipe Totec, through which we will 

continue to seek transformative change through collective action, self-representation, 

and actualization, and we welcome everyone aboard! 

Endnotes 

1. Land acknowledgement – Diversity statement: University of California, Merced. 

(2020). Retrieved February 26, 2020, from 

https://diversity.ucmerced.edu/accountability/policies-principles/diversitystatement 

2. “Aztlán,” is the mythical homeland of all MesoAmerican people who reside on 

both sides of the United States and Mexican border but were colonized by the 

Spanish in the 1500’s and by the English and other European settlers in 1848. 

These people claim indigenous roots to this geographical territory that was once 

the location of the fierce and intelligent Mexica, Aztec, Mayan, Mixtec, Toltec 

and other tribes who intermixed and were said to live harmoniously in the region 

before colonization. While “Aztlán” is largely regarded as a mythical homeland, 

its location is debated and is thought to be most of the southwestern United 

States. 

References 

Arce, S. M. (2016). Xicana/o indigenous epistemologies: Toward a decolonizing and 

liberatory education for Xicana/o youth. In D. M. Sandoval, A. J. Ratcliff, 

T. L. Buenavista, & J. R. Marín (Eds.), White Washing American Education: The 

NewCulture Wars in Ethnic Studies (pp. 11–42). Praeger ABCCLIO. 

García, R., Ruiz, I. D., & Hernández, A. (Eds.). (2019). Viva nuestro caucus: Rewriting 

the forgotten pages of our caucus. Parlor Press. 

Gumbel, R. (2017, February 22). Stephen Miller was no hero fighting left-wing 

oppression at Santa Monica High School. LA Times. 

Ruiz D. (2017, March 29). A Decolonial CONFERENCE Review: Meditations on 

inclusivity and 4 c's '17 in Portland, Oregon. Retrieved February 29, 2020, 

from https://www.latinorebels.com/2017/03/29/a-decolonial-conferencereview-meditations-on-inclusivity-and-4-cs-17-in-portland-oregon/ 


Iris D. Ruiz 

Ruiz, I. D., & Sánchez, R. (2016). Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies: New 

Latinx Keywords for Theory and Pedagogy. Palgrave Macmillan. 

About the Author 

Iris D. Ruiz earned her Ph.D. from the University of California San Diego and is a 

Lecturer at the University of California Merced. Noteworthy publications in rhetoric 

and composition include Reclaiming Composition for Chicanos/as and Other Ethnic Minorities: 

A Critical History and Pedagogy (2016), Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition: New Latinx 

Keywords for Theory and Practice (2016), and Viva Nuestro Caucus: Rewriting the Forgotten Pages 

of our Caucus (2020). 










Mourners at the memorial. 




Memorial for David Johnson 




Rhetorics of Translation in Tino Villanueva’s Crónica de mis años 

peores (Chronicle of My Worst Years) 


California State University Chico, on land of the Mechoopda people. 1 

In the rhetorics of translation, in the system of discourse we use to translate meaning, 

there is a gap between what is written in the original text and what is understood 

through the act of translation. 2 A space of disruption is created in the attempt to reinscribe 

what a text says and what a translator claims it says. Edgar Andrés Moros 

(2009) argues that the binary distinctions between the theoretical and practical 

understandings of translations and translation studies are problematic. He states that 

the “distinctions are seen as arbitrary and culturally determined” and “generally used 

to maintain power differentials,” and he goes on to explain that these oppositions are 

unnatural human constructs (Moros, 2009, p. 8). Moros maintains that despite the 

belief that the practice of translation is free from theoretical or ideological choices, the 

fact remains that “even if translators do not write about these choices as theory, there 

is an implicit theory that they have created and followed, and which may be inferred 

at a later time” (2009, p. 11). Furthermore, Jose M. Davila-Montes (2017) argues, 

“Translations advertise the existence of a text by, paradoxically, causing it to 

‘disappear’ in its original form and then by taking over its identity; a translation is the 

very illusion of reading” the original text (p. 1). In addition, translators are typically 

given the creative freedom to translate while adhering to the overall message of a text, 

but before translators can translate, they must interpret the text from and for their 

own understanding. And so, their translation is a reinterpretation of a text filtered 

through their own ideological, theoretical, rhetorical, and cultural understandings. 

Their translation is a re-inscription of a story upon the original text. 








Tino Villanueva is a prolific Chicano poet, relying on memory to serve as his 

muse to write about oppressive educational systems, the erasure and denial of Mexican 

American history, learning to defend himself in a foreign language, and interrogating 

and coming to terms with Indigenous heritage. In Crónica de mis años peores (Chronicle of 

My Worst Years), Villanueva tells the story of his childhood growing up in Texas as a 

disillusioned self-recognition of himself as an encumbering remnant of conquest and 

domination to America. 3 In the process of telling this story, however, Villanueva loudly 

denounces the continued perpetuation of a colonial history deeply embedded within 

every fiber of the American education system. Still, while this story is a story that he 

tells, this story is not the story that is translated. Villanueva utilizes Spanish almost 

exclusively within his Crónica de mis años peores publication. In doing so, he displaces 

readers whose first language is not Spanish and who must resort to English translations 

of his work. The English translation provided by James Hoggard creates a slightly 

different story that adheres to the binary Moros refers to in that Hoggard asserts the 

colonial gaze, seeks to control the text, and is dismissive of the decolonial strategies 

exhibited in the work. Villanueva’s rhetorical choices of Spanish for this collection is 

reminiscent of Gloria Anzaldúa’s resistance to write only in English or to avoid too 

much Spanish. Anzaldúa (2007) proclaims that “[her] tongue will be illegitimate” if she 

had to accommodate English speakers by not speaking in Spanglish, and that she’s 

constantly forced to choose between English or Spanish and or to translate to English 

(p. 81). Like Anzaldúa, Villanueva’s use of Spanish throughout the text almost 

exclusively marks his text as an act of defiance, and when he refuses to translate himself 

by bringing someone else to do it, this substitution is, in and of itself, an act of 

resistance. 

Before I go any further, let me pause and first position myself in order to 

contextualize the source of my resistance based on my embodied experience. My 

positionality is based on the experiential recognition that translations are complicated 

by cultural histories, time, and geographic location. Furthermore, as someone who 

grew up on the border, I learned early on to read in-between the lines across bordered 

spaces as a matter of survival, both literal and metaphorical. I was born in El Paso, 

Texas, and I spent most of my childhood in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua Mexico. I did 

not learn to speak English until I was 8 years old, and the dual languages are still a 

source of tension, especially when my students question whether they should take an 

English class from me, given my Spanish last name. Growing up translating for my 

mother taught me that the practice of translation is complicated. Some things cannot 

be translated. Words are not always enough. As a child, I found myself utilizing 

memories, senses, and even dreams to try to capture the words I needed to convey 


Rhetorics of Translation in Tino Villanueva’s Cronica de mis años peores 

meaning to my mom saying things such as, “Es como decía mi Abuelita, o huele como 

cuando la tierra se hizo mala.” I’m not sure how successful I was in trying to convey 

the right meaning to my mother, but I do know that this lived experience led me to 

constantly question how Spanish and English is translated. 4 As a rhetorician now, it’s 

led me to interrogate the intentionality and source of mis/translations and implications 

of mis/translations on the original text and on their various audiences. Thus, I insist 

that there is a gap or space created between translations that calls for scrutiny and 

interrogation. This practice can inform and transform both texts in its ability to 

unmask the process of translation, show the subtle shifts in meaning and their 

implications, and ultimately hold translators accountable. 

The interrogation of a translation is more complicated than simply finding the 

equivalent or near equivalent word in a different language. I base this understanding 

both from my lived experiences and from the established work in cultural rhetorics 

and translation studies. Cultural rhetoric scholar, Angela Haas (2008) explains that 

language is culture specific; memory and stories are culturally and locally based (p. 9- 

10). Similarly, in translation studies, Laura Gonzales (2018) writes that “language is a 

culturally situated, embodied, lived performance” and thus calls for “[c]ountering 

traditional notions of translation that limit the analysis of language transformation to 

written alphabetic texts alone” (p. 3). Thus, as a cultural rhetorician my approach to 

reading these poems by Villanueva involves trying to understand the subtle shifts in 

the language used to make meaning and to always remember that language and culture 

are inextricably linked. My reading of Crónicas de mis años peores is heavily influenced not 

only by his history but also by Chicano and migrant worker history in Texas and by 

my own history growing up on the border. My readings of these poems are my way of 

recovering a story that has been suppressed by the translation, specifically by 

Hoggard’s translation. 

My scholarship has always been rooted at the crossroad of rhetorics and 

poetics, specifically by writers of color, building and or maintaining real and rhetorical 

alliances, and creating a discursive community that seeks to aid in our mutual survival. 

I was initiated into this path by Native American writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko 

(1977), 5 Lee Maracle (2015), and Malea Powell (2012). 6 Powell taught me about the 

power of stories and storytellers, but from all of them, I have come to understand that 

story is theory. Reading stories as theory makes me cognizant that as I theorize, I am 

also in the process of creating another story and aware of the ethics that must underline 

my practice. In this article, I will first situate the presence and necessity of third space 

as a rhetorical framework to recover Villanueva’s story. Second, I will propose 

different rhetorical strategies that can be used as a decolonial praxis within Villanueva’s 



text. Lastly, I will put theory into practice by building a story that showcases how the 

rhetorics of translation can be used to tease out a decolonial story and in that expose 

the dangers of mis/translations. This final section will present a close rhetorical and 

translational analysis of a few selected poems from Crónica de mis años peores. 

Third Space Politics of Rhetorics and Poetics 

The understanding and denial of a relationship between a translator and a text creates 

a situation where the actual text and the translation of it can be two separate and highly 

divergent narratives. While they are both attempting to tell the same story, the 

translation of a text carries an imposed meaning dependent on the translators’ personal 

ideologies and theoretical understandings of the text. For example, as a graduate 

student, I first encountered Tino Villanueva’s poem “Haciendo Apenas La 

Recolección” in the anthology Literature and the Environment edited by Lorraine 

Anderson, Scott P. Slovic, & John P. O’Grady (1999). Immediately, I was struck by 

the editors’ loose translation of the title and synopsis provided in the introduction to 

the poem. “Haciendo Apenas la Recolección” originally from Villanueva’s poetry 

collection Shaking Off the Dark (1984/1998) is translated by the editors as “Barely 

Remembering” (Anderson, Slovic, & O’Grady, 1999, p. 219) The editors’ translation 

of the title suggests the grasping of threads of memory, a faint remembrance that needs 

more work. The use of “barely” also carries connotations of scarcity and insufficiency, 

suggesting that there are only scarce or insufficient memories. But that is not the case. 

“Haciendo apenas la recolección” can also be translated as “Barely Making 

Recollection” or “Just Now Making Recollection.” 7 

The key to understanding the real significance of this title and the poem is by 

recognizing the theoretical and cultural discourses Villanueva’s narrative has created. 

Alfonso Rodriguez (1998) suggests, “As a former migrant worker, [Villanueva] has 

personally experienced the struggle, and he has developed a way to deal with his 

attitudes and frustrations through the creative process in the form of poetry of social 

commitment” (p. 84). Furthermore, in “Haciendo apenas la recolección,” Villanueva 

retraces the routes of his childhood and reality as a migrant worker in Central Texas. 

The journey he undertakes in the poem is the recovery of his story—one that provides 

a “sense of peace and liberation” through the process of retelling his story (Rodriguez, 

1998, p. 85). As such, in either of my suggested translations, the speaker is not grasping 

at faint memories but is instead just now initiating the process of recalling these 

events. Additionally, there is a significant difference between Recolección and 

Recordar, which is the literal translation of “to remember.” Recolección, to recollect, 



has a more physical and active presence. The act of physically bringing things together 

and, even more pointedly, bringing things together that have been together and somehow 

belong together. 

So, despite the editor’s translation of the title and by association the poem 

itself, Villanueva’s memory is not failing. He is just getting started. The distinct 

difference between the text and the imposed reading creates a rhetorical space, an 

intermediate space, that exists between the original text and the imposed text. One in 

which we must ask, how much of the language we use cannot be translated with words 

alone but requires an embodied and lived understanding of the text beyond language? 

And what happens in the space created between the text and its mistranslation? Whose 

story are we really hearing in a translation? And, how can we tell the difference? 

Within the space, the space created between the original and translation of a 

text, the audience can interrogate the imposition of a translation, the colonial gaze of 

a text, and denounce it. Allow the text to speak for itself. But doing so calls for an 

alternative discourse and rhetorical framework. As Haas (2008) & Gonzales (2018) 

explain, in order to begin the interrogation process, we must consider Villanueva’s 

cultural underpinnings and position the text in the borderlands. In Borderlands/La 

Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa (1987/2007) describes the borderlands as 

rupturing spaces where time, history, and peoples collide. To live in the borderlands is 

carrying the weight of history on your back, to carry the “hispana, india, negra, española,[y] 

gabacha” on your back (Anzaldúa, 1987/2007, p. 216). To live in the borderlands is to 

recognize that in this space 

you are the battleground 

where enemies are kin to each other; 

you are at home, a stranger, 

the border disputes have been settled 

the volley of shots have shattered the truce 

you are wounded, lost in action 

dead, fighting back; (Anzaldúa, 1987/2007, p. 216) 

It is within this context that the rhetoric of the borderlands emerges. It is rhetorically 

informed by history, bodies, tongues, scars, and open wounds. It is rhetoric 

challenging presence over absence, erasure, and denial. As the child of migrant 

workers, Villanueva expresses these precise feelings of being stranger at home and 

carrying the weight of his people’s history on his back. In addition, Adela Licona 

(2005) terms this as a “(b)orderlands’ rhetorics,” which she argues “move beyond 



binary borders to a named third space of ambiguity and even contradiction” (p. 105). 

Strategically, Licona places parentheses around the “b” in borderlands in order “to 

materialize a discursive border” and to “interrupt any fixed reading of the notion of 

(b)orderlands” (p. 105). The materialization of this discursive space is necessary for 

stories like Villanueva, both to materialize and counter the narratives that have been 

written about marginalized communities, in this case migrant workers. Villanueva’s 

story is a borderland story where the weight of history and the oppressive education 

system seek to consume him. In a state of ambiguity, he is led to feel like a walking 

contradiction. Ni de aquí, ni de allá. But as he negotiates history and the imposition of 

history upon his body and memory, Villanueva shows that borderland stories challenge 

us to consider how these spaces are and should be about decolonial work. However, 

Hoggard’s imposed translation undermines its capacity, ignores the decolonial work, 

and perpetuates a colonial imposition and erasure upon brown bodies. 

Through Hoggard’s translation, Villanueva’s story is trapped and bound by 

colonial practices. Emma Pérez (1999) in The Decolonial Imaginary discusses this third 

space as the “practice that implements the decolonial imaginary” (p. 33). It is within 

this space of the decolonial imaginary that we as scholars can interrogate and renounce 

the colonial presence within academia. Furthermore, Pérez argues that a decolonial 

imaginary utilizes third space feminisms to contradict and challenge dominant 

discourse (1999, p. xvi). She says, “the decolonial imaginary in Chicana/o history is a 

theoretical tool for uncovering the hidden voices of Chicanas that have been relegated 

to silences, to passivity, to that third space where agency is enacted through third space 

feminism” (Pérez, 1999, p. xvi). The decolonial imaginary is a tactic by which to 

challenge the colonial history embedded within the lands, bodies, and stories. 

Additionally, Chela Sandoval (2000) shows that third-space feminism is “a theory and 

method of oppositional consciousness” and that such theory is “not inexorably 

gender-, nation-, race-, sex-, or class-linked” (p. 197). Utilizing third space 

methodology, we can build theory to illustrate the intricate process of decolonizing the 

translation of a text. By purposefully reading Villanueva’s work through these 

methodologies, we are enabled then to recognize the different colonial histories that 

are embedded within this bordered space, trapped by coded languages and colonizing 

legacies. Our task is to actively resist this colonial history by reclaiming and recovering 

Villanueva’s history. Enacting this process of reclamation and recovery is mediated by 

positioning ourselves in direct opposition in theory and in practice to the colonial 

history of the border. We must carve out a space to make this work happen. Other 

scholars, such as Licona (2005), have also articulated the intricacies and complexities 

of third space sites that can also shift from not only a practice, as Perez (1999) argues, 



but also a location (p. 105). Licona writes, “As a location, third space has the potential 

to be a space for shared understanding and meaning-making. Through third-space 

consciousness then dualities are transcended to reveal fertile and rhetorical 

performances into play (2005, p.105). Third spaces as practices and locations for the 

decolonial work provide the methodology for oppositional thinking that, in the 

Villanueva’s case, can be enacted in both capacities. Within Villanueva’s collection, 

readers have multiple narratives that overlap and counter each other: his original text 

and Hoggard’s translation. Teasing out the embedded story, as I have performed in 

my own translation, provides an alternate narrative, and this third space allows us to 

transcend beyond the text and engage the decolonial process as a performative action. 

Additionally, Villanueva’s role within the Chicano movement speaks to his 

positioning within the context of this third space. Heralded as a Chicano poet, 

Villanueva’s work, shaped by Chicano activism and the Vietnam war, was foundational 

to the Chicano Renaissance (Lee, 2010, p.174). Within Chicanismo, scholars have 

problematized the invocation of indigenous identity or a mestizaje as central to identity 

formation or legitimacy. 8 This is important to note since Villanueva self-identifies as a 

Chicano and asserts his position within the Chicano movement. And within his 

collection, Villanueva includes poems that interrogate and reclaim his Indigenous 

heritage, such as “Cuento del cronista,” where he invokes Tlacuilo, an Aztec scribe, 

and chastises Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca as a “maldito explorador” (“Cuento del 

cronista,” 1987/1994, p. 42). In this poem, he asks Tlacuilo for a blessing, to keep him 

honorable, to keep him from forgetting his lineage, and in the end, Villanueva comes 

to terms with the violence of his heritage and history. Iris Deana Ruiz (2018), for 

example, explains this instance as the invocation of “La indigena” trope which, she 

says, “seeks to revisit and revitalize the knowledges … and cultural practices of Pre 

Columbian indigenous peoples in MesoAmerica [who]…left behind priceless, even 

metaphysical, remnants for those of us here in the U.S. who seek decoloniality of the 

mind, decolonial agency, and a decolonial consciousness” (2018, p. 223). However, in 

line with scholars, such as Gabriela Raquel Rios (2016) and Eric Rodriguez & Evarardo 

J. Cuevas (2017), Ruiz explains that invoking “La indigena” trope is dangerous 

“because it confronts the purist argument of indigenous authenticity and advocacy and 

rejects the modernist subject positions already imposed upon her that do not allow her 

to identify with her indigenous, decolonial self” (2018, p. 224). There is also a risk of 

rejection, Ruiz explains, placed in a third space “in-between her indigenous and 

European self…” (2018, p. 224). In this way, the walking in-between identities, unable 

to really claim one identity over another or choosing not to for ethical reasons, places 

Villanueva in this third space subjectivity. This third space created by the fringes of 



the colonial history of the borderlands is precisely that rupturing space created by 

discordant languages that have not learned to speak and hear one another. This third 

space subjectivity is the space for interrogation and renunciation. 

Working from this third space, I begin teasing out the embedded story in 

Villanueva’s collection, allowing me to differentiate between the layers of storying 

taking place. My capacity to do this work is initiated by both recognizing Villanueva’s 

positionality within third space and by rhetorically analyzing the text and translation 

simultaneously from the third space. Aja Martinez (2014) articulates the difference 

between stock stories and counterstories. She argues that these differences are fruitful, 

and this notion may help us to understand Villanueva’s moves. She says, “Stock stories 

feign neutrality and at all costs avoid any blame or responsibility for societal inequality. 

Powerful because they are often repeated until canonized or normalized, those who 

tell stock stories insist that their version of events is indeed reality…” (Martinez, 2014, 

p.70). I would argue that in Villanueva’s collection, the stock story would be the 

translations. The translation and the work of translators, as previously discussed, 

usually go unchallenged and their biases unchecked. As such, the stock story created 

by the translation will supersede the actual story the author wrote. Martinez explains 

that the counterstory “is a method of telling stories by people whose experiences are 

not often told, …as methodology thus serves to expose, analyze, and challenge stock 

stories of racial privilege and can help to strengthen traditions of social, political, and 

cultural survival and resistance” (2014, p.70). The counterstory in Villanueva’s poetry 

is partially the original story and the story to be teased out in the third space. He 

examines the experiences of migrant Mexican children in Texas’ educational system 

during the 1950s. Their stories are rarely if ever heard. However, I will argue, the 

counterstory for Villanueva’s collection is complicated and nuanced because it’s coded 

and largely unwritten. Readers will need not only both versions of the poems but also 

may need to be heritage Spanish speakers with an understanding of migrant worker 

history in Texas in order for them to work in reading what is not written. Readers must 

make meaning in the absence of language. Make do. 

Lastly, I must shed some light on the fact Villanueva is certainly not the only 

author that can and has had his narrative colonized by the “creative freedom” of a 

translator. While I am not suggesting that all translations and translators are wrong, I 

am suggesting that a more critical approach to conducting said translations is 

necessary. I am also far from suggesting that writers of color have no agency over their 

texts or that they enact no heavy resistance on their part. In fact, I’m arguing quite the 

opposite. Additionally, as previously noted, I will maintain that it is within the third 

space of the borderland created between the actual text and the imposed translation 



that we, as the audience, can utilize to interrogate and denounce the coloniality of the 

translation itself and enact decolonial rhetorical strategies. 

Decolonial Praxis: Rhetorics of Defiance & Resistance 

Within Crónica de mis años peores, Villanueva confronts the racist and colonialist 

education system he survived as a child in Texas. This system denied his humanity and 

questioned his presence. His attempts to remedy the situation further silenced him. 

Villanueva’s experience speaks to many of us with a similar background, and I can 

attest the perpetuation of such practices even in graduate school. This dehumanization 

is widespread and deeply entrenched within the education system and academia at 

large. So much so, that writers and educators of color speak often of challenging the 

systems from within. For example, in “The New Mestiza Nation,” Anzaldúa (2009) 

speaks of “want[ing] our histories, our knowledge, our perspectives to be accepted and 

validated not only in the universities but also in elementary, junior high, and high 

schools” (2009, p. 204). Working within the academy to engage this type of work 

seems hopeful. However, working within the decolonial imaginary and a third space 

reminds us that our strategies must be precise and intentional. Here I am reminded 

from Audre Lorde’s (1984/2007) famous text, “The Master's Tools Will Never 

Dismantle the Master's House,” that “survival is not an academic skill”: the “master’s 

tools” will not lead to real and radical change (p. 112). This leads two to questions, 

how can writers of color interrogate and challenge the oppressive systems without 

perpetuating the same problems, and as scholars and writers of color, what tools do 

we have at our disposal to dismantle such systems? 

Recognizing Villanueva’s positionality within a third space, as previously 

discussed, allows us to understand that he too is working from within the system. He 

could have written the whole collection in English, translated the work himself, or 

requested revisions on the translation, but he didn’t. Non-Spanish speakers will 

ultimately resort to the translation, never questioning its authenticity. Anzaldúa (2009) 

makes a provocative call when she says, “We need to create poetry, art, research, and 

books that cannot be assimilated, but is accessible” (p. 210). While the text is 

accessible, at least a version of it is, the real story is coded and tightly embedded within 

itself. Villanueva’s work cannot be assimilated and subsumed. And in doing so, 

Villanueva shows how we can work within the system to show its purpose and 

hypocrisy, and through that act, we reclaim our own history and humanity. 

Villanueva’s rhetorical play and performance undermining academia’s 

expectations while still following the rules to tell his story is reminiscent of Native 



American scholars, especially those who have been talking about this very 

methodology for quite a while now. For example, in Narrative Chance, Gerald Vizenor 

(1989) explains that the trickster is always present and never silent; it is not bound to 

text or language. Furthermore, the trickster exists in the spaces between the real and 

the imagined, breaking down paradigms and binaries, and trickster discourse is the 

means by which to subvert a dominant discourse, according to Vizenor. In line with 

Vizenor, Malea Powell (1999) in “Blood and Scholarship” says, “Trickster discourse is 

deflative; it exposes the lies we tell ourselves and, at the same time, exposes the 

necessity of those lies to our daily material existence…” (p. 9). Thus, I can suggest 

that the trickster discourse is present within this third space, a space which forces us 

to see the two texts; challenges us to seek the original meaning within its cultural, 

historical, and linguistic context; and warrants us to recognize the purpose of the 

mistranslation. 

Powell (1999) moves the discussion further when she argues for “trickster, or 

mixed-blood rhetorics” that reconfigure the connection between rhetor and academy 

allowing the rhetor to “[follow] the Academy’s, the discipline’s, ‘rules’ by transgressing 

them, not just to oppose them but to transform them, to change utterly the grounds 

upon which our scholarship exists” (p. 10). Mixed-blood rhetorics, according to Powell 

(1999), are a methodology in both how we approach a text and interrogate how a text 

is constructed to subvert colonial impositions (p. 10). In other words, to engage mixedblood 

rhetorics is not only to read against the grain but rather an active practice of 

defiance. Translations are expected to accurately represent the original text. 

Villanueva’s approval of a translation leads readers to assume its accuracy. These are 

the rules. To recognize and acknowledge Villanueva’s strategies as a trickster’s rhetoric 

is to allow the possibility for us to see how he is working within the system to dismantle 

it. Furthermore, this process of seemingly working the system on one’s own terms to 

radically alter it, speaks back to Lorde. It’s not so much about refusing to use the same 

tools to dismantle academia, but rather retooling the methodologies. A sort of making 

do with what we have. 

Making do, or as I prefer doing a jale Chicano, is the process of finding a way 

to accomplish your goals. Growing up, I too heard often my mom saying, 

“Necesitamos un jale Chicano,” especially when things broke down around the house. 

This meant that we needed to fix it by finding a way that was inexpensive but efficient. 

Kelly Medina-Lopez (2018) refers to this type of process as a “rasquache” and argues 

that this process of making do can be understood within rhetoric and composition. 

She says that rasquache “presents a robust approach to meaning making by allowing 

users to pull from the compendium of theories, ideas, experiences, tangible tools, and 



intangible epistemologies they can access. Recycling, upcycling, making do, and 

making new meaning through whatever is available is an explicit performance of 

rasquache” (p. 2). As previously noted, Villanueva is a prolific writer in English and 

Spanish, but he made the choice to use exclusively Spanish for Cronica de mis años peores 

and have Hoggard translate the text. In doing so, Villanueva shows the reader how the 

oppressive nature of colonialism can function by allowing it to manifest within the text 

via Hoggard’s translation. In one way, he is following the academy’s rules. But by 

coding the narrative not simply in his own text but in the space between the two texts, 

Villanueva enact a trickster rhetoric, a rasquache, un jale Chicano. 

Within Crónica de mis Años peores, Villanueva engages an exclusively Spanish text 

to define his childhood and to recover his history. Villanueva explains (as cited in Lee, 

2010, p. 176) that in this poetry collection memory should: 

serve as inspiration--memory as muse, and ultimately, memory as identity. So 

you see, memory, for me, becomes a useful device to go back in time to recover 

a history which would otherwise be lost--a personal or communal history, no 

matter how lackluster or unsettling that history might have been. 

The rhetorical use of Spanish to relate this painful childhood illustrates the complexity 

of his story. Villanueva utilizes not only his memory to build a story, but by allowing 

readers to see the perpetuation of such oppressive practices he speaks of, he builds 

theory. At times, the lack of action is action and is necessary for us to witness. 

By allowing the two narratives to exist side by side, Villanueva forces us to 

recognize the artificiality of language itself. While they are seemingly a mirror reflection 

of each other in a different tongue—the reflection is distorted; the reflection is 

incomplete. Thus, we must question the source of the reflection. Whose voice do we 

hear? Who is the witness and who is the storyteller? In the process of forcing us to 

think about these questions, Villanueva asserts (as cited in Lee, 2010, p. 175) that a 

text is always a reflection, always a translation: 

I would say poems are what they are; they do what they do. Some of them, if 

deep-textured enough, will admit multiple interpretations, and the latter are 

left up to each reader, as you know. One is not privy to what each reader may 

or may not derive from what they read--you get out of literature what you bring 

into it. 



As readers, we are always in the process of reception, interpretation, and ingestion. We 

are hearing and feeling the stories, recognizing the power of these stories on our own 

memories and bodies, and utilizing these moments to build more stories and theories. 

As such, stories can also be a point of danger because of what we can bring into the 

narrative. We have the capacity to suppress it, misinterpret /mistranslate it, and even 

to colonize it. Thus, the space that Villanueva creates between his text and the 

translation of his text is the third space. It is from this space that we simultaneously 

look forward and backward, centered in the fluidity of the “now,” hearing and feeling 

and responding to the multiple voices speaking all at once and hearing and listening to 

our own bodies and memories respond to convergent and divergent narratives. We 

are in this third space or what Pérez (1999) refers to as the decolonial imaginary, as 

previously discussed. We are in the process of decolonizing the text, decolonizing 

history, and decolonizing ourselves simultaneously. 

Rhetorical & Translational Analysis: “Crónica de mis años peores” 

Traditionally, the English language has served as one of the master’s tools, and, as 

Lorde (1984/2007) reminds us, we need to re-tool and reinvent the tools we will use 

to suit our needs (p. 112). Our use of the English language must go beyond just 

pronouncing words correctly. In Borderlands/La Fronteras, Anzaldúa (1987/2007) says, 

“I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the 

world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that 

connect us to each other and to the planet” (p. 103). It is within this space of the 

borderlands that we have the capacity to dismantle the master’s house re-utilizing the 

tools available to us. We might be using the same language, but we are blending it with 

our tongues, bodies, memories, and stories. We are re-tooling and building a 

methodology. The tools to dismantle the master’s house are ours. They are culturally 

and locally based. They are embedded within our stories. Our stories must carry the 

weight of all those who came before us and all those who depend on us. Those who 

did not get the privilege of going to the university. Those who stand with us in the 

struggle. Those who did not finish la primaria. Those women who crossed over every 

week every day to clean and to cook and to take care of other peoples’ homes and 

families. Those men who crossed over every day to do anything to take money home. 

Those who worked in factories here and in Mexico or who worked in the fields, in the 

kitchens, in the shadows of existence. Our stories must carry the humbled recognition 

of our common plight and our need to fight. Our stories need to undo the history that 

is written upon us. 



Because Villanueva knows and understands this history by having grown up in 

the 1940-1950s in San Marcos, Texas prior to the Civil Rights Movements, he is able 

to undo the history written about him and others like him (Lee, 2010). After he is 

indoctrinated with the same colonizing history that had marginalized, erased, and 

dispossessed Native Americans, Villanueva, as a child, is forced now to hear the same 

demoralizing stories about his people, Mexicanos. Villanueva begins Crónica with 

“Clase de historia” (“History Class”) to initiate an act of rhetorical resistance. He says: 9 

Entrar era aspirar 

la ilegitima razón 10 de la clase, 

ser solo lo que estaba escrito. 

Sentado en el mismo 

predestinado 11 sitio 

me sentía, al fin, descolocado 

(Villanueva, 

1987/1994, pp. 2, 3). 

To enter was to aspire 

The illegitimate truth of the class, 

be only that which was written. 

Seated in the same 

predestined place 

I felt myself, finally, dislocated. 

(My translation) 

To enter was to breathe in 

the illegitimate idea of the class, 

only what was written was valid. 

Seated in the same 

prescribed place 

I felt myself, finally, dislocated. 

(Hoggard's translation) 

In this example, Villanueva’s story deals with the colonizing goals of the education 

system that serves to erase and/or to criminalize Chicanx 12 students within the history 

classroom. In the selection and subsequent translations above, Villanueva utilizes 

“aspirar” to mark the action his body takes as he enters this space. “Aspirar” has two 

possible translations. 13 One is like Hoggard’s translation, as in “to breathe in,” “to 

inhale.” Another common definition of “aspirar” though is “to aspire.” The act of 

aspiring to a dream requires more than a fleeting thought of a set goal but rather that 

the actual process of aspiring is where one begins to believe in the actualization of said 

dream. But this does not mean that one achieves it or simply attains this dream by 

aspiring to it. For example, Chicanx folks are told to aspire to the American dream, an 

achievable dream to all who enter its ivory towers, while failing to recognize that within 

this space we are reduced to nothingness. Hoggard’s translation, however, suggests 

that within this educational space we become a part of the fraud. Because to enter is 

to breathe, to enter is to internalize or accept and suggests that we all become 

complacent within this educational system. Poisoned by it, perhaps, but stuck, 

nonetheless. The process of entering this space allows us to ingest the illegitimacy as 

a reality and accept the fraud as our reality. But that is not the case. 

In addition to the problems with translating “aspirar,” it is also important to 

identify the subtle shifts that the second part of this line creates. Villanueva refers to 

“la ilegitima razón de la clase” (1987/1994, pp. 2, 3). Hoggard translates this line as 



the “illegitimate idea of the class.” While Hoggard’s translation suggests that the idea 

of the class is illegitimate, voiding the capacity of the members of this class to achieve 

anything, Villanueva asserts that he was trained to aspire to the illegitimate reason or 

truth of the class. La verdad de la clase. Essentially, Villanueva says that from the moment 

he enters these educational spaces he conditioned to desire something that does not 

exist, that cannot be attained, and that will always be withheld from him. Villanueva 

recognizes that the verdad is a fraud and thus separates what he knows and accepts as 

truth from the history he is told to accept as his. This separation is the only way he 

can survive. 

As Villanueva continues, Hoggard also continues to tell his version of the 

story, and it becomes increasingly significant to distinguish the presence and effect of 

colonizing ideologies in the rhetorics of translation upon the original text. Villanueva 

(via Hoggard’s translation) says: 

Era cualquier mañana de otoño, 

o primavera del 59, y ya 

estábamos 

los de piel trigueña 

sintiéndonos solos, 

… 

el estado 

desde arriba 

contra nosotros sin el arma 

de algún resucitable 14 dato 

para esgrimir 

contra los largos parlamentos 

de aquel maestro 

de sureña frente dura, 

creador del sueño y jerarquías, 

que repetía, 

como si fuera su misión, 

la historia lisiada de mi pueblo. 

(Villanueva, 1987/1994, pp. 2, 3) 

It was some morning in autumn, 

or the spring of ’59, and already 

we were 

the wheat-colored people 

feeling ourselves alone, 

… 

the state 

from on high 

against us with no weapon 

of any resuscitable date 

to wield 

against the long speeches 

of that teacher 

with the hard Southern mien, 

creator of the dream and 

hierarchies, 

who repeated, 

as if it were his mission, 

my people’s crippled history. 

(My translations) 

It was some morning in autumn, 

or the spring of ’59, and already we 

were 

the wheat-colored people 

who felt alien, 

… 

the state 

from on high 

against us with no weapon 

of a retrievable date 

to wield 

against the long speeches 

of that teacher 

with the hard Southern mien, 

creator of the dream and hierarchies, 

who repeated, 

as if it were his mission, 

my people’s crippled history. 

(Hoggard's translations) 

In this example, Hoggard’s use of “alien” to translate Villanueva’s “solos” asserts that 

Chicanxs exist within America in a perpetual state as foreigners, outsiders, and possibly 

from another world. Hoggard’s translation labels Chicanxs’ inability to use history as 

a weapon as a result of an inherent “alien-ness.” This perpetual state of an “outsider” 

makes history inaccessible and invalid for Chicanx because it asserts that they do not 



belong, and therefore, history does not belong to them or rather does not include 

them. This translation perpetuates problematic and dangerous ideologies that not only 

impact the translation but the original text as well. Accordingly, Hoggard’s translation 

assumes that Villanueva accepts his foreignness as a given. But the fact remains that 

“solos” means “alone” not “alien.” Thus, under Hoggard’s translation, Chicanx history 

is inaccessible because they do not belong, and such history is utterly non-existent. In 

Hoggard’s version, Chicanxs have no recourse to the dreams and hierarchies forced 

unto them. 

However, in the process of denying the speaker any date to wield as a weapon, 

the teacher alludes to his “lisiada historia.” In doing so, the speaker realizes that the 

history of his people exists but has been rendered inaccessible in the shadow and fraud 

of the American dream and history. He realizes that he must work to recover and give 

new life to the Chicanx history that paints all those “de piel trigueña” as criminals, 

failures, and foreigners. Such a new life is achievable by allowing this suppressed 

history to be told and heard. Under this oppressive education system, Villanueva 

reminds readers that they must find a way to tell their story even if they must resist, 

defy, and utterly change the system from within to start the process of decolonizing 

academia and history books. 

By the end of the poem, while both Villanueva and Hoggard are seemingly 

talking about the same thing and basically using the same variations of the same words, 

the liberties Hoggard takes with both translation choices and even word order changes 

the overall meaning of the text. Villanueva (via Hoggard’s translation) says: 

Aquí mi vida cicatriza 

porque soy el desertor, 

el malvado 15 impenitente que ha 

deshabitado 16 

el salón de la demencia, 

el insurrecto 

despojado de los credos de la 

negación. 

Sean, pues, 

otras palabras las que triunfen 

y no las de infamia, 

las del fraude cegador. 

(Villanueva, 

1987/1994, pp. 8-11) 

Here my life scars over 

because I’m the deserter, 

the wicked impenitent 

who left 

the classroom of madness, 

the insurrectionist 

stripped of the creeds of the negation. 

So let there be 

other words that are triumphant 

and not the ones of infamy, 

those of the blinding fraud. 

(my translation) 

Here my life scars over 

Because I’m the deserter, 

the profane impenitent 

who quit 

the crazy class, 

the insurrectionist 

stripped of the creeds of 

negation. 

So let there be 

other words that are 

triumphant 

and not the ones of infamy, 

those of the blinding fraud. 

(Hoggard’s translation) 



Hoggard creates a “good” translation in the sense that it is lyrical and poetic, but there 

are nuances in the language that are unaccounted for. At times these nuances are very 

subtle, but within this subtlety, lay the difference. In the example above, the primary 

shift lies in the word “deshabitado,” which translates as “left” rather than “quit,” as 

Hoggard suggests. This subtle shift automatically carries a negative connotation of loss 

and defeat. The shift within one word on its own does not change the entire story. 

However, identifying the shift as part of a much larger rhetorical pattern that builds 

upon each other begins to radically alter the story. Hoggard’s translation tells the story 

of someone who has healed despite the fraud of American history and suggests that 

there is nothing to be done about it. History gets blamed as the problem. And history 

is a problem. But Villanueva illustrates that history’s continued erasure, dispossession, 

and abuse of Chicanxs is perpetuated in the American education system, and while 

Villanueva does note a healing process has occurred, he, like Anzaldúa, carries the 

scars upon his body and recognizes that there is still much work to be done to rid 

ourselves of the blinding mentality of such a universalizing history. 

In “Clase de historia,” Villanueva loudly denounces the education system’s 

complacency and perpetuation of an indoctrinating colonial history, and in 

“Convocacion de palabras,” he interrogates the institutionalization of language itself 

(“Convocation of Words,” 1987/1994, pp. 22-27). Here again, Hoggard feeds into the 

rhetorical pattern as his translation largely deviates from and is dismissive of 

Villanueva’s story. Villanueva begins with: 

Yo no era mío todavía. 

Era 1960… 

y recuerdo bien 

porque equivocaba a diario 

el sentido de los párrafos; 

I was not my own yet. 

It was 1960… 

and I remember well 

because I would mistake daily 

the meaning of the paragraphs. 

I still wasn’t free. 

It was 1960… 

and I remember it well 

because every day I got the 

sense of the paragraphs 

mixed up: 

(Villanueva, 

1987/1994, p. 22) 

(my translations) 

(Hoggard's translations) 

Villanueva voices the frustration that comes from not speaking the dominant language 

and explains that the inability to communicate is dangerous and de-moralizing. 

Villanueva says, “Yo no era mío todavía.” “Todavía” can translate as “still” as Hoggard 

suggest, making the speaker recognize that he is “still not free.” But this is wrong for 

a few reasons. “Todavia” can also mean “aún,” which is closer to “yet,” which suggests 

that this is in the process up to this point. Additionally, while “yo no era mío” could 

mean the lack of freedom, as Hoggard suggests, it could also mean that as a child, 



which the speaker is at the time, was not in control or command of himself. Here we 

can see a marking of time that while he may not feel in control of his life or 

understanding his purpose now, there is a sense that this can change in the future. 

Additionally, the speaker is referring to having trouble understanding this new 

language, and therefore, he could feel a lack of control over the written word. And 

depending on the purpose of his exchange, this could be terrifying. Early on, when I 

translated for my mother, there was lots of fear. For her, I imagine, because she had 

to rely on a child to help her navigate. For me, because there was so much I did not 

know and making a mistake could jeopardize my family. The point is that without 

ethically engaging Villanueva’s text, taking into consideration both Chicanx history, 

regional language nuances, and other rhetorical strategies of storytelling practices 

among Chicanx, we have a different story altogether. In such a situation, the original 

story is withheld within the text, within the language, within the imposition of the 

translated version of the story. 

As Villanueva continues, he displays frustration in his inability to hear or fully 

understand the information contained which leads him to recognize the need for 

himself and for Chicanxs to reject the imposed colonizing indoctrination by taking an 

active role in self-education. He says: 

Irresoluto adolescente, 

recién graduado 

y tardío para todo, 

disciplinado 17 a no aprender nada, 

harás de ti 

lo que no pudo el salón de clase. 

(Villanueva, 1987/1994, pp. 22-23) 

Indecisive adolescent, 

recently graduated 

and late for everything, 

disciplined to learn nothing, 

you will do for yourself 

what the classroom couldn’t. 


Indecisive adolescent, 

just graduated 

and habitually late, 

taught to learn nothing, 

you will do for yourself 

what the classroom couldn’t. 

(Hoggard's translation) 

By saying “disciplinado,” Villanueva suggests that he was disciplined or trained to learn 

nothing, suggesting that this is an ongoing process but one that he can control. He can 

cease to follow, cease to be disciplined. Hoggard, however, translates this as the 

speaker has been “taught” to learn nothing, indicating that this is an established 

situation, an event that occurred in the past, and that perhaps he is beyond hope. This 

noted agency is again repeated and accurately translated in the end where he sees that 

he will do for himself what the classroom could not. He realizes that the classroom 

was not meant for him or those like him to succeed. This realization is significant 

because Villanueva suggests that within this education system different standards are 

set for Chicanx and students of color in general. This distrust of the educational system 



is a recurring theme for Villanueva. For example, in Villanueva’s (1984/1998) poem 

“I Too Have Walked My Barrio Streets” from Shaking Off the Dark, he says: 

I too have walked my barrio streets, 

gone among old scars and young wounds 

who, gathering at the edge of town, on nearby corners, 

mend their broken history with their timely tales. 

(I’ve been quizzed on Texas history— 

history contrived in dark corridors 

by darker still textbook committees. 

I’ve read those tinged white pages where the ink 

went casting obscurantism across the page: 

the shadows had long dried into a fierce solid state. 

And Bigfoot Wallace had always been my teacher’s hero, 

and what’s worse, I believed it, 

oh, how we all believed it.) (p. 52). 

In this poem, Villanueva asserts that Chicanxs are forced to learn and are quizzed on 

the history of their alleged ancestors’ demise, forced to repeat the words that 

criminalize, erases, and invalidates their presence within the classroom for a grade. 

There are multiple systems in place to ensure their failure. Sadly, this is an occurrence 

that is not limited but is extensive and widespread across all educational levels ranging 

from elementary education through graduate school. While there are certainly excellent 

educators, schools, and districts/departments that reject such discriminating practices, 

the fact remains that these are almost the standard. 

In order counter the power of language and diffuse the authority that is 

bestowed on the translator/translation, Villanueva invokes a convocation of words 

that primarily illustrates the archaic and hierarchical construction of knowledge as it 

also initiates the process of the decolonizing the language. He says: 



Esta será tu fe: 

Infraction 

bedlam 

ambiguous. 

Las convoqué 18 

en el altar de mi deseo, 

llevándolas por necesidad 

a la memoria. 

En la fecundidad de un 

instante 

me fui multiplicando: 

affable 

prerogative 

egregious. 

(Emphasis in original, 

Villanueva, 

1987/1994, pp. 22-25) 

This will be your faith: 

Infraction 

bedlam 

ambiguous. 

I’ve convened them 

in the altar of my desire, 

taking these out of necessity 

to my memory. 

In the fertility of an instant 

I multiplied myself: 

affable 

prerogative 

egregious. 


This will be your faith: 

Infraction 

bedlam 

ambiguous. 

I summoned them 

at the altar of my desire, 

raising them by necessity 

into memory. 

In the fertility of the moment 

I was multiplying myself: 

affable 

prerogative 

egregious. 

(Hoggard’s translations) 

In this convocation, Villanueva begins by inserting particular words in English. What’s 

significant about this weaving of words is both the meaning and story these few words 

tell, which I will attempt to convey. Villanueva asserts that these words will become 

his faith (p. 22). Convening them upon an altar, the words become either his sacrifice 

or his offering in his active renunciation of the domination that has plagued his story 

and in the hopes of decolonizing this space. His story becomes his faith, and thus, in 

this creed like recitation of his/story, Villanueva argues that we must utilize multiple 

languages as we utilize multiple spaces to engage the process of decolonization. The 

story Villanueva tells begins by recognizing the problem with the system (“Infraction 

/ bedlam / ambiguous”), a system in which the violations against people of color in a 

backdrop of chaos makes their humanity uncertain. Villanueva brings these words to 

his altar of desire and invokes them to his memory out of necessity (“llevándolas por 

necesidad / a la memoria”), out of the necessity to remember, to revisit, and to reclaim 

the history that is denied and from which his people are erased. 

As Villanueva continues to build his history, the English words begin to pile 

up into a mound containing stories and bodies. In a poetic retelling of history, 

Villanueva explains both the lure of the American dream, the eminent danger Mexican 

people experience (“affable / prerogative / egregious.”) and how recent immigrants 

are instilled with the desire to assimilate to reach some form of acceptance but are only 

shunned and end up living in an impoverished state (“priggish / eschew / 



impecunious”). Villanueva asserts though that in the process of attempting to accept 

the indoctrinated history, of attempting to demonstrate that they belong, there is also 

an ongoing process of recovery that is occurring. In other words, Villanueva 

demonstrates that our histories are interconnected. Our histories, as a people of color, 

lie at the foundation of this nation. If we can recognize how our histories build on 

each other, then we could map our interconnected struggles. Villanueva’s play with 

words here then is demonstrative of the mapping that occurs with language, the way 

language has been given the power to divide, categorize, and erase. He shifts it to show 

us how can wield their power. 

As Villanueva continues, we see the shift that the placement of the words on 

the altar creates to build a new story. This difference is utterly missed by Hoggard’s 

translation. Villanueva says: 

Cada vez tras otra 

asimile 19 su historia, 

lo que equivale a rescatar 

lo que era mío: 

priggish 

eschew 

impecunious. 


Villanueva, 1987/1994, pp. 

24-25) 

Time after time 

I understood their history, 

which was equivalent to 

rescuing 

what was mine: 

priggish 

eschew 

impecunious. 


One after another 

I made their history mine, 

which was equivalent to 

redeeming 

what was mine: 

priggish 

eschew 

impecunious. 


This instance is another example of the subtlety in the translation. “Asimile” could be 

translated in various ways. One of which would be to assimilate. This version would 

be more in line with Hoggard’s suggestion that this is making something your own as 

in the history Villanueva speaks about. But to “asimilar” also means something else. 

In this case, I’m prompted with my mother telling me as a teenager: “Asimilate o no 

vas a salir.” This meant that my inability to understand what she was telling me 

indicated that I would be going out that night. As such, “asimilar” means to 

“comprender,” to understand, to have learned the lesson. In this example, Villanueva 

is not making this colonizing history his own, but he understands that learning this 

colonizing history is important to be able to recover his own. In the same way that we 

can see multiple stories in the poem, the original, the translation, and my teased-out 

narrative within this rhetorical third space, Villanueva too can see the different 

histories building on each other and understands that he must work actively to recover 



his history. We utilize this rhetorical third space, as Licona (2005) shows, to negotiate 

meanings between histories and provide an alternative methodology for decolonial 

work to happen through poetry. 

The convocation of the words in this poem is beautiful and rhetorical. He 

builds an altar of English words in a Spanish poem that will serve to protect him. Early 

on, children like myself and Villanueva learn the shame of mispronouncing words and 

feel in academia that words like doctorate, professor, educated and so forth will protect 

us. They won’t. He says: 

Porque las hice doctrina 

repetida horariamente, 

de súbito 

yo ya no era el mismo de 

antes: 

assiduous 

faux pas 

suffragette. 


Villanueva, 1987/1994, pp. 

24-25) 

Because I made them a 

doctrine 

repeated hourly, 

suddenly 

I already was no longer the 

same as before: 

assiduous 

faux pas 

suffragette. 


Because I turned them 

into hourly repeated doctrine, 

suddenly 

I was not the same as before: 

assiduous 

faux pas 

suffragette. 


There are a few significant shifts in translation here. In this example, Villanueva makes 

the words a doctrine that he repeats daily. A key point in these lines is “las hice” in 

which he takes ownership of this action and marks himself as the creator of such 

doctrine. Then, we have the placement of this odd shift in time that is difficult to 

translate. “Súbito” means suddenly and in the placement on the page should mark a 

revelation as in, suddenly it dawned on me. But an interesting shift comes in the 

following line: “yo ya no era el mismo de antes” (Villanueva, 1987/1994, p. 24). The 

word “ya” is past tense and so the phrase is not “I was not the same as before” but 

rather “I already was no longer the same as before.” This clunky translation marks an 

instance that is beyond translation, but the “ya” and the “already” are important as a 

realization that he was already not the same as before. The insertion of the “ya” 

changes the sentence and makes the translation sound wrong but it’s right. In fact, I 

missed it the first time. This insertion marks this moment as a sudden internal 

awakening. Of figuring out that which was already known. A realization as in figuring 

out that you knew it all along. This is an empowering realization, and in the context of 



Villanueva’s story, it shows that he is in full control and self-aware of the wordplay 

taking place. He knew it all along. 

As this poem draws to a close, Villanueva recognizes that the process of 

reclaiming history requires authority and control over the text. He argues that this 

process begins by both dispelling misconceptions and misinterpretations of who 

Chicanx are and learning to be the creators of our own history. He says: 

Tenaz oficio 

el de crearme en mi propia 

imagen 

cada vez con cada una al 

pronunciarla: 

(Villanueva, 

1987/1994, pp. 26-27) 

A tenacious task 

that of creating myself in my own image 

each time I pronounced one of them: 


A constant effort, 

creating myself in my own image 

each time I pronounced one of 

them: 

(Hoggard’s translation) 

Villanueva explains that the power to write our own history has the power to create 

ourselves. As he moves through the convocation of each of those words, he creates 

himself repeatedly in his own image. Here, Villanueva marks a rejection of the imposed 

history and colonization. He will be his own person and is wielding himself into 

fruition one word at a time. Furthermore, he says: 

postprandial 

subsequently 

y de escribir por fin con 

voluntad 

las catorce letras de mi nombre 

y por encima 

la palabra 

libertad. 

(Emphasis in original, Villanueva, 

1987/1994, pp. 26-27) 

postprandial 

subsequently 

and finally writing 

willingly 

the fourteen letters of my name 

and over it 

the word 

libertad. 

(my translations) 

postprandial 

subsequently 

and finally willing 

myself to write 

the fourteen letters of my name 

and over them 

the word 

libertad. 


Villanueva theorizes that to write down his own name has the power to release him 

which we can argue would be to write his own history. This libertad, however, 

transcends that of any physical bondage but a recognition that bodies and minds can 

be consumed and confined by the history that they believe. In the case of a history 

that consistently seeks to revisit the exploitation and oppression of people of color, 



they will continue to be both victims and criminals. In either of these views, they 

always have seen as less than human and become unreal. Their bodies, stories, 

victories, and defeats become unreal. And within the realm of the unreal, it becomes 

increasingly easy to ignore, abuse, or deny their human rights and liberties. Villanueva’s 

final act of inscribing “libertad” over his name teaches readers that they are all 

responsible for their freedom and to find this libertad they must actively seek it and 

defend it. 

Conclusion 

Villanueva’s interrogation of both how we are written and how we are translated are 

interconnected. Whether a text attempts to tell Chicanx history or translate it, as 

rhetoric scholars, we must question their ethical engagement with the text and with 

the history. There is a text and there are words and then there is a space that transcends 

these—a rhetorical third space. Villanueva challenges the way history is written, what 

history is written, how bodies are written and criminalized within it, and how students 

of color within the American classroom continue to be subjected to the same 

discriminating practices both in how they are taught and what they are taught. 

Ultimately, however, Villanueva recognizes that our complacency with this system as 

scholars and educators is part of the problem. If we want to change the system, if we 

want to truly build a better society where humanity is not measured by the color of 

skin, by the accent in our stories, or by the “foreignness” of our surnames, then we 

have to be willing to write down our own names, tell our own stories, and inscribe 

libertad over all of it. 

Villanueva’s work forces us as rhetoricians to recognize the danger that 

constitutes the interpretation, the analysis, and even the translation of texts, especially 

those texts by people of color. His work forces us to recognize that despite our best 

efforts, we will always bring something of our own into the texts—our own agendas, 

our own ideologies, and epistemologies. Recognizing this potential then, Villanueva 

asserts in these collections that we must ethically approach all texts. We must recognize 

both the spaces which the text inhabits and the center of our understandings of the 

text and the discourse that is being engaged. Furthermore, Villanueva helps us to 

recognize the fluidity of language, the capacity of language to destroy, and the need to 

speak multiple languages. The fact remains that even when the text is in English, the 

language might not be “English.” Essentially, speaking of decolonial approaches, 

attempting to decolonize our classroom, our bodies, and our minds often leads us to 

learn and speak another language. It is a decolonial discourse that presents itself in the 



third space. In the space created by the “text” and the translation / interpretation / 

analysis and imposition of the new story. As such, our approaches must demystify 

colonial tactics and practices so that we can recognize them as such so that we have a 

chance to decolonize our spaces, our stories, our bodies, and our minds. 

Endnotes 

1. Land acknowledgement – California State University, Chico, Office of Tribal 

Relations. (2019). Retrieved February 23, 2020, from 

https://www.csuchico.edu/tribalrelations/ 

2. My use of “text” is not in exclusive reference to an alphabetical written text but 

rather used to imply the multiple forms of “texts” we read that do and do not 

use any form of alphabet and do include performative and other forms of 

material texts. All of these texts require a reading of some form and the transfer 

of information from the original text to a level of understanding requires an act 

of translation. Later, I shift to using “story” and “stories” when I speak 

specifically about the narrative Villanueva creates in his poetry collection and the 

translation. 

3. This collection was originally published without the translation as Crónica de mis 

años peores. La Jolla: Lalo, 1987. 

4. Laura Gonzales (2018) would refer to this instance as a “translation moment,” as 

“instances in time when individuals pause to make a rhetorical decision about 

how to translate a word or phrase from one named language to another” (p. 2) 

5. Leslie Marmon Silko (1977) in Ceremony writes: “I will tell you something about 

stories. [he said] They aren't just entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we 

have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don't have anything 

if you don't have stories” (p. 2). 

6. Malea Powell quotes Lee Maracle’s 1990 article titled on “Oratory: Coming to 

Theory” in her 2012 CCCC Chairs Address: “Stories Take Place: A Performance 

in One Act”: “Among European scholars there is an alienated notion which 

maintains that theory is separate from story, and thus a different set of words are 

required to “prove” an idea rather than to “show” one. We [indigenous people] 

believe the proof of a thing or idea is in the doing. Doing requires some form of 

social interaction and thus, story, is the most persuasive and sensible way to 

present the accumulated thoughts and values of a people. . .. There is story in 

every line of theory. The difference between us [indigenous] and European 

scholars is that we admit this, and present theory through story.” (qtd in Powell, 

“Stories Take Place…”, 2012, p. 384). In an interview with Liz Lane & Don 



Unger (2017) titled “Malea Powell on Story, Survivance & Constellating as 

Praxis” Powell explains: “For me, that practice of story is about engaging in 

multilayered historical and experiential events that happen in a space or place and 

trying to represent them the best you can or representing them from your point 

of view but not in a way that implies nobody else's point of view matters.” 

(4C4Equality, Writing Networks for Social Justice 

http://constell8cr.com/4c4e/introduction) 

7. Manuel M. Martin-Rodriguez (1993) also translates Villanueva’s “Haciendo 

Apenas la Recolección” as “Just Beginning to Remember” in “Aesthetic 

Concepts of Hispanics in the United States” Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the 

United States: Literature and Art (p. 118). 

8. Eric Rodriguez & Evarardo J. Cuevas (2017) speak of the dangers of Chicanx 

people taking on the mantle of mestizaje without recognizing how this process is 

a nationalistic agenda that makes a problematic and dangerous claim and erasure 

of Indigenous identities, lands, epistemologies, and ontologies (p. 230-232). 

Additionally, Gabriella Raquel Rios (2016) explains that in claiming and or rather 

seeking to verify an indigenous background leads to locating “indigeneity and 

Indigenous peoples vis-à-vis racist, eugenicist state-sanctioned logics or we locate 

it vis-à-vis racist, eugenicist biological logics. Both matter (however 

paradoxically) for the same reason: (ongoing) genocide” (2016, p. 120). Instead, 

Rios explains that one should “simply claim our identities through our politics, 

and that we align ourselves with Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies” 

(2016, p. 120). 

9. At the start of this section, I thought it would be worthwhile to explain a few 

things. First, the citations will be provided under Villanueva’s original works. In 

the book, the original work appears on the left page and Hoggard’s translation 

appears on the right. Second, although I discuss my analysis in the paragraphs 

following the poetry, I thought it was imperative to show readers all versions of 

the text. Third, I provided my full translations in the middle column in italics. 

Lastly, my translations presented here are certainly not beyond reproach. I am 

not a translation expert. However, what I have tried to showcase is the kind of 

work required necessary for us to ethically engage the translational of such 

works. In my own translations, I not only relied on dictionary definitions, but 

infused Mexican American and Chicanx history, Texas history, regional 

understanding of language nuances, embodied experience, and memory. 



10. “Razón” means motivo & argumento (reason), acierto & verdad, (to say 

something is right) juicio (reason), información (inquire within), ratio (at the rate 

of), and recado (message) (Webster’s 410). 

11. “Predestinado” literally translates as “predestined” not “prescribed,” which 

asserts claim over an object for an undetermined length of time (Webster’s 389). 

12. While I typically prefer to use Chicanx as a gender-neutral term and since it is in 

use with public and activist spaces, I will defer to Villanueva’s use of Chicano 

when referencing his own use. As such readers may notice a shifting between the 

use of Chicanx and Chicano. 

13. My initial approach to translating were from my own bilingual upbringing. My 

first language was Spanish and still the primary language my family speaks at 

home. I also verified all translations using Webster’s New World. Concise 

Spanish Dictionary. 2nd ed. 2006. (45) 

14. Resucitable comes from the conjugation of resucitar which means either “to 

bring back to life”; “to resurrect, to revive” or “to rise from the dead” (Webster’s 

427 (S)). Retrieve is to recuperar, which is to recuperate, recover, reclaim, and 

regain (Webster’s 383(E); 415 (S)). 

15. Malvado translates as evil, wicked, or a villain (Webster’s 308 (S)) 

16. Deshabitar means “to leave, to depopulate, to empty of people” (Webster’s 157 

(S)). 

17. Disciplinado literally translates as disciplined (Webster’s 169 (S)), which carries 

connotations of being trained to do or not do something, of self-control and/or 

imposed to be self-controlled. 

18. Convocar means reunión (to convene); huelga, elecciones (to call) (Webster’s 121 

(S)). 

19. Asimilar means idea, conocimientos, alimentos (to assimilate); compartir (to 

compare); equiparar (to grant equal rights to) (Webster’s 45 (S)). 

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Aydé Enríquez-Loya was born and raised on the border between El Paso, Texas and 

Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua Mexico. She is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, 

Composition, and Chicanx Rhetorics in the Department of English at California State 

University, Chico where she teaches classes in Chicanx rhetoric & literature, 

environmental rhetoric, rhetorics of horror, and technical writing. She received a Ph.D. 

in English with concentration on Cultural Rhetorics & Literatures of Color from Texas 



A&M University. She completed her BA and MA work at the University of Texas at 

El Paso. She currently lives in Chico, California with her husband and daughter. 










Gabe Vasquez, El Paso Strong Mural Artist 



Vol. 1, No. 1, June 2020, 49–55; 121–125; 179–184 

Interview with the El Paso Strong Mural Artist 

Gabe Vasquez 


University of Texas at El Paso, on land of the Tigua and Mescalero people. 1 

Fresh new paint sprang up across walls in the city of El Paso after a mass shooting 

killed 22 people. For mural artists like Gabe Vasquez, paint is a way of dealing with 

crises. For many writers like me, writing is our refuge, our form of expression. Some 

take to the streets; others also turn to their canvases and journals. 

On the morning of August 3, 2019, I was driving toward the El Paso 

International Airport. Little did I know I was heading directly into the line of fire. I 

was on the highway, and a white truck behind me flashed its headlights and sounded 

an alarming siren. I thought the driver was a civilian wanting to get past me as we 

drove onto the Sunland Park exit going east. My first thought was that this was some 

sort of new trick or “outfitting” of a car, similar to those annoying loud mufflers. I 

thought to myself this is the new loud muffler. 

As I passed downtown, speeding Border Patrol trucks were full speed ahead 

on the fast lane. I had never seen speeding migra trucks. And then as I got closer to 

Bassett center, I saw police vehicles at the entrances closing all exits. At this point, I 

knew something was wrong. As I got closer to the Airway airport exit, more police 

cars sped by. At that point, I received a text alert on my phone that warned El Pasoans 

to stay home because there was an active shooter in progress at Cielo Vista Mall. I 

immediately thought about my youngest brother, so I texted him. He confirmed that 

he was safe and that the shooting was all over the news. I got off at the Airway exit 

and arrived at the airport. 








I was on my way out of town to visit an aunt I’d never met before and to go 

hiking with my dog and husband. God works in mysterious ways. The mass shooting 

and having to process the hate that caused it was something I needed to deal with 

carefully. I’m a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), a fulltime 

Assistant Professor of Practice, and an Advisor for majors and minors. I’m also 

trying to meet deadlines writing graphic novels and plays. Needless to say, my life in 

recent years has increased my stress levels, and my mental and physical wellness has 

become a priority like never before. Looking back, hiking with my dog and husband 

alone in the forest is just what I would need to help me deal with the shock and pain 

of this tragedy. Reading all the breaking news and social media raised my anxiety levels. 

When I arrived at the airport, the lady at the counter asked, “Did you hear 

what happened? There’s a shooting at the mall.” The way she asked was as if she was 

asking me if I’d seen the latest action film at the movie theatre or as if she was sharing 

gossip with me. She didn’t understand why I didn’t match her smile or enthusiasm, as 

if I was the one being a rude customer because I wasn’t being friendly. Little did she 

know that inside my anxiety was increasing, and I just wanted to get out of there and 

back across town away from the chaos. 

We all have different ways of dealing with tragedy. My way sent me into a 

downward spiral of introversion. I just wanted to hide inside the shell of my body to 

deal with my own emotions. I needed time to process what was happening and why. 

Hiking in the woods was my immediate outlet. 

Before arriving to the forest, I encountered Coloradans at a dog park who 

asked me where I was from. When I said El Paso, a lady said, “Oh. I’m so sorry.” The 

next day at a different dog park deeper into the forest, I encountered not so friendly 

stares. In the parking lot, I noticed vehicles with Pro-Trump bumper stickers. At 

breakfast, a white man told me to be careful out there. Suddenly, I had thoughts about 

my own safety. 

I’m a brown woman. My husband is a Black man. I was the intended target of 

the mass shooter; my husband would have been a bonus. I wanted to go back home 

to El Paso. I felt unsafe. I had no way of knowing if the mass shooter was inspiring 

more like him, more killers of Mexicans – people who look like me. It felt too soon to 

be out in public. I didn’t know what my face and skin color would trigger for others. 

I went further into the forest. I didn’t mind getting lost in nature and disconnecting 

from social media. The anxiety was swelling, and I cried it out amongst the tall 

beautiful pine trees and breathed in the fresh air. 

The people of El Paso immediately got to work in dealing with this tragedy. 

Everyone contributed in different ways. El Paso muralist Gabe Vasquez did what he 


Interview with the El Paso Strong Mural Artist Gabe Vasquez 

does best and got to work on paying tribute to the 22 victims in the racist terror attack 

at the Cielo Vista Walmart in El Paso. He spray-painted a wall for over 24 hours 

straight, working through the night, to finish the El Paso Strong mural quickly (Figure 

1). The mural, located at 1011 N. Cotton Street, is now a historical landmark in El 

Paso. 

Figure 1: The El Paso Strong mural at night. Ronnie Dukes photographer. 

Dr. Isabel Baca, an Associate Professor at UTEP, reached out to me and asked if I’d 

be interested in interviewing the El Paso Strong mural artist for this publication, and for 

that invitation, I am grateful. I was enrolled in Dr. Baca’s Community Literacy 

internship course, where we were learning about writing with, for, and about the 

community. Dr. Baca is the Director of the Rhetoric and Writing Studies doctoral 

program, where I am currently a doctoral candidate. My research focus is on Visual 

Rhetoric and Composition. I research Mex-Chicanx artists who advance marginalized 

voices through their artwork. I am also involved in the arts community in El Paso as 

a comic book author, playwright, filmmaker, and I teach art at the El Paso Museums 

of Art and History. In Dr. Baca’s course my internship was with the El Paso Museum 

of Art working for their Education department. I also teach Chicana/o Cinema, 

Theatre, and the Roots of Latina/o Hip Hop at UTEP. 

I knew I had to move quickly in getting an interview with Gabe Vasquez. He 

had been featured already in other articles discussing the El Paso Strong mural and the 



tragic event that took place on August 3, 2019. I got in touch with Gabe through a 

student photographer at UTEP named Gaby Velasquez, whose photos are featured 

throughout this LWRS issue on recovery and transformation. I’m grateful to Gaby for 

her kindness in sharing her beautiful work with us and for putting me in contact with 

Gabe. 

The evening I got in touch with Gabe, he mentioned he was getting ready to 

dive into a very hectic schedule, so the interview needed to happen that day. 2 I met 

Gabe that night at the KLAQ Haunted House where he was commissioned to paint 

giant glow-in-the-dark murals to add to the spooky environment and Halloween vibe. 

This atmosphere was the backdrop of our interview to describe the setting. I filmed 

Gabe in front of some of his murals. Because our meeting was last minute and because 

I didn’t have a crew, I recruited my husband Ronnie Dukes to help me film the 

interview, so that I could focus on interviewing Gabe. 

I truly enjoyed meeting and getting to know Gabe. I felt a genuine kinship with 

him, as if I was meeting a brother from another. I believe Gabe is truly a conscious 

artist. He wears his heart on his sleeve and on his art. I was moved by his mission to 

coach and inspire young people to better their lives. I hope this interview provides 

some insight and an artistic perspective of this horrific event that aimed to kill people 

of Mexican descent like Gabe and me. 

So, without further delay, I present to you my interview with Gabe Vasquez. 

Videos of my interview are embedded in this text as links to YouTube so that readers 

have direct access to my recording. I edited the videos and added subtitles. 

INTRODUCTION 

ELVIRA: What is your name and background? 

GABE: My name is Gabe Vasquez. I go by the name Grenade. In 2006 I was 

introduced to Robert Kasner a.k.a. Jaws who’s no longer with us. He took me in like 

a coach and taught me so much. Introduced me to a bunch of people. I'm going to say 

the reason I'm good at graffiti letters is because of Jaws. Jaws introduced me to a guy 

named Gems. And Gems is the reason I'm doing all this. Because he taught me how 

to paint art. There's also a guy named Blast who taught me some things too. I'd say 

I'm a collaboration of all the legends in El Paso. 

ELVIRA: What kind of art do you make? What is the genre of your art? 



GABE: I'd say that my art is from the soul. There's a lot of graffiti involved. What I 

do is what I like. It's who I am. 

Video Link 1: Click on image. 

ELVIRA: What is an important artist tool? What can't you live without in your studio? 

GABE: I like painting with paint brushes, but spray paint - I love it. There's certain 

caps that I like using. It's not the one this paint comes with. These little guys right here, 

there's different kinds. I got a whole thing. I'll show you. Honestly if I was in a studio, 

I'll be upset if I'm painting anything smaller than this. I really want to paint big 

canvases. Four by four feet at the smallest. Cuz I like to spray paint them. That's just 

what I love to do. I'm really good with a brush too. I went to school for it. Spray 

painting is where my heart is completely present. 




ELVIRA: When did you start making art? 

GABE: I would say in 2006 when I met Jaws. He definitely brought out the artist in 

me, sent me to people who really brought it out. It's really hard for me to say. I'm stuck 

on 2006. I used to be in a rock band. I did wrestling for eight years. I started taking art 

seriously in college. I took spray-painting seriously the whole time I used it. When it 

came to art, more than just graffiti, I started taking it really serious in college. I went 

to Waldorf University in Iowa that's where I got a scholarship to wrestle. I was out 

there, and I was like, man, I haven't done any graffiti in a while. Just training hard. I 

was like I kinda want to do graffiti. I started doing business as my major. Then I 

switched it to graphic design. Then I switched it to Humanities with a Minor in Art. 

When I did that, I started going to the art classes. The teacher Christy Carlson, she 

pushed me hard. It's because she knew I was good. I just wanted to do graffiti. She 

would say hurry up and finish. I ended up doing nine murals at the college I went to. 

One in every department. I did a Marilyn Monroe in the theatre department. It was so 

cool. I was so about it. That's when I started taking art seriously. I was still a little 

minor at it. I didn't start getting like this until last year. 


ELVIRA: What are your words of wisdom for someone starting out in your field? For 

your future students...what words of wisdom? 

GABE: It's the same thing I'll tell all my wrestlers. I know you guys have high hopes 

and big dreams...you want it all. Hey, I'm not going to tell you you can't have it. But 

you're going to lose so many times before you start winning. And when you start 

winning you need to remember and realize why you're winning. And what's working 



and do that only. It's gonna' be a while. You're new at this. I believe in you like crazy. 

Do you believe in you enough to commit? Because you're gonna' have to be in here 

first and you're gonna' have to be the last to leave. Every time. You're gonna' have to 

pour your heart out when you're losing. As if you're on top of the world winning. It is 

so challenging. You're gonna' get broken down in so many different ways. But if you 

can rebuild yourself, you'll come back stronger and harder to break. Just don't get 

discouraged by the losses. They're coming. I promise you. I still take some to this day. 

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you react to it. So, 

you gotta' really really think about that. Decide where your heart's really at. Cuz it's 

gonna' hurt. 





An El Paso Strong sign with a US flag posted at the original memorial 

in El Paso, Texas outside of the Walmart 

where the shooting took place on August 3, 2019. 




Pardon My Acento: Racioalphabetic Ideologies and Rhetorical 

Recovery through Alternative Writing Systems 


California State University, Monterey Bay, on land of the 

Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen people. 1 

Rosa, by Any Other Name 

As a Latinx ! woman with an ambiguously White first name, Kelly, and a 

complicated, hyphenated Spanish language last name, Medina-López, I think about 

the words we use to name ourselves a lot. 2 I have secretly (and not so secretly) always 

been ashamed of my first name: the sharp “k” and double “ll” pronounced “l” and 

not the Spanish “y” causes the Spanish-speaking tongues of my friends and family to 

pause, to focus more on the word, to say it as if they hold something bitter in their 

mouths at the same time. My Abuelito Medina (QEPD) flat out refused to call me by 

my awkward White name, opting instead to twist the Ke - lly into “¿qué le?” short for 

“¿qué le importa?” (¿what does it matter?) as a playful joke or the universal “mija” 

when naming would fail. In middle school all of my friends had beautiful, strong 

Spanish names that rolled off the tongue: Gabriela, Yolanda, Mónica. I wanted one 

too, and I even begged my dad to change my name legally, “Please, apá, quiero ser 

Belén! o Magdalena!” But he never gave in, and I had a hard time understanding how 

my OG Latinx pops had double-crossed me in the name department. By the time I 

was old enough to legally change my name myself, “Kelly” was already far too 

embedded in my lived reality: we (my name and I) were stuck to each other, no matter 

how uncomfortable I felt about it. 3 








My struggles with naming as a person of color are not new or unique. Latinx 

literature and pop culture highlight the impact of naming and disnaming, or, better yet, 

“to call someone out of their name” and to insult (see Bucholtz, 2016; Smitherman, 

2000), on our community and has helped me understand my apá’s choice to give me 

a White name a little better. For instance, in

Pardon My Acento 

until I took Spanish for my language requirement in high school (easy A! or so I 

thought


the colonization of writing systems is an entry point for imperial expansion and settlercolonial 

violence against indigenous peoples, cultures, and languages. As Mignolo’s 

(1995) work revealed, the first colonization of our tongue happened in this long-ago 

context, and this colonization occurred in such a violent and traumatic way that it can 

never be fully recovered (Gutiérrez Chong, 1999; Menchaca, 2001; Baca and 

Villanueva, 2009). Using Mignolo to understand how alphabets have always operated 

as a foundational technology of colonization and oppression supports my current 

argument about the alphabetic violence of disnaming by excluding Spanish diacritics, 

like the accented “ó” in López. In other words, if, as Mignolo uncovered, early 

colonization began with a linguistic suppression of alphabetic inclusions and 

exclusions in the translations of indigenous speech to Western alphabets, then 

contemporary colonization also happens when the 26-letter Western colonial alphabet 

erases, or fails to account for, alternative writing systems, diacritical marks, and other 

alphabetic symbols and styles through Westernized spellings of our words, specifically 

in our names or naming. 7 This erasure, or failure to account for, other writing systems 

is what Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa (2015) called “indexical bleaching” and 

anchored in what they saw as “raciolingustic ideologies” (p. 150). 

Raciolinguistic Ideologies 

Flores and Rosa (2015) used the term “raciolinguistic ideologies” to expand the 

definition of a White gaze, or the recentering and normalizing of dominant White 

ideologies about bodies of color. While the White gaze (or ideological “eyes”


a White gaze in schools, where these bodies constantly need to “measure up” to White 

middle-class norms (p. 86). In the critique over how a White gaze has influences over 

systems of education, Paris and Alim (2014) argued that contemporary curriculum and 

pedagogy continue to reinforce hegemonic literate, linguistic, and cultural practices. 

This practice meant that minoritized students learn to value White, Western ways of 

knowing, doing, and languaging over their own modes, even in assets-based 

classrooms where diverse modalities are acknowledged. While Paris and Alim (2014) 

were careful in their critique of assets-based pedagogy and recognized it as 

foundational to their theorization of CSP, they reminded readers that assets-based 

approaches still center the White gaze, and that educational scholarship on access and 

equity continued to focus on “how to get working-class students of color to speak and 

write more like middle-class White ones” (p. 87). Paris and Alim’s argument reinforce 

how the White gaze recenters raciolinguistic ideologies through the standards and 

values of the U.S. educational system. But, bringing Paris and Alim together with 

Flores and Rosa exposes how recentering White Western values about language and 

languaging in school curriculums disciplines people of color and language-minoritized 

groups to understand DAE as a superior mode of communication. Thus, assumptions 

about accents, grammars, and whose bodies can and do speak DAE work both actively 

(through shifts in accent and grammar) and passively (by linking racialized bodies to 

“deficient” language) to influence listeners and speakers to norm themselves toward 

DAE. 

For speaking and listening, as Flores and Rosa (2015) indicated, raciolinguistic 

ideologies reinforce monoglossic language ideologies, or the belief that an idealized 

monolingualism is a standard to which all subjects of the nation state should aspire. 

Monoglossic language ideologies are not concrete sets of rules about how language 

should be spoken or heard, but rather a systemic ideology, a “cultural emblem” whose 

circulation “perpetuates raciolingustic ideologies and thereby contributes to processes 

of social reproduction and social stratification” (Flores and Rosa, 2015, p. 152). Using 

spoken accents as an example, Flores and Rosa (2015) argued that monoglossic 

language ideologies allow White listening ( subjects to ignore certain (White) accents 

or to consider particular ways of accenting language as “accentless,” while hearing (and 

attributing to certain bodies) other accents. In shifting the critique from how speakers 

perform language to how White listeners hear language, 10 Flores and Rosa discussed 

how appropriateness-based models for language education, like those that encourage 

students to use “academic language” or “disciplinary discourse,” inherently support 

raciolinguistic ideologies (p. 152). Regardless of any objective language practices 

and/or how well a linguistically minoritized speaker performs the “appropriate” 



language, the speaker can never control how a White listener will hear and interpret 

their speech. Monoglossic language ideologies feed the White listener’s understanding 

of who and how a speaker should speak before they have even spoken. Thus, their 

speech will always be heard and interpreted through raciolinguistic ideologies that 

mark their language as deficient, even if they demonstrate the same language patterns 

and accents as those used by their White peers. 

26 Letras / Letters 

Now, let me move from speaking and listening to reading and writing to suggest that 

raciolinguistic ideologies can extend our understanding over the impact that a White 

gaze has on languaging subjects by an exploration of racioalphabetic ideologies. What I 

mean by that is, if raciolinguistic ideologies recenter DAE and mark certain bodies as 

always already language deficient by the White listener, then racioalphabetic ideologies 

recenter the standard 26-letter Western colonial alphabet and mark alternative 

spellings and writing systems, and those bodies attached to them, as also already 

deficient to a White reader. This thread of study has already gained substantial 

attention, particularly as it relates to writing classrooms. Rhetoric and composition 

scholars, that study translingual students and their writing, have done an excellent job 

to trace how accents emerge (or not) in student writing and how White readers 

understand and interpret “accented writing” (see Canagarajah, 1999; Horner and 

Trimbur, 2002; & Matsuda, 2006). 

Nevertheless, the primary focus of this branch of scholarship is grammar and 

grammars versus spellings and writing systems, which is where a theorization of 

racioalphabetic ideologies can add nuance to an understanding of the interlocking 

discourses of language and power in a writing classroom. By ignoring writing systems 

as critical tools , scholarly discussions about grammar and grammars overlook 

alphabets as technologies of oppression and do little to challenge our notion of how 

students use writing systems to perform language. Racioalphabetic ideologies, then, 

operate from the assumption that there is always only one alphabet in the writing 

classroom. This assumption means that a White reader is always reading the standard 

26-letter Western colonial alphabet (and othering or racializing any deviations) only, 

and a minoritized writer is disciplined not to perform other writing systems because 

they are, through a White gaze, excluded from DAE. As a result, words that might 

traditionally have alternative spellings, like Spanish language words and names, are 

coded into the 26-letter Western colonial alphabet so that they can be read, 

deracialized, by White readers. The process of deracializing words, either through 



circulation or recoding, aligns with what Lauren Squires (2014) and Mary Bucholtz 

(2016) called indexical bleaching. 

Squires (2014), the first to introduce the term, claimed that indexical bleaching 

was similar to semantic bleaching, whereby a word, through repetition, loses its 

semantic force while still maintaining its grammatical function (see Bybee and 

Thompson, 1997), but different in that the words that are “indexically bleached” are 

stripped not of their semantic force but of their social or cultural value. Using media 

as example, Squires (2014) showed how language that is linked, or indexed, to a 

particular media source was adopted and circulated through a community of 

consumers before spreading outside of that community to new users who may not 

understand the original indexical linkage. In this process of adoption, circulation, and 

diffusion, the original social and cultural understanding of the language may be 

weakened or forgotten, turning the language from “media language” (i.e. indexed to a 

particular media source) to just “language” (i.e. retaining its “semantic meaning and 

pragmatic force but [losing] its social meaning”) (p. 43). While Squires did 

acknowledge the impact of indexical bleaching on particular cultural groups, she did 

not fully connect her theory to how language is racialized and deracialized and how 

that might affect minoritized populations. 

In “On Being Called Out of One’s Name,” Mary Bucholtz (2016) complicated 

Squires’ theorization on indexical bleaching by exploring practices of imperial naming 

and disnaming on students from linguistically or enthnoracially mar-ginalized 

backgrounds. This extended Squires’ definition of indexical bleaching from the loss of 

social and cultural value to “a technique of deracialization, or the stripping of 

contextually marked ethnoracial meaning from an indexical form” (Bucholtz, 2016, p. 

275). Using Jane Hill (1993), to support her argument, Bucholtz asserted that 

“hyperanglicized pronunciation of words seen as other-than-English is a fundamental 

strategy of White racial dominance through language,” and “pronunciation strategies 

that trivialize nondominant languages indexically reproduce racial hegemony” (p. 278). 

Working with Latinx youth to interrogate naming practices, Bucholtz (2016) argued 

that the politics of naming, as deliberate mispronunciation, anglicization, and indexical 

bleaching, was a normative, dehu-manizing, and deracializing process that is still very 

much pervasive in contemporary educational settings. 

While both Squires (2014) and Bucholtz (2016) are primarily focused on 

speaking and listening, like Flores and Rosa (2015), I extend their indexical bleaching 

definitions to include the coding and recoding of alternative writing systems into the 

dominant 26-letter Western colonial alphabet. Like hyperanglicized pronunciations, 

hyperanglicized spellings also indexically bleach words by removing their social, 



cultural, and ethnoracial meanings. Often, these two forms of indexical bleaching work 

in tandem to further decontextualize language from cultural or social meaning. For 

example, normalizing the spelling of Los Ángeles as Los Angeles might encourage a 

hyperanglicized pronunciation, whereas accenting the Á might cause readers to pause 

and reflect on the histories of the word and the land it names. Indexical bleaching, 

then, reframed to include the systematic erasure of alternative writing systems, sustains 

and normalizes the practice of excluding or erasing acentos on Latinx names (among 

many other possible forms of racioalphabetic harm toward language-minoritized 

peoples and their alternative writing systems). Thus, as I return to my exploration of 

when and where the “ó” gets left out of López in my professional life, it is not just 

about spellings and misspellings, but rather an exploration of when, where, and by 

whom I am deracialized, and the impact that has on my scholarly and professional 

identity. 

The complicated history between the early linguistic suppression of indigenous 

languages and letters, as Mignolo (1995) explored, and contemporary erasures of 

alternative writing systems through racioalphabetic ideologies are both patterns of 

White gaze normalizing the 26-letter Western colonial alphabet as an imperial 

technology for erasing other ways of knowing, languaging, and being. Before moving 

into a more detailed discussion of how and where erasures of the “ó” in López has 

happened, I’d like to take this space to point out that Spanish *, like English +, is a 

colonial language, and I want to make it clear that I recognize it as such. Colonial 

languages are necessarily messy, intersectional, and complicated, and I don’t intend for 

this article to be read as forwarding some kind of pro-Spanish agenda. Removing the 

acentos from Spanish names can be an agented choice that reflect an individual’s 

complex identity. For example, many indigenous peoples of New Mexico, where I am 

from, purposefully remove acentos and indigenize pronunciations of their colonial 

Spanish names as performances of rhetorical sovereignty. I don’t see this as working 

against my argument, but supporting it: the move to indigenize colonial names through 

agented revisions of spellings and pronunciations is a move to reclaim linguistic 

sovereignty against the violence of naming and disnaming and another way of 

responding to the call I make in this article. However it might manifest, disrupting 

colonial alphabet systems, especially through agented choices related to names and 

naming, is one way to push back against what Asao Inoue (2019) called “White 

language supremacy,” opening space for a pluriversal understanding of our alphabetic 

technologies, in his keynote address at the Conference on College Composition and 

Communication in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 



López-Lopez-LÃ³pez 

To illustrate how racioalphabetic ideologies encourage critical disnamings, I share 

stories of being named and disnamed in professional and academic settings as 

examples. Above I said that I am careful to respect the proper spelling of López, and 

I am. No matter where I enter my name, I always take the time to spell it correctly. 

Despite my rhetorical caution, my name rarely appears correctly in professional 

documents and materials. Conference badges are my favorite example of this 

alteration. I’m always excited to pick up my conference badge at registration: did they 

spell it right? Usually the answer is no, and I’m left to draw the acento on myself, as 

the image on the right in Figure 1 shows. When I went through a collection of 

conference badges, I noticed that the badges that include the accented “ó” were from 

Cultural Rhetorics (CR CON), Feminisms and Rhetorics (FemRhets), Popular Culture 

Association (PCA), and the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies 

(NACCS). 

Figure 1: Various conference badges (right) and 2019 CCCC 

conference badge with hand-drawn acento. 

The Conference on College Composition and Communication, 11 the Southwest 

Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA), and multiple badges from my 

home institute, California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) and the California 

State University (CSU) system were among those that left the accent off. While it might 

be easy to draw basic assumptions about why certain conferences and organizations 

accented my name and others did not, I would like to caution any readers against doing 

so and instead point our thinking in another direction. My disnaming from López to 

Lopez happens everywhere, not just on conference badges, and it is entirely more 



complex than just the cultural politics of a particular group or conference. Pointing 

fingers at particular organizations makes it about individual habits rather than the 

structures of racialization that allow racioalphabetics to operate unchecked. In other 

words, it calls attention to the symptom but ignores the underlying disease


Speaking to this last point and thinking through what may contribute to when 

and how I am disnamed, one reason disnaming may occur is because our web 

platforms and applications can’t process diacritic marks. For example, I remember 

feeling perplexed that the 2016 Symposium on Second Language Writing asked 

registrants to “avoid diacritics” when entering names for name tags (Figure 3). Why 

not? Was there a specific reason for those of us who use diacritics in our spellings to 

be asked not to? I wanted to ask these questions, but I also felt I had the answer. 

Actually, I’m confident that the volunteers (some of whom are friends and colleagues) 

who organized that conference recognized the beauty and diversity of all the languages 

and alphabets that came together in that space to discuss English language learning 

and that they didn’t intentionally ask participants to “avoid diacritics” out of some 

intolerance, but rather because the registration software was unable to properly 

process diacritics. Actually, the acknowledgement that names with diacritical marks 

might be entered on badges may demonstrate this awareness, and I have never seen 

this restriction noted on any other online registration forms, before or after. 

Technologies


The inability of technologies to process alphabetic diversity speaks to the 

pervasiveness of the racioalphabetic ideologies in coding and programming and the 

26-letter Western colonial alphabet programmers ascribe to in our modern modes of 

communication. In her seminal text Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Noble (2018) looked 

at the implicit bias of internet search engine algorithms to expose programmer bias 

and dismantle the common myth that algorithms are neutral, unbiased, mathematical 

tools. I tie the inability of certain internet forms to process diacritics to this same 

paradigm: those who code the forms operate from racioalphabetic ideologies to 

recenter the 26-letter Western colonial alphabet and thus fail to create technologies 

capable of processing diacritics. Considering the role colonial systems of education 

have played in racializing and deracializing minoritized groups (Tuck and Yang, 2012; 

Ruiz and Sánchez, 2016; Smith, Tuck, & Yang, 2018), in tandem with the continued 

globalization of our colleges and universities, the inability of a learning management 

system like Blackboard to reproduce diacritics is especially alarming. The failure of 

technologies to understand and accommodate diacritics only reifies the 26-letter 

Western colonial alphabet as the technological advancement of indexical bleaching and 

perpetuating a racial and linguistic hegemony. 13 So, if we understand the 26-letter 

colonial alphabet as a move toward settler-colonialism, and alphabets writ large as 

resource, commodity, or capital, technologies that fail to account for alternative 

alphabets and spellings have already settled the terms through which one can and 

should name and be named. Any alternatives are already destroyed and disappeared. 

To think through how we might disrupt and delink from colonial alphabets, I will now 

move this discussion toward theories of visibility and accommodation, which may 

offer new ways to think about the rhetorical recovery and transformation of Latinx 

language systems and alphabets. 

Figure 4: My name appears as LÃ³pez in Blackboard when entered as López (2019) 



Recovering Alternative Writing Systems 

The elefante


to pass signals the imperial legacies of racioalphabetic ideologies and their histories of 

expansion through state power. 

Identifying and deploying appropriate accommodations is not a social and 

politically neutral task, and neither are the terms “diversity” and “inclusion” (Ahmed, 

2012). Making spaces accessible for all bodies requires careful attention to 

intersectional abilities, identities, and experiences. Looking at inclusions and exclusions 

of diacritics as an accommodations issue sheds light on the rhetorical potential of 

recognizing alternative writing systems as tools for recovery and transformation. In 

the introduction to Towards a New Rhetoric of Difference, Stephanie Kerschbaum (2014) 

examined how teachers approach and accommodate difference in the writing 

classroom, arguing for pedagogies that both bring awareness to “differences that have 

received little attention” and provide “new insights on familiar differences” (p. 6). 

Central to her argument is a focus on “marking difference,” which Kerschbaum (2014) 

defined as the places where “speakers and audiences alike display and respond to 

markers of difference, those rhetorical cues that signal the presence of difference 

between two or more participants” (p. 7). Kerschbaum (2014) recognized markers of 

difference as “a new set of tools for tracing and analyzing patterns in how we might 

understand one another” (p. 7). Thus, alternative writing systems, like diacritics on 

Spanish words, are tangible textual markers of difference, rhetorical cues that signify 

an alternative way of speaking, knowing, writing, languaging, and engaging with the 

world. They also correspond to both “differences that have received little attention,” 

through technological and political erasures like those explored above, and “new 

insights on familiar differences,” like the indexical bleaching of common Spanish 

words and names written without accents (e.g. Los Angeles vs Los Ángeles) 

(Kerschbaum, 2014, p. 6). 

I find Kerschbaum’s ideas


and critical reclaiming of our alternative writing systems to not only “mark difference,” 

but also to recover our Latinx rhetorical modes and transform possible futures of 

writing and rhetoric for linguistically minoritized populations. Toward this goal, 

reclaiming our acentos offers one way to make visible our Latinx writing and rhetorical 

traditions, challenging deficit thinking paradigms that underline assumptions about 

whose bodies and languages fit in the rhetoric and composition classrooms, and whose 

bodies and languages need remediation. We can start this change by being careful and 

diligent with our own use of the 26-letter Western colonial alphabet in order to bring 

more visibility and awareness to alternative writing systems and by looking for ways to 

introduce our diverse students to alternative writing systems in our classrooms, in our 

mentoring, or in any other modes of contact. 

Writing in Acentos 

I return to Paris and Alim’s (2017) theory of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) for 

my discussion on how writing instructors might engage alternative writing systems as 

tools for critical consciousness building, like Freire (1996) called for, in the classroom. 

In their theorization of CSP, Paris and Alim (2017) were careful to direct attention to 

the fluidity and dynamism of languages, identities, and cultures, among youth and, in 

particular, youth culture. They insisted that CSP must demand explicit pluralistic 

outcomes and not recenter White Western norms and educational values. At the same 

time, CSP should resist static or stereotypical reifying of cultural values and be flexible 

and responsive to change. Finally, CSP must also be willing to critically engage with 

reifications of contradictory or problematic cultural values. These are all practices that 

we can keep in mind as we shape our pedagogy to be more mindful of alphabetic 

difference 

Thus, I ask that practitioners bear in mind how problematizing the 26-letter 

Western colonial alphabet with students in the writing classroom might accomplish 

those goals. If, for example, the 26-letter Western colonial alphabet is a tool of 

racioalphabetic ideologies and indexical bleaching, then how might encouraging the 

use of alternative writing systems in student writing yield more pluralistic outcomes? 

And, how might hosting conversations about critical erasures through indexical 

bleaching open a space for students to engage in dialogue about contradictory cultural 

values? I offer ideas here for beginning this work and encourage practitioners to 

carefully consider the goals of CSP and within their own classrooms, pedagogies, 

students, and ways of knowing and doing when imagining how best to engage CSP in 



their own space. My recommendations center around three strategies: critical 

dialogues, visibility, and tools we might use to accomplish these goals. 

One way we might counter racioalphabetic ideologies in the writing classroom 

is by engaging students in critical dialogues about the tension between the 26-letter 

Western colonial alphabet and alternative writing systems. I use first day introductions 

as a starting point because this timeframe is a place where negotiating names often 

occurs as commonplace in the classroom. When I introduce myself and my name, I 

like to write it out on the board, point to the “ó,” and ask students about it: Why is it 

there? What does it represent? Of course, this suggestion assumes that an instructor 

has a name that can be used as example. That doesn’t mean, however, that writing 

instructors cannot look for other opportunities that may open critical dialogues over 

examples that center on accenting or alternative writing systems. By calling attention 

to the use of alternative writing systems either through our own naming practices or 

through other course materials utilized in the classroom, we can raise critical awareness 

about naming, disnaming, and racioalphabetic ideologies, and we can invite students 

to consider the role alternative writing systems play on their own identity, identity 

formation, writing, and naming practices. Further, we can use these dialogues as a place 

to engage critical questioning on cultural stereotypes, reifications, and values that CSP 

calls for. 

Another suggestion for “writing in acentos” in the writing classroom centers 

around visibility. In order to enable the critical dialogues that I call for above we need 

more examples, more visibility of alternative writing systems not as separate from the 

26-letter Western colonial alphabet, but working with it, against it, and in it. In other 

words, we need to be more deliberate with our own spellings and namings, in our 

classrooms and in our critical scholarship, even if at times this becomes messy or 

inconvenient. A good place to start might be with (re)surfacing the acentos in the 

names of places, like Los Ángeles, San José, and México, that typically appear without 

accents. We can also be meticulous about respecting and reproducing alternative 

writing systems when we see them, like ensuring that we include acentos when spelling 

names and words that come to us accented. Please note, I am not suggesting that we 

(re)spell anybody’s name, especially those of our students. Rather, I am suggesting that 

we direct attention toward the visibility of accents and to continue to make that 

visibility prominent, especially for alternative spellings that already exist. Through 

critical dialogues and increased visibility of alternative spellings and writing systems, 

we can equip students with resources to make agented decisions about their own 

spellings. 



Finally, and key to ensuring the success of the previous two, we can teach 

students how to produce alternative writing systems in digital spaces. I have found that 

often one of the reasons the “ó” gets left out of “López” is because people simply do 

not know how to produce that accented letter on a keyboard or because the extra work 

of toggling between keyboards or making extra keystrokes leads some to believe the 

task in doing so is cumbersome and counterproductive. Earlier, in this essay, I use my 

university website as an example of how I am disnamed in professional spaces. While 

I can only speculate as to the real reason my name appears incorrectly on my 

university website, an educated guess would be that whoever entered my name either 

did not know how to make the “ó” or did not want to invest the extra time to switch 

between keyboards and/or make the necessary keystrokes. I recognize that toggling 

between keyboards and/or making extra keystrokes does require more labor, but it is 

minimal in scale if the extra effort is part of a commitment to diversity, inclusivity, and 

visibility. There are plenty of online videos and tutorials that can be used to teach 

students how to accent or type in alternative writing systems. Introducing students to 

the tools for producing alternative writing system directly after critical dialogues about 

them is a good way to reinforce the discussion. 

Critical dialogues, visibility, and an awareness of the tool available are the main 

ways that I approach teaching alternative writing systems in the classroom, and I 

humbly offer them as a starting point for anyone hailed to engage in this work. Further, 

while I speak from my truth in this article and use Spanish and English alphabetics, I 

do not mean to overlook or ignore all of the other beautiful writing systems that 

experience the same violence of indexical bleaching. Rather, I use my experiences and 

languages as example to invite similar work from across the pluriverse of writing 

systems, and I am particularly excited to see what might emerge from disruptions that 

use syllabaries and logographies. 

¿Qué hay en un nombre? / What’s in a name? 

We are our names, and our names carry specific rhetorical weight and value. Names 

signify something about the bodies, lives, and experiences they are attached to. Names 

give us place, purpose, and identity. Names are not neutral. For many Latinx people, 

heredamos los nombres de nuestros antepasadxs. Our names are remembrance and 

survivance: through our names we acknowledge where we come from and continue 

the memory of our loved ones. We honor our past. Looking to that past, I start by 

recalling the colonial history of anglicizing Latinx names to introduce the complicated 

history of naming, disnaming, racioalphabetic ideologies, and indexical bleaching in 



the United States. I then moved to a discussion of the systematic erasures of Spanish 

language diacritics through state-sanctioned rhetorical violence, like California’s Prop 

63. I use this discussion to support a call to decolonize the 26-letter Western colonial 

alphabet through “marking difference” and reclaiming our alternative writing systems. 

Whether or not people take up my call, at the very least I hope I provided a 

new way of thinking about writing systems as colonial technologies and surfaced 

important questions about the neutral utilitarianism of words, letters, and spellings. 

This work runs parallel to scholarship by Iris Ruiz and Raúl Sánchez (2016), Damián 

Baca (2008), and Ellen Cushman (2012), who all introduce alternative writing systems 

as frameworks for approaching rhetoric and writing studies differently. Following that 

tradition, I encouraged us to stop looking at writing systems as something static and 

fixed, but rather as a place of potential revision, something we can change and 

challenge, something we can remediate to better meet the needs of our Latinx 

rhetorics. Circling back to Ruiz and Baca (2017), in “Decolonial Options and Writing 

Studies,” I agreed with the notion that “our decolonial imperative, our contribution to 

WS, is to create and recreate the tools, perspectives, and practices most effective in 

helping to heal from the colonial wounds of Western history, and to create global 

realities no longer determined by imperial, Eurocentric horizons” (p. 228). If writing 

systems are tools, then I, like Ruiz and Baca, maintained that we must recreate our 

writing systems to recover from past traumas of misnaming, disnaming, 

racioalphabetic ideologies, and indexical bleaching. Further, and in solidarity, I invited 

allies and accomplices from across alternative writing systems to join in and consider 

how they might do similar work. In closing, let’s stop thinking about writing systems 

as monoliths, but as sites of disruption: open to additions, subtractions, logograms, 

syllabograms, pictographs, symbols, characters, and whatever else we may include that 

helps us write and reimagine our Latinx rhetorics, to recover our past but also to 

transform our future. 34 

Endnotes 

1. Land acknowledgement – Office of inclusive excellence. (2020). Retrieved March 

17, 2002, from https:///csumb.edu/diversity 

2. To my tocayas Kellie Sharp-Hoskins and Kelly Whitney: I am so blessed to be a 

part of the Kellies and to share my name with such amazing, smart women! 

Please don’t read this as me quitting our club or our name! 

3. A note on tone and style: I purposefully translanguage in this essay, not only 

across Spanish, Spanglish, and English, but also formal, informal, and oral codes. 

Translanguaging, as defined by Ofelia García and Li Wei (2013) is “an approach 



to the use of language, bilingualism, and the education of bilinguals that 

considers the language practices of bilinguals not as two autonomous language 

systems as has been traditionally the case, but as one linguistic repertoire with 

features that have been societally constructed as belonging to two separate 

languages” (p. 2). Translanguaging upsets the myth of monolingualism and/or 

linguistic homogeneity (see, for example, Makoni & Pennycook, 2005; Matsuda, 

2006) and reminds us that language is a social construct. Academic language in 

particular, like the alphabets that carry it, has been neutralized and naturalized in 

education and academic discourse (García, 2017). Although there has been a turn 

towards understanding, unlocking, and leveraging the power of translanguaging 

as classroom praxis, particularly in the writing classroom (see, for example, 

Horner et al., 2011) academic discourse, as evidenced through how academics 

and scholars write for publication, has been slow to adopt translanguaging as 

liberatory social justice practice. If we continue to encourage our students to 

translanguage, but reinforce Standard Edited Academic English through our 

publications, what message are we really sending? 

4. See also Lauren Mason Carris (2011), “La Voz Gringa.” 

5. I use alternative writing systems as a term that includes not only alternative versions 

of Latin script, but also syllabaries and logographies. 

6. I want to point to my own privilege here: I was able to make this agented choice, 

through education and social status, when most vulnerable and minoritized 

people do not have the same power. 

7. I am using the term “26-letter Western colonial alphabet” in favor of “26-letter 

English” alphabet to emphasize its role as an imperial technology of oppression 

and subjugation. 

8. I’m following Django Paris’ (2009) revision of Standard English to the more 

accurate Dominant American English. 

9. Please note, I am using the terms like “listener” and “speaker” not to implicate 

particular bodies, but rather as ideological constructs that are symptomatic of the 

structures of racialization. 

10. See M. Inoue, 2006. 

11. I would like to note that on the CCCC Scholars for the Dream Travel Award 

Website my name is spelled correctly in the list of past winners. 

12. See Calderon, 2014. 

13. See Larsen, 1996. 



14. I didn’t randomly select these surnames names as example. 2010 US Census 

Bureau data (the last year for which data is available) lists García, Rodríguez, and 

Martínez among the 10 most popular last names in the U.S. 

15. Although Medina’s first name should have an accent, I couldn’t find it spelled 

José anywhere, so I respect the common spelling. 

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Kelly Medina-López is an Assistant Professor of Composition Studies at California 

State University, Monterey Bay. She has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Professional 

Communication from New Mexico State University. Her research interests include 

border rhetorics, Latinx rhetoric and writing studies, Latinx ghost stories and myths, 

critical making, and language politics. You can find her writing in Constellations: A 

Cultural Rhetorics Publishing Space, Querencia: Essays on the New Mexico Homeland, and the 

forthcoming Decolonial Conversations in Posthuman and New Material Rhetorics. She is 

currently co-editing a collection tentatively titled We are all Monsters/We are all Saints: 

Haunted Migrations and Latindigenous Ghost Story. 










A homemade poster for Maribel Hernandez, 56 and her husband Leonard Cipeda, 

41 placed outside the Walmart in El Paso, Texas. 




Mexican Food, Assimilation, and Middle-Class Mexican 

Americans or Chicanx 


Texas State University, on land of the Tonkawa people. 1 

I have never stopped trying to assimilate. And I have succeeded in all the 

traditional ways. Yet complete assimilation—is denied—the Hispanic 

English professor. One can't get more culturally assimilated and still remain 

other. People of color carry the colony wherever we go. Internal 

colonialism: a political economy, an ideology, a psychology. 

–Victor Villanueva, Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, xiv. 

My name is Jaime Armin Mejía, and even though I didn’t start out this way, I have 

long been a compositionist for most of my career as a college teacher. My career first 

began by my being hired as a TA in an English Department at a borderland’s university 

more than 37 years ago. All this time, I have almost always prided myself as a 

composition teacher in the field of Rhetoric and Composition Studies. As time has gone 

on, though, what was once a young and floundering field has transformed now by 

people who sought to professionalize it into a full-fledged academic discipline. Along 

the way, as I worked towards professionalizing myself within this discipline, I learned 

that the pedagogical approach to the first classes I taught, basic writing courses, was 

first used over 150 years before, in the middle of the 19 th century. This pedagogical 

approach was determined by the textbook my students and I were assigned to use. Not 

only was the approach outdated by over a century and a half, but my students were 





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obviously also ill-served, especially when I consider that my students were almost all 

Mexican American and from the borderlands. In those early days of my career, 

practitioners within the emerging academic discipline of Rhetoric and Composition 

Studies were still using approaches that were focused primarily on what students 

produced rather than on the processes by which they produced that writing—what was 

later described as the product approach as opposed to the process approach to teaching 

composition. 

In no uncertain terms, what we now call Rhetoric and Composition Studies 

has changed from what it once was when I first began teaching as a TA in 1982. Today, 

it has become so professionalized that the early pedagogical issues directly relating to 

composition seem to have been cast aside entirely. Issues relating to rhetoric, on the 

other hand, are today what make the field of Rhetoric and Composition Studies more 

professionalized than it ever was before. There was once a day when the primary focus 

of Rhetoric and Composition Studies was on how to teach first-year college 

composition classes. Indeed, developing pedagogical approaches for teaching firstyear 

composition classes was our primary focus. In some ways, those days have long 

since passed. In their wake, developing an understanding of the rhetorical dynamics 

involved in almost everything under the sun has now become our focus. Recent years 

have brought an interest in what is called translanguaging or codeswitching, an interest 

that decenters the existence of a Standard American English, a type of ideal language 

which compositionists in the past, and still today, have typically strived to instill in 

their college composition students. 

What progressive members of our profession now desire most is to decolonize 

the teaching of writing where Standard English is no longer used as one of THE 

principal standards for assessing the writing of students. Instead, what this new wave 

of scholars and teachers are doing is introducing and legitimizing what many 

previously considered non-standard forms of English and culturally based topics 

related to them. Approaches for doing so range widely today, depending on the 

imagination and knowledge that a particular teacher has at hand. 

We, as compositionists and rhetoricians, however, are each situated quite 

differently, as our individual circumstances with our teaching careers, as I’ve said, can 

and often does differ considerably. What I’m about to present advances an approach 

which has pedagogical possibilities which you might find useful in the classes you 

teach, classes where I hope you develop rhetoric as the primary focus for the students 

and their writing. But as I said, we as teachers of writing are all situated differently. 

Graduate student teaching assistants or adjuncts can’t always do what a tenured 

professor can. Moreover, textbook committees often determine the textbooks most 


Mexican Food, Assimilation, and Middle-Class Mexican Americans or Chicanx 

of us have to use when teaching first-year or advanced writing classes, to say nothing 

of high school students enrolled in dual-enrollment classes. And if you don’t know, 

textbooks aren’t exactly useful to teachers wishing to engage in decolonizing how 

standard English and culturally-based ethnic topics are deployed. Textbook publishers 

have long held an over-determined control over much of what we do as writing 

teachers, something ethnic minority teachers like me have long lamented and protested 

against because of how little the readings included in textbook readers reflect the 

identities of the ethnic-minority students using them. 

Even if these textbooks were constructed in a way that teachers could 

productively use, teachers would still need the training to use such ethnically-based 

textbooks. Such training ideally would instruct them in ways which could open up 

possibilities for students to write using their own ethnically-based vernaculars. The 

training I have in mind for using such imagined textbooks would likely run into many 

obstacles within writing programs and English departments because this training 

would also involve decolonizing the methods of assessing student writing. Asao Inoue 

extensively articulates such assessment methods in his award-winning book (2015) and 

his recent Chair’s address to the Conference on College Composition and 

Communication (2019). In no uncertain terms, teachers wishing to engage alternative 

pedagogical approaches to teaching and assessing first-year college writing as well as 

writing in advanced writing classes will require training. Again, the training would have 

to encompass teachers assimilating specific cultural contexts and the ethnic nuances 

of topics and vernaculars native to the scope and breadth of what the students will be 

writing about. In other words, teachers will have to understand the intersectionality of 

issues which can serve to expand the repertoire of writing which we as compositionists 

should offer up to our students in our writing classes. Teachers assimilating specific 

cultural contexts and the ethnic nuances of topics and vernaculars native to many of 

our non-mainstream students reverses how knowledge is usually conveyed in 

American universities. 

Let me generalize about the training likely involved for such teachers. If we as 

compositionists are to open up vernacular possibilities to our writing students in our 

classes, teachers will have to assimilate knowledge from different cultural contexts not 

often a part of their training. Of course, some teachers and some students, on some 

level, may have already assimilated knowledge from these ethnic-cultural contexts. 

They will need to understand how this knowledge, found at the intersections where 

they will be situated, is used in the University and American society. At these 

intersections, different levels of identity construction are taking place for both teachers 

and students, depending on where the teacher and students are situated at that 



particular time. How students construct their identity at these intersections, according 

to gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, race, and social class, as well as location and 

time, will all be in the mix when presenting opportunities for students to write. To the 

extent that teachers can master the cultural rhetorical dynamics arising at such 

intersections, the better they will be able to facilitate and be open to the possibilities 

of writing and rhetoric arising in this teaching context. 

In the past and more traditionally, anyone who entered the teaching profession 

in English was assumed to have assimilated a cultural understanding of mainstream 

America, to say nothing of Shakespeare and British cultures. In Rhetoric and 

Composition Studies, it’s also always been assumed that prospective teachers will have 

assimilated Standard English as well as the process approach to teaching writing. 

However, we can almost never assume that our prospective and actual teachers have 

learned and assimilated important aspects of different cultures, be they LGBTQ, 

African American, Native American, and/or Latinx cultures. Unless the graduate 

student or teacher has pursued the study of different cultures and identity formations, 

what we will be expecting them to know will require remediation if our students are 

ever to expand their writing repertoires. Perhaps orienting prospective teachers to 

these kinds of pedagogical approaches exists here in Tacoma as well as elsewhere, but 

they most certainly do not exist everywhere. 2 In fact, all one has to do is look at the 

textbooks they use to see where our profession is currently situated. 

Changing the status quo will be no small matter, for unless these prospective 

teachers pursue assimilating knowledge from different cultural intersections and 

contexts, advancing pedagogical approaches of difference will only become an exercise 

in futility. We live in strange times. What we know to be better pedagogical approaches 

for teaching writing to our students simply is not always considered. Education 

historian Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr. (1987) documented how in the early 20 th century, 

teachers in San Antonio, Texas, argued for pedagogical approaches which were native 

to the ethnic students in their schools at that time. In the US, assimilation in 

educational settings at all levels has almost always operated against ethnic minority 

students. The high dropout and failure rate Mexican Americans have long suffered 

reflect the racist ramifications of this forced assimilation. And lest we forget, white 

folks, because of their deployment of this one-way kind of racialized assimilation, have 

almost never thought to ask what they’re losing from such a deployment. Indeed, they 

have long advanced the notion that being monolingual is superior to being bilingual 

when, as recent studies show, being bilingual has always required having more 

intelligence in every respect. Yet, we, as bilinguals, are typically forced to subtract away 

an important part of our ethnic identity construction. What follows offers up one 



possible way to go, if we are to begin reversing where many of us are currently doing 

when teaching composition and rhetoric. 

At the Department of English at Texas State University where I teach, we now 

offer junior-level advanced writing classes which now allow teachers to choose special 

topics. About two years ago, I began teaching this class using Mexican food as its 

special topic. I should note that in this course I am not hampered by a textbook 

committee about which textbooks I can use. So, I use Gustavo Arellano’s (2010) 

collection of essays about Mexican food, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered 

America, as well as a mainstream collection of food writing. Since my initial foray into 

teaching this advanced writing class, I’ve stayed with Arellano’s Taco USA and have 

moved to use Eating Words: A Norton Anthology of Food Writing, edited by Sandra M. 

Gilbert, Roger J. Porter, and Ruth Riechl (2016). This anthology complements Taco 

USA well because it has excellent articles covering the various issues about the 

consumption and production of food. For this type of class, which engages students 

to be creative in their efforts to compose essays related to Mexican food, the readings 

from both collections act as touchstones they can use to draw ideas from for their own 

creative efforts. 

This course is important for these students because it allows them the 

opportunity to continue honing their writing skills, something most students seldom 

get an opportunity to do after their first-year college composition classes. This course 

is also valuable because it presents opportunities for them to engage in cross-cultural 

thinking and translanguaging. These students are more mature, and while some may 

not take this class as seriously as they should, they often have an investment in their 

writing which one seldom sees in other classes. The rhetorical circumstances 

surrounding these students in this class are also noteworthy. Not only is the special 

topic for this advanced writing English class Mexican food, but their professor is also 

a Mexican American—a Chicano, to be more exact. That combination, in and of itself, 

creates a rhetorical situation for all of them where the circumstances have utterly 

changed from what they typically find in almost all the other classes in which they’ve 

likely ever been enrolled at their university. This change in their rhetorical situation for 

this class is no joking matter, for as they quickly discover, I bring a level of ethnic 

authority to the subject matter which is typically expected of advanced college classes. 

Teaching this class, now for the third time, has taken me on to new turf which 

I’d not previously ventured into. For the better part of nearly 25 years, I have been 

teaching a Chicanx Literature course, and for the most part, most of the students 

enrolled in that course have been Mexican American. I have an academic specialty in 

Chicanx Literature, having spent a good part of my graduate days studying and then 



writing my dissertation over the serial works of a Chicano writer, Rolando Hinojosa. 

By taking the direction of studying Chicanx Literature as a graduate student in the early 

1980s, I was obviously going against the grain of where most of English Studies was 

going at that time. While I wasn’t the only Chicanx graduate student doing so, there 

weren’t many of us engaging this sub-field of American Literature. Most of my 

academic career as a student had me assimilating what an American college education 

pushed on me. It wasn’t until I entered graduate school that this trek into the 

mainstream began its slow reversal. And because I was an ethnic minority student, my 

college career always operated against the grain of what the mainstream wanted of 

me—complete and utter assimilation away from my deeply embedded ethnic identity. 

There’s a great deal of dialectical irony in all of this. For never in my wildest dreams 

and imagination could I have ever conceived of ever teaching a class focusing primarily 

on the rhetorical dynamics of writing about Mexican food in American society. Even 

after having steeped myself in Chicanx Literature and the many cultural aspects 

contained in such an area of study, studying and teaching the rhetoric of Mexican food 

in an English class goes deeper for me, organically. 

You see, I was raised in a home with a Mexican mother whose brilliance 

expressed itself daily and most vividly through her cooking of Mexican food, especially 

her marvelous and rhetorically excellent enchiladas. And this opinion isn’t only my 

own, as there are many folks out there today who remember with extreme exactitude 

the sheer rhetorical genius of her cooking Mexican food. This understanding into how 

she could use her cooking to persuade her guests of her keen aptitude with her cultural 

funds of knowledge is what I can bring into my writing classes. Reading and teaching 

the well-researched essays that Arellano collects in Taco USA at best only supplements 

what I can bring to my advanced writing classes. Further supplementing this fund of 

knowledge is the fact that Food Studies is currently on the rise, with young Rhetoric 

Chicanx scholars like Steven Alvarez, Santos Ramos, and Consuelo Salas leading the 

way. The history and cultural impact which Mexican food has had and is currently 

having in the US represent a complex body of cultural material and mythological 

knowledge. It calls up a reservoir of rhetorical dimensions where writing and rhetoric 

teachers can find excellent tools for whetting the rhetorical skills and appetites of their 

students. 

Just as all teachers are situated differently with the diverse circumstances 

surrounding their roles as teachers, so too are our students, who occupy the most 

crucial part of the rhetorical situation which makes up all college writing classes. Where 

white students will most often occupy dominant positions in most English classes, 

their presence isn’t marked by having to work against the grain of assimilation like it 



can be and often is for many Mexican Americans. To their credit, white students do 

enroll in a class focusing on Mexican food but can clearly be disadvantaged because 

they often have no organic knowledge of the culture and of the social and political 

history of Mexico and its diverse variety of foods, there and in the US. Their 

knowledge of Spanish is often also quite limited if not altogether nonexistent. Because 

of the effects of white colonization, they must tread lightly in a class focusing on 

Mexican food taught by a brown professor whose origins are unquestionably Mexican. 

Their understanding of Mexican cultural foodways and of the people creating them 

often thrives on stereotypes which for them are almost always laughable. If it weren’t 

for the fact that they are enrolled in an upper-level English class in a major American 

university, a course like this, which could otherwise operate exclusively on superficial 

racialized stereotypes, would be a breeze for them. Their rhetorical situation in a class 

like this serves notice that colonizing tactics like racialized stereotypes and of 

essentializing ethnic human figures are grounds for failure. 

Aside from white students, the school where I teach also draws African 

Americans, Mexican Americans, as well as students whose heritage stems from Latin 

American countries. There are also students from racially blended families, with half 

of that blend often being Mexican. Thus far, the kinds of students this class draws 

have largely been ethnically, racially, and culturally mixed, as well as notably mixed by 

gender and sexual preference. Because my classes represent a vision of the future of 

this country, how we manage ourselves in our mixed rhetorical situation has become 

increasingly important. We nevertheless have to remember that this upper-division 

English class at my school still mainly draws white students—but all that’s changing. 

Increasingly, all classes at my University are mixed, and most of the classes I teach, 

including my Mexican food classes, are no exception. These mixed students, like in 

most all my classes, obviously represent part of a rhetorical situation that I as their 

teacher must entertain, just as I, as a Chicano, have long represented a part of my 

students’ rhetorical situation when they are writing for my classes. In my Mexican food 

writing classes, situated as they are in a central Texas university, students come from 

all over Texas, so our discussions often cover predictable and at the same time 

surprising cultural dimensions related to Mexican food. 

The school where I work became a Hispanic-Serving Institution, an HSI, 

about three years ago. Since that time, our campus has become a minority-majority 

school. The difference this change has made in student demographics is nothing short 

of astounding, given that this school has historically been populated predominantly by 

white students. This change, though, is unlike the diversification which occurred in the 

late 60s and early 70s when many universities began implementing open-admissions 



policies. The students of color we’re getting in greater numbers today at Texas State 

University are meeting entrance requirements which make almost all of them above 

average. What I mean to suggest by this is that these students of color come to us as 

talented individuals, indeed. The Mexican American students we’re getting today, like 

their white counterparts, increasingly come to us with middle-class backgrounds. They 

have a level of ethnic cultural sophistication in part afforded to them by the Internet 

and other popular culture influences as well as by their social class. When film director 

Robert Rodriguez, a student of Américo Paredes, came to campus to give The LBJ 

Distinguished Lecture a couple of years ago, the line of students waiting to get in went 

on for blocks. While many of those students were white hipsters, some of them were 

Chipsters—Chicanx hipsters, who, once again, served to demonstrate a level of ethnic 

cultural awareness currently in vogue in American society. 

From my experience, the Mexican American students I teach remain a mixed 

group. Some are immigrants, some children of immigrants, and fewer still are third-, 

fourth-, or fifth-generation Mexican Americans, much like the social scientific studies 

(that I have seen) reveal. On some level, these students each have a connection, in 

some way, to what Paredes once called Greater Mexico, and as we should all know, 

there are many different kinds of Mexican cultures— both in Mexico and the US. In 

Texas and certainly at Texas State University, Texas Anglos and African Americans on 

some level also have a connection to Mexican cultures, the affinity often being closer 

for African Americans than for Texas Anglos. The connections they all have, if they’re 

from Texas, can vary, but none can deny having some connection based on some 

understanding of Mexican cultures, especially if they come from larger Texas cities. 

For many of these students, their understanding of Mexican cultures, to the extent that 

they have any at all, clearly can come to them through the Mexican food they consume. 

When they enroll in my writing class focused on Mexican food, they know what they’re 

signing up for. In fact, it’s been interesting for me to note this semester that each of 

the students in my class has worked in some kind of restaurant or other, and not 

necessarily at jobs flipping burgers. So, they come to my class because on some level 

they have a fascination with and some understanding of the topic of Mexican food. 

There’s no doubt that Mexican food, in all its diversity, has hit its stride in current 

American popular culture. It’s a wildly popular topic today. 

Mexican food, as we all know, comes in many different forms. Gustavo 

Arellano (2010) all but conceded that no matter what shape or form that Mexican food 

takes, it’s still Mexican food and should be classified as such, which is quite an 

admission on his part. In his highly acclaimed book Taco USA, Arellano (2010) 

documented how wide the range of possibilities was, and had been historically, in the 



US, to say nothing of the wide range which exists in Mexico itself. No matter if we’re 

talking about tamales, burritos, or enchiladas, to name just three types of Mexican 

food, the wide-ranging variety across the countless Mexican restaurants and homes, 

where it can be found served, is striking. From high cuisine restaurants to other not 

so high sit-down restaurants, and in fast-food haunts and street-side taquerias and food 

trucks, the variety of what is served makes any definitive categorization difficult to pin 

down. No matter what type of Mexican food we’re talking about, whether it’s mole or 

dishes serving nopales, the wide range makes them difficult to categorize definitively. 

So, when a writing class with students as diverse as they currently are encounters 

Mexican food as a type of cultural topic, a comparably wide range of views that people 

have toward Mexican food shouldn’t come as a surprise. This mixed context of 

studying and writing about Mexican food recreates an important part of the ethnic 

rhetorical situations found in writing classes throughout the country as well as beyond. 

How we reached this point (where writing and rhetoric students can write 

about their complex relationships with Mexican food) reflects how encompassing 

Rhetoric and Composition Studies has become. Today, there’s almost no topic we 

can’t cover in our writing and rhetoric classes, something textbook companies have 

yet to realize completely. Mexican food as a topic offers up rhetorical dimensions 

which present students with the possibility of exploring and analyzing the complexities 

in their lives and in the world where they currently live. For some students, if we take 

what they write as any indication of how they think and situate themselves against a 

current topic of popular culture like Mexican food, then, once again, we see a wide 

spectrum of views. This wide spectrum of perspectives reflects how richly complicated 

and absurd the topic of Mexican food can sometimes be. For instance, some students 

actually gauge the value of an outing to a Mexican restaurant by the chips they’re served 

as a preliminary aperitif. If the chips aren’t good, then their whole experience at this 

Mexican ethnic restaurant is also not good. What this uncomplicated view reflects, of 

course, is a shallowness of thinking that evades other complexities found in most 

Mexican restaurants in the US. The level of superficial thinking can, of course, be 

gauged and assessed further by the ethnic identity, the gender or sexual preference or 

social class level of the person settling on this type of view. What on Earth is this 

person thinking, when saying that the quality of an entire Mexican restaurant 

experience is based solely on the chips? One doesn’t have to be a Mexican American 

to see a lack of critical thinking in a view such as this. 

Leaving aside the fact that there are indeed some bad chips served in some 

Mexican restaurants, how students situate themselves in places serving Mexican food 

provides a goldmine of rhetorical possibilities for analysis. Such places have historically 



been fraught with what are sometimes highly contentious rhetorical dynamics. And 

Mexican restaurants are not the only places where such contentious dynamics can be 

found. My college students, no matter their ethnic identity, almost categorically come 

from middle-class backgrounds. College entrance exams, it is now well known, 

measure nothing more than a student’s social class status. And as we all know, getting 

a college education today means that these same students are more readily assimilating 

middle-class values. 

One such value which people in the middle class have adopted widely is the 

convenience of eating out and of not having to cook their meals at home. And one 

thing my students have confirmed is that, again, no matter their ethnic identity, very 

few of them are cooking anymore. Convenience for them has become the most 

sought-after quality of most of their situations, and in relation to what students are 

eating, what we now know is that for most of them, convenience means that they are 

not cooking. What one would think this situation would mean for Mexican American 

college students, who hold their culture closely is that the skill of cooking Mexican 

food has been saved and nourished through constant practice. However, if one were 

to think this about them, that they are conserving important aspects of their Mexican 

food heritage, then one would be incorrect. Surmising that their assimilation into white 

mainstream culture is proceeding along unabated would also be incorrect, thus 

presenting before us a rather striking conundrum. That is, it’s simply too inconvenient 

for them to set aside time to cook a meal, any meal from any ethnic group, and such 

is the reality for most of our current college students, many of whom come to us with 

middle-class aspirations and increasingly from middle-class lives. 

Eating out, though, isn’t a convenience which many Mexican American 

students from working-class backgrounds can afford. The sexist division of labor 

found in many Mexican American homes remains a constant, even today, but this 

division of labor is one which has been dissipating with every successive generation. 

With more education comes the attainment of a higher social class status for more and 

more Mexican Americans. Obviously, there are cultural implications when such 

upward mobility happens, which for our writing students can raise rhetorical questions 

about the assimilation of mainstream values which can obviously complicate how 

they’re situated when it comes to writing about Mexican food. Jody Aguis Vallejo 

(2012) stated in Barrios to Burbs: The Making of the Mexican American Middle Class, that for 

many Mexican Americans, the move up in social class status doesn’t necessarily mean 

a loss of culture. For many in her study, assimilation away from their ethnic Mexican 

cultural ways isn’t necessarily automatic, nor is it merely symbolic; something 



celebrated only on commercialized holidays like when whites celebrate St. Patrick’s 

Day throughout the country. 

There is no doubt that Mexican culinary foodways have become highly 

commercialized, something which has been going on for more than a century. A recent 

news report from San Antonio, for instance, reported that a very popular chain of 

tamale restaurants from the lower Rio Grande Valley, Delia’s Tamales, is opening up 

a new restaurant in San Antonio, over 200 miles north of the Valley. When Delia’s 

Tamales opened up in the Valley, now with six locations in the mid-Valley, their 

commercial success has skyrocketed. During Thanksgiving and Christmas, the most 

popular tamale season of the year, they post security guards at the entrances of their 

restaurants to ensure no one creates any trouble fighting over their precious 

commodity. Having security guards posted there is almost unheard of in any other 

restaurant that I know of, whether it be a Mexican restaurant or not. While Delia’s 

Tamales is not the only local restaurant making and selling tamales year-round, they’ve 

succeeded where few others have even ventured to go on such a widespread scale. 

Their wildly successful venture obviously is due to the fact that their tamales are 

damned good, and good for folks from all walks of life. The rhetorical dynamics 

surrounding their highly successful venture undoubtedly can only mean that people 

like Delia have figured out the cultural culinary rhetorical dynamics contextually 

surrounding her environment. Certainly, there was some marketing involved in the 

commercial success of Delia’s Tamales, but more than even the rising number of 

people entering the middle class, the main reason for their widespread commercial 

success is based on Mexican culture—and not just any Mexican culture. Their tamales 

are unique and native to the Texas Mexican Valley culture of that region, which, as 

Gloria Anzaldúa (1987/1999) pointed out, is a unique borderlands culture. Places like 

Delia’s Tamales represent but one example of a highly complex rhetorical 

phenomenon which our college writing students have much to learn from. All the 

ethnically-based restaurants found throughout the entire country, though, can serve as 

sites for rhetorical analysis. The main reason for why we should have Chicanx college 

students analyze Mexican food and the sites where it’s produced and consumed 

represents an act which pushes back against restrictive assimilative forces which have 

long been holding too many of us back in American academia. 

Back in 1989, I attended my first academic conference where I presented a 

paper for the first time just up the road in Seattle. I had traveled from Columbus, 

Ohio, in March, and on my flight from Chicago to Seattle, down below, all I could see 

was the Great Plains, all covered in snow, and the whiteness of the sight is one I’ll 

never forget. When I landed, I remember thinking how far away I was from my home 



in south Texas where it almost never snows because of the sub-tropical climate—it 

felt so far away and seeing all that whiteness didn’t help any. In the paper I presented 

at that conference in Seattle, I argued that college composition teachers should 

incorporate ethnic cultural topics in their classes. Surprisingly enough, my paper was 

so well received that, afterwards, I was kidnapped by some basic writing tutors, all of 

them people of color and all from the basic writing center at the University of 

Washington-Seattle. They took me to what must’ve been Pike Place Market and 

straight to a hole-in-wall Mexican restaurant there. At this nook of a place, I had the 

privilege of eating some of the best Mexican food I had had away from home ever 

since having to live in Ohio for my graduate studies there. The special hospitality I 

enjoyed on that day made my trip across the country absolutely worthwhile and special. 

It affirmed my thinking about the importance of using aspects of our cultural identity 

to develop the literacy skills of Mexican Americans. The message I had come to Seattle 

to deliver had resonated with my hosts so much that it sent me back home even 

stronger in my beliefs. 

Thirty years later, we as Mexican Americans find ourselves living in a country 

where a deep racism has once again raised its ugly head. At the same time, more of us 

have risen up the social and educational ranks which this country affords and which 

we have worked very hard to obtain. Yet, our assimilation into mainstream culture is 

still being questioned, as evidenced recently by Tom Brokaw’s comments and apology 

about Hispanics needing to work harder at assimilation (Garcia, 2019). Our presence 

in this country has a long and complicated history, one fraught with violence but also 

with many victories against the suppression of our presence in this country. These 

victories, in my view, make me see our future as bright, in part because today, there 

exists at least one vehicle which has long been helping us carry ourselves into the 

mainstream and the mainstream into our presence. That vehicle, of course, is Mexican 

food. It is a vehicle which, much like our history, is fraught with many rhetorical 

dimensions which all of us can use in our writing classes to create a greater 

understanding of the complexities which, more than anything else, are working to bind 

us together rather than working to tear us apart—bad chips notwithstanding. 

Endnotes 

1. Land acknowledgement – Chief Placido memorial statue. (2020). Retrieved March 

21, 2020, from http://www.toursanmarcos.com/attractions/arts/chief-placidomemorial-statue.html 



2. This was a paper presented at the University of Washington-Tacoma, May 1, 2019. 

I wish to acknowledge Rubén Casas for inviting me to present this paper and do a 

workshop on the same topic. 

References 

Aguis Vallejo, J. (2012) Barrios to Burbs: The Making of the Mexican American Middle 

Class. Stanford University Press 

Anzaldúa, G. (1987/1999). Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute 

Books. 

Arellano, G. (2010) Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. Scribner. 

Garcia, S. E. (2019, January 28). Tom Brokaw apologizes for comments about 

Hispanics and assimilation. New York Times. Retrieved March 19, 2020, from 

https://www.nytimes.com 

Gilbert, S. M., Porter, R. J., & Riechl, R. (Eds.). (2016). Eating Words: A Norton 

Anthology of Food Writing. W. W. Norton & Company. 

Inoue, A. B. (2015) Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing 

for a Socially Just Future. Parlor Press. 

Inoue, A. B. (2019, April 4). How do we language so people stop killing each other, or what do 

we do about white language supremacy? In Chair’s Address for the Conference on 

College Composition and Communication. Retrieved March 4, 2020, from 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brPGTewcDYY 

San Miguel Jr., G. (1987). Let All of Them Take Heed: Mexican American and the 

Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910-1981. University of Texas 

Press. 

Villanueva, V. (1993). Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. NCTE 

Publications. 


Originally from the lower Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, Jaime Armin Mejía teaches 

at Texas State University. He has long been active in bringing together related issues from 

Rhetoric and Composition Studies and Chicanx Studies, especially as these have to do 

with understanding of bicultural literacies originating from Chicanx cultures. 










Local singers pay tribute to the victims through song. 




Candles along the fence light up the memorial at night. 




People gather at night along the line of crosses. 




Inventing PLEA: A Social History of a College-Writing 

Initiative at a Chilean University 

Ana M. Cortés Lagos 

Syracuse University, on land of the Onondaga Nation, firekeepers of the 

Haudenosaunee. 1 

There are currently several publications that trace the development of Writing Studies 

from their emergence (which we could locate in the late 90’s) to today (Ávila Reyes, 

González-Alvarez, & Castillo, 2013; Molina & Quintana, 2016; Natale & Stagnaro, 

2016) in Latin America. Some of these studies suggest that this development happened 

in permanent contact with traditions in North America and Australia. In fact, the 

approximate dates we usually identify with the emergence of the field coincide with 

the first publications by a notable Argentinian scholar named Paula Carlino, who was 

the first to perform comparative studies on writing practices in the United States, 

Canada, and Australia (Molina & Quintana, 2016). Later, Carlino co-edited Writing 

Programs Worldwide, with Chris Thaiss, Gerd Braüer, Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams, and 

Aparna Sinha. These contacts and collaborations indicate the intertwining of academic 

and personal histories across borders and traditions (Donahue, 2009), which not 

always register in scholarly writing. These collaborators and their traditions have 

unequal standings, access, and power in global academia (Lillis & Curry, 2010). One 

consequence of such power imbalances is that when scholars located at the “margins” 

engage in broader (international, cross-border) scholarly conversations they are often 

read as emerging from and indebted to the “central,” hegemonic traditions 

(Canagarajah, 2002, p. 10). 

By this, I don’t mean to say that such learning and borrowing from other 

(perhaps more self- aware and longer standing) traditions and disciplines did not 








happen. However, I would like to argue that rather than stemming out of other 

traditions (ones perceived as dominant or hegemonic), the Latin American tradition(s) 

engaged with them as a natural and necessary part of excellent scholarly work, which 

requires researching what others have found on the subject matter. It is precisely this 

teasing out of the local and the global and the tracing of the circulation and exchange 

of theories and concepts that I find most interesting. 

I attempt to trace the social history of a writing program in Chile. Specifically, 

I focus on PLEA, the Programa de Lectura y Escritura Académica (Program for 

Academic Reading and Writing) of the Pontificia Universidad Católica (PUC) de Chile. 

Recent scholarship about Writing Studies in Latin America describes the kind of 

institutional and social contexts in which the study and development of instructional 

models around writing emerged in the region. However, the motivations, 

coincidences, and interpersonal dynamics that helped to shape this field—and 

particularly PLEA—in Chile are seldom accounted for, in part, because this 

development is fairly recent and, in part, because narrative accounts or social histories 

are disciplinary approaches in Writing Studies that generally escape the way this field 

defines itself in Latin America. However, through narrative accounts and social 

histories, I attempt to show how a local tradition grounded in French functional 

linguistics took up the Bakhtinian concept of genre; developed questions, lines of 

inquiry, and pedagogies around the problem of college writing; and found relevant 

echoes in North American WAC/WID scholarship and Systemic Functional 

Linguistics. This social history will also show how inspired grassroots work can 

produce powerful curricular and institutional transformations. Thus, a social history 

of PLEA can provide a view into the kind of academic practices, social dynamics, and 

communications across borders that shaped Writing Studies in areas other than the 

United States. I believe that such histories are crucial for understanding the different 

traditions, theoretical displacements, and (re)inter-pretations that configure the 

Writing Studies field on a transnational scale. 

The development of PLEA and the study of writing at this institution 

continues to evolve since I began collecting data for this study. For the purpose of this 

article, I focus only on the initial years of this initiative: its creation, deve-lopment of 

an early self-awareness, and implementation. In order to (re)construct this history, I 

conducted five interviews with people who played a role in the emergence and 

development of PLEA: Natalia Ávila Reyes, Christian Peñaloza Castillo, Soledad 

Montes, Natalia Leiva, and Riva Quiroga. 2 I also worked with Natalia Ávila Reyes’ 

personal digital archive that consists of a series of Microsoft Word, Excel, and 

PowerPoint materials, and Adobe PDF files related to the development of WAC 


Inventing PLEA 

interventions in three different disciplines: Nursing, Civil Construction, and 

Engineering. These disciplines provided a variety of genres, including writing 

assignments, rubrics, lists of frequent errors in student writing, presentations for 

disciplinary teacher training, and minutes of agreements between disciplinary experts 

and writing specialists. Working with these different pieces of a puzzle involved that I 

move back and forth between interviews, archival materials, institutional documents, 

and other secondary sources in an attempt to construct a chronology and contrast my 

interviewees’ assertions and interpretations with other available information about the 

particular location in time and space in which PLEA emerged. 

I present this history with a sense of personal urgency because the individual 

stories that shape institutional accounts are fragile. Even as I tried to gather nar-ratives 

and documents for recent events, I came across how dates and facts slip from memory 

and how records were irredeemably lost. The people whom I discuss here are my 

mentors; PLEA is part of my own training as a scholar and an important piece of the 

path that brought me to work in Writing Studies. The tradition in which this program 

inscribes itself—if such a tradition exists (see Tapia-Ladino et al., 2016)—is my own 

tradition, and by understanding it, I understand my own history as a researcher and 

scholar. Hence, the process of writing this social history has re-quired that I constantly 

interrogate my own interpretations; search for corroborative support across the 

narratives of my different sources; and contrast these personal histories with other 

scholarly sources that might help me reconstruct the phenomena I aim to describe. 

However, let me address a few limitations. Because the participants I interviewed 

are people I care for and trust, I feel a responsibility to document this social 

history in a way that does not break my trust with such individuals. Thus, I have tried 

to be fair and respectful to the participants who worked to aid me in the creation of 

this project. For this reason, I have decided to omit the names of many collaborators 

whom I did not interview from PLEA because these individuals did not have an 

opportunity to contribute in a direct manner. Instead, I created spaces for the main 

actors involved in this history, so these individuals are noted, and their voices inserted 

in this text. But I resisted my impulse to insert long transcriptions from the interviews 

in the text. Finally, writing this article involved Spanish to English translations, so I 

attempted to preserve the tone and expressive quality of these translations. However, 

because I may fail at this effort, all original extracts from the interviews can be found 

as endnotes (in Spanish) throughout this article. 



Social and Institutional Context 

Several related social transformations took place in the Chilean educational landscape 

during the first decade of the 2000s: an expansion of the middle class and a broadening 

of high school education coverage produced an increase in access to the university 

(Neira, 2004). At the same time, in response to this expansion and diversification in 

the student population in higher education, there was a sudden growth in the number 

of higher education institutions. Indeed, this expansion in access to the university is 

documented often by publications dealing with the emergence and development of 

the PLEA writing program (Ávila Reyes, González-Alvarez, & Castillo, 2013; Sánchez 

& Montes, 2016). These changes are also discussed by Hernán Neira (2004): 

Most of these new students have arrived at higher education due to an expansion of 

the high-school education coverage that reached 90% in 2000, in an average of 10 

years. Though the wealthiest quintile is still the most relevant user of college 

education, the rise in student population is due mainly to the fact that the second, 

third, and even fourth quintiles are now candidates to university. 3 (par. 10) 

Now, broadening access to higher education and the increase in student population 

diversity all imply positive transformations, but the way this process unfolded in Chile 

is not altogether unproblematic. As Neira and other writers (Cruz-Coke, 2004; 

Redondo, 2005) suggest, these new students were not harmoniously integrated into 

the university system in a way that produced the equal access to education that would 

be expected from such an expansion. Rather, the response to this sudden growth in 

the demand for higher education emerged from actors that radically changed the logics 

and dynamics of the provision of education: “a generation of businessmen with the 

capacity to create universities, supported by power groups and access to capital,” 

according to Neira (2004, par. 8). 6 These capitalists were not necessarily motivated by 

profit, but by an interest to promote their own conservative ideologies. Thus, most of 

these non-traditional students that arrived at the university did so on the “margins” of 

the system, so to speak. 

Understanding the demands that emerged with the expansion of access to 

university requires a brief explanation regarding the larger context of Chilean higher 

education. Chilean higher education institutions can be grouped roughly into two 

groups: those that belong to the Consejo de Rectores and those that do not. The 

organization Consejo de Rectores de las Universidades Chilenas (CRUCH or Counsel 

of Rectors of Chilean Universities) was created in 1954 and was designated to 



coordinate the work of universities in the country, with the purpose of generating 

standards and guidelines for the excellence of higher education research institutions. 

Traditionally, it grouped the most prestigious public and private universities across the 

nation, including the two oldest Chilean universities: Universidad de Chile (founded 

in1842) and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC) (founded in1888). During 

the 1980s, the military dictatorship promoted the expansion of the educational system 

by encouraging the participation of private investors in this sector. Thus, numerous 

private universities and technical education institutes emerged (Gonzáles & Espinoza, 

2011). A limited number of these new universities, since then, have developed into 

prestigious institutions in the higher educational system. However, a number of these 

institutions have failed as educational projects (Cruz-Coke, 2004). This failure 

translates in the incapacity to obtain accreditation, and even proving uncapable to 

prepare their students for national standard examinations (Rodríguez Ponce, 2012). 

Hence, while the expansion of access to higher education in Chile was a fact, 

the inclusion of social and educational differences associated with this transformation 

is, in great part, a myth. While the numbers reflect positive change in terms of broader 

access to university across socio-economic groups, in practice, students from lowermiddle 

classes seldom share the same classrooms with students from more affluent 

socio-economic backgrounds. Students from the fifth quintile usually attended 

traditional universities (members of the Consejo de Rectores), but students from other 

quintiles accessed mostly the newer private universities. Thus, the particular ways in 

which this transformation of higher education was experienced at the Universidad 

Católica can be explained by these differences and other institutions in terms of 

institutional histories and composition of student bodies. Universidad Católica is, after 

all, a member of the Consejo de Rectores, a traditional university attended–at the time– 

by a majority of affluent students. According to Ávila Reyes (2017): 

About the diversification of students that arrived to the University…though that 

expansion did take place in Chile, it’s a bit thorny to say that it was very high. Well 

yes, the expansion in Chile was of something like the 1000%...Crazy! But from that 

percentage, the number that made it into the Universities of the Consejo de Rectores 

was very small. So yes. […] Católica did grow. A lot! When I did my undergraduate 

studies, there were like 5000 students. 4 It’s nuts how it grew in that decade! 5 But that 

exponential growth shown by the global statistics. That was concentrated in the 

newer, private universities, not the traditional Universities of the Consejo de 

Rectores. 7 



Because Universidad Católica is a traditional university, this institution did not 

necessarily experience substantial changes in terms of the composition of its student 

body. Still, this institution began to promote a series of internal trans-formations 

maybe due to rapid growth in the size of the student population, perhaps as an attempt 

to meet international standards, or perhaps to adhere to a general turn toward studentcentered 

education in Chile. 8 The Plan for the Development of the University, from 

2000 to 2005, acknowledges the need for college education to adapt to a changing 

world and to provide students with broad, flexible transferable skills that will make 

them more competitive in the contemporary job-market: 

For example, the capacity to deal with complex problems in creative ways, be good 

team workers, communicate effectively in oral and written form, speak a foreign 

language, have a great capacity to process information, etc. 

To achieve the previous goals US universities are reinforcing and improving 

their general education programs, expanding active learning, promoting 

undergraduate research, and extending academic exchange programs with foreign 

universities (UC, 2010). 10 

Thus, at this particular institution, the pedagogical turn translated into a search 

for strategies to promote comprehensive skills and abilities in students and the 

development of college pedagogies—a process that emulated, in a way, the U.S. model 

of a university. A study conducted by the Chilean scholars Verónica Villarroel and 

Daniela Bruna (2014) indicates that this turn toward a model based on competencies 

in higher education took place in Chile in the late 1990s, following international trends 

in education, and defined competencies as contextualized, transferable skills. Villarroel 

and Bruna also mention several controversies that arose with the introduction of these 

guidelines, among those who believed these were necessary for the education of critical 

citizens and those who believed this paradigm put unnecessary strain on university 

professors, but Villarroel and Bruna do not go as far as to analyze the rhetoric around 

this turn. 

At Universidad Católica, effective oral and written communication were some 

of the key skills highlighted by this institutional plan. To this purpose, one measure 

that began to be developed was the implementation of a campus-wide written 

communication exam. The first step in this direction involved the design of the test 

and a rubric to assess writing, which called for experts in psychometrics working at 

MIDE UC, 9 a Universidad Católica center dedicated to this kind of work. The second 

step was to evaluate this instrument in practice. This step required that a team of 



experts in language be involved, such as professors from the Linguistics Department 

like Marcela Oyanedel, Ana Maria Harvey, and Jose Luis Samaniego as well as a few 

students studying linguistics. Natalia Ávila Reyes and Christian Peñaloza Castillo were 

among those students. 

Before the end of this five-year period, the university implemented a written 

communication exam, which was a graduation requirement for all undergraduate 

students. As the results of this test, scores and rates of approval per academic unit 

began to circulate at the administrative level and concerns about writing grew. Cristian 

Peñaloza Castillo (2017) comments, 

The thing is that, beyond scores, there is the problem. A problem that everyone knew 

that was there but that was now being quantified. And so, some academic units start 

manifesting their interest in, normally remedial courses…but of doing something. 

Thus, before 2003, writing had become an institutional concern at Pontificia 

Universidad Católica. 

I find that there may be some parallels between the way this local writing 

initiative developed and particular moments in Rhetoric and Composition Studies in 

the United States. As it so happens in the U.S., the emergence of first-year writing 

courses coincided with a national expansion of access to higher education at the 

beginning of the twentieth century (Berlin 1987; Bazerman, 2014; Bazerman et al., 

2016). However, as shown throughout this section, this development does not neatly 

mirror 1970s literacy crisis narratives (Lamos, 2011; Mutnick, 2000). Indeed, PLEA at 

Universidad Católica was not created so much as a reaction to a diversification of the 

student body, but rather as part of a transformation of the institutional model that 

aimed to align the Universidad Católica with the United States’ higher education 

model. However, this top-down agenda to mirror the U.S. university as an educational 

model was not grounded in any general pedagogical or curricular design theories, even 

less with theories about writing and writing peda-gogies. So, despite these clear 

historical parallels, the writing exam, the first-year writing course, and the first research 

on writing implemented at this institution were all driven during this period by local 

theories, questions, and problems; and all with little to no knowledge or contact with 

Rhetoric and Composition disciplinary work in the U.S. For some time, a small group 

of people invented Writing Studies locally. 



“We were so young”: Inventing Writing Studies 

Between 2003 and 2006, three studies related to academic writing were published by 

faculty from the Linguistics Department of PUC (Samaniego, Oyanedel & Mizón, 

2003; Harvey & Muñoz, 2006). Both Ana Maria Harvey and Marcela Oyanedel were 

key figures in this research: Oyanedel was trained in the tradition of French grammar 

and functional linguistics, and she was a pedagogue at heart. Harvey was an acute 

researcher in the field of discourse studies, always aware of the more recent 

developments in the field. Both, as well as José Luis Samaniego (a grammarian at 

Universidad Católica) played an important role in the organization of the ALED 

Conference 11 that took place as early as 2001 at Universidad Católica. The theoretical 

and rhetorical traditions –French grammar, linguistic functionalism, and discourse 

analysis– by these women and the School of Letters they constituted at the time at 

Universidad Católica are also important to delineate within the context of producing 

the first regional studies on college writing. 

Natalia Ávila Reyes appears to draw some attention to a time when these 

research lines and the emerging interest in writing as an object of study and the 

institutional demands around writing instruction were all seeming to converge but had 

not yet been fully made sense of. However, a visit by an early Latin American specialist 

in writing may have acted like an oracle to shed some light, a sign perhaps that some 

attuned scholars were already seeing the development of a new area of study for this 

region. This visit is also a reflection, perhaps, of an institutional context suddenly 

receptive to this kind of research and a foreshadowing of the disciplinary spaces that 

would take on the task of developing it further in the years to come. However, in that 

moment, there were still no writing-specific courses in place at the university, and while 

data was being gathered, this group of scholars was still trying to figure out best ways 

of approach, as Natalia Ávila Reyes points out: 12 

Natalia: The first time I ever heard about this topic was in an ALED Conference that 

was organized at PUC, here on this campus (San Joaquín). It was tiny. And, to that 

ALED came Elvira Narvaja de Arnoux. Have you heard of her? From UBA 

(Univeristy of Buenos Aires). She invented these workshops, that don’t exist anymore, 

for the general education program of UBA. […] And those were the first courses that 

were taught. In fact, this is the first bibliography that I know of. It is a very linguisticworkshop 

approach, very similar to what we started doing here at Universidad 

Católica. 



Ana: Ah! So then, when you started designing the course, you thought: “We will do 

something similar to Narvaja’s” … 

Natalia: No. We started doing something similar because we were linguists. 

One of the first data collections conducted by Samaniego, Oyanedel, and 

Mizón (2003) to study college-student writing took place in the early 2000s, within the 

context of a research study titled “Function and quality of academic discourse.” 13 This 

research was supported by internal university funds called DICPUCs, which are 

awarded to research projects that had almost (but not quite) qualified for national 

funding. DICPUC includes funds for main researchers, research assistants, and 

materials. Natalia Ávila Reyes, Christian Peñaloza Castillo, and a few other research 

assistants, who at that time were advanced undergraduate and graduate students, 

worked on this project. 14 Apparently, they were all given the task of finding problems 

or criteria to evaluate samples of student writing: 

There what we did was we gathered texts very much flying by the seat of our pants, 

and then analyzed them, also flying by the seat of our pants. Obviously, what you did 

as a linguist, taking a text and analyzing what problems it had, was to construct 

inventories of errors 15 (Ávila Reyes, 2017). 

Their findings on student writing as part of exploratory research were published in an 

internal institutional report that is often cited by later works dealing with PLEA 

(though the report itself is somewhat difficult to find). Still, maybe one of the most 

important contributions of this study –besides the fact that it was the first, hence, a 

foundational study on writing conducted at this university– is that this study brought 

together a group of people that would later take on the development this kind of 

research. 

In fact, when the written communication exam was implemented, it was this 

team of student researchers that was also called to work on the evaluation process, 

beginning with the rubrics to assess students’ writing and ending with the actual 

written exams. By 2005, they designed and started teaching a writing instruction 

module at the Faculty of Letters in connection with the course “Introduction to 

Linguistics.” When the results of the written communication exam offered 

opportunities for comparisons among the average scores of different academic units, 

more and more faculty started requiring writing courses for their students. Also, as 

faculty across different schools started noticing the presence of lingering failing 



students in advanced levels of their undergraduate programs, concerns reached higher 

officials of the university’s administration, as Peñaloza Castillo (2017) points out: 

So, then the Provost Office said: “We can’t leave these lads hanging, or else they won’t 

be able to graduate.” And this is when summer courses were invented. […] I imagine 

the first must have been taught by Marcela Oyanedel, Jose Luis Samaniego, they must 

have taught some classes, but soon it was Natalia and me who were doing those 

courses. They were summer intensives. And there a group of student assistants started 

to come together. In fact, I remember that, for one version there were so many 

students enrolled that we had to have a morning and an evening session… 16 

What they started teaching in these courses –and the way they taught them– 

echoes the first research on writing conducted at the Linguistics Department of PUC. 

These studies were designed to address frequent errors in student writing, 

communicate the academic norms and conventions, and provide linguistic tools to 

construct coherent and cohesive texts. A solid tradition of grammar and linguistics was 

the core of this design. With time, the group of instructors added to these their 

knowledges of education. Much like the American scholars that raised critiques to 

current traditionalist approaches to error (Lu, 1991; Laurence; 1993) or who identified 

with Mina Shaughnessy’s work Erros and Expectations (1979), this group of Chilean 

scholars soon became aware that this kind of traditional or remedial approach centered 

on errors was inadequate for teaching writing at the university level. In the context of 

our interview, Christian Peñaloza Castillo reflects that the rationale behind this 

realization was probably influenced by a turn towards genres, functional grammar, and 

discourse analysis that had recently been introduced in the Linguistics Department by 

a group of professors and graduate students, together with an awareness about the 

specific features of disciplinary discourses (Hyland, 2004; Prior & Bilbro, 2012). 

This turn introduced theorists like Bakhtin, Medvedev, and Voloshinov. 

Indeed, an article by Oyanedel (published in 2006) and some course syllabi developed 

around the time suggest that the reception of the Bakhtinian concept of genre was 

mediated by a linguistics foundation that traced a trajectory from Ferdinand de 

Saussure, through structuralist linguists such as Roman Jakobson, Louis Hjemslev, and 

Émile Benveniste, and then functionalists like André Martinet and Jean Michel Adam 

(see also Feuillard, 2012). In this context, the concepts of text and genre came to “fill 

in a gap” that sentence-level linguistics could not make sense of; that of the text as a 

unit of meaning (Oyanedel, 2006, p. 10). Interestingly enough, these theorists also 



influenced the development of Writing Studies in the U.S. (Miller, 2005; Prior, 2009). 

Notably, Bakhtin’s theories heavily influence English studies (Devitt, 2004). 

Needless to say, by 2005 several writing courses were in place, and researchers 

conducted and published studies on writing and academic discourse. Even though 

other scholars (specifically from Universidad Católica de Valparaíso) published rather 

prolifically on academic writing at that time, the case of PUC was an interesting 

contribution because, at this particular location, Writing Studies emerged in relation 

with discourse studies. At this point, from the group of student assistants that began 

working on this project, at least Natalia Ávila and Christian Peñaloza were students 

with a master’s degree; their work as teachers and researchers was funded by small TA 

salaries and university funds. It was young people’s work: exploratory, passionate, but 

somewhat precarious. It still had not found a stable place within the institution, neither 

in terms of a clear location within one or more university departments or disciplinary 

areas, nor as a stable curricular structure, or in terms of sources of funding. The same 

can be said about Writing Studies at this particular time and place. 

Inventing Writing in the Disciplines: Finding WAC 

The PUC institutional plan regarding writing considered two fundamental actions. 

One action was the implementation of the written communication exam. The other 

action was a curricular intervention that was designed to be implemented in each 

academic unit and that consisted of what the University President called “marked 

courses.” These courses were selected more or less randomly and were designated as 

writing intensive courses: writing activities and writing assessment were important 

components of the syllabus. This move was, of course, an attempt to reproduce the 

U.S. model of writing intensive courses. However, the teachers designated to work on 

development and implementation became cognizant of this parallel somewhere during 

the design process, an awareness that further corroborated that the directions this 

initiative was taking made theoretical and practical sense in comparison to 

international experiences. 

So, once summer writing courses were established and academic departments 

were ready to count on an introductory, remedial writing course for students, faculty 

within those departments started to wonder how to implement the second part of the 

plan: writing in the disciplines. This part of the plan is when a new form of 

collaboration sprang into action between writing specialists and disciplinary specialists 

across campus. The Nursing School and the Civil Construction School became the 

first two departments to express an interest to implement this initiative. Later on, the 



Engineering School also jumped on board. Although for different reasons, the 

collaboration between the Nursing School and the Engineering School constituted 

crucial turning points in the history of PLEA. One of those turning points implied 

locating a broader disciplinary conversation within an international field of research 

(Writing Studies, Rhetoric and Composition); the other, locating a more powerful and 

stable source of funding for this emerging writing initiative. 

The Nursing School and Nurses 

During Natalia Ávila Reyes´s first encounter with Charles Bazerman, at a conference 

held in Chile around 2009, Bazerman had made a comment to her, according to her 

recollection, that was something like, “Yes, nurses are always leaders in WAC 

initiatives. I don’t know why. They are proactive, enthusiastic… I don’t know.” Some 

years later, Ávila Reyes was accepted at the Graduate Program at the University of 

California Santa Barbara, under the mentorship of Bazerman. In 2005, however, she 

was still trying to figure how to implement disciplinary writing courses at the Nursing 

School of PUC. Very soon after, her collaboration efforts produced unexpected 

outcomes. 

Part of the intervention at the Nursing School dealt with gathering and 

analyzing text samples; identifying genres and recurrent writing problems; and finally, 

generating writing assessment rubrics for this specific context. The intervention also 

involved carrying out a series of workshops for both faculty and student assistants. In 

these workshops, writing specialists met with disciplinary experts to discuss issues, 

such as how to use rubrics to evaluate student writing as well as discussing the 

fundamentals of teaching writing in the disciplines. These workshops were also used 

to address and de-stabilize common assumptions about writing, such as the idea that 

writing is a basic competence or the idea that writing amounts to remediating the 

failings of previous academic trajectories. Instead, learning how to write in a discipline 

was framed as a process of enculturation into the discipline, producing arguments 

supported by using scholarly references produced by disciplinary experts (Prior, 2013; 

Wenger, 1952/1998). Indeed, the work with the nursing school offered and 

opportunity to move away from the remedial towards a model that drew on specialist 

knowledge to design pedagogical interventions; in other words, pedagogy based on 

empirical research. 

As Peñaloza Castillo (2017) recounts, this approach was driven both by the 

group’s initiative as by the need to persuade campus authorities through the collection 

of “hard data”: 



To do this work right, beyond the theoretical background you are putting together, 

you need the support of statistics, because, when you talk to psychologists–who were 

the ones that had the control of the exam–or even when you talk with Main Campus, 17 

you need to show up with your quantitative data. Not just with an uncorroborated 

theoretical support. 18 

As Castillo points out, the collaborators of PLEA worked to gather empirical evidence 

to use as rhetorical resources to inform their practice and to negotiate the relevance 

and efficacy of the program with university administrators. 

Academics at the Nursing School made these actions possible due to their 

active interest to engage in this discussion. In fact, they were not only interested in 

performing better as teachers and adequately responding to student writing, but also 

developing a scholarly interest in ideas about academic writing pedagogies within their 

discipline. Moreover, they wanted to do some research and publish about this work 

and experience (Mantuliz, Salamanca, Ávila Reyes, et al., 2011). Ávila Reyes (2017) 

recounts, 

And they went to the data bases to do searches about writing, and… Oh! They found 

a tradition. That was somewhere around 2005 or 2006. So there, through the nurses, 

I got to read Paula Carlino, and I got to read people working on college writing in 

Australia, like Aitchinson… 19 

Indeed, it was through the collaboration with this group of nurses that Ávila 

Reyes encountered WAC scholarship for the first time. Thanks to this serendipitous 

event, the pedagogical and investigative approaches that resulted from this group at 

PUC suddenly became grounded in a clear and well-established theoretical framework, 

informed and defined by the work of scholars such as Susan McLeod, Charles 

Bazerman, David Olson, and Paula Carlino. This newfound scholarship was utilized 

to re-signify and re-interpret the understanding of academic conventions and genres 

and to cast a new light on ideas like the “marked courses” initiative that had been 

introduced at this university during the rise of institutional awareness about writing. 

Yet, whereas collaboration with the Nursing School emerged from academics in 

nursing interested to generate better pedagogical practices for their students, the 

collaboration with the Engineering School was triggered by institutional constraints. 



The Engineering School 

In 2007, the Engineering School of Universidad Católica went through an 

accreditation process conducted by the ABET international accreditation agency. 

Apparently, the Engineering School fulfilled all the requirements for accreditation 

before going through its assessment process except for one: this school had no 

disciplinary writing courses. Hence, for engineers, writing became a problem yet to be 

solved. While collaborations between engineers and writing specialists helped to get 

the process started, once writing specialists identified some predominant genres, 

relevant journals, and recurrent citation practices, engineers quietly retreated back and 

left writing to the writing specialists. 

The peculiarity of the Engineering School was its size. Generally, other schools 

at the Universidad Católica admitted between 30 to 100 students, but the Engineering 

School admitted four or five times that number. 20 At the time, the people working on 

writing in the university were still, basically, Ávila Reyes, Peñaloza Castillo, and a few 

other student assistants. However, to implement a writing course effectively within 

this discipline required faculty knowledgeable in WID (Writing in the Disciplines). 

Thus, around 2009, Engineering provided a permanent and sustainable source of 

funding that initiated a search for instructors, and PLEA was founded. 

PLEA experienced accelerated growth and continual development due not 

only to the WAC initiative in place and legitimacy across campus but also its source of 

funding and presence within the largest school at the university. The coordinators of 

the program recruited more young and emerging scholars to teach. Soon, the success 

and spirit of collaboration between PLEA groups created a certain glamour around 

the program that made it popular among undergraduate students. Hence, during this 

period, the best students of their cohort applied to work with PLEA as student 

assistants, and they labor was greatly appreciated for evaluating the written 

assignments produced by the 40 to 45 students per course, the enrollment norm at the 

Engineering School. Work in PLEA was further enriched by collaborators seeking 

common goals and outcomes, according to Ávila Reyes (2017): 

We held meetings with engineering instructors. We read texts among us. We had one 

day each week where we would read a bibliography and comment on it. We all made 

the course syllabus together, student assistants and instructors, with an equal right to 

voice. We changed those things that didn’t work from one semester to the next. All 



in the logic of action research, because we didn’t know anything. We were inventing 

the wheel in that sense. 21 

This kind of fully engaged collaborative work, both within the members of PLEA as 

well as with the discipline-specialists involved within the initiative, led to pedagogical 

models that emerged from empirical research gathered within the program. The 

dynamics of such labor dynamics lasted until 2011, when Ávila Reyes left Chile (and 

PLEA) to begin her doctoral studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. 

However, such work continues in that what was started was left in the hands of a 

group of former PLEA student assistants who are now graduate students in 

Linguistics. 

Conclusion: Recent Developments and Future Questions 

PLEA continues to grow as a provider of writing courses for different academic units 

at PUC. Since 2016, two other initiatives independent from PLEA were implemented 

to address writing at the university, no doubt influenced by the work from PLEA. One 

initiative is PED 22 (Programa de Escritura Disciplar or Program for Disciplinary Writing), 

a program designed for instructors to promote the use of writing as a tool for learning 

in academic disciplines. The other initiative is known as PRAC 23 (Programa de Apoyo a 

la Comunicación Académica or Program to Support Academic Communication), a writing 

center meant to support Universidad Católica’s student population. 

During 2014, a specialist in Systemic Functional Linguistics undertook the 

direction of PLEA. This theoretical perspective could introduce PLEA to broader 

conversations with this theory of language, as well as an additional methodology for 

the study of academic discourse, and a pedagogy in coherence with those orientations. 

The introduction of this framework may transform and unify the theoretical grounding 

of PLEA’s work in ways unimaginable as of yet. This new approach centers on 

systemic functional genre pedagogies: “In SFL approaches, the teaching-learning 

process is typically seen as a cycle which takes writers through modelling, joint 

negotiation, and independent construction” (Hyland, 2003, p. 26). A possible 

advantage of having one unified theoretical frame is that it allows each instructor to 

design and develop their course syllabi autonomously, while adhering to a common 

set of values and principles that orient the program as a whole. 

These recent developments show that the formation process of a project like 

PLEA is profoundly dynamic and in constant dialogue with thought outside Latin 

America: the U.S. tradition in Writing Studies first and the Systemic Functional 



Linguistics second. I say dialogue because the different influences that have shaped 

the development of this project have always been received by an academic culture with 

an identity of its own, which has operated as an active interpretation and appropriation 

of these elements. It is difficult to tell, at this point, what transformations in terms of 

research orientations and pedagogies these more recent contacts with international 

theories will produce. But, most probable, these dialogues between Writing Studies in 

Latin America and other traditions will continue to expand. For instance, conferences 

like ALES (Association of Latin American Writing Studies) –with a clear transnational 

orientation– continue to gain force and a presence in the international panorama. My 

hope is that other people will learn from histories like the one I have discussed as ways 

to help to interrogate the borders of national and regional traditions in Writing Studies 

and to raise relevant questions with regard to the theoretical exchanges, 

appropriations, and loans that shaped traditions located at the center of the global 

academic landscape (Canagarajah, 2002). 

When I began doing this research, back in 2017, my understanding of the field 

of Writing and Rhetoric Studies, and its development in Latin America looked very 

different. I was new to the field in the U.S. The ALES conference had just been 

formed, and I had not had the chance to look at my own tradition from a distance. 

Even the question (no longer standing) about the existence of a regional discipline and 

tradition seemed relevant and pressing. The present study, which now feels a bit 

outdated and naïf raises, however, some important questions. Can the field of writing 

and rhetoric be understood as one that develops across boundaries, rather than solely 

inscribed within national territories? How would understanding this field across 

borders transform the understanding of the discipline? What roles does the study of 

regional (marginal or “emergent”) traditions play in the understanding of the field at 

large? What are some productive ways of promoting a dialogue between traditions 

with unequal prestige and power? And, what are some of the principles and outcomes 

that we expect will come from such exchanges? 

Endnotes 

1. Land acknowledgment - College of arts and science of Syracuse University. (2020). 

Retrieved February 25, 2020, from https://thecollege.syr.edu/landacknowledgement/ 

2. Interviews with Natalia Ávila Reyes and Christian Peñaloza Castillo are cited 

intensely throughout the text, because they are co-founders of PLEA. Interviews 

with Soledad Montes, Natalia Leiva, and Riva Quiroga were essential for my 



understanding of recent developments concerning this program, but not cited 

directly in this article. 

3. Personal translation, of the original text in Spanish: “La mayoría de los nuevos 

alumnos han llegado a la educación superior gracias a la extensión de la cobertura 

de enseñanza media, que era del 90% en 2000, con un promedio de 10 años. Si 

bien el primer quintil es proporcionalmente, todavía, el mayor usuario de la 

enseñanza universitaria, el incremento de alumnos en ella se debe 

fundamentalmente a que alumnos de los quintiles segundo, tercero e incluso 

cuarto hoy son candidatos a ingresar a la universidad.” (Neira, 2004, web). 

4. Personal translation, of the original text in Spanish: “Alumnos y profesores no 

tienen hoy tanta capacidad para incidir en el sistema como una generación de 

empresarios con capacidad de crear universidades, apoyados por grupos de poder 

y acceso a capitales. Estos empresarios universitarios no necesariamente se 

mueven por el lucro, pues muchos lo hacen más bien motivados por incrementar 

la difusión y el poder de las ideologías -casi siempre conservadoras- que 

comparten.” (Neira, 2004, web). 

5. This number is hyperbolic. The actual number was closer to 15000. 

6. The 2000s. 

7. Original text in Spanish: “La diversificación de los sujetos que llegaron a la 

universidad. Si bien esa expansión en Chile es un poco mentiroso decir que fue 

súper alta… A ver, en Chile la expansión es como de un 1000% en diez años, una 

cuestión así de locos, pero de ese porcentaje los que llegaron a las universidades 

del Consejo de Rectores son muy poquitos. En el fondo, […] la Católica creció un 

montón. Cuando yo entré eran como 5000 estudiantes, si es ridículo como creció 

en esa década. Pero, ese crecimiento exponencial, de locos que muestran las cifras 

globales, se concentró más en las universidades privadas más nuevas, fuera del 

Consejo de Rectores.” 

8. It is challenging to point out specific literature about this topic. Although there are 

publications that suggest that such a shift was taking place during the first decade 

of the 2000s in Chile and maybe other countries in Latin America (Dettmer, 

2008), these references emanate from studies in different disciplinary pedagogies, 

e.g. medicine (Triviño et.al., 2009), engineering (Salgado et.al., 2012), nursing 

(Araya et.al., 2011). And, the terminology describing the turn may vary 

(competences, skills, integral training). 

9. Personal translation of the original text: “…la capacidad de enfrentar 

creativamente problemas complejos, trabajar bien en equipo, comunicarse 

eficazmente en forma verbal y escrita, hablar un idioma extranjero, tener una gran 



capacidad para procesar información, etc. // Para lograr los objetivos anteriores 

las universidades de los EEUU están reforzando y remozando sus programas de 

formación general, expandiendo el aprendizaje activo, favoreciendo la educación 

personalizada, promoviendo las actividades de investigación en el pregrado y 

expandiendo los programas de intercambio académico con universidades 

extranjeras.” (UC, 2010. Plan de desarrollo 2000-2005). 

10. Short for Centro de Medición de la Universidad Católica, Center for 

Measurements of Universidad Católica. 

11. ALED stands for Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios del Discurso, Latin 

American Asociation of Discourse Studies. This organization was founded 1995 

in Caracas, Venezuela (http://www.aledportal.com/aled.html). 

12. Original text in Spanish: “Natalia: […] yo la primera vez que escuché hablar de 

este tema fue en un encuentro ALED que se hizo en la PUC, aquí en San Joaquín. 

Chiquitito. Y a ese ALED, vino Elvira Narvaja de Arnoux. ¿La ubicas? La de la 

UBA. Y ella inventó unos talleres, que ya no existen, del ciclo básico de la UBA 

[…] Y estos fueron los primeros cursos que se hicieron y, de hecho, es la primera 

bibliografía que yo conozco. Ese enfoque es un enfoque bien de taller lingüístico, 

y es bien parecido a lo primero que empezamos a hacer nosotros en la 

Universidad Católica. // E.: Entonces ustedes cuando empezaron a pensar en el 

diseño dijeron, ya, algo parecido a lo de Narvaja… // Natalia: No. Empezamos a 

hacer algo parecido porque éramos lingüistas.” 

13. The original title in Spanish is "Función y calidad del discurso académico escrito." 

14. The names of people who were not interviewed or asked to contribute to this 

history was purposely omitted. 

15. Original text in Spanish: “…ahí lo que hicimos fue recopilar textos, a tontas y a 

locas, y analizarlos, también a tontas y a locas. Obviamente lo que hacías, como 

lingüista agarrando un texto y analizando qué problemas tiene, era eso: hacer 

catastros de problemas.” 

16. Original text in Spanish: “Casa Central (Subdirección Académica) dijo, “a estos 

chicos no los podemos dejar en el aire porque sino no van a poder aprobar sus 

licenciaturas”. Y se inventan los cursos de verano. El primer curso de verano […] 

me imagino que los primeros los debe haber dado Marcela Oyanedel, José Luis 

Samaniego, que algunas clases deben haber dado, pero ya los hacíamos 

básicamente Natalia y yo. Eran cursos durante enero. Intensivos. Y ahí también se 

empezó a armar un equipo de ayudantes. De hecho, recuerdo que en una versión 

se inscriben tantos estudiantes que tuvimos que tener una versión matinal y una 

versión vespertina…”. 



17. Meaning, people in high administrative positions in the university. 

18. Original text in Spanish: “Entonces para hacer bien este trabajo, más allá de todo 

este marco teórico que te estás armando, necesitas un sustento estadístico, porque 

cuando hables con los psicólogos, que eran los que tenían el control de la prueba, 

incluso cuando hables con Casa Central, llega con evidencia cuantitativa. No solo 

con el soporte teórico no corroborado.” 

19. Original text in Spanish: “Y se fueron a las bases de datos a buscar sobre 

escritura, y… ¡Oh! Encontraron que existía una tradición. Eso, fue el 2005, tal vez 

el 2006. Y ahí, a través de las enfermeras, yo llegué a leer Paula Carlino, llegué a 

leer gente que trabaja en Australia con temas de escritura universitaria, como 

Aitchinson…”. 

20. Contrast with recent data on the following site: 

http://www.psu.demre.cl/postulacion/carreras-requisitos-yponderaciones/pontificia-universidad-catolica 

(last visited, December, 2017). 

21. Original text in Spanish: “Nos juntábamos con profes de Ingeniería. Leíamos 

textos entre nosotros. Teníamos un día a la semana para leer bibliografía y 

comentarla. Hacíamos entre todos el programa, ayudantes y profesores, mismo 

nivel de voz. Cambiábamos las cosas que no habían resultado de un semestre a 

otro. Super en la lógica de investigación acción porque no sabíamos nada, 

estábamos inventando la rueda en ese sentido.” 

22. See PED’s website here: Programa de Escritura Disciplinar, 

web: http://escrituradisciplinar.uc.cl/ (last visited, December, 2017). 

23. See PRAC’s website here: Programa de Apoyo a la Comunicación Académica, 

web: http://comunicacionacademica.uc.cl/ (last visited, December, 2017). 

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Linguistique, 48(2), 27–58. 

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públicas y privadas. El conflicto de las universidades: entre lo público y lo privado, 

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Cambridge University Press. 


Ana María Cortés Lagos is a PhD student and writing instructor at Syracuse University 

in the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric and Composition. She also serves as 

assistant editor for the WAC Clearinghouse International Exchange series (Latin 

American section). Her work focusses on the development of the Latin American 

writing studies tradition, transnational writing studies, the geopolitics of knowledge 

production, as well as WAC and WID pedagogies. Her work has been published in 

journals like Textos, Onomazein, Transnational Literature, and Lenguas Modernas. 










An “El Chuco Strong” sign is displayed with prayer candles. 




A sign with the names of the El Paso victims flowed with flowers 

that visitors watered consistently until the memorial was moved to Ponder Park 



Cont. Interview with the El Paso Strong Mural 

Artist Gabe Vasquez 


EL PASO STRONG 

Figure 2: Gabe Vasquez and other artists working on mural. 

Gaby Velasquez photographer. 

ELVIRA: What inspired the El Paso Strong mural piece? What does this piece 

represent? 

GABE: All right. I can't say that I was directly affected by the tragedy that happened. 

I wasn't so hyped to heal the community. The way it happened was that this dude that 

I know he had permission to paint that wall and do graffiti on it. Told me that if we 

do it right now in the heat of the moment, you're gonna' get a bunch of attention. He 

wanted to do it like the billboard, which is just white and orange El Paso Strong. I 

thought that was kinda lame. No offense to him, but that's just so simple. I was like 



people died, bro. I'm trying to go hard for them. If this is about to be a memorial piece, 

I wanted to do them justice. I knew right off the bat what to do because that's just 

how I am. I'd like to say that somebody put that idea in my head. You know what, 

dude? Let's just do some simple letters and write El Paso Strong. And put the city 

inside of it. That's gonna' go hard. That's a lot. I was like I'll do it. I went out and 

bought some paint from the store. Went over there and started it. It didn't get real 

until I met people who were directly affected. I'm talking about a guy whose sister 

dropped to the floor to shield her baby. Broke the baby's arms. Got lit up and died 

with her husband. That one hit me the hardest. What a way to go out. Hearing all the 

stories. That put me on a mission. People started coming. It wasn't about the news. It 

was about people who were directly affected coming and bleeding their soul to me. 

Whoa, it means that much to you? Then I guess we gotta' kill it. 


ELVIRA: How does the El Paso Strong mural help with recovery and transformation? 

GABE: Well with recovery I'm gonna' have to say that time heals all wounds. Recovery 

is also very based inside the mind. Because if you can't let it go, you're gonna' be hurt 

forever. But you don't have to be. As far as transformation goes... Well this city has 

definitely stepped up its security game. As a society, our own little thing going on, I 

just hope that it was an eye opener to people. It could have been any one of us. So, at 

any time you can go. It will be your turn. Are you even ready? If you're not, you need 

to get out there and get ready. I myself still can't die a happy person. I still feel like I 

got so much more to do. That's only gonna' happen through pushing myself. I have a 

lot of love for the people that passed. If you don't push yourself and really chase after 



what your vision is, then you're never gonna' have a life that you want. That's what I 

want for everyone really. I feel like everyone chasing their desires. I feel like that uplifts 

our community as a whole. Improves everybody's life. 

ART PROCESS 


ELVIRA: How did you make the mural? How did you know when the piece was 

finished? 

GABE: This thing is how I do it. I know when I'm done when this thing (pointing to 

head) is quiet. Whenever you're painting a wall, if you don't step back a thousand times 

it's not a good job. You have to step back so many times. I've been doing this for 

fifteen years. I have a real good idea of what a solid mural looks like in my eyes. On 

top of that I have a friend who’s my partner. His name is Dave Navarro. He's a very 

critical person too. Together we create all these things. He's who I've been doing all 

my El Paso Strong Murals with. If I can please that guy, then I know that my art is 

amazing. That's good. I did a good job. All right. Dave's quiet. Good. 

ELVIRA: How did you meet Dave? 

GABE: His brother's Gems. Gems the reason I can do this. A lot happened that day. 

I may have lost some friends who weren't really my friends. But not Dave because 

Dave's actually my friend. And he stood by my side when everyone left. We've been 

painting a lot. Even before that we've been painting. It brought us closer together. I'm 

really happy for that. Life is a lonely place. 



HEALING THROUGH ART 


ELVIRA: How does the El Paso Strong mural help us heal? 

GABE: I'm gonna' be a future art teacher and wrestling coach in high school. In Texas 

you have to teach to coach. I love combat. I'm almost a black belt in a martial art. Inspiring 

others is what I love doing. It's kind of like, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a 

day. But if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. That right there, to me 

that's what inspiration is all about. Through inspiration healing just happens. I'm not trying 

to distract everyone from what happened. I just hope that through the concept that we're 

pushing that is El Paso Strong, that people will remember it and remember everything 

we've been through. I'm hoping that how hard I'm trying... shows them exactly how I feel 

about what I want to do with my life. I'd like for all this to be what I do for the rest of my 

life. Coming from El Paso it's kind of hard. If I was in California, it would be gravy. But 

in El Paso, it's a little challenging. We're a good arts community. I'm hoping through all 

of this it inspires others to go out there and chase their dreams. Diligently. Super 

committed. Just do it. I have a lot of love for the people who were affected. I wish there 

was more I could do besides just painting pretty things. If I could at least put this El Paso 

Strong mural that means a whole movement that we have. It's like a mentality. Then that's 

cool because if it unifies the community just a little bit, if it uplifts it just a little bit, well 

then it was worth doing a thousand times. 




ELVIRA: How do you see the role of artists? 

GABE: I got a good one for you. Have you ever heard that a picture is worth a thousand 

words? Maybe more. I kind of feel an artist is a voice for people. And hopefully what they 

do impacts society positively. Don't get me wrong I like to write my name on everything. 

I do graffiti. If I can help people become inspired through what I do, present positive 

messages through symbolism. Uplifting the community is big deal to me. My role to me 

as an artist, is to inspire others, uplift them, inspire them through the things that I do. As 

far as community goes, I feel this way everywhere I go. It's about humanity really. 

Humanity is so much bigger than society at large. It's everybody. Everything. I'd like to be 

a positive source of inspiration to everyone. I'd rather uplift everyone everywhere. I'd 

rather just empower everyone everywhere that I go. I'm all about that. I really am. 





Memorial outside of Walmart with the Mexican, American, and Texan flag. 




Poets in the Classroom: What We Do When We Teach Writing 

Laurie Ann Guerrero, with Sabrina San Miguel and Cecilia Amanda Macias 

Texas A&M University-San Antonio, on land of the Coahuiltecans. 1 

In 2019, Texas A&M University–San Antonio celebrated its ten-year anniversary. 

Situated in the Southside of the city, surrounded by the beloved nopales and mesquite, 

our dear university holds true to the goal of reaching upward and outward, committed 

to the students and the community it serves. 

I am in my fourth year as a Writer-in-Residence on this campus, which was 

built on the land where my family has lived for generations. To be from this specific 

part of Texas (having learned in public schools which men should be celebrated for 

our independence from Mexico or for our tenacity to be become our own Republic 

and how this city and those who governed it played such an important role to form 

our identity as proud Texans) requires a much more open mind and more inclusive 

way of thinking in order to best understand the steadfastness and audaciousness we as 

a people in this area have maintained for generations. 

My ancestors toiled in these fields, among the same nopales and mesquite, 

raised their babies here, buried their loved ones here. I am raising my babies here. My 

grandparents are buried here—my grandparents who picked cotton, who didn’t have 

access to education, who endured racism and classism and sexism that wasn’t just 

outwardly brought upon them, but was internalized, adding to the complex identities 

and histories into which we were born. 

And now I, too, work on this land, in a capacity my grandparents could only 

have dreamed of. I am a writer, a documentarian—from a family of laborers. Writing 

and teaching on this campus has unraveled in me a kind of understanding I could not 

have had otherwise. 







Laurie Ann Guerrero 

BETWEEN THE SOIL AND THE SUN 

by Laurie Ann Guerrero 

in honor of the 10 th anniversary of Texas A&M University-San Antonio 

for Cecilia Amanda Macias & Sabrina San Miguel 

...you cannot afford to think of being here to receive your education; 

you will do much better to think of yourselves as being here to claim one… 

The difference is that between acting and being acted-upon… 

it can literally mean the difference between life and death. 

–Adrienne Rich, “Claiming an Education,” (p. 231) 

This is what I want to tell you: 

This is yours—the air and all who breathe it. 

We belong to each other, you see. 

You need not carry the stones in your heart 

any farther. Here, there is no paper, no 

number, no fight you need to produce 

so that someone else will make space 

for you. It’s the history in your hands 

that build, brick by brick, the rooms 

into which you walk. We will mark the days 

as they come: a job lost, another child 

gone, lines—to vote, to eat, to pay our debts— 

conferring, as it were, temperance noted 

in books our people could not read. Look here, 

this is what I want to say: you are not here 

to receive your education, but to build upon 

the lessons distilled through generations, 

to give your own inherent knowing 

in return—in the name of something far greater. 

In the spirit of yours and mine whose bodies 

hold up the soles of our feet and whose knowing 


Poets in the Classroom 

tames the quivers in our throats. Here is the lot, 

cleared, and in its place, the documented 

evolution of our work on this land: our breath 

in contracts with the earth and with each other. 

You are the bloom that holds the root, making 

magic between the soil and the sun. 

My students bring with them their own rich histories; more than 80% are from 

this area, according to my conversation with our university president, Dr. Cynthia 

Teniente-Matson. Also, of the students we serve, Latinx make up 71%, first-generation 

students make up 70%, and women make up 60%. These facts are the proof that we 

are reaping the benefits of the struggles of those who bore sweat in our name. And 

that is sacred. And that is what I get to see and take pride in as part of this institution— 

the bloodlines that exist here, the struggle, the empowerment. To know this land, to 

honor it, is to represent it well—which is to say, we are a family. 

This is the basis for which I run my classroom. As a teaching poet, my job is 

not just to get students to write, and write well, but to help students uncover what 

needs to be written—their own histories and the history they are making. This work 

requires that the classroom become a safe space to explore, to risk, to ask questions, 

and most importantly, it requires that all who enter do so with a willingness to be 

vulnerable. In this lies strength—and when students are forthcoming with their fears, 

their goals, their histories, they become empowered, they become empathetic, and the 

steadfastness we inherited from our people becomes that with which we progress. By 

adding to the already documented accounts, by offering a previously omitted part of 

the story, we recover what was historically taken from us: our voice. And, as important, 

we recover a self-awareness wholly developed and nourished by the respecting and 

honoring of who and where we are from. 

In the last few years, I spent a great deal of time with 2 specific graduate 

students, writers: Sabrina San Miguel and Cecilia Amanda Macias. I worked with them 

closely throughout four consecutive semesters on campus. I chose to share their work 

with you because of their persevering commitment to their education, to their art, and 

to their brave and difficult emotional / physical / spiritual work. 

Sabrina & Cecilia both graduated in May of 2019 with an MA in English. They 

are co-founders of, Feliz, a zine for women of color “who define their own damn 

happiness.” The two are a unique pair who had very different paths that got them to 

same university at the same time— each challenging and supporting the other, each 

speaking up on the other’s behalf, each daring the other to be louder, braver, and each 



the loudest to applaud in the other’s audience. I was just lucky enough to witness this 

gift of young, strong, brilliant women who happened to take some classes with 

me…who happened to let me bear witness to this generation of empowered women. 

A single mother of three small children, a dedicated writer, native to the 

Eastside of San Antonio, Sabrina San Miguel explores the intersections of identities in 

her work. Her poetry works to scratch away at the layered history of women in her 

family while reconciling also what she intentionally or unintentionally gives to her own 

children. A first-generation college graduate, Sabrina sustains her commitment to be 

bold, to dare to break tradition, and all in the name of making a space for her children 

and community to do the same. Her poetry is gritty, unapologetically honest and 

reveals unspoken intimacies in the struggle for justice. 

DRIVING MY CHILDREN TO SCHOOL 

THE MORNING AFTER ANOTHER MASS SHOOTING 

by Sabrina San Miguel 

NPR reports that video footage surfaced of the mass shooting in Sutherland Springs. 

I am driving. Rent is late. I cannot think over the kids’ chatter. 

Said the monster both smoke and metal were systematic in his destruction. 

The phone won’t get shut off until the 25th. 

My children are always loud. Today they are curious. 

Aisle after aisle. Pew by pew. Seven minutes in heaven. Trespassing against many. 

My son is counting streetlights now. Asking me to reconsider my dinosaur preference. I stand my 

ground. Velociraptor, kid and I ain’t budging. Oh god, how will I pay for Christmas next month? 

White woman on radio calls in to ask why no one fought back. 

I am caught off guard. Stop thinking about bills. I scoff at her question— as if it is normal to bring 

a weapon to praise and worship on Sundays. 

Texas Department of Public Safety released the list of the dead. Grouped the families 

together so that they remained safe, at least on paper. 



My children are quiet now. I tell my daughter to stop googling his name. 

Not to give him power in death. She says she’s happy we don’t believe in 

god. I wish we didn’t believe in theaters or schools either. 

Twenty-Six in total. Children and the elderly. Mostly women. 

I read some of their ages— One. Five. Ten. Children the same age as my own. Not driving in a car 

this morning with their mothers. And dinosaurs. I cannot imagine the quiet there. How death 

sounds the morning after. Do gunshots echo in the ear canal of those that lived? 

A man with a country accent calls in. Says this is how the world is nowadays and we 

should better prepare next time. 

My son tells me he would protect me from a T-Rex if it ever came to Texas. Ninjas too. I push the 

thought of his tiny brown body protecting me from anything out of my mind. Look at him through 

the rearview mirror. Scan his almond eyes. Brilliant baby teeth. None missing just yet. Take note 

of the gray hoodie. In case I have to identify his body. A quick prayer that I never will. 

The program cuts away briefly to something unrelated about Hollywood before we 

pull up to the school. 

I scan my daughter. Tortoise shell glasses. Unicorn hoodie. Her nails are 

painted purple and chipping. Please God let them live— and help me with rent. 

Cecilia Amanda Macias is also a dedicated writer, native to the Southside of 

San Antonio and the surrounding area. Both academic and creative, Cecilia dares to 

ask the questions in her work that too many shy away from. She is a brilliant debater, 

deliberate in the expression of her sharp ideas and opinions, and often she speaks the 

truths others cannot. A dancer, performer, and visual artist as well, Cecilia’s poetry 

holds a space for her to breathe, to lay down her arms, and to reflect on those whose 

voices were not as strong as her own. Her work makes no apologies—it is logical and 

hard-hitting and demands that you catch up. 



LA PALOMA 

by Cecilia Amanda Macias 

The doves that remained at home, never exposed to loss, 

innocent and secure, cannot know tenderness… 

–Rainer Maria Rilke, “Dove that Ventured Outside” 

You died as swiftly as you hit the glass. 

Paper towel scrape— 

unresisting plumes 

lift off concrete. 

Peering electric blue, 

lifeless 

eye. Slit throat, guts 

on white-gray feathers. 

Parking lot processional— 

I commit you to the black 

garbage. Peace. 

I experience a joy like no other when I watched my students receive their 

master’s degrees and start their own careers. But it’s the conversations, the sharing, 

the risks we took in the classroom that led to the long hours dedicated to the solitary 

act of writing—the quiet space where we (myself included) distilled our individual 

goals, our collective plights. The quiet space where we go to dare ourselves to be 

bolder, be stronger, be true. 

While there are a great many benefits to reading and engaging with poetry 

(including the reconciling of our own intimate truths and growing our capacity to think 

wider and more inclusively), reading poetry will not change our history. But writing 

poetry will most certainly change the course of it. 

This is what we are doing. 

Endnotes 

1. Land acknowledgement – The native people. (2020). Retrieved April 30, 2020, 

from https://www.nps.gov/saan/learn/historyculture/history3nativepeople.htm 



References 

Rich, A. (1977/1979/1995). Claiming and education. In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: 

Selected Prose 1966–1978 (pp. 231–236). W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 

Rilke, R. M. (1995). “Dove that Ventured Outside.” In Ahead of all Parting: The selected 

poetry and prose of Rainer Maria Rilke (S. Mitchell, Trans.). The Modern Library. 

About the Poets 

Laurie Ann Guerrero is the author of Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying (University of 

Notre Dame Press 2013) and A Crown for Gumecindo (Aztlan Libre Press 2015). Her 

latest collection, I Have Eaten the Rattlesnake: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming from 

Texas Christian University Press. She has held consecutive positions as Poet Laureate 

of the city of San Antonio (2014-2016) and the State of Texas (2016-2017). Guerrero 

holds a B.A. in English Language & Literature from Smith College, an MFA in poetry 

from Drew University, and is the Writer-in-Residence at Texas A&M University-San 

Antonio. 

Sabrina San Miguel was born and raised on the Eastside of San Antonio. A founding 

member of Felize Zine, San Miguel is the mother of three and the first in her family 

to receive a college education. San Miguel received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English 

and in Women’s Studies and her master’s degree in English at Texas A&M-San 

Antonio. She is currently at work on her first collection of poetry, My Mother was a 

Woodworker. 

Cecilia Amanda Macias is a founding member of Felize Zine and creates scholarship 

researching and producing Chicana literature and performance. Her poetry 

investigates Chicana identity, ancestral legacy, and the role of the poet-scholar. Macias 

was born into the Tejana diaspora in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is a proud resident 

of San Antonio’s Southside and currently works supporting adult education. She 

received her Bachelor of Arts and her master’s degree in English at Texas A&M 

University-San Antonio. 










A cross with Jesus Christ was hung from a sign near the memorial. 




Always Been “Inside” 


University of Arizona, on land of the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui 

peoples. 1 

A note from the author 

This essay represents a project of decolonial disobedient conservatism. 2 Beginning with a particular 

rhetoric partnership and expanding to academic, public, and personal realms, this essay functions as 

a meditation on the theme of rhetorical recovery and transformation in naming, self-identification, 

agency, and voice beyond the logic of coloniality embodied in the terms Hispanic and Latino. The idea 

of the “pluriversity and truth” upon which decoloniality operates defines this meditation (Mignolo, 

2017, p. 41). For this essay, pluriversity and truth involves a foundational recognition of Latinx as 

“complex, heterogenous people” (Anzaldúa, 2012, p. 77). I narrow focus of this meditation to a 

particular segment of Latinx of which I am a member: generations of individuals in the United States 

removed from our roots physically, epistemically, culturally, and linguistically by the machinery of 

racism and coloniality; a population deemed not assimilable, branded as minorities, and faced with 

what comes with, and after, the realization that we have “always been inside” the multiple spaces 

called America. The style of the essay reflects influences from the genre of the personal essay, the genre 

of critical autobiographical employed by Victor Villanueva, writings on critical race theory, and the 

writing of Gloria Anzaldúa. Thus, five interwoven episodes comprise the structure of this essay. For 

reference, I describe the episodes as follows: the two episodes entitled “Mary” and “The False Mirror” 

establish central concerns regarding naming, self-identification, and agency through a public rhetoric 

partnership; the episodes entitled “Where Consciousness, Conscience, Comfort Converge” and 

“Towards an End” explore the deeper issues of coloniality and racism within the first two episodes 

and suggest theories and approaches to these issues in and beyond the writing classroom; and the final 








episode “Voice without a Language” addresses concerns about the limitations of these theories and 

approaches. 

Mary 

Mary Ulloa has been on my mind for months. Everything I know about her comes 

from a few paragraphs written by Laurie Grobman in her 2015 article entitled 

“(Re)Writing Local Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Histories: Negotiating Shared Meaning 

in Public Rhetoric Partnerships.” In the article, Grobman (2015) examined 

community-based projects that promoted the partnership between various racial, 

ethnic, and cultural groups to show that teacher-scholars and students can participate 

in “purposeful, impactful public work” (237) and to identify challenges of power and 

control in such partnerships and their resulting product. One young Dominican 

American student involved in the partnership described herself as “the only 

Hispanic/Latino from the cuidad de Reading (Pennsylvania)” (qtd. in Grobman, 2015, 

p. 246). 

Yet more than 250 “rhetorical citizen historians” and “citizen-scholars”—titles 

only bestowed upon the participating undergraduate writing students who appear to 

be neither citizens of Reading, Pennsylvania, nor historians of rhetoric—worked with 

Mary and other residents of Reading, who rhetorical citizen historians and citizenscholars 

identified as “partners.” Despite the equitability that such a title connotes, 

partners were “wholly dependent on collaboration” with rhetorical citizen historians 

and citizen-scholars (Grobman, 2015, p. 244); throughout the intellectual labor, 

administration, and oversight of the six-year partnership, rhetorical citizen historians 

and citizen-scholars were entrusted to uncover, recover, and preserve local racial, 

ethnic, and cultural histories (Grobman, 2015, p. 237). From this labor, administration, 

and oversight came work that was disseminated to the public, including 

“approximately 6,000 books and booklets on local African American, 

Hispanic/Latino, and Jewish history” (Grobman, 2015, p. 237). 

“Hispanic/Latino”? This framing caught my eye as unusual. 

A question arose between Grobman and "community partners (first Jonathan 

Encarnacion, then executive director of Centro Hispano who initiated the project, 

followed by Yiengst, followed by Toledo)” (Grobman, 2015, p. 246): which moniker, 

“Hispanic” or “Latino,” should be used throughout the book and for the title. “Our 



decision to choose the name ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’” Grobman wrote, was challenged 

by Mary (p. 246). 

The decision? 

Hispanic/Latino. 

The reason? 

“…Mary powerfully and comfortably spoke as an insider with and for her own, 

othered community, ‘giving them significant control’ over naming and identity," 

Grobman (2015) noted (p. 246). 

A small part of me, I acknowledge, desires to tell you that Grobman’s decision 

and reason must represent her recognition of la facultad de Mary. Gloria Anzaldúa 

(1987/2012) defines la facultad as a “latent” and “unknowingly cul-tivate(d)” capacity 

possessed by those individuals who are caught between two worlds (p. 61). This 

capacity permits one “to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to 

see the deep structure below the surface” (p. 60). For these individuals, la facultad 

develops as a “survival tactic,” according to Anzaldúa (2012) against oppressions (p. 

61). This tactic is strongest in “the females, the homosexuals of all races, the darkskinned, 

the outcast, the persecuted, the marginalized, the foreign” (Anzaldúa, 2012, 

p. 60). 

Now, nothing in the text in Grobman’s article supports my own desire, and 

mi propria facultad tells me that my desire comes from conditioning, both as an individual 

of color living in the United States and a scholar of color producing scholarship in the 

field of rhetoric and composition studies to give comfort to White fragility and to be 

complicit with White privilege. 

From the little that I know of Mary based on Grobman’s text, la facultad de 

Mary seems obvious: she questions the either/or binary formed by ethnic termi-nology 

for Latinx codified by the federal government of the United States; her knowledge of 

a cultural identification and naming seems to go beyond this binary; she has the 

courage not only to challenge Grobman’s leadership about this binary but also to 

confront Grobman and community leaders about their presumed authorial and 

cultural agency for Latinx. 

Then, mi facultad screams at me. We can see that Grobman’s decision and reason 

represents a larger rhetorical trope of Whiteness about roles of authorial agency and cultural agency in 

auto-ethnography, a logic of coloniality towards Latinx in the United States about conditional cultural 

naming, permissive identification, and probationary agency, a re-enforcement of a subject/object binary 

rooted in the power dynamics of race in the United States. We know; we have seen it through the eyes 

of those before us. We know; we have seen it through our own eyes. We moan, for we will know we 



will see it through the eyes of our children. And, I re-center myself, taking a step back with mi 

facultad. 

One danger of speaking of la facultad de Mary and mi facultad this way is the 

danger of misinterpretation; that, by speaking this way, I am enacting that which 

Cherríe Moraga (1981/1983) warned against, “ranking the oppressions” (p. 29). That 

is not my intention. My intention is to emphasize the uniqueness of la facultad to each 

individual and, in this uniqueness, the specificity of oppressions and the complex 

collective experiences that inform our facultad. Think of la facultad, in an individual or 

as a concept, beyond the reductionist lens of Whiteness, of racism, of coloniality that 

attempt to corral the “complex, heterogenous people,” as Anzaldúa (1987/2012) 

describes, that is Latinx to some singular essentialized classification (p. 77). As a 

complex and heterogenous people, we can learn and grow and heal from the sharing 

of common collective experiences, like the struggle of naming, self-identification, and 

agency. One thing learned from this struggle comes from our “ethnographic 

observation of white people,” something Krista Ratcliffe (2005) spoke to in bell hooks’ 

work: a “survival mechanism throughout history” for African Americans to 

understand the functionality of Whiteness and racism in cultural tropes (p. 115). I add 

that this mechanism can also extend to Latinx in our efforts to understand the 

functionality of that which underlies Whiteness and racism in cultural tropes, 

coloniality. 

To start, Grobman’s decision and reason to use Mary to name an entire 

community in an auto-ethnographic rhetoric partnership, given Mary’s objection to 

the either/or binary of self-identification, smacks of a cultural trope that Paulo Freire 

(1996) identifies as false generosity: 

Any attempt to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deference to the 

weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false 

generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the 

continued opportunity to express their “generosity,” the oppressors must 

perpetuate injustice as well. (p. 26). 

This false generosity speaks to an assumed, overarching authority that Grobman 

exercises over both the choice of names and the extent of permissive cultural, authorial 

and discursive agency for Latinx in Reading which is represented through her public 

rhetorical partnership. Moreover, this false generosity speaks to a larger cultural trope 

of Whiteness and racism beyond the function, execution, and product of her 

partnership that presents a false mirror to not only cultural naming, but also to 



intricacies and intimacies of naming, self-identification, and cultural agency beyond 

coloniality. 

For Mary, for Latinx, and for me the struggle of naming, self-identification, 

and agency requires us to recognize and re-exist beyond false generosity and the false 

mirror. 

The False Mirror 

The painting entitled The False Mirror by French Surrealist Rene Magritte comes to 

mind as an analogy. If you have not seen The False Mirror, then here is a description: 

the central image of the painting is a single, lash-less eye of a White male, with a round 

black pupil set at the center of a clouded blue sky of the iris. Although the eye reflects 

an image of the heavens in the natural world, the eye is not a mirror per se. Here, the 

painting suggests that the eye is subjective and selective. Such selectivity stems from 

an ongoing negotiation by so-called “Man” with his conscious, unconscious, and 

collective conscience. Though representative of an art movement that explored the 

reality that underlies the mind, The False Mirror reveals to its audience that the eye of 

this universality still is raced and gendered and Western. I have yet to see an art history book 

acknowledge this point. Thus, The False Mirror serves as an analogy to the mind’s eye to 

the unexamined positionality, terminology, and agency granted by coloniality through 

which we see and are seen—the selectivity and subjectivity of a raced and gendered 

and Western gaze reflected as universal for humanity and civilization. 

Perhaps it is common not to question that reality we think our eyes reflect until 

we are presented with a situation that challenges not only what we see but also the 

notion of how and why we see what we see, as Magritte’s The False Mirror attempts to 

do in questioning the positionality of authority. The questioning of this positionality 

centers on a duty of reasonable care, not intentionality. The intentionality of [add name 

here] as a good person is a common cultural trope of Whiteness used to evaluate 

accountability and recourse for a failed duty owed to people of color. With respect to 

Grobman’s public rhetorical partnership, I believe that there are grounds to question 

the reasonable care that she took to counteract particular dysfunctionalities of 

Whiteness—the false reflections of Hispanic and Latino as either/or binary of naming 

and self-identification and the appearance of permissive cultural agency for Latinx— 

in order to ensure auto-ethnography for Mary and her community. 

From her statement, Mary may not have been convinced that Hispanic / 

Latino is one term. Her answer—the part that Grobman (2012) quoted—seemed 



contradictory: Mary maintained, “…so let’s put the words together and reach out to 

three communities within one… let’s reach out to the Latino, Hispanic, and 

Hispanic/Latino community” (p. 246). Mary identified Hispanic / Latino as one of 

three communities, the other two being Hispanic and Latino. Then, she suggested that 

words be put together. This contradiction seemed natural, not surprising to me, for it 

speaks to the inherent nature of racism with terms like Hispanic and Latino. Apparently, 

Grobman and community leaders failed to address this contradiction. Instead, their 

discussion centered on the control of naming and identity politics after Mary 

“challenged” them (Grobman, 2015, p. 246). 

Let me speak generically for a moment. One student challenged figures of 

authority on concepts affecting an entire community after these figures of authority 

posed and addressed the question, which should be the use of throughout the book and for the 

title, Hispanic or Latino? So the authority figures decide which of these concepts is 

acceptable based the opinion of one student deemed “an insider” who spoke “with 

and for her own, othered community,” and the authority figures were persuaded into 

“giving them” significant control over naming and identity by following this one 

insider despite the “important lesson that each student will respond differently” 

(Grobman, 2015, p. 246). Interesting, no? But what I find more interesting is the shift 

in the scope of control over naming and identity given by the authority figures: “Mary 

persuaded us to use the term Hispanic/Latino in an article included in the book” 

(Grobman, 2015, p. 246). Naming and identity in an article included in the book, not naming 

and identity throughout the book and for the title, which was the question between 

community leaders and Grobman that Mary challenged. 

The question asked, the generosity of control given, but nowhere was there a 

genuine dialogue that explored the intricacies and intimacies of naming, selfidentification, 

and agency for Latinx, which should be the basis of the duty of 

reasonable care in such a partnership. Instead, this type of question has a singular 

objective: to confirm the presumptive answer of people who project a privilege of 

authority. This type of question reflects a power dynamic within rhetorical situations 

and represents a doxa and kairos that involves race and racism in the United States. 

Doxa, “the Greek word for common or popular opinion” (Crowley & Hawhee, 1999, 

p. 9), results in the conflation of Hispanic or Latino as racial markers, which are terms 

of ethnicity, not race, according the federal government of the United States, as well 

as cultural markers, which are intended to be markers of origins outside of the United 

States, but are markers of meaning in racially-focused American culture. Kairos means 

the context of an issue, referred to as “time and place” or “circumstances” by 

Quintilian and is the second of two Greek concepts of time that addresses a “kind of 



time—quality, rather than quantity” (Crowley & Hawhee, 1999, p. 31). Kairos affects 

the choice, meanings, uses, and interpretations of terminology related to the United 

States’ system of race, like the terms Hispanic and Latino. Such terms come to exist 

and evolve with and within time, place, and circumstance; for example, Hispanic and 

Latino have taken on social and political connotations (often negative connotations) 

amid anti-immigrant rhetoric under the Trump Administration. 

Outreach programs exist within a doxa situated in a kairos that extends well 

beyond theories of the classroom and the perimeter of a university, which is visible in 

Grobman’s partnership. While Grobman (2015) describes her partnership as 

“purposeful, impactful public work” (p. 237) and focuses on challenges of power and 

control in the partnership and its resulting product, Grobman portrays local racial, 

ethnic, and cultural histories with a palatable, almost combative, tension and a 

paternalistic slant: partners as “partial and interested, argumentative, vying for 

legitimacy and control, privileging one reality to diminish another” (p. 243) and the 

argumentative discourse as leading to “dependency” and “subservience” because of 

struggles between constituencies and participants in “third spaces” (p. 244). These 

themes of dependency, subservience labor, authorship, and privilege suggested 

pronounced inequality in the community’s role in the partnership and, likely, the 

history shaped with their narratives for the public. 

In her question to Mary, Grobman made the rhetorical choice to describe the 

question without an explanation of doxa regarding Hispanic and Latino and to ignore 

kairos in the history of the living definition of these terms or other terms that may 

overlap or precede Hispanic and Latino. Should the onus, then, fall on Mary, if the 

humanistic stage of the pedagogy of the oppressed were applicable, to not only 

challenge Grobman and community leaders on the use of Hispanic or Latino to 

suggest a third option in using those terms, but also object to terms per se and demand 

a dialogue about naming, self-identification, and agency for Latinx as acts of authentic 

thinking? 

“Authentic thinking,” Freire (1996) argued, is “thinking that is concerned 

about reality, does not take place in an ivory tower isolation, but only in 

communication” (p. 58). To what reality was Mary to speak? The reality of the 

partnership? The reality of her culture as a subject? As an object? The reality in a 

negotiated identity? The reality of identity beyond such negotiations? To what extent 

could Mary speak to any one of these realities? How? If she did, if she found language 

to capture these realities, would Mary be truly heard? 

In this conundrum, Mary reminds me of myself: a strong sense of self; an 

identity forged through public and personal experiences examined in institutions 



removed from both a challenge tempered by the answer for which permission is 

conditionally granted and a place where confirmation is implicitly demanded. Mary 

was a college-aged student, Dominican American, in Reading, Pennsylvania in 2015. I 

was a college-aged student, Mexican American, in segregated Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 

1995—the year that Mary was born, possibly, or two years before. I also see myself in 

Mary because of changes to agency as well as to my thinking about naming, identity, 

race, and national origin. I was the Mexican kid from the ghetto that graduated from 

college and law school. I was a Latino lawyer who practiced law in Chicago, Milwaukee, 

and conservative Central Illinois for twelve years. Now, I am a doctoral student in the 

Southwest. True today as it was in 1995, Hispanic, to me, represents the concoction of 

a racist Nixon and the United States Office of Budget and Management to separate 

Latinx from the racial classification of “White” through “ethnicity” as a qualifier as 

well as the contempt of my parents toward that term and the imposition of that term 

on them. Latino didn’t exist in my mind until 1997, when the United States Office of 

Budget and Management codified it as an ethnicity. 

Nonetheless, Latino carried a more personal connection for almost twenty 

years of my life. In spite of the use of Latino by the American Bar Association, my 

roles in organizations like the Latino Law Student Association, the Professional 

Latino/Latina Allstate Network, and Conexiones Latinas de McLean County, and my 

self-identification as Latino for years, I had not been aware of the academic distinction 

between Latino and Mexican American until my second month at the University and, 

thus, I was not Latino—or, at least, not in the Southwest. Once aware of this 

distinction, I declared that my identity was mine and not a matter of race or politics— 

sort of. After my father passed away, I wanted to honor his memory and my heritage 

through dual American and Mexican citizenship. A lack of critical thinking overall or 

a myopic attachment to the legal recognition of duality underscored my discovery 

through the application process for dual citizenship that I already was a Mexican 

national by blood. 

Now, I self-identify as an American citizen and a Mexican national, identities 

that are not synonymous with Hispanic and Latino. Hispanic and Latino reflect a facet 

of American identity in a country defined by interlocking systems of domination and 

white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, to borrow bell hooks’ two terms. But the 

expectation exists for me, as for Mary, to speak of Hispanic and Latino apart from 

personal experience and knowledge, terms fixed in time and space and subject to their 

doxa in a particular kairos. My agency, like Mary’s, is permissive and probationary, 

regardless of our assertiveness, regardless of our ethos and logos. 



Authentic thinking brings me to the importance of the question, why? Why as 

a question should precede all other questions. Think of Grobman’s partnership 

beginning with why from Mary’s perspective and that from the people in her 

community. Why are we presented first with an either/or binary of the Othered? Why do you seek 

to reduce us to one of these terms? Why are we Othered in our home, in our community, in this 

partnership, in your mind? Why the presumption of authority, of affirmation, of arrogance? Why not 

ask us, ask and understand our naming, our identity, our negotiations as we live life here? Why not 

let us lead since this is our history? Why do we need your help anyway? Why don’t we just lead? Why 

do we speak of ourselves in the different ways that we do? 

I cannot help but to think of the oft responses to Why? A polite withdrawal. A 

prickly silence. A pointed apology. I think of Freire (1996): “No oppressive order 

could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why?” (p. 67). Freeing one’s 

reflection from the false mirror, getting oneself to questions on why speaks to the role 

of consciousness of, and of one’s positionality in, contradictions and oppression in 

naming, identity, and agency. It also speaks to a concern about the point where 

consciousness, conscience, and comfort converge. 

Where Consciousness, Conscience, and Comfort Converge 

“While only a revolutionary society can carry out this (problem-posing) education in 

systemic terms,” said Freire (1996), “the revolutionary leaders need not take full power 

before they can employ the method” (p. 67). This sentence proceeds the sentence 

about an oppressive order’s prohibition on the question, Why? The challenge of 

reaching revolutionary leadership, I think, is the revelation that the critical 

consciousness that makes—and keeps—authentic thinking separate from false 

generosity begins with a consciousness of who is the oppressed and who is the 

oppressor. “Who” is hard to determine in some instances when we, like Laurie 

Grobman and Mary Ullao, are people attempting to employ thought, effort, and action 

toward a constructive end. 

A pedagogy of the oppressed involves a critical consciousness of 

contradictions and oppression, as well as the implementation of praxis. Praxis means 

transformative action and reflection toward authentic existence, humanization, and 

liberation in the process of being. Dialogue is a definitive element of praxis, according 

to Freire (1996). Transformation and liberation come from realizations by the 

oppressed and the oppressor, the former, of its duality and its initial, misplaced 

objective to become the oppressor or “sub-oppressor” (p. 27) and the latter, the 



anguish in the discovery of herself or himself as oppressor, the resistance to solidarity 

with the oppressed, and yet rationalizing guilt through the continued dependency and 

paternalistic treatment of the oppressed, according to Freire (1996). 

This is where I struggle. 

Must the oppressed complete the first humanistic stage to enter the second 

liberation stage? Is it until then and only then that the oppressor can be liberated? Can 

a revolutionary leader employ the problem-posing education effectively if the answers 

to the preceding questions are “no”? 

Naming and identity come with agency and authority through humanity, yet 

the struggle for this agency and authority stems from dehumanization, which is 

reflected and reinforced by language that names and identifies me within systems of 

oppression and politics of domination designed to promote the agency and authority 

of a dominant people. One major system and politics of oppression and domination 

is racism. As Mignolo (2017) identifies, racism stems from the logic of coloniality but 

shifts with nation-states and, in these, the shifting rhetoric of humanity as defined by 

citizenship status (p. 42). For Latinx in the United States, the struggle of racism exists 

as one of multiple realities. Latinx have to reconcile positionality as individuals, as 

members of communities, and by status in nation-states through the realities of racism 

by our presence in the United States as well as by the presence of our territories or 

nations of origin in our lives, even if the latter presence is just generational legacy. 

These realities of racism come from the histories of colonialization and the 

presence of coloniality. Then, truer to the concerns of these realities is this question 

of communication in authentic thinking that involves naming and identity: What if the 

oppressor and oppressed had each posed the question of why to themselves and each 

reached critical consciousness of contradictions and oppression for themselves, but 

each decided to value their own interests over the interests of humanization and 

liberation? This is not a novel question. Freire addresses it: isn’t the tension between 

anti-dialogical action and dialogical action, between false generosity and authentic 

thinking, between activism/verbalism and praxis, at core, because of individual 

interests? 

For those individuals with a possessive investment in Whiteness, to borrow a phrase 

from George Lipsitz (1998), the assimilationist concept of American identity creates 

and fosters social, economic, and political attitudes and benefits from systematic 

domination and oppression through racism. For them, maybe critical consciousness 

of contradictions and oppression exists, but, because of their positionality, they can 

pass or they found a path or they seek a peace and they value that which brings them 



comfort through their investment over all else. This is where consciousness, 

conscience, and comfort converge. 

Movement toward an end beyond this investment, beyond coloniality, could 

be propelled by a deeper exploration of the role of racism, the potential of epistemic 

delinking and conscientização, and the capacity to think otherwise about naming, identity, 

agency, and difference. 

A. On Racism 

Toward an End 

Recognizing the role of language and discourse in racism, Iris D. Ruiz (2016) argued 

that racial classification and hierarchies operate as discursive constructs that distort the 

life experience and long history of oppression of certain racial groups and foster 

inequality in material realities to maintain current power structures of dominance and 

oppression. W.E.B. DuBois’ defines the contradictory nature of race and its history, 

according to Ruiz (2016); race has “all sorts of illogical trends and irreconcilable 

tendencies” (p. 10) and “[e]ventually, he decided that race might not be a concept at 

all but rather, as, ‘a group of contradictory forces, facts and tendencies’” (p. 10). 

Sociologists Edward T. Telles and Vilma Ortiz (2009) identified common 

misconceptions about race, issues of agency based on race, and the power of social 

perception of race regarding Hispanics and Mexican Americans that lead to social, 

economic, and political inequalities and attitudes. Race, despite doxa, is not a fixed set 

of racial categories applicable to everyone, according to Telles and Ortiz (2009). Yet, 

they insist that categories, like Hispanic and Mexican American and Latino, among 

others, are arguably conflated with race or interpreted as racial designations. Thus, race 

and racial designations involve agency and authority in naming, identity, and mobility 

as well as access to opportunity, property, and legal right, as Telles and Ortiz (2009) 

discussed. Hispanics and Mexican Americans elect their race—that is, self-identify, 

even on matters with the federal government of the United States—but, as Telles & 

Ortiz (2009) pointed out, the social perceptions of others determine the race of 

Hispanic and Mexican-Americans. 

Racism is woven into the concept and language of assimilation and American 

identity, visible throughout the legal and socio-political history of the United States. 

Here are just a few examples: the Naturalization Act of 1790, the first naturalization 

law in United States, restriction on citizenship by naturalization to free White persons; 



Benjamin Franklin’s anti-immigration position towards Germans; Theodore 

Roosevelt’s position on the ideal assimilated American; the use of the English language 

for assimilation and as the de facto official language of the United States; and, Trump’s 

anti-immigration politics and racial politics toward people from Latin America. The 

concept of “White” and citizenship in the United States has changed over the history 

of the nation. “Whiteness is, however, a social fact, an identity created and continued 

with all-too-real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige, and 

opportunity” (Lipsitz, 1998, p. vii). 

People whose descendancy traces back to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the 

Dominican Republic, Haiti, the countries of Central America, and the countries of 

South America may be allowed to assimilate and to become “American.” While 

gender, sexual orientation, and religion were social and legal factors for assimilation 

and citizenship at different points in American history, the racial construct of White 

has always been the definitive quality. Those who could “pass” as White, by color, 

physiognomy, and the adoption of cultural norms, could become American in the eyes 

of the public and the law. Those who could not pass were marginalized as hyphenated 

Americans by social perception, affecting their status in the social structure, access to 

employment and education, and marriage, be it because of social discrimination or, for 

a time, if applicable, anti-miscegenation laws. Hispanic and Latino, arguably, is a 

conceptual extension of hyphenated American. Re-appropriation and cultural identity, 

I think, is where debate about doxa about Hispanic and Latino occur intraculturally. 

In response to social perceptions and doxa of Americans, the adoption of 

hyphenated-American identities may represent an act of political unification against 

racism. One example: 

Today racial movements not only pose new demands originating outside state 

institutions, but may also frame the “common identity” in response to statebased 

racial initiatives. The concept of “Asian-American,” for example, arose 

as a political label in the 1960s (Omi & Winant, 2013, p. 89). 

Whether it is an imposition by others or a reaction to being Othered, Hispanic and 

Latino have a common culture. “The Latinoist movement (Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, 

Cubans, and other Spanish-speaking people working together to combat racial 

discrimination in the marketplace) is good but not enough,” Anzaldúa (1987/2012) 

wrote: “Other than a common culture we will have nothing to hold us together” (p. 

109). 

The common culture is racism. 



B. On Epistemic Delinking and Conscientização. 

Epistemic delinking, a concept of decoloniality attributable to Walter Mignolo and 

Anibal Quijano, is a process of clearing a distinct conceptual space for decolonial 

approaches to ethics and politics, a “space for ‘thinking otherwise’; that is, for thinking 

of writing, literacy, and discourse apart from traditional (i.e., Greco-Roman) histories 

and theories of rhetoric and apart from traditional (i.e., classical, liberal) notions of 

race and ethnicity” (Ruiz & Sánchez, 2016, p. xiv). These traditions extend from the 

applicable colonial matrix of power: coloniality, 3 a concept important to epistemic 

delinking and, in this, decolonization and decoloniality. 4 

After political independence is achieved, the country or territory in question 

still relies on the former colonizer or “the colonial matrix of power” for its knowledge 

and resources of knowledge, that is to say, “the ongoing (and thoroughgoing) system 

of epistemological, ideological, economic, and cultural hegemony that was established, 

developed, and maintained through European expansion across the globe” (Sánchez, 

2016, p. 82). Addressing translingualism, but applicable more broadly, Steven Alvarez 

(2016) spoke to the liberating potential of delinking across languages in rhetoric and 

composition studies because “(d)elinking entails the ability to re-read the world and 

the opportunity to re-write it” (p. 27). Mignolo (2017) identified this ability to re-read 

and re-write the world through the concept of decolonial disobedient conservatism. 

Decolonial disobedient con-servatism seeks to delink from the logic of coloniality in 

order to re-exist, both of which involve “civil and epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo, 

2017, p. 41). Re-existing, for Mignolo (2017), “implies relinking with the legacies one 

wants to preserve in order to engage in modes of existence with which one wants to 

engage” (p. 40), but re-existing “depends on the place of the individual in the local 

histories disavowed, diminished and demonised in the narratives of Western 

modernity” (p. 41). Mignolo (2017) saw re-existing as distinct from resisting, the latter 

being “trapped in the rules of the games others created, specifically the narrative and 

promises of modernity and the necessary implementation of coloniality” (p. 41). 

Epistemic delinking identifies the problem of coloniality, conceptualizes the 

source from which epistemic colonialism is bred through the colonial matrix of power, 

and proposes an epistemic, discursive, and rhetorical separate from Western tradition 

through re-existing. To me, epistemic delinking from coloniality and re-existing are 

essential to dismantle racism, along with reaching other objectives, but my question is, 

Toward what end? 



If racism is delinked epistemically, what episteme takes its place? Delinking 

does not mean a romanticized recapturing of indigenous knowledge, which itself is 

varied, complex, the subject of kairos, and must acknowledge that some people are 

impacted negatively by coloniality. Yet, they do not have indigenous roots (a few 

examples come to my mind: Mexicans of Africans and Chinese descent; people like 

me who have visibly dark skin but complete Spaniard roots from migration to Mexico 

in the late 1800s and early 1900s). A series of questions about practicing epistemic 

delinking and re-existing arise naturally. How? What should and shouldn’t be delinked? 

Who decides? What if two or more colonial matrices of power are involved? What 

does delinking and re-existing beyond Hispanic and Latino involve for individuals, 

communities, and a large society? These questions are not posed to belabor a point. 

Epistemic delinking and re-existing are complex theoretical concepts that, if placed 

into practice, raises a complex series of problems of the mind, the heart, and morality. 

Reappropriation of a pejorative term or rhetorical tropes, inclusion of silenced 

or diminished voices, identifying the colonial matrix of power, these approaches are 

some examples to move toward epistemic delinking and re-existing in rhetoric and 

composition studies. Yet, from my readings, there is no clear-cut analysis as to the 

agency and invention necessary to create new knowledge through language and 

discourse. Consider the idea of clearing space to “think otherwise” about terms like 

Hispanic and Latino and questions like that asked of Mary. Consider the ability to reread 

and the opportunity to re-write, consider voice, consider feelings. All of these 

would demand “conditions under which knowledge at the level of doxa is superseded 

by true knowledge, at the level of logos,” as Freire (1996) identified, to address the 

colonial matrices of power involved in race and racism in the United States (p. 62). 

With racism, the ongoing negotiations of doxa and logos are intertwined with kairos. 

Critical consciousness—conscientização—provides a complimentary means for 

epistemic delinking and re-existing consistent with decoloniality. Critical 

consciousness is “learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, 

and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality,” as Freire (1996, p. 17) 

notes, and “by means of which the people, through a true praxis, leave behind the 

status of objects to assume the status of historical Subjects” (p. 14). Praxis, authentic 

thinking, and dialogical action all serve critical consciousness through epistemic 

delinking and re-existing, but epistemic delinking and re-existing need to be, 

individually and culturally, a process of discovery with the understanding that 

individuals and cultures are in the process of becoming—“unfinished, uncompleted 

beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality” (Freire, 1996, p. 84). An important 



reminder for critical consciousness and decolonial disobedient conservatism is to 

consider that 

[t]he truth is, however, that the oppressed are not “marginals,” are not people 

living outside society. They have always been “inside”–inside the structure 

which made them “being for others.” The solution is not to “integrate them 

into a structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so they can 

become “beings for themselves” (Freire, 1996, p. 55). 

C. To Think Otherwise 

My students gave me something that made think about them, think about doxa and 

kairos in thinking, think about the application of critical consciousness, epistemic 

delinking and re-existing to Hispanic and Latino, and to think about Jonathan 

Alexander’s and Jacqueline Rhodes’ (2014) call on advocacy for difference in the 

classroom. 

Each student in two sections of English 102 had the same canned assignment: 

identify three additional solutions to help those affected by lead poisoning in Flint, 

Michigan, with the audience of your solutions being officials from the State of 

Michigan, Flint residents, and entrepreneurs. With a design based, in part, on writing 

assignments from my first year legal writing courses at the University of Wisconsin 

and a crisis role-playing exercise that was done with me and 25 other students in a 

nine-month Multicultural Leadership Program, this assignment sequence as the last of 

three argumentation papers would be where I emphasized critical thinking the most in 

their writing. The last project was the last of four major steps in more autonomy and 

accountability. I was somewhat surprise, I am ashamed to admit, that the majority of 

my students identified the issues of class, race, color, and age in the context of the 

Flint Water Crisis. 

On the last class, one student surprised me with a class card, signed by all 

students with notes written by most. I was humbled. So many warm and heartfelt 

comments. Even after so many years, the sentiments stuck with me. Sentiments along 

the lines of thank you for caring and thank you for emphasizing our betterment. But in these 

sentiments was a reoccurring theme: gratitude for “teaching” students to think 

critically. These comments came out after spending fifteen weeks together. In their 

eyes, I proved myself trustworthy and invested in their good. They could open up to 

me to the extent that they felt comfortable, not to the extent that I demanded it of 

them. I emphasized my commitment to their agency and to fostering an environment 



of dialogue. Our discussions dealt with examples of doxa in kairos, at first, removed 

from them. A speech by Nelson Mandela, portrayed by Morgan Freeman, in the film 

Invictus. A talk by Susan B. Anthony on women’s suffrage. Opening statements and 

testimony from the film Philadelphia. A speech given by Robert F. Kennedy in 

Indianapolis on April 4, 1968; the day Martin Luther King was assassinated in 

Memphis. Failures of humanitarian efforts in Sudan. Health decisions and body image 

in an Op-Ed article from the New York Times by Angelina Jolie. An article from the 

New York Times and a response published in the New York Times about the Native Lives 

Matter movement. Environmental Activism displayed through photography by 

Sebastião Salgado. The list goes on. All of these involved narratives, but none of them 

were narratives per se—narrative was taught as one of many rhetorical strategies for 

argumentation. 

My premise was simple: for them to think critically about themselves, I needed 

to establish the comfort in them to approach issues that they may have never thought 

about and that they feel comfortable to discuss. They began to associate the examples 

for their projects to themselves and their lives, yet they identified with larger abstract 

concepts of humanity and liberation, but not simply through their identity. Their 

willingness to bring their lives and social justice issues into the classroom changed with 

steps toward an understanding of difference. 

Alexander and Rhodes (2014) emphasize the importance of difference in 

student narratives and in texts assigned for class reading. Multicultural pedagogy 

compromises substantive engagement of difference through a focus on an 

understanding of identity that reduces it to a shared humanity concept and to 

“somehow identical to (or identifiable with)” one’s own identity (Emphasis in original, 

Alexander & Rhodes, 2014, p. 438). This focus creates a flattening effect, according 

to Alexander and Rhodes, from “the unexamined assumption that ‘understanding’ and 

then ‘tolerance’ or even ‘respect’ are predicated on ‘identity’” (p. 438). As aides to 

writing narratives, students, argued Alexander and Rhodes, should be exposed to 

difficult texts that directly “challenge the blind spots of dominant culture” and “an 

audience’s ability to make radical alterity coherent and tame, texts that enact the 

impossibility of unknowable difference” (p. 446). Alexander and Rhodes’ (2014) 

argument raises practical concerns about dialogue. 

Dialogue is the basis of critical consciousness, authentic thinking, praxis, and 

epistemic delinking. For dialogue to occur, Freire (1996) identifies the importance of 

“conditions under which knowledge at the level of doxa is superseded by true 

knowledge, at the level of logos” (p. 62). Mary Louise Pratt (1991) proposes the 

application of contact zones to open teaching as a cultural mediation that would 



embrace “safe houses” and “a rhetoric of belonging” (p. 40). The notion to ask 

students to write about difference, like Alexander and Rhodes suggested, after being 

challenged by difficult texts is an opportunity to raise questions of agency, authentic 

thinking, and generosity of naming and identity, much like those in Grobman asking 

Mary about Hispanic and Latino. Without trust and a sense of comfortability, I am 

concerned about the narratives that students choose to share. Will that narrative reflect 

difference or be flattened by the question asked of the student, the hierarchical 

relationship between teacher and student in the assignment, and the student’s desire 

to appease the teacher for a good grade? 

From my experience, narrative is often taught as a three-week project during 

one semester of first year composition. Critical consciousness is forged through praxis 

over time. How comfortable will a student be to address difference, especially 

difference that involves race and racism, through dialogue beyond the narrative in the 

classroom in the political, public, and personal realms from which difference stems? 

Perhaps we in the field of rhetoric and composition need to ask ourselves this question 

first. I think of race and racism in particular. Scholars identify the importance of race 

and racial ideology to writing and rhetoric, yet race and racial ideology since 2009 are 

defined vaguely, according to Jennifer Clary-Lemon (2009), and discussed through 

metonymy, synecdoche, metaphor, and aporia in the classroom and scholarship. If we 

flatten the realities of race and racism through the identity of Whiteness, if we are 

reluctant to engage a dialogue about race and racism with one another, what can we 

ask of our students realistically? 

Our reluctance may have a lasting impact. Our reluctance may do harm to our 

students when the writing in our classroom today becomes the basis of their attempts 

at dialogue in political, public, and personal realms tomorrow. In our classroom, 

students have a presumptive right to their own voice—one of many privileges 

packaged with University life. In political, public, and personal realms, the same people 

may not, for reasons that contradict the ideals of thinking otherwise, of engaging 

difference, of promoting dialogue. A quote from Jacqueline Jones Royster (1996) 

comes to mind: 

Although the systems of voice production are indeed highly integrated and 

appear to have singularity in the ways that we come to sound, voicing actually 

sets in motion multiple systems, prominent among them are systems for 

speaking but present also are the systems for hearing. We speak within systems 

that we know significantly through our abilities to negotiate noise and to 

construct within that noise sense and sensibility (p. 38). 



The realities of racism in political, public, and personal realms limit students’ 

negotiation and construction of sense and sensibility within systems of speaking and 

hearing, starting as early as memory will allow. Voice with a language and with 

listening, they learn, is a privilege, granted by the performance of master narratives 

and, in this, granting naming and identity. This leaves some to discover that their own 

voice—their authentic voice—begins without a language. 

Voice without a language 

But choice hardly entered into most minorities' decisions to become American. Most 

of us recognize this when it comes to Blacks or American Indians. Slavery, forcible 

displacement, and genocide are fairly clear-cut. Yet the circumstances by which most 

minorities became Americans are no less clear-cut. The minority became an 

American almost by default, as part of the goods in big-time real estate deals or as 

some of the spoils of war. What is true for the Native American applies to the 

Alaska Native, the Pacific Islander (including the Asian), Mexican-Americans, 

Puerto Ricans. 

Victor Villanueva, 1987, p. 18 

Generations of Americans, whose descendancy can be traced to Mexico, Puerto Rico, 

and the countries of Central and South America, have adopted the binary in the 

assimilation/straddling-two-world story. I find that “straddling”—the notion of the 

two mutually exclusive worlds brought together by an individual’s conscious efforts— 

has become a common trope for those who identify as Hispanic or Latino. This binary 

relates to another binary: the assimilation/minority binary. 

Both binaries use rhetoric of “home” as the source of their non-American 

culture. Yet, for these generations of Americans I speak of, “home” was not only a 

haven for culture but also a “contact zone” for American racism. The assimilation/ 

minority binary entered the home over generations and through different forces that 

penetrated home life. 

Assimilation is promoted upon entry to the strata of post-secondary, four-year 

undergraduate study. This promotion is reflected in the popularity of the early work 

of Richard Rodriguez. Victor Villanueva (1987) identified the inherent problem in the 

assimilation/minority binary by addressing Rodriguez’s popularity: 



But what is it, really, that has made him famous? (Rodriguez) is a fine writer; 

of that there is no doubt. But it is his message that has brought him fame, a 

message that states that the minority is no different than any other immigrant 

who came to this country not knowing its culture or its language, leaving much 

of the old country behind to become part of the new one, and in becoming 

part of America subtly changing what it means to be American (p.17). 

Rodriguez’s popularity reflects a doxa rooted in racism and allows him a voice to be 

the voice of the assimilation for the Latino and the Hispanic. His voice rang in my 

ears. 

Rodriguez became “Richard” to me because I was “Jesse” and not “Jesus.” 

Jesse was told about Richard because Jesse, the Marquette student with the Writing 

Intensive English Major from a ghetto of the nation’s second-most segregated city, 

could do but didn’t do and wouldn’t do—and, apparently, struggled with the exact 

same issues in the eyes of some of his teachers—what Richard talked about doing and 

did at the 1986 annual conference of the NCTE: 

“Listen to the sound of my voice,” [Rodriguez] said. He asked the audience 

to forget his brown skin and listen to his voice, his “unaccented voice.” “This 

is your voice,” he told the teachers (Villanueva, 1987, p. 20). 

Listen to the sound of my voice and find that, despite my bronzed skin, my voice is 

“unaccented” like Richard’s voice. But my teachers’ voices, like Richard’s voice, was 

not my voice. And, as Villanueva (1987) notes, “[Rodriguez] spoke more of the English 

teacher’s power than the empowerment of the student” (p. 20). Their voice is 

not my voice; I have a voice of my own. This should be simple to understand. But. But 

who would want to hear my voice? Who would want to know about the role of 

American racism in my name and my accent? “Jesse” received his name after his 

grandfather because his grandfather “hey-SOOS” couldn’t be “GEE-sus” according 

to the naturalization agent who worked with my grandfather as the first of many newly 

allowed to naturalize under the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952. So, he 

became “Jesse”—Jesse Paul Romero. Jesse, the grandson, had his mother Elizabeth’s 

accent because, linguistically, he just learned it from his mother, and, protectively, she 

wanted to ensure that his skin color, physiognomy, and surname could be drowned 

out by the sound of his voice so that I wouldn’t face the same problems she did, like 

getting beat in school by teachers, bullied by students, and enduring discrimination 



because of her color, physiognomy, and surname. 

The problem with my voice was Jesse didn’t have a language beyond that 

which embodied the very thing that he stood against. Others with a voice didn’t have 

a language either, like bell hooks (1994) noted: 

When I came to Freire's work, just at that moment in my life when I was 

beginning to question deeply and profoundly the politics of domination, the 

impact of racism, sexism, class exploitation, and the kind of domestic 

colonization that takes place in the United States, I felt myself to be deeply 

identified with the marginalized peasants he speaks about, or with my black 

brothers and sisters, my comrades in Guinea-Bissau. You see, I was coming 

from a rural southern black experience, into the university, and I had lived 

through the struggle for racial desegregation and was in resistance without 

having a political language to articulate that process. Paulo was one of the 

thinkers whose work gave me a language. He made me think deeply about the 

construction of an identity in resistance. There was this one sentence of 

Freire's that became a revolutionary mantra for me: "We cannot enter the 

struggle as objects in order later to become subjects." (p. 46) 

The experiences of Jesse during his college and law school education in Wisconsin, of 

Jesse Paul during the practice of law and in his published writing in Illinois, and of 

Paul (just because I always hated the sound of my first name) the doctoral student in 

Arizona all have something in common. These experiences, along with other 

experiences, observations, and readings, all gave my voice a language. 

This leads me to think about Mary, especially in this passage by Villanueva 

(1987): 

Better that we, teachers at all levels, give students the means to find their own 

voices, voices that don’t have to ask that we ignore what we cannot ignore, 

voices that speak of their brown or yellow or red or black skin with pride and 

without need for bravado or hostility, voices that can recognize and exploit the 

conventions we have agreed to as the standards of written discourse—without 

necessarily accepting the ideology of those for whom the standard dialect is 

the language of home as well as commerce, for whom the standard dialect is 

as private as it is public, to use Rodriguez’s terms (p. 20). 

I also think of Ricardo, my son, who turned the age of ten in 2017, as a fourth and 



first generation American: the son of a father who is an American citizen and a 

Mexican national and a mother who is Mexican and a naturalized American citizen. I 

think of my son and his voice. I think of bell hooks. I think of 1987, the year 

Villanueva wrote those words and when I turned the age of ten that May. 

… … … 

I sit at a small white iron table shaded by an awning of the Student Union Memorial 

Center from the noon Sun that bleaches the University of Arizona Mall. My son sits 

at a table a few yards away, revising his paper about Juan Ponce de Leon on his iPad 

while I revise this essay. 

Two days ago, I had asked him, Why Ponce de Leon? 

“Because our teacher wants us to write about the explorers that discovered 

America.” 

He told me about what he learned about Ponce de Leon, about the friends that 

helped Ponce de Leon—the slaves. 

The thoughts I shared with him that day—those come to mind. Those 

thoughts, like so many thoughts before it, have been on my mind. Those are the 

thoughts that weigh like lead in your stomach. Thoughts that leave you choosing your 

words carefully, concealing your feelings well (you hope), weighing your silence as a 

stay you cannot and should not sustain. Thoughts that leave you besides yourself, 

questioning critical consciousness, authentic thinking, epistemic delinking, re-existing, 

racism, naming, identity, voice. Thoughts that engulf the work you do toward an end 

you fear you will never see. 

I sit with my thoughts and look across the Mall. 

The white campus police truck comes to a stop then leaves as a student in a 

gym red tank top and navy track shorts jogs passed my table in the opposite direction, 

the magenta band that holds her ponytail in place slowly slipping away from her blonde 

mane. Students stop on the Mall lawn for different reasons. Over the years, students 

stopped to kick the soccer ball around with my son. I watched him play, laughing, 

happy to be included in this world. My son does not really know my work or the worlds 

that it touches. And he does not know the depth of my discussions with his teachers 

in his world: Ponce de Leon’s “discovery” and “friends”; the annual celebration of 

colonial days, complete with the requirement for students to dress up as colonizers 

and the master narrative that erases Indigenous and African people of “America”; their 

refusal to use words like smart and gifted and leader to describe my son despite their 

knowledge of his accomplishments at his elementary, at the University of Arizona, and 



in many communities throughout Tucson. I remember that delinking “is a long 

process, at different levels and with different needs and preferences,” like Mignolo 

(2017) said (p. 40), as I stare at the white spots that the sun has bleached into the 

bronzed skin of my hands. 

I sit in silence, thinking. 

Endnotes 

1. Land acknowledgement – Native American Student Affairs. (2020). Retrieved 

February 26, 2020, from https://nasa.arizona.edu/ 

2. Argentine sociologist Walter Mignolo (2017) describes decolonial disobedient 

conservatism as follows: “the energy that genders dignified anger and decolonial 

healing, and its main goals are delink (from the colonial matrix of power, a 

concept described later in this essay) in order to re-exist, which implies relinking 

with the legacies one wants to preserve in order to engage in modes of existence 

with which one wants to engage” (p. 40). 

3. Mignolo (2017) provides a short overview of the term coloniality as follows: 

“This term – in short – refers to the Colonial Matrix of Power. I understand the 

CMP as a structure of management (composed of domains, levels and flows) that 

controls and touches upon all aspects and trajectories of our lives. If one looks at 

the transformations of the CMP since its formation in the sixteenth century, one 

sees mutations (rather than changes) within the continuity of the discursive or 

narrative orientation of Western modernity and Western civilisation: from, in the 

nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Christianity (Catholic or Protestant) to 

secularism, liberalism and Marxism (in other words, from the Christian to the 

civilising mission); and from ‘progress’ in the nineteenth century to 

‘development’ in the second half of the twentieth” (p. 40). 

4. Mignolo (2011) viewed decolonization as “a complex scenario of struggles” of a 

period in time where the elite sought to govern themselves and expel “the 

imperial administration from the territory” (qtd. in Sánchez, 2016, p. 82). 

Decoloniality, in contrast, addresses an aftermath of the elite’s self-governance— 

an “imperialism without colonies” (qtd. in Sánchez, 2016, p. 82) that bred 

epistemic colonialism, coloniality to use Mignolo’s word. 

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imperative and the problem of narrative coherence. College composition and 

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politics. Tempe University Press. 

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called my back: Writing by radical women of color (2 nd ed., pp. 27–34). Kitchen 

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J. Paul Padilla Padilla is a doctoral candidate in the Rhetoric, Composition, and the 

Teaching of English Program at the University of Arizona. Mr. Padilla’s scholarly work 

in rhetoric and composition studies has appeared in Composition Studies and enculturation 

and has work forthcoming in College Composition and Communication in late 2020. 










The figure, depicting the crucifixion, could be seen at the edge 

of the memorial as one entered the barricade blocking 

the entrance to the Walmart parking lot. 




A Mexican flag was hung behind the Jesus figurine. 




Rhetorical Herencia: Writing Toward a Theory of Rhetorical 

Recovery and Transformation 


University of Arizona, on land of the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui 

peoples. 1 

The barrio has its history, perhaps it is not written but as for me, it is oral. From the many that 

came to the barrio some left to go North to work, others with jobs as musicians, or shoe makers, 

others were carpenters, and they all sank roots in that barrio. 

Ramona González, 

“Historias y Cuentos de Doña Ramona: ¡Adiós, Barrio Chihuahuita!” 

Academically speaking, I am a feminist rhetorical history recovery scholar; personally 

speaking, I am the maternal granddaughter of Doña Ramona González (1906-1995), 

a published Chicana writer from the 1970s, whose texts, history, and herencia I aim to 

rescue, recover, and preserve. Importantly, her writings also document the importance 

of memory, recovery, and preservation. Doña Ramona’s writings ground my research, 

which is a part of my own rhetorical herencia. I begin theorizing rhetorical herencia 

through my journey of recovering of my abuela’s writings. 

In the summer of 2014, I completed my first book manuscript, Occupying Our 

Space: The Mestiza Rhetorics of Mexican Women Journalists and Activists, 1875-1942, a 

feminist recovery project, which highlights the writings and rhetorical history of 

Mexican women rhetors. While writing this manuscript (spring 2014) and recovering 








the works of Mexican women writers, my family made an archival recovery of our 

own: an old cardboard box containing over seven hundred and fifty pages of my 

maternal grandmother, Doña Ramona González’s, writings. Her works, written mostly 

in Spanish, were produced during the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and early 

1970s in El Paso, Texas. Later that year, my father and I would begin the slow and 

laborious process of preserving them through digitization and later translating them 

into English. One afternoon, while writing the conclusion to Occupying Our Space, my 

father called and asked, “Can I read you a piece your grandmother wrote?” Giving him 

all my attention, I listened as he read the introduction to a piece she wrote titled “Picos 

y Tolondrones: Para Todos los Preguntones”: 

Figure 1 

Chicano culture is rich, so it follows that its literature is rich. They are rich 

because they are a mixture of Hispanic, Indian-Mexican and a sprinkling of Anglo- 

Saxon cultures. The culture that we are most attached to is the Indian-Mexican, the 

mixture of which we call Chicano here in the United States. The revolution in this 

culture is about not letting it disappear, although it exists in the majority of those 

born in the United States, it is hidden for several reasons. And now, it is time to 

bring it into the light, to lift it up, and to have pride in it. 

Hearing Doña Ramona’s words, delivered in my father’s eloquent Spanish, I 

froze. From beyond the grave, my grandmother was speaking directly to me. Her 

words, written more than forty-five years ago, validated my writing and gave deeper 

meaning to my recovery work. In this piece (Figure 1), an introduction to over ninetyfive 

pages of dichos, Doña Ramona frames the importance of recovering the Chicano 

and Mexican mestizo culture by recovering the stories of our ancestors from our own 

memories and calling upon members of our community to help construct knowledge. 

Expressing an early understanding of Chicanismo, Doña Ramona’s concepts from “Picos 

y Tolondrones” and other of her writings with regard to historical discursive recovery, 

pride in our culture’s history, and memory have come to frame my understanding of 

the work I and others do as rhetorical scholars, which I call rhetorical herencia. Herencia 


Rhetorical Herencia 

means heritage, or that which is an integral part of you by birthright, such as culture, 

language, and traditions. 

Claiming a Rhetorical Herencia 

In the summer of 1990, at the age of nineteen, I moved from Central Texas to far 

West Texas or la frontera, which to this day is home to my extended family and has 

been for almost a century. I had been accepted the previous fall semester of 1989 to 

The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Due to financial reasons, living in the 

dorms did not fit the family’s budget. We considered other options. My eighty-fiveyear-old 

widowed abuela, Ramona González (1906 – 1995), was living alone and in 

need of a caretaker. As what often happens in many traditional Mexican families, 

children become the responsible caretakers of their elders. My abuela’s advanced age 

had rendered her frail and physically weak, unable to leave the house or shop for her 

own groceries; and so, moving in with her offered a better situation for me as a young 

woman living in a college town away from family. In return for a place to live, I agreed 

to take care of the grocery shopping, cleaning, and caring for Doña Ramona, while I 

also went to school. 

Upon moving in and taking on the role of caretaker, it became apparent that 

my abuela and I were generations apart in some of our thinking, but we found many 

more ways to connect and find common ground. To bridge the gap of the seven 

decades between us, we focused on the connection to our herencia. Our shared herencia 

marked those relevant characteristics and elements as women from the same family: 

food, genealogy, traditions, aspirations, religion, geography, literature, and writing. On 

many occasions, we spoke of the literature I was reading in my classes at the university, 

such as Faulkner and Hemingway, and then, on different days, we would read poetry 

from Mexican authors like Octavio Paz or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. From our talks, 

it was obvious she had read these important authors. Having gone only as far as high 

school, Doña Ramona had claimed her own education by becoming an avid reader. 

On occasion, I would share some of my college class writings with her. She would 

offer writing and editing ideas, which many times were far better than the advice I 

received from my instructors and tutors. Ashamed to admit, I never stopped to ask or 

wonder why this was so, but little did I know that she was a published writer. She has 

left it to me to piece together and recover her history. 

Unfortunately, it would not be until years after her passing that I would learn 

the depths of Doña Ramona’s skill and passion to write and discover her own 

significant publications. Unbeknownst to me at that time, in her sixties and seventies 



she had accomplished her goal as a writer, writing mostly in Spanish. Significantly, she 

was a published Chicana writer in El Grito: A Journal of Contemporary Mexican American 

Thought (1967-1973), one of the key literary journals of the Chicano Movement (Cutler, 

2014). However, she did not publish beyond this work. In our many conversations or 

pláticas (talks), she did not speak much, if any, of this facet of her past. Possibly because 

as many Mexican American women having grown up in the 1920s – 1960s (and even 

beyond) did not voice their accomplishments. For them, speaking out, especially to 

brag of oneself, was taboo. Writing as family and community scribe, though, Doña 

Ramona knew the power of not just our pláticas, but of her own palabras (words). 

Today, her words haunt me. I dream them. Fading when I awake, I can’t always make 

out the details of the message. I wish I had recorded those pláticas during our sobremesas. 2 

In her early sixties, when she began writing the stories and memories she 

preserved from her childhood, Doña Ramona cultivated and revealed her intellect, 

insight, and creativity through her documented words in cuentos, poems, fables, dichos, 

riddles, and creative non-fiction vignettes. During her lifetime, Doña Ramona 

recorded her memories for future generations, yet she was not able to realize the 

publication of a large majority of her writings. However, the rescue and recovery of 

her materials has transformed into my rhetorical herencia. The moments and pláticas that 

I spent with Doña Ramona, would fundamentally ground my identity as a Chicana, 

and more, would instill hope in me that I could become a writer. Fortunately, I 

inherited the seven hundred and fifty pages of her written words, which are now 

considered an important part of US-Mexico literary and rhetorical frontera history. In 

February 2019, Doña Ramona’s papers were accepted into the Tejana and Chicana 

Collection at the Nettie Lee Beson Latin American Collection at The University of 

Texas at Austin. 

In reflecting on what I have learned about and have yet to recover of Doña 

Ramona’s writings, the term herencia consistently comes to mind. Because she 

bequeathed me her writings, the scholar in me adds rhetorical to herencia – rhetorical 

herencia. Linguistically, I prefer the Spanish word herencia over the English word heritage 

because of its connection to my own Spanish language upbringing. As countless 

scholars of color (Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherie Moraga, Iris Ruiz, Isabel Baca, and Victor 

Villanueva) have argued, Más que nada, el idioma forma una gran parte de nuestro patrimonio. 3 

Now, in working on the transcriptions, translations, and future publication of Doña 

Ramona’s writings, I frame rhetorical herencia as a key methodological and theoretical 

component of rhetorical recovery. Adding to the concepts of Latinx rhetoric, I also 

believe that rhetorical herencia can be used to ground recovery work in Latinx research 

approaches. As a relatively new term, Latinx emerges from wanting to break down 



boundaries of gender, sex, ethnicity, and race, and results in a complex multifaceted 

definition, which seeks to include a variety of individuals and identities. Soto Vega and 

Chávez (2018) define Latinx as “ refer[ring] foremost to an ethnic identity that is often 

associated with a brown racial identity, but it can also refer to a white or black racial 

identity, as well as an indigenous identity (not to mention how multiraciality 

complicates this simple schema)” (p. 320). For many, the term Latinx conjures mixed 

emotions regarding inclusion; however, I see it as a term rife with possibility. Like in 

mathematics, the ‘x’ in Latinx serves as a variable, an unknown, or placeholder for a 

value that is not yet known. The methodological approach of pairing the Latinx 

definition of possibility with rhetorical herencia has the potential to build upon Latinx 

scholarship as a connection to our personal (close communities and family) and 

professional transformation as Latinx scholars working in a system that many times 

works to further suppress our voices. 

Latinx rhetorical scholars research, recover, and transform into knowledge not 

only of that which is familiar, but also what is not yet known or hidden from others in 

the academy. This transformation does not presume a simplicity of the process. On 

the contrary, knowledge construction remains difficult because the data must be 

subjected to a colonizing sieve of academic research processes. I propose that 

rhetorical herencia can aid or begin decolonizing processes, much like Iris D. Ruiz and 

Raúl Sánchez (2016) achieved in Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies, to create a 

distancing from Western knowledge in order to reclaim one’s own self-determination. 

Many times, we don’t know our own rhetorical herencia until we ask such questions as 

“Who am I? Where do I come from?” But whom do we ask and where do we turn in 

order to uncover our rhetorical herencia? Here I position rhetorical herencia 

retrospectively as I see it within the current rhetorical and educational scholarship of 

Latinx researchers. Scholars, such as Octavio Pimentel (2015), have turned to la gente 

buena in their communities to tell historias de éxito; Aja Martinez (2016) asks questions 

about racism within the academy and looks at a counter story; Julia López-Robertson 

(2016) works with children of color and their mothers using pláticas literarias to tap into 

children’s knowledge of their lives along la frontera. In further surveying the Latinx 

rhetorical scholarship, rhetorical herencia grounds and builds our work in the academy. 

Rhetorical herencia appears in the scholarship of taco literacies and immigrant youth 

literacies (Alvarez, 2017); studies into Mesoamerican códices (D. Baca, 2009); the work 

of translation in Latinx communities (Gonzales, 2018); service-learning in our Latinx 

communities (I. Baca, 2012); feminist film work (Hidalgo, 2017); the Latino/a 



discourse in education (Kells, et al., 2004), and Chicana feminist rhetorical recovery 

(Leon, 2013; Ramírez, 2015; & Enoch & Ramírez, 2019). 

For this inaugural issue of Latinx Writing and Rhetoric Studies (LWRS), which 

focuses on rhetorical recovery and transformation, I offer the theoretical and 

methodological framework of rhetorical herencia. I borrow Barbara L’Eplattenier’s 

(2009) definition of methodology, “[M]ethodology allows us to theorize the goals of 

our research, methods allow us to contextualize the research process or the research 

subject and materials” (p. 69). The goal of adopting rhetorical herencia as a methodology 

is to create a way in which to include our local communities – the barrios, churches, 

not-for-profits, and other non-academic spaces of cultural gatherings, including our 

families’ histories – in order to uncover marginalized voices and spaces that have been 

suppressed by traditional methodologies. Further, I suggest that rhetorical herencia 

functions as a feminist research methodology that within its framework questions the 

traditional methods of inclusion of white-only western Anglo-Saxon communities into 

scholarly conversations, or into the canon. Hui Wu (2002) brings the idea of feminist 

methodology to a strong point: “From a gendered point of view, feminist 

methodology of rhetorical history does not refer to an innocent research activity for 

research’s sake, but rather an intentionally radical effort to exert transformative power 

of research methods” (p. 85). Drawing, too, on Michelle Colpean and Rebecca Dingo’s 

(2018) recent work on engaging geopolitics of contexts, rhetorical herencia as a 

methodology pushes against the “drive-by race scholarship [which] assumes, 

unquestioned that unmarked whiteness is the ‘phantom center’ of our rhetorical 

theory” (p. 306). Thus, rhetorical herencia research and analysis forwards the 

assumption that traditional means of research are not value-free or neutral. 

In proposing rhetorical herencia, I direct to it this question: How can Latinx 

scholars develop rhetorical concepts or approaches in and out of the classroom to 

account for rhetors and/or rhetorics that are excluded from traditional rhetoric? 

Rhetorical recovery is historical work, which legitimizes once-suppressed and hidden 

forms of writing and brings to light rhetorical situations within our current politics and 

work to re/center marginalized peoples’ knowledge. It equates to bringing hidden or 

previously unrecognized writings, texts, and/or subject embodiments to the fore 

through the process of situating those texts within a legitimized history. In this article, 

I define and show examples of rhetorical herencia and also introduce my own work on 

rhetorical herencia through the writings my abuela, Doña Ramona González, left our 

family and the collective Mexican American community. 



Locating and Defining Herencia 

A recent study of genetic memory by Berit Brogaard (2014), a Danish American 

neuroscientist and philosopher, shows how humans are more than likely born with 

collective and connected memories of and about their ancestors. In a Philosophical Issue 

article, “In Partial Defense of Extended Knowledge,” Brogaard’s research pointed out 

that a person can have knowledge of episodes or actions without having experienced 

them within our states of reality. Furthering the argument in “Remembering Things 

From Before You Were Born: Can Memories be Innate?”, Brogaard (2013) suggests 

that we are able to capture and even relive the memories of our ancestors. Her research 

confirms a belief I have held for many years, which is that as living descendants of our 

ancestors, we carry a recollection of moments, events, or traumas experienced by our 

family members from before we were born, which I call ‘ancestral remembering’. 

Brogaard’s research, which indicates that we have a DNA connection to our ancestors, 

whether through memory, physical traits, “things remembered” or “things said,” 

provides a distinctive connection and opportunity for scholars of color. While the 

scientific research is promising, the Latinx community and scholars of color do not 

need such research to remind us that we can and do tap into this ancestral connection. 

Many Latinx scholars have already been engaging in this practice of recovering our 

family and community’s past and connecting it our present scholarship, which helps 

us define who we are today. Chicana scholar Eden Torres (2003), in Chicana without 

Apology: The New Chicana Cultural Studies, notes “that much of the creative work of 

Chicana writers exposes the wounds, confronts those who inflict pain, and tries to 

exorcise the shame that some individuals feel. Thus, this work can be seen as an 

attempt to grieve, to express the pain, and to heal” (p. 13). Latinx communities already 

know that we must link our memories to our current condition. We invoke our 

ancestral remembering through our ways of participating in the world –the food we 

eat, the music we listen to, the clothes we wear, the literature we read, the customs we 

keep, the ways we worship, the places we live and work, and the topics we engage in 

for research and writing. Rhetorical herencia is the way we study these participatory 

markers. 

Imbricated within ancestral remembering, herencia refers to the traits, customs, 

practices, beliefs, and memories we inherit from our ancestors and their connected 

collective culture to our present realities. These belongings [I intend a double 

implication of “belonging” here as also being a part of a community] – some tangible, 

others intangible – are given to us at birth and are those we carry with us throughout 

our lives. Our herencia, especially that of people of color, which many times remains 



lost or hidden due to colonial violence and institutional suppression, holds the power 

to ground us in the present and direct us toward a transformational future. When one’s 

own herencia is uncovered, recognized, and articulated, whether in community writing 

projects or classroom assignments, it holds the power to shift the trajectory of future 

generations, much like the movement of the Mexican American Studies program in 

Arizona public schools (Cabrera et. al, 2014). In our current divisive political climate, 

it is not uncommon that the Latinx community can be blinded to or deny their herencia, 

preferring the current mode of thinking or status quo, believing that it can possibly 

lead to greater economic success or acceptance. Because for many the past remains a 

marked unknown, herencia and the processes of uncovering that which is hidden can 

also cause anxiety. However, to understand who we are as Latinx people, it is 

important to acknowledge our own herencia. 

Rhetorical herencia as a methodology or theory can work as a basis for inquiry 

into writing studies in the classroom, as well as in the recovery of lost history, stories, 

and people, to connect us to those things we know, but maybe are not sure how we 

know. Or, as Victor Villanueva (2008) describes in “Colonial Memory, Colonial 

Research,” “…knowing something ain’t right and there ain’t no puttin’ it right but 

can’t be no ignoring the wrong” (p. 84). The “not ignoring the wrong” is where 

rhetorical herencia comes into the process of “puttin’ it right.” As a theory, rhetorical 

herencia reminds us that we can materialize and uncover a past through inquiry – doing 

genealogical work, digging in local and national archives, and conducting oral histories 

with our family and people of our communities and barrios. Rhetorical herencia 

translates also into a writing studies methodology of “naming what we know,” as Linda 

Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle (2015) have put it. I ascribe rhetorical herencia to 

serve as a Latinx threshold concept, which is a “concept critical for learning and 

participation in an area or within a community of practice” for the Latinx research and 

writing community to use (Adler-Kassner & Wardle, 2015, p. 2). The work of 

rhetorical herencia can translate into a rhetorical research methodology of considering 

our local community members as knowledge makers, acknowledging those things 

spoken or not spoken, uncovering forgotten or suppressed cultures, religions, 

traditions and daily practices, and more that we find within our quotidian lives, such 

as Octavio Pimentel’s work on redefining success within Mexican American 

communities (2015). 

As an approach that many of our Latinx scholars already utilize, rhetorical 

herencia can be utilized with students in our classes or in our own scholarly work. We, 

as Latinx scholars, do write about these inherited memories or what Kiki Petrosino 

(2015) in her poem “Literacy Narrative” calls “complaining ghosts.” When we answer 



the ghosts and write about the ancestral connections and rememberings – our herencia 

– we write ourselves. We come closer to finding who we are, where we are from, and 

also, where we are going. Writing about and recovering our herencias helps reconcile 

the trauma, recover some of the lost memory, and transform it into public knowledge. 

Locating Rhetorical Herencia: un encuentro 

During the spring of 2017, I began piecing together Doña Ramona’s expansive work 

by digitally scanning her writings, reading them page by page to identify writings for 

translation, and mapping her path in becoming a writer within the Chicano Movement. 

Primarily, her writings form a feminine part of the Chicano literary Movement through 

her five stories that were published in 1973 in one of the first special publications 

focusing on Chicana writings, El Grito: Chicanas en la literature y el arte. To offer a 

gendered contextualization of her writings, El Grito: A Journal of Contemporary Mexican- 

American Thought (Romano-V, et. al. 1967-1973), marks the literary journal that major 

Chicano writers, such as Rudolfo Anaya, author of Bless Me, Última, and Tomás Rivera, 

author of …y no se lo tragó la tierra/…And the Earth did not Devour Him, published some 

of their first writings. Anaya and Rivera would go on to win the Quinto Sol Literary 

Award, for which Doña Ramona was nominated in 1974. She did not win the prize; it 

went to Estela Portillo-Trambley. 4 In short, my grandmother published alongside 

distinguished Chicano writers of the Chicano Movement, yet her writings have gone 

overlooked for over four decades. Now, Doña Ramona’s writings, both published and 

unpublished, form a part of this told and untold history of the Chicano literary 

movement. Significantly, in February 2019, her writings were formally accepted into 

the Chicana and Tejana Collection at the University of Texas at Austin Nettie Lee 

Benson Latin American Collection under the title, The Ramona González Collected 

Writings. 

While she began writing, I was hardly a toddler. Today, as a mestiza scholar, I 

write at the textual and geographic border of knowledges, languages, memories, and 

places – at the multiple and blurred disciplinary borders of my adopted academic 

language of rhetoric, the voice of personal narrative, poetics, history, two languages 

(Spanish and English), and the recovery lens of feminist historiography and rhetorical 

herencia. These border knowledges and Doña Ramona’s recently recovered writings 

(my herencia) are imbricated in my skin and bloodline with a century-long maternal 

family history of struggle, life, and community connected to Mexico and the frontera 

along the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. 



Figure 2: Image of González Grocery in El Paso, Texas. circa 1938 

Herencia, closely tied to memory, connects me to the time I lived with my abuela, 

Doña Ramona (1990-1995). We would sit together in the mornings and engage in what 

Francisco Guajardo and Miguel Guajardo (2013) call pláticas. Amid the toasted tortillas 

and café, our pláticas constructed realities and events from her past – memories of her 

growing up in Barrio Chihuahuita, a historical barrio located along the Rio Grande, 

and moving to Segundo Barrio (both located in El Paso, Texas). She told of her 

wanting to attend college and to become a writer and journalist, and she recounted the 

events that happened in the family corner-store, González Grocery (1931-1958) 

(Figure 2). I would quickly eat my breakfast and rush off to school, attend my history, 

literature, and education classes, not giving these talks a second thought. In reality, it 

was my abuela who was truly giving me my own history, literature, and education. 

Twenty-eight years after her passing, she once again is guiding me. One 

summer evening in 2014, while I was visiting family in El Paso, my mother, Sandra 

González, called: “You may want to come and look what is in this box your Tia Norma 

brought over.” I had no idea that I was about to open a time capsule of my abuela’s 

past, a treasure trove of Chicana rhetorical and literary history. Lifting the lid, I 

discovered over seven hundred and fifty pages of manuscript-ready writings stacked 

inside the faded vegetable box. The writings in this archive vary in genre: one-page 

poems, short stories, and memoirs as long as forty-five pages, universal sayings or 

dichos (over five hundred), oral history textual recordings, and much more. These 

writings were originally composed on a manual typewriter in the late 1960s and early 

1970s and at times reveal her notes and pencil markings visible throughout the faded 

pages. As historical artifacts, they stand as textbook examples of primary documents. 



In reading her writings closely, I recognize that they are fundamental texts to 

recover and preserve as part of our US-Mexico and Texas rhetorical, literary, and 

border history. The genres she wrote vary and demonstrate the depth of Doña 

Ramona’s Spanish language proficiency, especially for not having been formally 

educated in its grammar. For example, there are approximately fifty poems written in 

Spanish for children, such as “Amor chiquito,” “A el niño,” “A la niña,” and “El gato y el 

ratoncito.” They speak of sweet first love, lessons for behaving at home and school, and 

conversations between a cat and mouse. While these themes seem simplistic in nature, 

they represent how Doña Ramona understood and communicated Mexican 

American’s early literacy practices, such as through fables and tales. Other lengthier 

writings reveal a dual border and barrio historical significance. A series piece entitled, 

“Por vida de estas santas cruces, yo viví en estos barrios,” narrates the daily living conditions 

and details in character vignettes a variety of historical moments of the people in Barrio 

Chihuahuita during the early 1900s. One story also reads as an oral account of a barrio 

episode in 1910, the year the Mexican Revolution erupted. These writings capture what 

Leticia Garza-Falcón (1998) contends narrative writings by Mexican Americans 

embody, “a more varied view of the human experience in the social world...[and]… 

recover a human complexity which would otherwise have been banished from the 

heterogeneous history of the people of Texas and the Southwest” (23). These firstperson 

feminine narrative perspectives by Doña Ramona center on a barrio within the 

U.S./Mexico borderlands and represent essential pieces to historicize, preserve, and 

make accessible to Mexican American scholars and essentially to the greater public of 

the Texas border region. 

During the civil rights era and at the beginning of the Chicano Movement, 

Doña Ramona, now in her mid-60s, began to record the memory of her raza on an 

old, grey Remington typewriter. From a young age, Doña Ramona longed to be a 

journalist, but never accomplished this goal. Instead, later in life she took up writing, 

and, from her memory, she recorded the daily happenings and conversations of the 

people from her home community, Barrio Chihuahuita. Word by word, she was 

constructing an early Chicano literary history. For over four decades, Doña Ramona’s 

unpublished writings lingered in an unmarked family archive. The essence of a 

community and personal herencia in this project is reflected in the many of Doña 

Ramona’s writings, such as in a piece titled “Los Libros,” whose genre I have labeled a 

cuadro, a one-page literary piece (not a poem) that focuses on one subject. In this cuadro, 

Doña Ramona gifts a young child a book, admonishing him/her to read in order to 

claim a richer (not necessarily monetary) future. These examples point to everyday 

community literacy practices in her Barrio Chihuahuita and beyond, such as in other 



barrios, where literacy practices do not resemble the Western standard of knowing and 

learning. 

Figure 3: Los Libros: from the primary writings of Romana González. Circa 1973 

Books 

This book is yours, very much yours. I give it to you so you can see it and if you want, 

you’ll read it and you will have more happiness. 

A few verses are scattered in your Book. They are like stairways of stars that will carry 

your thoughts high, very high. You will feel joyful when you read and understand them. 

They are stories and verses for you, all for you. Through words in the story and in the 

verse, you will hear harmonious songs, you will see other lands, you will feel the desire to see 

distant and rare stars shining on a clear night. They will make you desirous to recreate 

yourself in the aromas of rare gardens and flowers. And you'll have fun watching the 

nuances of different birds. 

But how sad it is when a Book full of fascinations, of fragrances of carnations and roses, 

of sparkling stars, of distant lands and thousands of wonders, that you have in your hands, if 

you do not open it to read it and recreate yourself in the beautiful Tableaus. Hold the Books 

in high esteem, child, like a treasure. Take care of your Books and enjoy them, the painted 

figures, whether from nature or from things. You will see unknown landscapes in the photos 



and paintings on the pages of your Books. With your Books you will spend the best times of 

your life. 

Read, Child…… 

Read, good books….. 

And you will be very rich….. 

In “Los Libros” (Figure 3), the literal handing-down of literacy from one 

generation to the other in my family emerges as thematically central. Spanish language 

writings such as “Los Libros,” and many more within the archive, mark my own 

rhetorical herencia with Doña Ramona that represent her passing on to me the tools 

and understanding of a bilingual literacy. As recovery researchers, we must ask: When 

writing about ourselves, our families, and our communities, how do we remain the 

objective researcher? As a trained researcher, I don’t believe that this stance is fully 

possible with rhetorical herencia, as with Moraga’s and Anzaldúa’s (2015) theory in the 

flesh. On the contrary, researching and writing about one’s own family, community, 

or oneself can serve as an act of resistance and decolonization. As the maternal 

granddaughter of Doña Ramona, I recognize that I am always already written into this 

recovery of these writings, which I call un cuento de cuentos (a story of stories). The 

entanglement remains inescapable. As shown here, thetorical herencia equates to a 

relational recovery connected to who we are and brings about a transformation of 

ourselves and our community. By using rhetorical herencia as a methodology, we 

recognize our proximity to the subject. Like seeking out our student’s funds of 

knowledge as a decolonizing pedagogy, uncovering my own rhetorical herencia presents 

an entanglement in which I hope to remain. Rhetorical herencia as a methodology of 

recovery makes this entanglement possible. 

In some of the poetry and children’s stories she writes, I can identify the 

relational recovery, such as in this short poem, “A la niña.” In this work, I imagine 

Doña Ramona thinking of one of my cousins or of me, the young girl that would run 

into her lap on our family’s frequent visits and whose tears she would wipe away. After 

our family drove away, my abuela possibly sat at the typewriter and wrote: 



Figure 4: A La Niña: from the primary writings of Ramona González. Circa 1973 

To the Little Girl 

Little girl, do not cry, do not cry, 

Time is for something better than just for getting by. 

Little girl, smile, little girl, smile 

For time soon flees away. 

Little girl you are sweetness, you are sweetness, 

Treasure it like a virtue. 

Let no one take from you that nectar, 

That is the springtime of your life. 

Child, you are perfume, perfume, 

You are the aroma beyond compare 

From the gardenia and from the rose, 

And the blossoms of the fragrant orange grove. 

Conserve your tears, 

Keep your sweetness, 

Spread the perfume 

Along the pathway that you go. 



These writings are not the fleeting words of calm from a grandmother to her 

granddaughter. Because of the situated historical and rhetorical context within the 

Chicano literary movement, “A la niña” (Figure 4) reflects a Latinx bilingual literacy of 

a 1960s Chicana writer from the US-Mexico frontera claiming her voice and 

transforming the history for those who recover it into knowledge for future 

generations. The more I read into and write about the writings from Doña Ramona, 

the more I believe this research and recovery work has been reserved for me to 

complete. The introduction of her work and recovery of just a few of her writings here 

marks only the beginning of this project. Further, I contend that my own rhetorical 

herencia and recovery serves as a transformational moment for our discipline, but more 

importantly, for the Latinx community, much like the people still living in Barrio 

Chihuahuita, looking to find their place with our world. 

Conclusion 

A method for academic and archival recovery work, rhetorical herencia can function as 

a threshold concept for Latinx communities and serve as a methodology for recovering 

texts, voices, and materials from our own families and communities. Rhetorical herencia 

gives a deep relational connection with our work rather than just a topic that we ask 

students to research and analyze. While the phrase rhetorical herencia may be novel, the 

method is not new to our Latinx scholars. Many scholars, Aja Y. Martinez (2016), 

Steven Álvarez (2017), Cruz Medina (2013; 2013), Isabel Baca (2012), Iris Ruiz (2016), 

Laura Gonzales (2018), and many more, have been engaging in this work for decades. 

Looking ahead to new research, rhetorical herencia serves as a way of talking about what 

we do and naming what we know as a research community. 

Endnotes 

1. Land acknowledgement – Native American Student Affairs. (2020). Retrieved 

February 26, 2020, from https://nasa.arizona.edu/ 

2. The word pláticas references Guajardo & Guajardo’s use of pláticas as etymology, 

inquiry, and pedagogy in “The Power of Plática” (2013) published in Reflections: 

Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning (159-164). Sobremesa is a term in 

Spanish that refers to the intimate and connective talk after a meal. 

3. More than anything, language forms a large part of our heritage. 

4. See Faye Nell Vowell and Estela Portillo-Trambley, “A MELUS Interview: 

Estela Portillo-Trambley.” Varieties of Ethnic Criticism, vol. 9, no. 4, 1982, pp. 

59-66. 



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Cristina D. Ramírez is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at the 

University of Arizona, where she directs the doctoral program. She specializes in 

archival rescue and recovery of work of Mexican and Mexican American female 

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Mexicana Activism in the Spanish Language Press, 1875-1922 (Southern Illinois University 

Press, 2019). 










Cont. Interview with the El Paso Strong Mural 

Artist Gabe Vasquez 

CHALLENGES FOR ARTISTS 

ELVIRA: What are some of the obstacles and challenges you've encountered as an artist? 

GABE: I can describe it in a metaphor. This city is like a bucket full of crabs. Stepping 

on each other trying to get to the top and get out. And it's not cool because we can all 

make it in whatever we do. There's no need to hate on anybody. Me for instance, I'm 

not doing this for the attention, fame or money. I'm real serious about doing art for 

my life as a career. I'm real serious about being a very very high pedigree art teacher. 

I'm covered in tattoos. Any high school I go to is going to think twice about me. If I 

have a really gnarly background, I'm in. And then I can make some real noise in the 

community. Helping people get better at being themselves. Really, I'd like to just 

eliminate the hate. No matter what you do, you're not the only one here doing it. If 

you're the best, good for you. You don't have to act like it. If we're all a big team, then 

imagine how much easier those obstacles are removed. It's a big thing. The hate in this 

city is pretty real. Envy and all that stuff. If we were all El Paso Tribe, then we're gonna' 

go places fast. No one's gonna' have to worry about anything except pushing 

themselves. To be worth it. 




ELVIRA: What impact do you think that commercialism and the media has had on 

your work? Is this good or bad? 

GABE: Well it's really cool, but a lot of people say ah, you're going to be a sellout. I 

would love nothing more than to be on Team Red Bull, Team Mountain Dew, Team 

Montana. And just promote everything. Because I think it's really cool. What was 

someone's dream to be when they started to play guitar? To be a rock star, right? I 

don't see what else you'd do with that. It's just really cool when you can engage in that 

segment of this game. There's the quality that's number one to me. There's the 

technique that's number one also. Exposure and what you can do with it that's a big 

thing too. I'm not trying to be a reckless person and be famous. If I was gonna' be well 

known, I'd like it to be positive, uplifting. That way I'm not a bad guy. 


ELVIRA: Can you talk about how do artists survive? How do you make a living? If 

there's a message you could give to people in El Paso who want art, what would you 

say? 

GABE: There's degrees to it because if you want something simple then you might get 

it cheap. But if you want something like this, you're gonna have to break the bank. 

Everyone has cute ideas they want to have done. When they try to get it done, they 

find out how much it actually costs to do it. That's when their ideas aren't cute 

anymore. If you want someone really good, you're gonna' have to pay up for it. Not 

because we think we're so amazing we gotta' charge for everything. No. What you're 

paying for is my fifteen years of blood, sweat, and tears. My family just started having 

hope in me. So, you're paying for a lot. No one's just born able to do this. Art is not 



something you're born with. You weren't born with the soul of an artist. You earned 

it through hard work. I went to school at Hanks. My wrestling coach, Coach Carter, 

has a great saying. Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. I don't know 

if you guys think that some people are special, they're not. They just work really hard. 

There are some people gifted but if they don't work hard, they're not going far. So 

that's the thing when pricing art. The difference is going to the mall for clothes or 

going to Goodwill for clothes. What do you want? Name brand? Super amazing. Go 

to the mall. You might find some cool things at the Goodwill, but you went there cuz 

it's cheap. And you got hand me downs that are worn. So, it's just what you want. 

That's the thing that people don't understand. I hate it when they think we're gonna' 

do it for exposure cuz I don't need any of that. 

CONCLUSION 


Putting this work together and writing this piece, months after this tragedy occurred 

has provided me an opportunity to further process the aftermath. We now know that 

the killer was indeed driven by bigotry, hate, racism, and white supremacy emboldened 

by the current President of the United States of America. However, even more 

infuriating, the shooter, who acted like he was brave driving over ten hours from Allen, 

Texas to El Paso, acted cowardly pleading not guilty. 

As a playwright, I also had the opportunity to participate in the El Paso Strong 

evening of short plays by El Paso Playwrights. This special event was presented by the 

Dramatists Guild and the UTEP Department of Theatre and Dance and led by the 

amazing award-winning playwright Georgina Escobar, a Visiting Professor of Practice 



at UTEP. I used this writing opportunity to try and wrestle with the bigger issues that 

led to this hate crime and act of terrorism. It made me think about the ideologies that 

exist that spawn this sort of violence and hate in our society and that goes on to shape 

individuals to do such a thing. 

In a course I teach, The Roots of Latina/o Hip Hop, my students and I discuss 

Robert Moses, known as a “master-builder” in the City of New York, whose own 

racist beliefs and actions led to the further destruction of people of color, especially 

Blacks and Latinx in the Bronx. I based the main character, El Billonario (The 

Billionaire), of my short play on Robert Moses. To me, he represents a corrupt 

politician with white supremacy motivations to uplift white people and further 

marginalize people of color. I also wrote the short play as a challenge given by the 

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel who had just visited UTEP and gave a 

playwriting workshop that I participated in. The challenge she gave us was to write a 

play based on a profile on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. The assignment was to pick a 

character who disrupts our assumptions of people based on race, class, and gender. 

I found a white male character on the list with the build of a fireman and the 

look of a corporate-looking white man who I perceived we would normally see in 

positions of power. In my play, El Billonario is a powerful businessman who acts like a 

politician, but his wealth is what gives him so much power over major decisions being 

made in the City of El Paso. I wanted to illustrate a dominant force actively advancing 

the quality of life for white people and corporate entities, while completely ignoring 

and destroying the lives of marginalized communities and people of color. In writing 

the play, I was also inspired by an analysis a colleague gave, offering criticism of those 

who say they are surprised by acts of hate and violence. I believe I understood her 

message as saying that if you’re surprised by the existence of racism and white 

supremacy, then you’re choosing to ignore the reality of the experiences and history 

of people of color. If you chose to be ignorant of and to the experiences of those less 

fortunate in your community, then you too help to pull the trigger, unleashing the 

spray of bullets that kills innocent victims who live regular lives buying school supplies 

on a beautiful, sunny Saturday in the safest city in America – El Paso, Texas. 

I stand with my fellow artist and my spiritual brother Gabe Vasquez when he 

says that El Paso Strong is a message to the world that we are a strong community that 

will rise above the terror unleashed on our beloved Chuco. If anything, this tragedy only 

makes us stronger. El Paso’s artists are just getting started in a renewed movement to 

empower, raise awareness, and uplift and heal our community. 



Endnotes 

1. Land acknowledgement – Shepherd, J. P. (2019, March). "Indigenous El PASO": 

How the Humanities help us SEE El Paso as a native place. Retrieved March 21, 

2020, from https://humanitiescollaborative.utep.edu/project-blog/indigenousel-paso-how-the-humanities-help-us-see-el-paso-as-a-native-place 

2. This interview took place on Friday, September 20, 2019 in El Paso, Texas. 

Embedded Video URL Links 

Link 1: https://youtu.be/XKop-v0uogA 

Link 2: https://youtu.be/dGvJBO3VvJE 

Link 3: https://youtu.be/xJH1gXinlbo 

Link 4: https://youtu.be/eE5n-K8ai3U 

Link 5: https://youtu.be/jQpx2VLPiKE 

Link 6: https://youtu.be/DGpa8ocGEts 

Link 7: https://youtu.be/r4_9jLG8PJs 

Link 8: https://youtu.be/JH7XIcxIzPE 

Link 9: https://youtu.be/LGVxnuvSUsI 

Link 10: https://youtu.be/bHNfhsOL5EM 

Link 11: https://youtu.be/qc9Sy7lEhnY 

Link 12: https://youtu.be/12vZb2atOVA 


Elvira Carrizal-Dukes is a Doctoral Degree Candidate in the Rhetoric and 

Composition program at UTEP where she is also Assistant Professor of Practice and 

an Academic Advisor for Chicana/o Studies. Elvira earned a bachelor’s degree from 

the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in Journalism, Chicano Studies, and Theatre 

Arts, and she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Film from Columbia University 

in New York City. Elvira was born in El Paso, Texas and raised in Chaparral, New 

Mexico. She is the author of graphic novels, plays, and films. Her Japanese graphic 

novel A.W.O.L. exhibited at Tokyo Comic Con in 2018. For more information about 

Elvira’s work, please visit http://www.dukescomics.com. 



Figure 3: Religious items placed outside of the Walmart to memorialize the victims. 

Photograph by Gaby Velasquez. 










Review of Bordered Writers: Latinx Identities and Literacy 

Practices at Hispanic-Serving Institutions 

Edited by Isabel Baca, Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa, and Susan Wolff Murphy. 

Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019. 248 pp. 


University of Washington Seattle, on land of the Coast Salish peoples, land 

that touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the Suquamish, 

Tulalip, and Muckleshoot nations. 1 

Although members of the various Latinx communities that make up this nation 

comprise the largest minoritized group by far, little has been written about 

undergraduate students from these communities by scholars in the field of rhetoric 

and composition. Like its 2007 predecessor, Teaching Writing with Latino/a Students: 

Lessons Learned at Hispanic-Serving Institutions co-edited by Cristina Kirklighter, Diana 

Cárdenas, and Susan Wolff Murphy, Bordered Writers: Latinx Identities and Literacy 

Practices at Hispanic-Serving Institutions is a concerted effort by a group of impassioned 

scholars who wish to contribute to a better understanding of the challenges that Latinx 

students encounter as they embark on their college careers, especially in terms of the 

narrow, monolinguistic ideologies that continue to inform the teaching of writing in 

colleges across the country. 

Immediately, a slight modification in titles from the first volume (Latino/a) to 

this one (Latinx) signals the sweeping changes that have taken place in the interim. 

Although the focus in both collections is on student identities and literacy practices, 

the sites and the language used to describe them has also shifted dramatically. For 

example, not only has the University of Texas at Pan American become the more 

comprehensive University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, but multiculturalism has been 








replaced by translingualism. As a consequence, the bevy of scholars included in this 

volume are in a position to contribute new theoretical, pedagogical and practical 

insights that promise to move the field forward in ways that many of the scholars 

included in the earlier volume could not have imagined a mere twelve years ago. 

Through their well-grounded citations, theoretical positions, method-ologies, 

data collection and analyses, the contributors to this volume demonstrate a familiarity 

with critical concerns facing the field, especially as those concerns impact the academic 

lives of Latinx students who face an array of challenges as they transition from their 

communities of belonging to the various community college and university settings 

they inhabit. On a broader level and to different degrees, a number of the essays in the 

collection explicitly engage the ever-expanding focus across the nation on the 

establishment of Hispanic-Serving Institutions and the role they play in providing 

Latinx students with the kinds of support they need to be successful. And whether 

they invoke more locally nuanced concepts like familia or more widely recognized ones 

like translingualism, contributors demonstrate a familiarity with and awareness of how 

such concepts can be utilized to address the needs of Latinx students. As a reader, I 

am impressed by the range of theoretical and methodological approaches that 

contributors call on and heartened by their careful excavation of the critical role that 

lived experience plays both in their individual development as scholars in the field and 

their efforts to intervene in the lives of their students. In this respect, their use of 

testimonio accents and signals a more sophisticated intervention in the field that rightly 

acknowledges the vital role that language, culture, and identity play across the projects 

that contributors address. 

The introduction, ten essays, and five testimonios that comprise this volume 

include scholarly research and personal stories designed to enlighten a broad audience 

of fellow scholars and educators about how they can make use of the theoretical and 

methodological principles available in the field to gather data and stories that provide 

readers with a better understanding of the Latinx students they are likely to encounter 

in their classrooms. The introduction serves to effectively bind the various testimonios 

and essays by providing a coherent narrative that locates the work in the scholarship 

that others have contributed to the field. The essays in each of the four parts— 

Developmental English and Bridge Programs, First-Year Writing, Professional and 

Technical Writing, and Writing Centers and Mentored Writing—are different enough 

from one another in terms of the theories and methods they invoke and the data they 

analyze, but what is common across the four parts is a palpable commitment by every 

writer to make members of a broader audience aware of the challenges Latinx students 

have encountered over the last several decades, as well as the kinds of interventions 


Review of Bordered Writers 

educators need to consider to make a difference in these students lives. The five 

testimonios serve to personalize the more scholarly treatises (although a number of the 

ten chapters also make effective use of testimonio) by humanizing the telling and, in line 

with current theoretical interests in the field, embodying that telling in the lived 

experience of scholars who to a great degree faced and met the same kinds of 

challenges in their own personal lives. 

Because it is both timely and overdue, Bordered Writers responds to the needs 

of a wide audience in the field of rhetoric/composition and beyond. The book is 

relevant to graduate faculty and writing program administrators whose primary 

responsibility is to prepare graduate students to teach writing to culturally diverse 

students. No doubt faculty who teach graduate seminars and practicum courses on 

language, culture, identity, and pedagogy will find refreshing takes on topics and 

lessons relevant to the scholars they are cultivating. Faculty in schools of education 

and administrators charged with addressing diversity by building or rebuilding existing 

programs will find the subject matter relevant as well. Finally, the book will appeal to 

students in advanced, undergraduate courses designed to examine the teaching of 

writing or the broader education of Latinx students as their numbers in university 

settings continue to increase. As the co-editors make clear in their introduction, 

“[b]ordered writers, in and outside Hispanic-Serving Institutions, have a voice that 

must be heard and should not be ignored” (2019, p. 10). 

Endnotes 

1. Land acknowledgement – Native life & Tribal Relations. (2020). Retrieved 

February 21, 2020, from https://www.washington.edu/diversity/tribal-relations/ 

References 

Baca, I., Hinojosa, Y. I., & Murphy, S. W. (Eds.). (2019). Bordered writers: Latinx 

identities and literacy practices at Hispanic-serving institutions. SUNY Press. 

Kirklighter, C., Cárdenas, D., & Murphy, S. W. (Eds.). (2007). Teaching writing with 

Latino/a students: Lessons learned at Hispanic-serving institutions. SUNY Press. 


Juan C. Guerra, Professor of English and Chair of American Ethnic Studies at the 

University of Washington, is co-editor of Writing in Multicultural Settings (1997) and 

author of Close to Home: Oral and Literate Practices in a Transnational Mexicano Community 

(1998). His most recent book, Language, Culture, Identity and Citizenship in College 

Classrooms and Communities (2016), develops a set of rhetorical and discursive tools that 



disenfranchised students can use to navigate and negotiate the pedagogical spaces they 

inhabit in writing classrooms and beyond in the course of becoming citizens in the making 

in a global society. 










A row of crosses made by Greg Zanis to honor 

each victim of the El Paso shooting on August 3, 2019. 




The “Grand Candela” memorial dedicated to the victims located at Walmart. 




Review of Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families 

Translanguaging Homework Literacies 

By Steven Alvarez. Albany, State University of New York Press, 2017. 212 pp. 


Texas Tech University, on land of the Comanche tribe. 1 

This story begins with thirty-three-year-old María Cruz’s emigration from Morelos, 

Mexico to Southern California, where she married and had four children. Ten years 

later she and her family moved to New York City, where through complex networks 

of neighboring families, school and religious events, after-school programs, and the 

ability to broker languages by María’s eldest daughter, Gina, María and Gina found 

themselves in the MANOS community – the Mexican American Network of Students, 

a grassroots educational mentoring program organized by volunteer mentors and 

Mexican mothers. MANOS offered free after-school and evening tutoring to families, 

primarily Mexican immigrant families in New York City. María’s is just one of several 

mothers’ stories included in Steven Alvarez’s Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant 

Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies. But it is through María’s story that Alvarez 

introduces his book’s main goal: to “confirm the importance of collaboratively gained 

family literacy for cultivating positive attitudes toward echándole ganas in schooling 

and brokering the immigrant bargain” (p. xviii). Alvarez’s premise requires readers to 

consider “how the immigrant bargain offers a space for intergenerational 

dialogue...with rather than for children, even despite the standardized academic power 

of English literacy” (p. xxiv). 

In reading this book, it is important to understand “the intergenerational 

narrative of echándole ganas,” a term Luis Urrieta, Jr. (2009) argues has no clear 

English equivalent because “it is a term embedded in emotion and struggle, but would 








most closely be translated to ‘giving it your all’” (qtd. in Alvarez, 2017, p. xvi). Equally 

important are superación narratives, which Alvarez asserts “articulate stories about 

quality of life, security, and economic well-being” (p. xvi). Together, narratives of 

echándole ganas and superación form part of the immigrant bargain, a common, but 

nonetheless complicated history of first-generation parents and their hopes for hard 

working, academically successful second-generation children. 

Because of Alvarez’s work as a MANOS mentor, his research is situated within 

five years’ worth of involved documentation. Thus, his research provides a 

comprehensive study that is divided into six chapters and shares the work of seven 

mentors, nine first-generation Mexican-origin immigrant mothers and their twentyone 

children as they navigate, or broker, socio-linguistic interactions at MANOS. 

Chapter 1, “Mexican New York City: Making Community at MANOS” 

contextualizes family navigation, particularly for mothers, of educational opportunities 

in Mexican New York City and describes a flexible and strategic blueprint used by 

MANOS to successfully engage literacy mentorship. Alvarez explores the history of 

the larger Mexican-origin community in New York City beginning in 1990 when New 

York experienced an influx in the population of Mexican immigrants caused by 

financial crisis in Mexico and shifts in New York City’s economic circumstances that 

increased demand for low-wage labor (p. 6). While Alvarez describes the changing 

landscape of the city, he zooms in on Foraker Street, one of New York City’s Mexican 

immigrant barrios and the site of his fieldwork. MANOS was located in the basement 

of the San Juan Bautista Catholic Church on Foraker Street. Like the city, the barrio 

experienced an influx of Mexican immigrants and thus an increase in student 

enrollment and “community desire for educational support” (p. 8). This increase 

sometimes strained MANOS’s resources, requiring a collaborative and communal 

effort to keep MANOS going. Alvarez details both the layout and structure of 

MANOS’s mentoring, documentation of grants, applications, and report cards of 

mentees, mentorship time and space allocation, and available resources such as a 

library of donated books in multiple subjects and languages. Through his introduction 

of the MANOS families and mentors, Alvarez asserts that mentors “brokered 

literacies, opening spaces for shared power relations and social interaction among 

mothers and children when doing homework” (p. 23). These relationships were 

established between mothers, mentors, and mentees and constructed a uniquely 

mutual and negotiated translanguaging learning community experience. 

Chapter 2, “Translanguaging Events: Homework Literacies at MANOS” 

establishes the book’s theoretical framework, a theory that re-constructs 

translanguaging events as a “methodological approach for coding and narrating literacy 


Review of Brokering Tareas 

activities in situated contexts” (p. 42). Alvarez asserts that the promise of opportunity 

and social mobility inherent in the immigrant bargain is also present (though not 

always articulated) through increased bilingual opportunities. It is in this chapter that 

Alvarez explicitly defines a broker (the noun) as “the mediating participant who 

establishes or destabilizes the link of communication among communicants” (p. 43) 

and to broker (the verb) as “[serving] as a liaison with influence in exchanges between 

individuals” (p. 43). Both mentors and mentees functioned as brokers with mothers in 

homework situations at MANOS. Alvarez describes the mentoring at MANOS as 

“brokering between audiences and embodying shifting and dynamic positions of 

power”; this problematizes monolingual assumptions through a translanguaging 

framework which allows communities to “better...understand the nuances of literacy 

practices” (p. 41-42). These nuances of brokered performances, however creative and 

critical, are not without the added complexity of disrupted or redistributed power 

dynamics between children and their Mexican immigrant, language-minoritized 

parents which Alvarez continues to discuss in the latter half of his book. 

Chapter 3, “Translanguaging in Practice: Homework, Linguistic Power, and 

Family Life” offers a detailed look at the day-to-day translanguaging occurrences 

during homework and mentoring sessions at MANOS. Alvarez reintroduces readers 

to Gina and María and discusses the substantial amount of language responsibility 

Gina carried not just for her mother, but her entire family. Alvarez also analyzes two 

translanguaging events in a case study that reveals how translanguaging functions to 

circumscribe monolingual constraints and helps to develop an “understanding [of] 

how language excludes but also includes agents within discourses and communities” 

(p. 81). These agents include the significant contributions of language-minoritized 

parents in homework sessions and their children’s overall academic progress. 

Chapter 4, “Brokering the Immigrant Bargain: Negotiating Language, Power, 

and Identity in Mexican Immigrant Families” and Chapter 5, “Brokering 

Communities: Community Superación and Local Literacy Investment” describe in 

more detail the immigrant bargain at MANOS and examine how MANOS worked to 

establish trust among mentors and immigrant families while translanguaging English 

language homework. Alvarez explores how MANOS mothers served as powerful 

agents in their children’s formulation and perception of the immigrant bargain 

narrative as well as how MANOS mentees perceived and were affected by this parental 

influence. More specifically, the rhetorical power of immigrant parents both motivated 

their children, but at times conflated academic aspirations and success with pressure 

to assimilate and distance themselves from their parents. In efforts to ease this tension, 

Alvarez notes that “[t]he support that MANOS provided…reflects a community effort 



to engage with the dominant institutional language while maintaining the integrity of 

the home language used to communicate in personal relations” (p. 108). MANOS’s 

support for this type of engagement came through the sustained, nurtured trust of care 

and commitment, creating a safe space for brokered performances and translanguaging 

events that addressed the immigrant bargain. 

Chapter 6, “Tareas, Community, and Brokering Care: Mentoring Local 

Languages and Literacies” concludes Alvarez’s research with a call for the use of a 

plurilingual model for K-12 schools, university teacher education programs, and 

grassroots organizations to practice collaboration in ethnographic fieldwork, creating 

a group community literacy specialists Alvarez refers to as educator-ethnographers. 

This model, according to Alvarez “[derives] generative themes, crafts, and vocabularies 

reflective of the linguistic repertoires of local communities” as well as teaches 

educators to be aware of and attentive to “subtractive policies that blame students’ 

languages and families by characterizing them as shortcomings (p. 143). Alvarez’s time 

at MANOS concludes with the book; however, he finishes with suggestions for 

educator-ethnographers to continue the work of meaningful community literacy 

cooperation. Alvarez’s final claim explicitly points to the importance of community 

and academic partnerships, a claim that supports one of the book’s underlying 

assertions, an assertion Alvarez acknowledges is not new…that bilingualism is a civil 

right. 

Through Brokering Tareas, Alvarez offers an in-depth ethnographic study of 

MANOS that broadens public understanding of translingual communicative acts, 

foregrounding the complexity and richness of such acts. Informed by his positionality, 

his in-depth involvement in the community, the book’s methodology noticeably 

possesses a deep sense of respect and responsibility to ethical and reciprocal research 

within this community. While Alvarez acknowledges that his book does not address 

the gender dynamics of these brokered translanguaging events, his work certainly 

opens the conversation to these contributions. Overall, Alvarez constructs a 

sophisticated, well-sequenced examination of community and literacy that grapples 

with the recognition that “the force of academic English’s legitimacy to dominate 

certainly does not necessitate believing in a mainstream way of speaking, reading, or 

writing” (xxi). Rather, Alvarez argues, “ideological dispositions and preferences 

communicated through discourses that sanction the immigrant bargain are instilled in 

individuals over long, slow processes” and his work seeks to “focus [on] these dynamic 

contributions aimed at advancing immigrant families’ emergent bilingualism” (xxii). 


Review of Brokering Tareas 

Endnotes 

1. Land acknowledgement – Lubbock County, Texas. (2020). Retrieved April 03, 

2020, from https://www.co.lubbock.tx.us 

References 

Alvarez, S. (2017). Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging 

Homework Literacies. State University of New York Press. 


Marlene Galván was born and currently resides in the Texas Borderlands. She is the 

granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, daughter of Mexican American parents, and 

mother to one beautiful boy. She is a lecturer in the First Year Writing Program at 

the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and Ph.D. student in the Technical 

Communication & Rhetoric program at Texas Tech University. 








2021 CALL 

FOR 

SUBMISSIONS 

Latinx Writing and Rhetoric Studies (LWRS) is the professional journal for the college 

scholar-teacher interested in both national and international literacy events dealing 

with Latinx Communities, Diaspora, and Identity and Cultural Practices. 

LWRS publishes articles about literature, rhetoric-composition, critical theory, 

creative writing theory and pedagogy, linguistics, literacy, reading theory, pedagogy, 

and professional issues related to the teaching and creation of Latinx epistemologies. 

Issues may also include review essays. Contributions may work across traditional 

field boundaries; authors represent the full range of institutional types. 

We seek submissions for our 2021 summer issue! 

For details on how to submit to LWRS, please visit the submission guidelines on our 

web page: https://latinxwritingandrhetoricstudies.com/submission-guidelines/ 

To be considered for our next issue, please submit your work by October 1, 2020 

Send submissions to all three email addresses: 

LWRS –– cccclatinxcaucus@gmail.com 

Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa – yndalecio.hinojosa@tamucc.edu 

Christina V. Cedillo – CedilloC@UHCL.edu

LWRS June 2020 Volume 1, Issue 1

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