Reflections Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing and Service Learning Volume 13, Issue 1, Fall 2013

Editor: Cristina Kirklighter, Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi

Associate Editor: Willma Harvey, Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi

Assistant Editor: Jessica Pauszek, Syracuse University

Book Review Editor: Tobi Jacobi, Colorado State University

Editorial Board: Hannah Ashley, West Chester University Nora Bacon, University of Nebraska-Omaha Adam Banks, University of Kentucky Melody Bowdon, University of Central Florida Jan Cohen-Cruz, Imagining America/Syracuse University Ellen Cushman, Michigan State University Linda Flower, Carnegie Mellon University Eli Goldblatt, Temple University H. Brooke Hessler, Oklahoma City University David Jolliffe, University of Arkansas Linda Adler-Kassner, University of California, Santa Barbara Joyce Magnotto Neff, Old Dominion University Kristina Montero, Syracuse University Patricia O’Connor, Georgetown University Nick Pollard, Sheffield Hallam University Luisa Connal Rodriguez, South Mountain Community College Barbara Roswell, Goucher College Lori Shorr, Office of the Mayor, Philadelphia Amy Rupiper Taggart, North Dakota State Unviersity Adrian Wurr, University of North Carolina at Greensboro Copyright © 2013 New City Community Press

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

Member CELJ Council of Editors of Learned Journals http://reflectionsjournal.net

ISSN: 1541-2075

Cover Photography by Joseph Voves, http://www.josephvoves.com/

Design by Elizabeth Parks, http://www.elizabethparks.com Reflections, a peer reviewed journal, provides a forum for scholarship on public rhetoric, civic writing, service learning, and community literacy. Originally founded as a venue for teachers, researchers, students, and community partners to share research and discuss the theoretical, political and ethical implications of community-based writing and writing instruction, Reflections publishes a lively collection of scholarship on public rhetoric and civic writing, occasional essays and stories both from and about community writing and literacy projects, interviews with leading workers in the field, and reviews of current scholarship touching on these issues and topics.

We welcome materials that emerge from research; showcase community- based and/or student writing; investigate and represent literacy practices in diverse community settings; discuss theoretical, political and ethical implications of community-based rhetorical practices; or explore connections among public rhetoric, civic engagement, service learning, and current scholarship in composition studies and related fields.

Submissions: Electronic submissions are preferred. Manuscripts (10–25 double-spaced pages) should conform to current MLA or APA guidelines for format and documentation and should include an abstract (about 100 words). Attach the manuscript as a Word or Word-compatible file to an email message addressed to Cristina Kirklighter at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi ([email protected]). Your email message will serve as a cover letter and should include your name(s) and contact information, the title of the manuscript, and a brief biographical statement. Your name or other identifying information should not appear in the manuscript itself or in accompanying materials.

All submissions deemed appropriate for Reflections are sent to external reviewers for blind review. You should receive prompt acknowledgement of receipt followed, within six to eight weeks, by a report on its status. Contributors interested in submitting a book review (about 1000 words) or recommending a book for review are encouraged to contact Tobi Jacobi at Colorado State University ([email protected]).

Articles published in Reflections are indexed in ERIC and in the MLA Bibliography.

Contents Reflections: Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing and Service Learning Volume 13, Issue 1, Fall 2013

1 Editors’ Introduction Isabel Baca, University of Texas at El Paso Cristina Kirklighter, Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi

13 Interview with Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez Isabel Baca, University of Texas at El Paso Cristina Kirklighter, Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi

52 Nuestros Refranes: Culturally Relevant Writing in Tucson High Schools Cruz Medina, Santa Clara University

80 The Eagle Meets the Seagull: The Critical, Kairotic & Public Rhetoric of Raza Studies Now in Los Angeles Elias Serna, University of California, Riverside

94 Poetry: Fieldnote Steven Alvarez Poetry: She Used to Say Romeo Garcia Poetry:Una Mujer Partida Isabel Baca

102 “A Clear Path”: Teaching Police Discourse in Barrio After-School Center Lance Langdon, University of California, Irvine 127 Public Art, Service-Learning, and Critical Reflection: Nuestra Casa as a Case Study of Tuberculosis Awareness on the U.S.-Mexico Border Eva M. Moya, University of Texas at El Paso Guillermina G. Núñez, University of Texas at El Paso

152 Artwork by Dr. Adam Webb Adam Webb, Arizona State University

159 The Power of Plática Francisco Guajardo, University of Texas Pan American Miguel Guajardo, Texas State University in San Marcos

165 Chicanas Making Change: Institutional Rhetoric and the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Kendall Leon, Portland State University

195 Review: Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia Iris D. Ruiz, University of California, Merced

202 Review: Conquistadora Lisa Roy-Davis, Collin College

208 Review Essay: Texts of Consequence: Composing Social Activism for the Classroom and Community and Unsustainable: Re-imagining Community Literacy, Public Writing, Service- Learning, and the University Amy Rupiper Taggart, North Dakota State University Editor’s Introduction

Isabel Baca, University of Texas at El Paso “You should know that the education of the heart & Cristina Kirklighter, is very important. This will distinguish you from Texas A & M University – others. Educating oneself is easy, but educating Corpus Christi ourselves to help other human beings to help the community is much more difficult.” —Cesar Chávez

“Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.” —Maya Angelou

“There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.” —bell hooks, killing rage: Ending Racism

“The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the

1 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.” —Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change

few years ago in 2009 when Steve Parks was editor, Reflections came out with a special issue entitled Democracia, ¿pero A para quien?, Democracy, but for whom?. Many scholars and teachers were inspired to use a number of articles in future research projects. That issue offered much needed research, voices, and hope for Latin@s, especially those with a foci in community engagement and social justice. However, much has transpired with Latin@s since 2009 that jeopardizes the progress of Latin@ issues of education, literacy, immigration, and social justice. This is particularly true in Arizona with the subsequent HB 2281 that threatened culturally relevant ethnic studies programs. A few years before, Proposition 209 dismantled bilingual education. SB 1070 came as another assault with its racial profiling of Latin@s in Arizona. We, as special co- editors at Texas Hispanic Serving Institutions, as well as other members of the Latino Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and Conference of College Composition and Communication (CCCC) listened with great sadness and anger as our Arizona members recounted the dismantling of educational programs validating Mexican American students through culturally relevant literatures and bilingual education. The caucus, along with other identity-based caucuses, had just started the Writing and Working for Change project (see http://www.ncte.org/centennial/ change) with Samantha Blackmon, Cristina Kirklighter, and Steve Parks. Cristina had interviewed two NCTE Chicanos of Teachers of English founders, Dr. Carlota Cardenas de Dwyer and Dr. Felipe Ortega de Gasca. A third interviewee and early member of the caucus, Dr. Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez from the University of Arizona, played an instrumental role in the NCTE Task Force of Racism and Bias during the 80’s. These leaders played a pivotal role in pushing for the inclusion of Chicano/a literature and bilingual education during the 70’s and 80’s in textbooks and within curricula across the nation.

2 Editor’s Introduction | Isabel Baca & Cristina Kirklighter

Honoring those who came before us and respecting these historical contexts are an important part of what many Latin@s value within and outside of academia. As part of this historical collective, we, as special editors, knew that the Arizona affront to Latin@s needed to be told by those like Dr. Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez who began teaching Chicano/a literature to her students in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s in Tucson high schools and at the University of Arizona. Some of these students became nationally known figures like Mary Carmen Cruz, a subsequent K-12 leader in NCTE and Arizona, and Richard Martinez, J.D., a nationally known attorney representing the two teachers from the Tucson Unified School District who filed suit against the State of Arizona for dismantling the Tucson Mexican American Studies program. Dr. Gonzalez also honors those who came before her, such as her hard working Spanish-speaking parents who encouraged her to excel in school, her English teachers in Arizona, and her NCTE predecessors from many ethnicities and races on the NCTE Task Force of Racism and Bias who helped teachers on national, state, and local levels teach ethnic literature back in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Her predecessors helped her realize in 1971 as a new Tucson teacher “that the only way to change the outcome for Latino students was to change the pedagogical model and recognize and respect the students’ and parents’ culture and language and incorporate them into the school culture.” With her teaching, scholarly, and administrative career in Arizona devoted to bilingual education, ethnic studies, and the director of the National Center for Interpretation Testing, Research and Policy at U. of A., Dr. Gonzalez, in her interview, makes a compelling case that Arizona’s “Proposition 203, S.B. 1070, and H.B. 2218 infringe on persons right to equal opportunity to education and employment.” But, she does far more than that in this interview by sharing her story of growing up in the 1940’s within a Spanish-speaking only home in Phoenix, her ascent to becoming the only sibling to pursue higher education, her Tucson high school teaching experiences in 1969 and 1970 overhearing teachers’ negative comments about students of color, her realization in 1971 that culturally relevant literature spoke to and validated her students’ experiences, her reactions to the recent laws that dismantled much of the progress for Mexican American students in Arizona, and much more. We believe that Dr. Gonzalez’s credentials in these areas and her sharp memories in tracing the history of Mexican American students in Arizona will demonstrate

3 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 what happens when state legislatures jeopardize Latin@ student success and thus the future of this country as the largest growing student population of “minorities” in this country.

In addition to Dr. Gonzalez, other contributors to this special issue also examine student success and the role of multiliteracies within communities and academia. Together, these contributors advise how we as scholars must be open to thinking and practicing beyond traditional forms of research, scholarship, and communication. We can produce and construct academic knowledge and higher learning via platicas, ensayos, dichos y refranes, poetry, archival collections, artwork, interviews, ethnographies, and public art exhibits. This issue’s contributors explore our Latin@ identities and roots, and they show us how the disconnect and need to bridge higher learning and communities influence and impact our participation, roles, and success in the workforce, education, institutions, and society.

Cruz Medina, in his article, “Nuestros Refranes: Culturally Relevant Writing in Tucson High Schools,” demonstrates how students can fight back in Tucson schools from an oppressive system through writing grounded in dichos or proverbs from wise elders who instruct others on how to survive in the midst of struggles. Faced with Arizona legislators’ and the State Superintendent, Tom Horne’s, initiatives to close down the TUSD’s Mexican American Studies (MAS) programs in Tucson, students and teachers fought back with culturally relevant writing through a book entitled Nuestros Refranes, where students wrote about, as Karen Rosales, a contributor to the book says, “their dreams, motivations, and struggles” (p 67). This writing serves to name and empower them in the face of oppression by using familiar writing grounded in code-switching and dichos. As Cruz Medina states, the code-switching demonstrates their “cultural allegiance and engagement,” and the use of “dichos” takes them beyond education and to the cognizance of self-determinism. Such writings markedly contrast, as Medina points out, to the policymakers’ language grounded in “specific ideologies that uphold colonial beliefs about racial supremacy while dismissing the history, knowledge, and culture of non-whites.” Medina also examines how a student fights “linguistic terrorism” through a ‘prove them wrong’ rhetorical strategy by seeking constant tutorial help to make

4 Editor’s Introduction | Isabel Baca & Cristina Kirklighter those around him see he had a great mind. While celebrating the effective rhetorical strategies in writing from these Tucson students, Medina also participates in the historical homage to Arizona teacher leaders that came before him, such as honoring the work of María L. Urquides, Adalberto Guerrero, Henry Oyama, Roseann Duena González, and Mary Carmen Cruz. He describes how Tucson has a rich history of developing culturally relevant programs for ethnic students, which makes Nuestros Refranes that much more significant in honoring the teacher elders who laid the foundation for MAS.

The reverberations of the struggles experienced in Arizona are also felt in Southern California as we see in Elias Serna’s article “The Eagle Meets the Seagull: the Critical, Kairotic and Public Rhetoric of Raza Studies Now in Los Angeles.” Serna focuses on The Raza Studies Now (RSN) group made up of Raza studies activists who support the struggles of MAS in Arizona and advocates for Ethnic Studies in high schools and community colleges in Southern California. We asked Serna to not only focus on RSN and what preceded it with the first Ethnic Studies initiative in Southern California for colleges and universities, the historic 1969 El Plan de Santa Barbara, but also to read and respond to Cruz Medina’s article to draw connections. Serna focuses on two Raza Studies Now conferences that created spaces “where rhetoric, education, literacy, and the public converge” with a historical presence in drafting another “Plan” called the Plan de Los Angeles (PLA) that would center in high schools. Focusing on Logos and Kairos, Serna analyzes a document written with the help of RSN, the Santa Monica Intercultural District Advisory Committee (IDAC) report. The RSN summer of 2012 conference centered on creating a collective document of “El Plan” through seven break out groups thus producing “a profoundly organic, community involved and broad-based Raza document.” Serna analyzes how the “Plan de Los Angeles” is filled with plieto rhetoric, an unapologetic and resistance rhetoric that occurs when logos fails to convince. Right after the RSN 2013 conference, it was announced that George Zimmerman was found not guilty. Raza activists took the streets using protest dichos and chants, such as “No Justice! No Peace!” taken from the 1992 L.A. uprisings. Dichos and Kairos focusing on social justice occurred here. After nine undocumented Latino students were placed in Arizona immigrant detention facilities, the Dreamer 9 protest occurred and that Raza Studies Now centers on. Serna demonstrates

5 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 how RSN used not only its historical predecessor, El Plan de Santa Monica, but also crossed the state border into Arizona to support and learn from the struggles there. We at Reflections encourage contributors to use social media in addition to writing their articles. If readers wish to learn more about Elias Serna, they can go to an interview with Cruz Medina at http://writerscholarprofessional. blogspot.com/2013/11/q-with-reflections-contributor-elias.html. Cruz’s previous blog addresses the Tucson Ethnic Studies issues and his article.

In this special Reflections issue, Steven Alvarez, Romeo Garcia, and Isabel Baca use poetry to connect to the reader and show how literacies can be acquired and identities be constructed via la familia, languages and dialects, and life on the U.S.-Mexico border. As Medina does in his article, Steve Alvarez also recognizes the value of code switching. In his poem, “Fieldnote,” Alvarez shows the beauty of code switching, of using both English and Spanish to help students with the diverse literacies co-existing in Latin@ communities. Through his use of English and Spanish, he shares how language brings the familia and education together, builds relationships, and educates individuals seeking a brighter future. Romeo Garcia, in his poem “She Used to Say,” gives tribute to his abuela, his grandmother, by recognizing her wisdom and advice: Be proud of who you are, your roots, your accent, your language, and your culture. Always be a fighter and never give up. Garcia carries his grandmother’s words as he pursues higher education and honors his grandmother by being proud of his Latin@ heritage. In “Una Mujer Partida,” Isabel Baca describes a Latina’s loyalty to her country, her roots, and her family. Recognizing that la familia y la sangre (family and blood) are of utmost importance to her, Baca, though recognizing the existence of both a physical and a metaphorical river and border, encourages Latin@s to seek opportunities and a better life for themselves and their loved ones. Baca identifies the Latin@ love and loyalty to la familia, and she urges others to never give up, continue to fight, and never let go of those ties with which they are born.

6 Editor’s Introduction | Isabel Baca & Cristina Kirklighter

Lance Langdon, in his article “A Clear Path”: Teaching Police Discourse in Barrio After-School Center,” takes us to a study he conducted at an after-school center in a working class Mexican neighborhood of Orange County, California, one of the most conservative counties in the nation. Through the theoretical lens of James Paul Gee’s theories of discourse and identity, Langdon studies a Criminal Justice Club at an after-school center run by Mike, a Mexican American police officer in training, who came from a similar neighborhood filled with gang activity. Mike works with at-risk youths to steer them away from drugs and gangs and encouraged them to see themselves as embodying identities tied to law enforcement. These new identities create conflicts, not unlike what their mentor Mike experiences, as they attempt to negotiate between their identities as potent “future cops” and “at-risk” youth. As a demonstration of these complexities that ties to Elias Serna’s article regarding the protests demanding racial justice in L.A. after the George Zimmerman verdict, one of Mike’s students, Katie, proceeds to research and present on the Zimmerman verdict using a Fox News story as part of her research and the detective work she learned from Mike. Langdon realizes the problems of this police discourse that promotes law-abiding students, but perhaps at the expense of devaluing the identities and subordinate positions of their neighbors.

In their article, “Public Art, Service-learning, and Critical Reflection: Nuestra Casa as a Case Study of Tuberculosis Awareness on the U.S.-Mexico Border,” Eva M. Moya and Guillermina “Gina” Nuñez encourage us to explore multiple venues, literacies, and forms of public engagement and higher learning to bring about public health education and structural social change. Through student engagement, the Nuestra Casa Initiative, in addition to creating Tuberculosis awareness, serves as a venue that can lead to advocacy, social change, and better health conditions for the communities impacted by this disease. This initiative serves as an example of how scholarship through other means, such as public art, can cross disciplinary boundaries, reach diverse populations, engage students, faculty, and community members, and create health and social awareness. As a traveling exhibit, the project reached different geographical locations, from El Paso, Texas, Atlanta, Georgia, and various cities in Mexico. The Nuestra Casa allowed diverse populations to give testimonies and become engaged. Using a tendedero (a clothesline)

7 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 and trapitos (pieces of cloth), the exhibit’s visitors’ thoughts and opinions were expressed, capturing these individuals’ emotions and reflections. Nuñez and Moya not only promote service-learning and critical reflection as ways of engaging students and communities, but they also advise us to engage our communities with our scholarship by means that the majority of the people, la gente, have access to, such as public art exhibits, not so much books and scholarly journal articles. For a description and video of the Nuestra Casa project, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2KcXbrjHbg.

As an example of how in addition to the printed text, the visual text contributes to literacy and engagement, we have included artwork that represents the Latin@ value and honor of la familia. Adam Webb, in his artwork, speaks to literacies and the role la familia plays in acquiring and practicing different forms of literacy in life today. Webb provides examples of visual literacy and with it as a tool, he shows how seeing the familia and making connections are valued in Latin@ life. Webb’s different sketches illustrate how papi, mami, and the community can be literacy resources. La familia takes center stage in promoting multiliteracies.

La familia speaks to the root of plática as discussed in Dr. Francisco Guajardo and Dr. Miguel Guajardo’s essay or, in Spanish, ensayo, “The Power of Plática. As editors of this special issue, we (Isabel Baca and Cristina Kirklighter) were privileged to participate in a virtual audio plática with both Francisco and Miguel Guajardo this past October that will be uploaded to our featured articles page. These brothers grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. Plática, as they define it, in the essay is “an expressive cultural form shaped by listening, inquiry, storytelling, and story that is akin to a nuanced, multi-dimensional conversation.” They learned this form through their parents, Angel and Julia, and dedicate this essay to them. Their essay is divided into four sections (1) plática as etymology (2) plática as inquiry (3) plática as pedagogy, and (4) plática for community building and development. Plática as etymology discusses the way their plática historically developed first with their parents’ daily plática around coffee, and the Guajardo brothers saw how they extended this plática within the community. They demonstrate later that when they entered academia, they saw how the “Socratic method and critical conversations” resembled the plática. What they learned

8 Editor’s Introduction | Isabel Baca & Cristina Kirklighter through injecting plática into academia was how their experiences growing up shaped their perceptions of these historical characters through storytelling and to bring “relationships and issues to life.” Plática as inquiry becomes a method of collecting data based on establishing relationships and trust in the communities they study. They demonstrate this through an oral history project on braceros. Angel, the lead community-based researcher, taught students how to access braceros through plática. He shared his own stories to engage the braceros in plática. Plática as pedagogy discusses how their parents were teachers: Julia with her teachings of la biblia (bible), and Angel with la universidad de la vida (university of life). These literacies “shaped their curriculum and instructional approaches,” and the Guajardo brothers saw them as teachers even though Julia had no schooling and Angel went to the 4th grade. Plática for community building and development focuses on their parents’ question on the utility of these brothers’ educations. What good is an education unless it serves purposes of community building through plática and developing respectful relationships? This is what their parents and community instilled in them, “a practice to guide organizations, lead public information campaigns, shape school curriculum, and even push higher education institutions to behave more humanely.”

In “Chicanas Making Change: Institutional Rhetoric and the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional,” Kendall Leon addresses change in institutional and public spaces and examines how Chicanas (Mexicanas or Latinas) use experience to “make” or “construct” things, such as organizations, histories, and practices. Leon analyzes Chicanas’ strategies for inciting change and Chicanas’ rhetoric in constructing and bringing about change. By presenting an archival case study of the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN), one of the first Chicana feminist organizations, Leon examines Chicanas’ coalition building strategies and practices. She shows us how Chicanas bring about change by writing, theorizing, and making an identity, an identity she refers to as la hermandad, the Chicana sisterhood. Sharing personal experiences as well, Leon addresses how working in the university can further distance us from our home communities and our commitment to the public good. Citing Miguel and Francisco Guajardo’s research and work, Leon discusses how it can be difficult to maintain our responsibilities to our home communities while meeting the expectations set for us as academics.

9 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013

Leon advises us to practice, create, and pursue connective works that enable us to build bridges and make change. It is by making connections, often within institutions, that we learn and grow. Leon describes CFMN’s work in addressing employment training for Chicanas, and it is through this organization that Leon teaches us how by turning to the work of community organizations, we learn about institutions, and we learn to make connections within these institutions.

It is these institutions and their treatment of women faculty of color that encouraged Iris D. Ruiz to review the book Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia, edited by Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. Gonzalez and Angela P. Harris (Utah State Press, 2012). In addition to summarizing the book content, Ruiz examines the issues, concerns, and challenges expressed in this collection of essays and narratives. Ruiz identifies the central claim of the book: Racism and sexism are still very much present in our educational institutions. By briefly addressing some of the stories in the book, Ruiz shares the voices of these women by describing their silence in academia and its scholarship and the fear of academic corporatization. These stories relate to Kendall Leon’s concept of la hermandad, the Chicana sisterhood, where recognizing the importance, need, and value of such sisterhood is important to women faculty of color. Discrimination in academia will continue to exist, Ruiz argues, as long as unequal treatment, unequal opportunity, and unequal status are given to women faculty of color. Ruiz concludes her review by recognizing the value of Presumed Incompetent as holding the potential to transform the academy.

As we see in Ruiz’s review, stories of silencing and injustices can empower faculty and students. Conducting oral history projects to discover the lost voices of injustices are another form of empowerment. When students conduct these projects in the communities surrounding the university as part of civic work, students often discover the many important lost voices of the past that preceded their interviewees. As Lisa Roy Davis points out in her review, sometimes students need mentor texts like Esmeralda Santiago’s 2011 novel Conquistadora. This book is Santiago’s first

10 Editor’s Introduction | Isabel Baca & Cristina Kirklighter book centering on historical fiction based on Ana, a mistress of the owner of Hacienda Los Gemelos, a mid-19th century Puerto Rican plantation. Unlike Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara, this novel is shaped through the lives of the slaves, such as Siña Damita, the midwife of the plantation. Davis describes how Santiago creates these slave characters in their “full potential as artists, healers, and caregivers in their capacities on the plantation.” As Davis rightly points out and as we also see with the Guajardo brothers, oral histories and memoir aid students in envisioning experiences different from their own. Historical fiction brings other insights in “imagining lost and untold stories.”

Our review essay for this issue written by Amy Rupiper Taggart focuses on Texts of Consequence: Composing Social Activism for the Classroom and Community (2012) and Unsustainable: Re-imagining Community Literacy, Public Writing, Service-Learning, and the University (2013). Taggart begins her review essay by sharing her experiences ten years ago with teaching a graduate seminar on community- engagement in composition studies. Where were the stories of failures and mistakes students asked within this scholarship? Inspired by her students, she later co-edited with Brooke Hessler a journal issue focusing on those mistakes and failures. Here then she focuses on two books that extend these conversations. Mathieu’s book, Tactics of Hope, is a springboard for Unsustainable that furthers “a certain genre of failure and challenge story” and enhances the definition of sustainability. Taggart thoroughly reviews the different sections (1) Short-Lived Projects, Long-Lived Value; (2) Community Literacy: Personal Contexts; (3) Pedagogy, and (4) Calls for Transnational Sustainability. What Taggart says can be gained from this book is that failure provides an opportunity to learn. While Unsustainable asks the question “how can we resee programs through the lens of tactical rhetorical sustainability,” Texts of Consequence is focused on making “activism through literacy” key to composition studies while also focusing on “success” in this area. This book particularly speaks to the activism we see in this journal issue. Again, Taggart carefully reviews the various sections of this edited collection: (1) Composition Studies Taking on the Establishment; (2) Composition Studies Institutionalizing Rhetoric and Writing for Social Change; and (3) Composition Studies and Community Activism. As Taggart states, both books provide us with guidance in activism and both books help

11 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 us “understand our field through its continuum of successes and failures, and if we learn one thing from these books, it should be that no one method or model will suffice for rhetorical intervention in social problems.”

As editors of this special issue, we feel honored to present contributions of such high caliber, contributions that speak to our Latin@ culture, language, roots, rights, and multiliteracies. We recognize the challenges we face as Latin@s both in and outside academia, and we welcome opportunities to address these challenges and our efforts to overcome them. Education, literacy, immigration, civic engagement, and social justice are issues central in Latin@ life. As editors, we invite you, the reader, to explore the possibilities that come from the diverse genres and forms of scholarship presented in this special issue. Multiliteracies are valued throughout this issue, and the contributors, as do we, recognize the beauty and treasure found in la familia and in our gente as sources of knowledge, rhetoric, social justice, and wisdom. It is because of our buena gente spirit and the luchador (the fighter) in all of us, that we proclaim, “Adelante! Juntos lo podemos todo!”

12 Interview with Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez

Isabel Baca, University of Texas at El Paso Cristina and Isabel’s invitation to be interviewed for this edition of the journal is an honor. I apologize to all readers & Cristina Kirklighter, in advance for a contribution that could have been much Texas A & M University – better with more time, but I’m grateful to have the chance to Corpus Christi comment on a topic that has been the motivating factor in my personal life and my life as an educator and linguist. I will respond to a few questions that have been posed to me by Cristina and Isabel, frame the ethnic studies problem in a larger context, highlight NCTE and CCCC’s work in this area, recounting the work of the Task Force on Racism and Bias in the important work of assisting teachers to recognize and implement a curriculum that authentically represents historic work, and comment briefly on Cruz Medina’s insightful essay on the ethnic studies issue in Arizona.

1. How would you define NCTE’s and CCCC’s involvement in the issue of ethnic literature and ethnic studies? And in your discussion, can you tell us about your history with NCTE and CCCC in regard to the teaching of ethnic literature to language minority students and other students of color?

13 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013

I am very proud to have been a part of NCTE and CCCC’s members’ efforts for three decades in the development and implementation of approaches to helping traditionally excluded students of color to develop their innate intelligence by engaging them in a curriculum that reflects and supports their home cultures, language, language styles, lore, traditions, values, histories, beliefs, and understandings of the world.

I was privileged to become a member of the Chicano Teachers of English Caucus, established in 1970 by Felipe Ortego and Carlota Cardenas Dwyer—two passionate, sophisticated literary scholars and teachers who were zealous in their dedication to inclusivity. In 1971, I attended my first NCTE convention, and, in Las Vegas, I found these like-minded souls Carlota and Felipe and others who shared my own goal of improving educational prospects for Latino students. I realized from my own experience that unless there is a connection with school created by a teacher, a text, a theme, a set of lessons, there is no chance of academic achievement and every chance of alienation from the larger society and their own communities. The lack of home-school connection through recognition of language, culture, and integration of familiar cultural ideas and themes fosters a passive acceptance of the school and larger culture’s conception of a student’s place in the world. Those stereotypes and negative images held by the larger society slowly begin to form the self- image of the student, and the lack of academic achievement becomes a self- fulfilling prophecy, thus producing the decades of high attrition, lack of high school completion, and scarce postsecondary attendance. I saw this first hand in the high schools in which I did my student teaching. I saw the attitudes of the teachers and heard their disparaging comments about their students’ smelly burrito lunches and their parents’ alleged lack of care for the education of their children. I found myself privy to attitudes and stereotypes that are consistent with the colonial discourse of majoritarian educators in regard to a language minority.

Born to a working class Chicano family in Phoenix, school was a place I felt I belonged, and my mother’s greatest dream for me was a college education and a profession that no one could take away. Mama spoke the little broken English she knew to me, intent that I

14 Interview with Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez would not be punished like my brother and sisters for not knowing English when I entered school. I also had a role model in her as she assiduously studied the newspaper every day, with her new 1948 unabridged dictionary by her side on the floor. At five, I was already Mama’s interpreter, and she was pushing me to learn to read fast so I could help her read too. I was the college scholarship girl, the girl who loved school, who worshipped her teachers, especially English teachers (González, 1993; 2000), and whose teachers for the most part were encouraging and positive.

Like other “scholarship” Latino children (Rodriguez, 1982; Villanueva, 1993), I was the hope of my family, the one who would make it in the white world, the one who would have a profession and bring the family the value their very existence had lost for them. I had experienced typical discriminatory treatment by other students, derogatory name calling, and I understood very well my family’s place in the world. I knew that we were different, spoke Spanish, and we were not “Americanos” who everyone else was fortunate to be. We had been refused service in restaurants; my dad worked very hard and left very early in the morning to his construction jobs. He spoke only Spanish to me, and I knew he didn’t know how to read and write. I knew from my sisters and brothers that I was lucky to be able to swim at the pool across the street, because there was a time when Mexicans couldn’t swim at most public pools. I also knew that our family took their places at the back of the bus and that my mother was taking citizenship classes and learning English. My mother never talked to my teachers, because she couldn’t, but she held them and the school in the highest esteem. School was a positive experience for me and the place where I excelled—unlike the very negative experiences of my brothers and sisters.

Therefore, when I did my student teaching at a Tucson secondary school with a Latino, African American, and Native American population of nearly 90%, I experienced firsthand the second class treatment of students of color and a curriculum that did not include their histories, literature, texts, or images of any kind. Particularly abhorrent to me was the institutional mistreatment of Mexican American students who were Spanish dominant English language learners. In fact, in 1969 and 1970, during my teaching experience as a student teacher

15 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 at a local Tucson high school, I saw literally hundreds of students whose educational opportunities had been severely limited by their misclassification as special education students and their substandard pedagogical treatment in alleged ESL classrooms, where no content of any kind was presented and time was passed watching movies and doing endless crossword puzzles with limited learning value, as well as learning parts of speech and the mindless drilling of sentence patterns.

I am grateful for my ability to witness this teacher talk in its full context during those two years of student teaching, with no one filtering discussions. In the teacher’s lounge and workroom where teachers prepared between classes, I heard the teachers’ negative comments about their students and the persistent perpetuation of stereotypes and negative labeling of students. My name, Roseann Dueñas, some aspects about my persona (I guess), and my unaccented English provided safe passage for me, and without any preplanning or design, I became privy to all. Had rhetorical research been in vogue in 1969 and 1970, this teacher talk would have produced an informative case study and contributed much to our understanding as a profession about teacher bias. As I look back, I can see these “agents of the empire” carrying out their culturally prescribed roles (Giroux, 1983). The “tracking” of the students into college prep, normal, and remedial/ ESL added to the structural institutional racism that many of the teachers were not consciously aware of but who followed the stated and sometimes unstated rules rigorously, gatekeeping the highest level and reserving that space for the anointed. Although school culture is just a microcosm of the larger society, the intensity (8 hours daily) of the school experience makes its effects singularly toxic. This is what contributes to the overall effectiveness of using public schools as the indoctrination camps for all children, but in its most noxious forms, assimilation and indoctrination sites for immigrants, subordinated racial, ethnic, and language minorities. Moreover, the school’s lack of equitable relationship with the community makes the effect on students that much more pernicious, as in these situations, the lack of communication and collaboration between school and parents is nonexistent or hostile, leaving the student no recourse. In these traditional relationships, parents are powerless and seen as enemies of the school culture. As Cummins (1986) contends, minority students’ persistent school failure and the relative lack of success of previous attempts at educational reform have been unsuccessful because they

16 Interview with Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez have not significantly altered the relationships between educators and minority students and between schools and minority communities. In his groundbreaking article in the Harvard Educational Review, Cummins (1986) presents the typical Assimilationist, subtractive, exclusionary, Transmission model versus the Intercultural Orientation, additive, collaborative, advocacy model, in which teachers and schools build a positive relationship with the community, thereby promoting the empowerment of students which can lead them to succeed in school. The intercultural model incorporates cultural and linguistic literature, language, beliefs, values, and other elements of the minority group and invites community participation. Cummins (2001) argues:

In social conditions of unequal power relations between groups, classroom interactions are never neutral with respect to the messages communicated to students about the value of their language, culture, intellect, and imagination. The groups that experience the most disproportionate school failure in North American and elsewhere have been on the receiving end of a pattern of devaluation of identity for generations, in both schools and society. Consequently, any serious attempt to reverse underachievement must challenge both the devaluation of identity that these students have historically experienced and the societal power structure that perpetuates this pattern (p. 650- 651).

In 1971, I had already come to the conclusion that the only way to change the outcome for Latino students was to change the pedagogical model and recognize and respect the students’ and parents’ culture and language and incorporate them into the school culture. I realized that discriminatory treatment and poor expectations of students lead to academic poor self- concept, academic underachievement, separation from school, through failure or dropout, and alienation from family, ethnicity group, and mainstream society. The key was to create a multicultural, tolerant, respectful classroom environment and to introduce curriculum, materials, literature, and topics that spoke to the students’ experience. Later my intuition that exploring students’ understanding of the world through literature that reflected their lives and that of their families or forebears would help them find their voice, lead them to critical thinking, writing,

17 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 and discussion, and build their confidence as learners. Later I would find my intuition reified by the work of Paulo Freire (1970) with his magnificent critical pedagogy model, where students engage in a dialogic process towards understanding, honing their cognitive and verbal skills in the process of evaluating their world. I would also later refine my approach to include an anti-racist agenda, helping students understand this pervasive phenomenon and prevent the societal inclination to “otherize” members of other ethnicities or races (Nieto, 1992).

Finding the inclusivity mindset at NCTE, with my colleagues in the Chicano Teachers of English was the experience that shaped my academic trajectory. I had found a concrete way of including the language and culture of Latinos and other minority students: through literature. I realized at that moment that the best way to reach my Chicano/a students at the University of Arizona was to use Chicano literature as the core of the course and engage the students to respond to the literary themes and genres, and explore their own stories, reactions, and feelings about the events in a story, or the feelings captured in a poem based on their own experiences. For me, the Chicano Teachers of English and the curiosity and interest of members of the leadership in CCCC and NCTE in my colleagues and my experience and observations working with racial and ethnically diverse students was heartening and inspirational. And the battles we sometimes had to engage in at the national level were instructive not only to our opponents but to ourselves, as we gathered data and presented empirical arguments for the programs, seminars, and other activities of the Chicano Teachers of English. I also found comfort in the fact that I was not the only sole Chicana who was a member of a large department of English comprised of white men. I found much-needed mentoring in the wisdom and advice offered by a small group of Chicano and other Latino professors of higher education who also found themselves in the singular position of teaching composition and or literature or teacher education at a university of college, often being the only Latino (or any minority) professor in a department of English or program in composition or language arts teacher education. Some had interaction with Latino students or other students of color and had had great success in teaching the literature and had marvelous strategies and insights into all the major Latino works of the period. Others were members of affiliate NCTE

18 Interview with Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez affiliates and had had experience teaching high school students and working with teachers regarding integrating this literature into their curricula.

Like the Bremmentown musicians, through the years, our numbers grew as we reached out to similar colleagues and assisted them in fully participating in NCTE and CCCC activities, providing their much needed insights to the larger membership (Kirklighter, 2009)

IMPLEMENTING THE GOALS OF SEARCHING FOR AMERICA FOR NCTE AND CCCC Just before I came to a national NCTE conference in 1971, members of the Task Force on Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English, Ernece Kelly, Carlota Cardenas Dwyer, Felipe Ortega, and others had already made a monumental mark on the NCTE scene and in the national conception of American literature. This team of scholars and teachers reviewed the most frequently used textbooks and found the work of racial and linguistic minorities to be flagrantly absent or contain works that introduced or reinforced racial, ethnic, and linguistic stereotypes. The product of this committee’s work and careful review of textbooks was a report and a groundbreaking statement Searching for America (Kelly, 1970). This short, powerful statement became the blueprint for NCTE and CCCC’s commitment to expanding the notion of the American canon and the place of works written by people of color and by women. In addition to stating their findings, the Task Force provided an empirically sound rationale for the importance of including literature in textbooks, materials, and curricula that was inclusive and representative of the cultures, values, life experiences, language styles, beliefs, and viewpoints of ethnically, linguistically, and racially diverse students.

Of course, as in challenge to tradition, many saw the racial and ethnic literature inclusivity movement as an assault on pedagogical standards, the revered canon, and even on the totality of western civilization. Scholars and teachers alike were distressed at giving up space to the unknown literature of marginalized people. Scholars were affronted and teachers were very often resistant, fearful of learning new texts and attempting to understand a perspective and epistemology with

19 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 which they had little to no experience. Teachers were also afraid that the literature introduced topics that were unsavory (because of their truth telling in terms of poverty, discrimination, and alienation from the majority society). Teachers complained that there were words written in a foreign language and that this detracted from the value of the text. Others complained that the ideas were uncomfortable and might inspire student reaction. (Hallelujah, this is what we wanted – to engage students and inspire verbal and written response, anger, pride, inquiry—anything but passivity). This reaction magnified the lack of teacher understanding of the communities they served and the leviathan disconnect between school and the home cultures and languages of their students. Carlota, Ernece, Vivian Davis, Lawson Inada, and I, as well as many others, gave countless preconvention and postconvention workshops, seminars, talks at national, regional, and at local affiliate conferences – all aimed at assisting teachers to be better prepared to teach Chicano, African American, Asian American, and Native American literatures. There were battles in NCTE, within academia, in English departments, and as inclusivity became more entrenched, the battles shifted to recruitment of scholars who could teach this literature and mortal combat over their retention and tenure. Colonial rhetoric was used to brand scholars, from “he’s too radical” to “he’s not Chicano enough,” to “she has published only in the realm of Chicano literature and not broadly enough” to “she’s too much of a generalist,” and not committed to one area. There were myriad excuses for lack of inclusivity of criticism of literature in journals, even in the major organs of the NCTE. As Chicano Teachers of English Caucus president Felipe Ortego argued in his 1970 letter to Richard Ohman, Editor of College English, when Ortego’s essay, “Chicano Poetry: Roots and Writers” was rejected for publication,

Not to publish our expressions or to publish something about us by a non-Chicano is simply to perpetuate the worst features of racism and the colonial mentality that continues to permeate the country (Ortego, 1970).

Collaboration with members of the Black Caucus, the able and tireless assistance of Sandra Gibbs, Ph.D., NCTE Staff Liaison, and NCTE and CCCC executive directors, as well as interested NCTE

20 Interview with Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez colleagues provided assistance and support in pursuit of introducing methods, techniques, approaches, research, and concerns regarding the literacy education of Latino students. The hard fought civil rights legislation passed in the 1960’s, such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting rights Act, the 1968 Bilingual Education Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act made the idea of a more equitable educational opportunity for African American students and language minority persons education and the promotion of bilingual education more palatable to NCTE members and begin breaking down somewhat the traditional stereotypes and misconceptions about Latino and other students of color.

The general ethnic literature movement, including the work of NCTE and CCCC in this area had myriad goals, including expanding the literary canon, broadening the breadth of text books that promulgated the almost exclusively dead white male-oriented tradition, and the use of ethnic literature as primary works for the teaching of literature and the development of critical reading, writing, and thinking for all students, K-12 and postsecondary to enrich and strengthen diversity and understanding of all of the facets of what it means to be an American. Most importantly, the underlying premise was that for traditionally underachieving populations such as Latino students, these techniques and methods would not only develop literacy skills but would also and most importantly bring about long term academic engagement and achievement thus reversing the longstanding history of low academic achievement by Latino students in the schools, thereby increasing opportunities to learn and excel. This in turn would provide an avenue for social mobility and significantly increase the ability of Latinos to participate in society in a more equal manner in terms of employment and have greater and more equal access to equal access to employment, civic life, and the political sphere. The sociological goal was acculturation rather than assimilation. Thus, literature, language, cultural information, and history would be used not only as a worthy curricular topic but a means to affirm the cultural and thus self- identity of language minorities and other students of color, thus promoting the overall educational goal of assisting students in meeting their individual potential and giving them the tools in critical reading, viewing, and thinking required to achieve academically and in life. (It is indisputable that in the 1950’s and 60’s, continuing to the present, Latino students had the lowest

21 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 academic achievement among all students in the U.S. and by state, with the exception of Native American students. In most heavy Hispanic population states and in the Latino southern diaspora, these same low academic achievement outcomes are still true today.)

ASSISTING TEACHERS IN IMPROVING THE INTELLECTUAL RIGOR OF LANGUAGE ARTS CURRICULA FOR STUDENTS OF COLOR AND STUDENTS LEARNING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE I also worked hard to incorporate an understanding of the needs of English for second language students to be provided a cognitively challenging and enriching curriculum that was on par with their grade level rather than the often remedial and linguistically and intellectually stunted pedagogy and materials promoted by outdated English as a Second language methodology, textbooks, and curriculum. In my role as Chair of the NCTE Task Force Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English, I worked to change the perception of English teachers regarding limited and non-English speaking students. As a linguist specializing in second language pedagogy, this was a particularly important topic for me—as this failed educational strategy had adversely affected millions of Latino and other language minority children who had been relegated to dredges of ESL or remedial English curricula. Chicano caucus researchers and writers such as Kris Gutierrez and Lawson Inada served on the Task Force with me. Our work was supported by the Executive Council through the able liaison work of Sandra Gibbs, Ph.D., NCTE Staff Liaison.

Informed by current research in the areas of second language acquisition, bilingual and multicultural education, literacy and literacy development, and best practice in language arts, cognitive academic language development, and composition, the NCTE Task Force Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English (1986) published the pamphlet, “Expanding Opportunities: Academic Success for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students.” In this short brochure, Task Force members opined that many curricular approaches used with ESL students and other students of color have “impeded rather than fostered their intellectual and linguistic

22 Interview with Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez growth” (p. 1). The Task Force labels the educational approaches and methods typically used with ESL learners and other students of color “miseducation” and asks the following question, followed by a set of teaching principles to use instead:

How can educators reverse this miseducation and develop responsible ways to meet the needs of these students? Research shows that culturally and linguistically diverse students can achieve academic success if appropriate strategies for teaching reading and writing are used (p. 1).

TEACHING WRITING Incorporate the rich background of linguistically and culturally diverse students by

• Introducing classroom topics and materials that connect the students’ experiences with the classroom.

Provide a nurturing environment for writing by:

• Introducing cooperative, collaborative writing activities which promote discussion, encourage contributions from all students, and allow peer interaction to support learning. (pp. 1-2)

NCTE and CCCC widely distributed the brochure to affiliates and through national and regional conferences and conference programs provided enough space and time to programs concerning language development. In the 80’s, the NCTE and CCCC joined several other professional organizations such as Teaching English to Speakers of other Languages (TESOL), Linguistic Society of America (LSA), Modern Language Association (MLA) and took a strong stand against the English Only Movement (González, Schott, and Vasquez, 1988), “eschewing any movement whose objective it is ‘to establish English as the official language….[and] to render invisible the native languages of any Americans.’” In 1990, NCTE published an anthology of essays, Not Only English: Affirming America’s Multilingual

23 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013

Heritage, in which my article “In the aftermath of the ELA: Stripping language minorities of their rights” appeared (González, 1990a). In this essay, I explained the essential civil rights that would be lost for U.S. language minorities if the English Language Amendment proclaiming English the official language was passed.

During the mid- 80’s, the language rights and promotion of ethnic literatures and histories of minority students was loudly supported by various NCTE publications and policy statements. NCTE and CCCC worked to include Latino, African American, Native American and Asian voices and experiences in their major activities; therefore, I participated in numerous committees and commissions to prevent the ongoing neglect of the learning needs for this important and growing population and move them from invisibility and marginalization to the center of the discussion.

Although NCTE was devoted to the English language arts, its commitment to literacy and its research members’ understanding of the integral connection between students’ home language and culture with learning and academic achievement, bilingual education began to be slowly implicitly acknowledged as a salutary component of English language arts education. The idea of nurturing and supporting a students’ home language began seeping its way into the efforts of the NCTE. Although the Students Right to Their Own Language (CCCC, 1974) was a pronouncement of the educational importance of recognizing, respecting, supporting, and promoting students’ right to speak and write in their home speech styles, that document never really contemplated the role of the student’s home “native” language as a part of the language arts curriculum. However, those of us who supported bilingual and multicultural methodologies as a key approach to curriculum design for monolingual or dominant speakers of Spanish or those who came from bilingual homes where both languages are spoken began to invoke Students Right to their Own Language to advocate for that pedagogical solution. The work of Collier (1989), Heath (1983), Hakuta (1986), Skutnaab-Kangas, T. (1988), Cummins (1981) illuminated the critical importance of building on a child’s first language knowledge for rapid acquisition of the second language and most importantly, the understanding of the pernicious effects of withholding instruction in the first language

24 Interview with Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez and forcing literacy development in language in which there is no oral proficiency (Cummins, 1986).

However, when the “standards” movement gained momentum in the 1990’s, NCTE was compelled by the membership’s wish to contribute standards informed by research and best practice to fashion national standards. As always, I sat on the Standards committee and took my customary position reminding everyone that the document we created must take into account the fastest growing school-age population – Latinos, and that the curricular considerations regarding the literatures and histories of students of color had to be taken. I also reminded the Committee of the continuing disparate educational outcomes for Latino students and other racial and ethnic minorities as well (see González, 1990b).

2. As a pioneer in the teaching of ethnic literature to Chicano/ Mexican American students as a primary tool of inclusion and engagement in schools, how do you view the various language, immigration, and other educational policies established in the state of Arizona for the past decade?

As much as I understand the cycles of rejection and acceptance of ethnic racial, and language minorities in the U. S. as contingent on the state of the economy, unemployment, the presence or absence of war or threat of war (Heath, 1977), I am shocked and disturbed to my core at the vitriolic and patently hostile actions the state of Arizona has taken against Latinos embodied in Proposition 203 (English for the Children, 2000); S.B. 1070 (Support our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act); H.B. 2281 (Ethnic Studies Ban). It is inconceivable that these aggressive and shameful legislative initiatives have been generally accepted by the Arizona public. Even in the most cynical scenario, I could not have imagined the creation of these policies. Moreover, these legislative actions have been imitated by other states such as Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Utah (National Immigration Law Center, 2012) and in some cases, made even more toxic. As a sociolinguist, I understand intellectually the politics and processes that are taking place, but I

25 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 cannot accept them. My family has been in Arizona since before it was a state, and Mexican Americans feel that Arizona is a Mexican heritage state. They are the backbone of the ranching, the mining industry, agriculture, the hotel industry, the tourist industry; they are the labor upon which the state depends. Yet there is no allegiance to them. Arizona’s expression of hostility to this productive ethnic group is beyond the pale. Moreover the educational, psychological, and economic harm caused to the children who have no access to education and the countless families who left the state out of fear and the damage to the economy is reprehensible and unrecoverable. Yes, I am disappointed in my state and feel helpless that nothing can be done to curb the hostile rhetoric and hate speech produced by a small but obviously powerful group of persons. Perhaps it is my deep understanding of the psychological effects and long term adverse effects and damages of these educational, language, employment, immigration, social and other critical services policies on children, families, and hard-working, industrious Arizonans that makes it particularly painful to accept.

As Cruz asserts in regard to H.B. 2281, legislation passed in Arizona in 2010 banning ethnic studies, the official language movement also utilizes the discourses of colonialism, an ideology that, in order to dominate, disempowers some social groups through subjugation and “subjectification“ (González with Melis, 2000). I am also fully aware that for Latinos, language use is the central trait over which the dominant group can exert control. But in the case of Arizona, the English only act Proposition 203 eliminating bilingual education as an appropriate pedagogical approach for English language learners, this law was only the beginning of a series of aggressive legislative actions whose end goals was to cause a mass exodus, prevent additional immigration, decrease political power and prevent the growth of political power.

When I edited Language Ideologies: Critical Perspectives on the Official Language Movement, Volume I (González with Melis, 2000) and Volume 2 (González with Melis, 2001), the scholars I invited to contribute considered Proposition 203 English for the Children the most negative and adverse ballot initiative against bilingual education, Latinos, and local parental educational choice that they had seen. It was astonishing to see that Proposition 203, which eliminated the

26 Interview with Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez option of bilingual education for limited and non-English speaking children in Arizona, was only the beginning of a set of hostile policies aimed at Latinos and eradicating equality of educational opportunity for Latinos and instituting ghettoization policies that led to a life of fear and lost opportunities for Latinos and a mass exodus of this population from the state. My two edited volumes published by NCTE examine the history of language policies in the U. S. and other countries in which there are territorial minorities (such as Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans) whose ancestral home was acquired through war or political treaties. The entire Southwest of the U. S. belonged to Mexico and was lost as a consequence of the Mexican American War (1846-48). This forced thousands of Spanish-speaking Mexicans to instantly become citizens of the U.S. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ceded 55% of Mexico’s territory (present-day Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah as well as western portions of New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming) to the U.S., and the Gadsden Purchase (1853) finalized the acquisition of Mexican territory, adding to the U.S. present-day southern Arizona and New Mexico. While the Treaty guaranteed all persons residing on these lands “the free enjoyment of their liberty and property,” the U.S. government was able to control and restrict Mexican land ownership, access to justice, education, employment, and other social benefits through the implementation of restrictive English-only policies and reinterpretation of the treaties.

For example, in 1851, the U.S. Congress passed the Land Act (known as the Gwin Act or California Land Act) (Clay, 1999), requiring all California landowners (indigenous peoples, Mestizos, and descendants of Spanish and Mexican settlers) to show proof of ownership in English. This Act therefore forced non-English speaking landowners to obtain the services of English-speaking lawyers and to participate in lengthy and expensive court proceedings in order to prove their ownership. Lacking English proficiency and unfamiliar with the U.S. legal system, almost all California property owners lost their land to the English-speaking majority; 40% “of the holdings were sold to pay the fees of English-speaking lawyers” (Crawford, 1992, p. 66). Moreover, in 1879, California declared English the required language for “all official writings, and the executive, legislative, and judicial procedures,” becoming the first English-only state in U.S. history (Crawford, 1992, p. 67). Through these exclusionary

27 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 language policies, the Californian English-speaking majority solidified its political and economic position, while Spanish-speaking Californians became strangers in their own country, mere workers on their own land, and a disenfranchised minority.

Exclusionary educational and language policies for Latinos in the state of Arizona throughout its history have been documented in the work of many scholars. The infamous “1C” classroom in operation from 1919 to 1967 requiring children in the state of Arizona to enter an English immersion program before starting first grade has been studied and documented by Combs at the University of Arizona. This educational policy segregated Latino students and held them back one to several years until they learned English. Combs contends that Proposition 203 banning bilingual classrooms from Arizona’s public schools is essentially a return to a shameful era in education that resulted in unequal educational opportunity, high dropout rates, and poor educational achievement for generations of Latinos. University of Arizona Professor Mary Carol Combs found that throughout the existence of the program known as “1C,” the Hispanic dropout rate in Tucson schools never dipped below 60 percent (Weslander, 2000). In contrast, Combs reported that after almost 30 years of bilingual education, the statewide Hispanic dropout rate is 17 percent and the bilingual student dropout rate is less than 6 percent, according to statistics from Tucson Unified School District. According to Weslander (2000), Combs reported that “Under “1C,” minority children - even if they spoke English - were herded into the program automatically simply because of the neighborhoods where they lived. Students remember an oppressive environment where they were punished for speaking their native languages. The “1C” program mainly affected Mexican-American, Tohono O’odham, Yaqui and Chinese children in Tucson and in a handful of towns near the Mexican border. Similar programs were established in Phoenix and surrounding areas as well. Obviously, under this program, generations of Latino children and families educational and thus life achievements and outcomes were negatively affected.

MacGregor-Mendoza documents English-only educational policies in Las Cruces, New Mexico in which children were ethnically segregated on the basis of their limited or non-English speaking ability and punished for speaking Spanish, the only language in which they had

28 Interview with Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez fluency. The methods of punishment included public humiliation, washing mouth out with soap, wearing a dunce hat, physical segregation, standing in the corner, and other physical humiliations. Physical and psychological measures are the most common punitive methods utilized to implement restrictive language policies. Ranging from individual to group application, such methods have been used in the U.S., Australia, and in many other linguistically diverse societies throughout their histories into the 21st century (Jacobs, 2006; Skutnabb- Kangas & Dunbar, 2010). In the Southwest, teachers and administrators punished children for speaking Spanish on school grounds, utilizing multiple forms of corporal and verbal punishments— including hitting with rulers and other objects, spanking, unabated bullying, name calling, “public humiliation... by denying students access to the bathroom until they could state their needs clearly in English,” and various forms of individual isolation and group segregation (MacGregor-Mendoza, 2000, p. 361).

As I recall in the Introduction to Language Ideologies, Volume I (2000), my own brothers and sisters were punished for speaking Spanish in school, although that was the only language in which they had fluency. My brother was held back in the first grade for three years until the teacher was satisfied that he could speak English. My sister remembers being monitored even on the playground, scolded, and punished for speaking Spanish. Gloria Anzaldua (1987) states the integral connection between language and self-identity and the damage that is done by restricting or prohibiting native language use: “I am my language.” Restricting language use and punishment tied to language use is a condemnation of self-identity in that language is the expression of self-identity and tied to the core of ego. Therefore, any restriction of native language use adversely affects self-identity and self-concept. These were not rare occurrences, but took place repeatedly throughout her entire primary education. By the time she reached high school, she thought of herself as unintelligent and always thought of herself as not cut out for school. My brother also regarded himself as academically deficient and never was able to attain his intellectual promise. These are lifelong harms that have unending consequences that are perpetuated for generations because of the cycle of economic distress for children and grandchildren that an insufficient education and poor self-confidence of one generation create.

29 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013

3. What propelled the public rhetoric and support of legislation that have brought Proposition 203 and S.B. 1070, and H.B. 2181 into being?

For many Americans, the growing number of language minority persons in the United States signals a threat to the cultural fabric of U.S. society. For these individuals, English is symbolic of the assimilationist goal to ensure that foreign elements are normalized. The fear of the “other” is prominent in this framework and controlling the element that is seen as “foreign” or threatening, is a seemingly non-hostile way of reducing the power that self-identity provides to ethnic groups and individuals as well as reducing equality of educational opportunity, which limits social mobility. Similar restrictive language policies and equality of educational opportunity have been used with the alleged assimilation of other ethnic groups and Native Americans, using the schools as the primary institution of indoctrination (González, Vásquez & Mikkelson, 2012). The schools remain one of the most ardent battlegrounds for the English language policy debate.

In Arizona, fear of disruption of the social order and the loss of political power prompted the hostile rhetoric and wide public engagement in the obvious ethnic hostility embodied in the Proposition 203 English for the Children (2000), Senate Bill 1070 “Support our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” (2010) as well as the law prohibiting ethnic studies House Bill 2281 (2010). It is important to recognize that Proposition 203 was initiated and passed during a period of a dramatic demographic growth for the Latino population in Arizona through immigration as well as via natural birth rates. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of Latinos in Arizona increased by almost 50%, from 688,000 to 1.29 million — 1 million of Mexican origin, magnifying the Mexican presence in the state (U.S. Census, 2000).

The demographic growth of Latinos in Arizona was most evident in the school population. For instance, between 1998 and 2008, Hispanic enrollment in K–12 institutions “ballooned from 268,098 to 416,705; an increase of 148,607 students. This student increase represent[ed] 86.3% of the total growth in the K–12 student population” (Garcia, Öztürk, & Wood, 2009), leaving little doubt that Proposition 203

30 Interview with Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez disproportionally impacts Latino students. Notably, Latino children in Arizona were segregated, attending schools that typically had “four times as many students classified as ELL [English language learners] as [did] the schools attended by the state’s white students,” and were significantly underachieving academically because of lack of proper educational support (Gándara & Orfield, 2010, p. 5). According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, only 23.1% of Latinos graduated statewide from high school, in comparison to 64.5% of enrolled majority students (The William C. Velásquez Institute, 2000).

However, in contrast to the popular misconception that Latinos were a drain on the Arizona economy during this period, they in fact made a significant contribution by providing cheap labor, paying taxes, and purchasing goods (Pavlakovich-Kochi, 2011). For example, in 2004, Mexican immigrants as consumers spent $6.1 billion; Mexican visitor spending was recorded at $2.4 billion; and Mexican immigrants as workers contributed $23.1 billion. Altogether, Mexican immigrants, residents, workers, and visitors contributed $31.6 billion to the Arizona economy, including $1.735 billion in direct tax revenue to state and local governments. During the same period, the “cost” of immigrants (i.e., hospital, educational, social services) was only $1.1 billion. Discounting the positive role of Latinos in the Arizona economy, anti-immigrant and nativist movements blamed immigrants (especially undocumented immigrants of Mexican origin) for narrowing job prospects for U.S. citizens, abusing social services, and failing to pay taxes. Additionally, the drug war along the Arizona/Mexico border reinforced the intolerant attitude towards Mexicans among the general public.

Second, Proposition 203 identified non-English languages as the problem in education, on the false assumption that heritage language instruction hinders English acquisition. This view emanated out of a common but fallacious belief in the U.S., as well as in many other countries that heritage languages are a disadvantage to language minorities and thus need to be restricted and eliminated. Approaching native languages as a problem, Proposition 203 promoted English-only instruction as the sole means by which to assimilate the language minority population. Thus, a major goal of Proposition 203 was the elimination of bilingual education in Arizona as a viable instructional approach to learning English. However, since only 30% of LEP children were in bilingual

31 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 programs, and 70% already attended English-only schools, it is clear that eliminating bilingual education was not about language per se, but about deeper social issues. By impeding LEP children’s access to education, Proposition 203 masked ethnic and racial animus as a result of a growing Latino presence in the state and succeeded in further marginalizing the Latino population. In fact, in their study, Huddy and Sears (1995) found that the societal majority’s objection to bilingual education stemmed from both racial prejudice and the threat of the “spread of foreign language, customs, and habits that challenge the sense of pride and esteem that the societal majority derived from their identity as ‘Americans’” (p. 142).

The seductive appeal of Proposition 203 lay in its alleged purpose of improving educational opportunities for children while Senate Bill 1070 promised safe neighborhoods and improved police service. The third bill passed in this same period, H.B. 2281 (the ethnic studies ban) is singularly venomous in its attack on an educational methodology that is empirically unassailable – permitting students to study their own history and literature. The ethnic studies program is indisputably an exemplary model of multicultural education, with critical thinking, reading, and writing goals, that engages students with the educational enterprise, attaining academic achievement and prevents attrition, and Cruz Medina views this legislative fiat as ultraconservative Arizona policy that continues the colonial subjugation of Latino/as in the Southwest. H.B. 2281 prohibits schools from teaching ethnic studies under the false assumption those courses “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government” and “ethnic solidarity” House Bill 2281, p. 1).

The inflammatory language employed in the bill suggests un- American treasonous and conspiratorial acts and stirs up similar animosity used to gain U.S. public support of the imprisonment of the Japanese American population during World War II. Any rational analysis of the bill and its proposal was successfully prevented by framing the ethnic studies curriculum as subversive. The text was enough to engage and enrage a public that has been fever-pitched into looking for ways to target a population they see as intrusive and in direct competition for their jobs and a threat to their political power.

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No attention was paid to research, which identifies ethnic identity as a critical component of healthy, successful behavior among language minority members as opposed to poor ethnic identity that has been empirically determined to correlate with high-risk behaviors among adolescents, such as gang involvement, drugs, alcohol, early pregnancy, dropping out (Samaniego,& Gonzales, 1999; Sanchez, 1993). The opinions of experts who advised against the bill were rejected as self-serving (if they were Latino researchers) and if they were majoritarian researchers, irrelevant opinions of “ivory tower” scholars with no connection to reality and the needs of the state (González and Melis, 2000, 2001). To the astonishment of academics, students, teachers, devoted school administrators, a law that will eliminate positive educational outcomes was passed in a state whose largest school-age population is Latino. Over the protests of countless scholars at the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and national professional organizations, the law was passed, and the road towards the shut-down of this much needed program was paved.

Students chained to their chairs during school board meetings professing the importance of the ethnic studies curriculum to them, their families, their sisters and brothers, their futures, and defending a program of study rather than demonstrating the abject apathy of many unengaged students, was not taken into account by the highest educational governmental agency. Empirical data showing the effects of the ethnic studies programs in terms of significantly decreasing attrition in Tucson Unified School District were also dismissed. Moreover, the law was punitive in that if the school district failed to comply with the law, schools would have 10% of their apportionment of state aid withdrawn. There is no doubt that Tom Horne, State Superintendent of Public Instruction and initiator of Proposition 203 (2000), introduced this initiative with the intention of eliminating the ethnic studies program in Tucson Unified School District No.1, which offered courses on the social, cultural, and political history of Mexican Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans. Ethnic studies programs such as these are predicated on the educational theory that a better understanding of cultural identity strengthens self-identity, which in itself promotes learning, educational achievement, and personal success (Samaniego & Gonzales, 1999).

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The ethnic studies program is not only based on sound pedagogical methodology, but the United Nations recognizes the right of minority children to study their own culture as a basic human right. Thus, six human rights specialists from the United Nations condemned House Bill 2281 on May 13, 2010, for violating the human rights of language minorities. In Arizona, civil rights advocates and Tucson Unified School District teachers, represented by Attorney Richard Martínez, filed a complaint against Tom Horne and members of the Arizona State Board of Education (Acosta v. Horne, October, 2010). John Huppenthal, Horne’s successor, declared in 2011 that high schools that continued to offer courses in Mexican American Studies were in violation of House Bill 2281 (Hing, 2011). Although the auditors chosen by Huppenthal found that the program did not violate the specifications of the law, in January, 2011, administrative law Judge Lewis Kowal declared Tucson Unified School District to be in violation of H.B. 2281 (Lara, 2012). He further declared that its Mexican American Studies program must be eliminated or the District would face a 10% monthly budget reduction penalty. The District voted to eliminate the program (Huicochea, 2012).

In an interesting end to a long federal desegregation lawsuit in February 2013, Judge David Bury of the U.S. District Court in Tucson ordered Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) to provide culturally and linguistically relevant courses relating to the history of Mexican American and African American students in order to achieve racial balance (Huicochea, 2013). The TUSD school board voted 3 to 2 to lift its objection to these courses and cited four reasons for their reinstatement:

1) Students need to feel like they are reflected in the curriculum; 2) Many teachers have spoken out about the importance of incorporating Mexican American Studies in the curriculum of the Tucson, Arizona schools. 3) The incorporation of such a curriculum has worked to instill pride in students’ Latino heritage, says Lorenzo Lopez, a teacher in the district. He himself felt that he first wanted to become a teacher because he took a Chicano/a literature course in college and finally felt that he saw himself reflected in the curriculum. 4) Unfortunately, many students who do not see themselves reflected in curricula become disinterested and disengaged, making college seem like a waste of time. If

34 Interview with Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez

these courses can be introduced at a younger age, retention in school will be much easier. In fact, the Mexican American Studies curriculum was a huge success when it was still in schools — it graduated 100 percent of students from high school and 82 percent went on to college (Lauren, 2013).

TUSD will offer the courses in three high minority high schools and identifies these new classes as ‘culturally relevant’ courses required by the Unitary Status Plan mandated by federal court order. The classes will be held for one year and the district will evaluate the courses and determine refinements and expansion (Huicochea, 2013). This is an example of the value of the federal government in ruling fairly in civil rights matters of race, language, gender, and ethnicity.

4. How have these policies affected the educational achievement of Latino students in Arizona?

Latino children— the fastest growing school-age population in Arizona— were the primary target of both Proposition 203 and H.B. 2281. As Lawton (2007) points out, “Proposition 203 was the first of a series of legal changes aimed directly or symbolically at the flow of Spanish-speaking immigrants into Arizona” (p. 6). Considering the prominent role of Latinos in Arizona history and the fact that bilingual education was pivotal for this group’s equal opportunity for education, it is clear that Proposition 203 targeted populations that the social majority feared as politically formidable.

The passing of Proposition 203 in Arizona has had pernicious effects: depriving children of the opportunity to build on their native language skills to develop literacy in their native language and quickly transfer to their second language English, as they build their oracy. Moreover, children are now subjected to regulation of their native language and many school districts and schools have employed restrictive language policies. Therefore, the educational atmosphere for many Latino children is one of fear and repression, where children and their parents often feel unwelcome, and little to no effort

35 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 is made to communicate with children and parents in a language they can understand. Moreover, bilingual education in Arizona has been demonized to the point where school districts are afraid to implement such programs.

The social and academic segregation of LEP children in Arizona was further exacerbated by the modification of the structured English immersion program into a four-hour daily block dedicated to English phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and semantics, all of which are irrelevant to learning academic concepts and language (Gándara & Orfield, 2010). Therefore, it has been argued that Arizona violated the desegregation mandates of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and failed to provide appropriate language instruction for LEP children mandated by the Supreme Court in Lau v. Nichols (1974).

Proposition 203 is a classic restrictive language policy, since it does not offer alternatives for LEP students. By prescribing one year of ESL classes, Proposition 203 forced LEP students to enroll in mainstream classes before they gained sufficient English proficiency to succeed academically. This policy ignored the clear empirical findings that children need five to seven years of bilingual instruction in order to acquire academic language proficiency in a second language (Collier, 1987, 1989, 1995). By eliminating parents’ choice of bilingual education for their children— and segregating these children from their peers— Proposition 203 has obstructed LEP children’s equal access to education.

Therefore, Proposition 203 has had harmful effects on Latino LEP children by not meeting their educational needs (Gándara & Orfield, 2010; Garcia, Öztürk, & Wood, 2009; Wright & Pu, 2005). As Combs, Evans, Fletcher, Parra, and Jiménez (2005) found: (1) teachers, administrators, and staff from 13 of the 18 schools in their study reported that children “cried or were traumatized by being instructed exclusively in a language they did not understand”; (2) children’s self-esteem was damaged; and (3) their emotional and learning problems were exacerbated (pp. 710–712). Garcia et al. (2009) noted that in 2007 Latinos scored below the benchmark in critical reading, mathematics, and writing, and were underrepresented in higher education. For example, at Arizona State University, only 12.2 %

36 Interview with Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez of Bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2007 were earned by Hispanics (Garcia et al., 2009) in a state where they comprise up 24% of the population. Without postsecondary education, which has become the basic requirement for most jobs, Arizona Latinos were highly likely to experience economic deprivation and continued underrepresentation in the political process.

Because Proposition 203’s stated goal differed greatly from its actual oppressive goal, this educational legislation is emblematic of a covert language policy. Rather than bettering educational opportunities for language minority children, Proposition 203’s English-only instruction has disabled their academic success and future potential. Considering the lifelong, and generational, devastating effects of English-only instruction on LEP students, Proposition 203 has done much to silence the increasing political presence and weaken the economic and social stability of Latino and Native American communities, impeding their acculturation into the majority society. By excluding Latinos and other LEP persons from “symbolic and material markets” and denying them access to the resources of the social majority, including full participation in education and subsequently in employment and political life, Proposition 203 reinforced their poverty through “capability deprivation” (Mohanty, 2009, p. 102). Significantly, the social majority does not perceive these socioeconomic, cultural, and personal deprivations as outcomes of language discrimination but as inherent characteristics of these language groups that cause their economic failure and poverty. This language attitude fails to acknowledge that these inabilities and disadvantages are not inherent— but socially constructed. Moreover, similar to Proposition 227, it has been argued that Proposition 203 violates Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment because it discriminates on the basis of national origin by restricting access to education on the basis of language— an element central to the identity of many Latinos (Johnson & Martínez, 2000).

Crafters of Proposition 203 utilized various means to ensure that the “intended” goal of Proposition 203 was implemented. By identifying heritage languages of LEP children as a problem in contrast to the benefits of English instruction, Proposition 203 exploited the ideology of English as the only means to the successful assimilation of language

37 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 minorities to U.S. mainstream society. After passing Proposition 203, the Arizona Department of Education developed a new English- only curriculum which emphasized rigid English-only instruction, forbidding use of the native languages in the classroom, creating more barriers to their education. Because LEP children were separated from their English-speaking peers, segregation increased in Arizona schools. Moreover, Proposition 203 disallowed educational testing in the native language of LEP students that had been permitted by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). After the passage of Proposition 203, student progress was measured by two standardized tests: the Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards (AIMS) and the Stanford Achievement Test (Stanford 9), while the use of Aprenda 2 (the Spanish version of the Stanford 9 designed for Spanish-speaking LEP children) was prohibited in Arizona.

Implementation of Proposition 203 (2000) was assured through a set of strategic tactics: (a) requiring teachers and administrators to adhere to the policy or be removed for five years; (b) permitting any “parent or legal guardian of any Arizona school child... to sue for enforcement of the provision of this statute” (Proposition 203 A.R.5. §15-75); and (c) utilizing various propaganda campaigns to shape the pro-English-only attitude among members of local communities, including the broadcast of the few Latino and “immigrant” supporters to create the illusion that Proposition 203 was not anti- immigrant, anti-bilingual, or anti-Latino. An important element of the propaganda was to diminish bilingual education, as well as bilingual teachers and respected researchers by calling them “loonies, kooks, nutcases, laughingstocks, and cultists” and accusing them of damaging or victimizing LEP children with bilingual teaching (Wright, 2005, p. 673; see also Lawton, 2008; Yamagami & Tollefson, 2010).

For educators, the consequences of violating Proposition 203 were immense. Schools, school districts, and their administrators and teachers were denied the opportunity to challenge Proposition 203, a language policy that they knew would have damaging effects on the educational outcome of LEP children and their communities. Once the English-only instructional curriculum and rules were established, as well as the criterion set for permitting students to enroll in

38 Interview with Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez bilingual education, any violation of these policies resulted in the reduction of much-needed state funding and “eventual state takeover or privatization of the school,” or even job loss for nonconforming teachers and administrators (Wright & Pu, 2005).

Finally, by reinforcing the marginalization of ethnic groups, privileged members of the social majority maintained their status quo. For instance, those in the social majority secured control over Arizona’s politics, retained their political and economic prestige, and continued benefiting from their social position, including the ability to educate their children in well-funded private schools. The passage of a harsh immigration law (S.B. 1070, 2010) in Arizona “testified to the relative lack of political power of Arizona Latinos, and to the hardened views toward illegal immigration among Republican politicians both here and nationally” (Archibold, 2010, n.p.).

5. How do these policies conflict with the “best practice” that NCTE and CCCC have advocated?

Obviously, Proposition 203 effectively banning bilingual education for LEP students, S.B. 1070, permitting state police authorities to racially profile Latinos and inquire as to their immigration status; and H.B. 2281 effectively banning ethnic studies programs because they promote ethnic chauvinism, violates NCTE and CCCC tenets of best teaching practice and professionally and universally accepted theory and teaching practice. These legislative initiatives violate basic human rights, as well as the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution and the Supreme Court holding Lau v. Nichols (1974) clearly stating that lack of linguistic access to education is a flagrant violation of civil rights. These aggressive and plainly hostile legislative actions violate the spirit and the four corners of NCTE and CCCC’s long commitment to expanding the American canon to be more inclusive and including in a non-tokenistic way the work of racial and linguistic minority authors and permitting students true access to education by providing a curriculum and materials that reflect their cultural and linguistic characteristics and experiences.

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Searching for America’s (Kelly, 1970) goal was that “the truth and reality of our nation’s history and literature be embodied in the texts and other teaching materials, and that includes the fact of the racial and ethnic diversity of its peoples” (p. 2). The Task Force focused particularly on the inclusion of literature pertaining to nonwhite minority groups, stating:

Of all the minority groups in the United States the non-white minorities (American Indians, blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, et al), more than any others, suffer crippling discrimination in jobs, housing, civil rights, and education.

The consequences of oppression make themselves most visible in major urban centers. But these consequences, if less overt, are just as real in rural America. By comparison, the amount and effects of racism and bias in English and Language Arts educational materials might seem insignificant. But they are not and cannot be ignored.

In the course of his education, a student acquires more than skills and knowledge. He also finds and continues to modify his image of himself, and he shapes his attitudes toward other persons, races, and cultures. To be sure, the school experience is not the sole force that shapes self-images and attitudes towards others. But in the measure that school does exert this influence, it Is essential that the materials it provides fosters in the student not only a self-image deeply rooted in a sense of personal dignity but also the development of attitudes grounded in respect for and understanding of the diversity of American society.

The accomplishment of these ends is a responsibility and obligation of those involved in English and Language Arts programs. Therefore continuing action to accomplish them is the obligation and responsibility of teachers, curriculum planners, textbook selection committees, local and state education authorities, designers of learning systems, and publishers (Kelly, 1970, p. 3).

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The above preamble to the specific deficiencies to be avoided in college anthologies to assure inclusivity of non-white minorities and K-12 criteria for anthologies and texts is thoughtful and theoretically progressive. The recognition of the Task Force members of the vital nature of self-image to academic growth of students is commendable and demonstrates knowledge of the psychological foundations of good pedagogy. Studying the history, contributions, philosophy, literature, and creative art forms of a particular ethnic group for a member of that group is salutary. This is particularly vital. There is no doubt that ethnic studies would be a natural progression of the ideas presented. In fact, ethnic studies was born out of the recognition that the histories, accomplishments, philosophy, literature, and other creative work of members of ethnic and racial groups was an academically definable body of knowledge comprising a disciplinary area and could constitute an undergraduate major, a master’s degree, or doctoral studies. Whereas there are universal themes, genres, archetypes, elements of literary study in all literature, a body of literature pertaining to a particular group is worthy of study.

Given those universally accepted assumptions, the state of Arizona’s stance on ethnic studies is absurd and plainly founded on irrational biases and negative intentions. Tucson Unified School District is the second largest school district in Arizona and is well known for numerous firsts, including award-winning bilingual education programs, notable disagreements with the State Department of Education in terms of the implementation of Proposition 203 in 2000, when it valiantly sought to continue its ability to provide quality access to education to its limited and non-English speaking children by continuing its bilingual education program. Moreover, after the passage of Proposition 203, the Arizona Department of Education withstood well founded criticism and decided that it needed a target to remove the heat. Perhaps TUSD’s exemplary ethnic studies program has had tremendous media attention because of its overwhelmingly positive student outcomes. In the alternative, the entire battle over ethnic studies may have been staged to gain political favor and campaign finance assistance of a certain group of voters in the state to meet the political ambitions of Tom Horne, former superintendent, who was elected Attorney General of the state of Arizona coincidentally in 2010, when both S.B. 1070 and H.B. 2281 were passed.

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Proposition 203, S.B. 1070, and H.B. 2281 infringe on person’s right to equal opportunity to education and employment. Fairness and equal treatment under the law are the quintessential principles upon which the United States of America was founded and that distinguish it as a beacon of democracy in the world. Striving to achieve these ideals is a moral imperative, grounded in the construct of social justice and in the U.S. Constitution. Social justice recognizes the dignity of every human being and each person’s inalienable right to an equal opportunity to meaningfully participate in all aspects of society in the pursuit of a high quality of life. The goal of social justice is to ensure that all persons have a voice in the decisions that directly impact their welfare and that of their children. An inclusive concept, social justice applies to all persons, regardless of their social or economic standing, race, national origin, or their ability to speak English. The fair application of the principles of social justice in the U.S. demands that justice be ensured for historically marginalized populations, such as language minorities who are limited- and non- English-speaking (LEP) and whose access to equal opportunity has been traditionally denied on the basis of language. In all arenas of public life, LEP individuals continue to be treated differently or excluded by virtue of their inability to speak English at a certain level of proficiency.

A commitment to social justice embraces the belief that the government has the responsibility to enact strong and coherent public policies that ensure equality of opportunity and fair treatment under the law for all of its citizens. Although the U.S. has always been a culturally and linguistically diverse society, English-only policies have dominated the language of public life, impacting how business is conducted, how the government interacts with its people, how education is provided, how the political process operates, and how justice is served. The monolingual English perspective in the U.S. is so ingrained in public thought that discriminatory policies become norms, such as permitting the exclusion of sound educational approaches to serve the needs of children who are monolingual speakers of another language, or banning ethnic studies courses in public education because of an irrational conclusion that a course that teaches students about themselves is injurious to the wellbeing of the state. These ethnocentric policies have failed to support the goals of social justice, and instead have erected a barrier between LEP populations and key cultural institutions, thereby perpetuating a

42 Interview with Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez cycle of educational, economic, and social inequality. Effectively, these policies have determined who is included or excluded from the benefits and protections afforded to all residents of the U.S.

At my retirement party after 43 years of service and induction in the University of Arizona Women’s Plaza of Honor on January 25, 2013, I was honored by the comments made by many former students, but particularly by Mary Carmen Cruz, MA and Richard Martinez, JD, who commented on the power and promise of ethnic studies and ethnic literature to the enterprise of education for racial and ethnic minority groups. Both of these highly successful people were in my early Freshman English classes in the mid 1970’s at the University of Arizona, in which I had sought permission and been granted the opportunity to veer from the sanctioned curriculum and use Chicano literature as the stimulus for discussion, analysis, and writing in the course. This became my laboratory, where I could experiment with the variables of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and film to present topics and materials of interest to an entire class of Chicano students and gauge the usefulness of the material to the goal of learning to write and writing to learn. Here were students who were loath to write a “composition,” but bursting to expound on a variety of topics and critical inquiries suggested by the literature and historical exploration of Chicanos in the U.S. Here was a student that had failed Freshman composition excelling at writing that required contemplation, careful analysis, problem solving, and critical thinking and complex evaluation. Later, both students took the first Chicano literature course offered in the English Department of the University of Arizona from me. Mary Carmen Cruz, TUSD teacher mentor and longstanding NCTE and CCCC leader, thanked me for inspiring her and opening the doors for her in her graduate work, professional life, and in NCTE and CCCC. I was touched by her comments crediting me as her mentor and the principal reason for her success in her lifetime of working with students and teachers— thanking me for making the University of Arizona accessible to countless students who felt excluded from the University. Richard Martinez, J.D. has had an illustrious career in the law and is best known for his speaking and writing prowess in a profession of verbal athletes. Richard served as the legal representative for two teachers who brought suit against the State of Arizona regarding the ethnic studies program at TUSD. He reminded everyone gathered at the

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Women’s Plaza of Honor that day of the absurdity of banning the study of Chicano literature and other ethnic literature works that had inspired him and many other undergraduates at the University of Arizona to continue in higher education. He recounted his early experiences with the University, relating that my introduction to Chicano literature gave them the motivation, self-confidence, and sense of belonging that had been heretofore missing at the University of Arizona for him. He expressed his profound sadness that the opportunity he was given and that students at TUSD had been given by the ethnic studies program would no longer be available, lest they inspire treason and the overthrow of the government, as stated by H.B. 2281. He reiterated that HB 2281 was an absurd piece of legislation based on personal bias and unbridled hostility had taken away the joy of discovery and true engagement in education that he and his classmates had when they found themselves and their realities in the pages of Bless me, Ultima (Anaya, 1972), for example. Richard remarked that in the dialogue of the characters, in the events of the plot, in the unanswered questions, they found their lives and their histories, their concerns, and their secret thoughts.

The work of the students Medina presents and analyzes in his research article is an expression of resistance, of non-acceptance of an irrational world, and shows the spirit of a subordinated people who will persist and in the end show their strength, resolve, integrity, pride, and dignity – trumping the colonial narrative in the end.

Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez, Ph.D. is the first Mexican American woman to earn full professor status at the University of Arizona where she taught for 41 years. Retired in 2013, she is now Professor Emeritus of English and Director Emeritus of the National Center for Interpretation: Testing, Research and Policy and the Agnese Haury Institute for Interpretation, both of which she founded and directed from 1983 to 2012. Professor Gonzalez also founded and directed the academic tutorial program—the Writing Skills Improvement Program—whose primary mission it was to assist underrepresented students and students receiving financial aid as well as other students to meet their academic potentials, persist, excel, and graduate from the University of Arizona. This critical program enabled thousands of

44 Interview with Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez underrepresented students at University of Arizona to graduate and to go on to graduate and professional schools by using a methodology that assisted students to build writing fluency and effectiveness, by capitalizing on the use of their cultural life experiences and engaging students in ethnic literature. A linguist specializing in English as a second language and sociolinguistics, particularly language policy, Dr. Gonzalez has served as an expert witness in numerous civil and criminal cases involving language discrimination and language access, working with the Department of Justice, the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, the Legal Aid Society Employment Law Center, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the Mexican Capital Legal Assistance Program, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF), the Justice Project, public defender offices, private attorneys, and legal aid societies. In 1999, the National Council of Teachers of English awarded her the NCTE Distinguished Service Award for her leadership and service—the only Latino/a to hold this honor. Fundamentals of Court Interpretation: Theory, Policy, and Practice (1991, 2012) is considered the seminal work in language access in the courts, and her NCTE publications Language Ideologies: Critical Perspectives on the English only movement, Volume 1 (2000) and Volume 2 (2001) have contributed greatly to the field of language policy.

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REFERENCES

Acosta v. Horne, Complaint, No. 4:10-cv-00623-JMR (D. Ariz. Oct. 18, 2010). Anaya, R. A. (1972). Bless Me, Ultima: A Novel. Berkeley, CA: Quinto Sol Publications. Print. Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Archibold, R. C. (2010, April 20). Immigration bill reflects a firebrand’s impact. New York Times, p. A12. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Clay, K. B. (1999). Property rights and institutions: Congress and the California Land Act of 1851. Journal of Economic History, 59(1), 122-142. Collier, V. P. (1987). The effect of age on acquisition of a second language for school. (ERIC Document Reproduction Services No. ED296580). Collier, V. P. (1989). How long? A synthesis of research on academic achievement in second language. TESOL Quarterly, 23, 509-531. Collier, V. P. (1995). Acquiring a second language for school. Directions in Language and Education, 1(4), 1-12. Combs, M. C., Evans, C., Fletcher, T., Parra, E., & Jiménez, A. (2005). Bilingualism for the children: Implementing a dual- language program in an English-only state. Educational Policy, 19(5), 701-728. Conference on College Composition and Communication. (1974). Student’s Right to Their Own Language [Special issue]. College Composition and Communication 25: 1-32. Crawford, J. (1992). Hold your tongue: Bilingualism and the politics of “English only.” Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Cummins, J. (1981). The role of primary language development in promoting educational success for language minority students. In California State Department of Education (Ed.), Schooling and language minority students: A theoretical framework (pp. 3-50). Los Angeles: Evaluation, Dissemination and Assessment Center, California State University. Cummins, J. (1986). Empowering minority students: A framework for intervention. Harvard Educational Review, 56, 18-36.

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Cummins, J. (2001). Author’s Introduction – Framing the Universe of Discourse: Are the Constructs of Power and Identity Relevant to School Failure? Harvard Educational Review, 71, 649-655. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press. Gándara, P., & Orfield, G. (2010, July). A return to the “Mexican Room.” The segregation of Arizona’s English learners. The Civil Rights Project. (ERIC Document Reproduction Services No. ED511322). Garcia, E. E., Öztürk, M. D., & Wood, J. L. (2009). The critical condition of Hispanic education in Arizona. Tempe, AZ: Office of the Vice President of Education Partnership, Arizona State University. Giroux, H. A. (1983). Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. González, R. D. (1990a). In the aftermath of the ELA: Stripping language minorities of their rights. In H. A. Daniels (Ed.), Not Only English: Affirming America’s multilingual heritage (pp. 49-60). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. González, R. D. (1990b). When minority becomes majority: The changing face of the English classroom. English Journal, 79(1), 16-23. González, R. D. (1993). Language, Race, and the Politics of Educational Failure: A Case for Advocacy. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English. González, R. D., & Melis, I. (Eds.). (2000). Language ideologies: Critical perspectives on the official English movement (Vol. 1): Education and the social implications of official Language. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates and National Council of Teachers of English. González, R. D., & Melis, I. (Eds.). (2001). Language ideologies: Critical perspectives on the official English movement (Vol. 2): History, theory and policy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates and National Council of Teachers of English. González, R. D., Schott, A. A., & Vásquez, V. F. (1988). The English language amendment: Examining myths. English Journal, 77(3), 24-30.

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González, R. D., Vásquez, V. F., & Mikkelson, H. (2012). Fundamentals of court interpretation: Theory, policy, and practice (2nd ed.). Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press. Hakuta, K. (1986). Mirror of language: The debate on bilingualism. NY: Basic Books. Heath, S.B. (1977). Language and politics in the United States. In M. Saville-Troike (Ed.), Georgetown University round table on language and linguistics (pp. 267-296). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Heath, S.B. (1983). Ways with words. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Hing, J. (2011, June 22). Audits find that Tucson’s ethnic studies program is legal. New America Media. Retrieved August 20, 2011 from http://newamericamedia.org/2011/06/audit-finds- that-tucsons-ethnic-studies-program-is-legal.php House Bill 2281, 49th Leg., 2nd Reg. Sess. (2010). Available from http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/hb2281s.pdf Huddy, L., & Sears, D. O. (1995). Opposition to bilingual education: Prejudice or the defense of realistic interests? Social Psychology Quarterly, 58, 133-143. Huicochea, A. (2012, January 11). TUSD board shuts down Mex. American Studies. Arizona Daily Star. Retrieved January 27, 2012 from http://azstarnet.com/news/local/education/ precollegiate/tusd-board-shuts-down-mex-american-studies/ article_89674600-5584-58a8-9a0f-4020113900f9.html Huicochea, A. (2013, February 9). Judge orders TUSD to teach about culture. Arizona Daily Star. Retrieved October 1, 2013 from http://azstarnet.com/news/local/education/ precollegiate/judge-orders-tusd-to-teach-about-culture/ article_004c78d3-87d8-5a26-b280-f6ad30da2aec.html Jacobs, M. D. (2006). Indian boarding schools in comparative perspective: The removal of indigenous children in the United States and Australia, 1880-1940. In C. E. Trafzer, J. A. Keller, & L. Sisquoc (Eds.), Boarding school blues: Revisiting American Indian educational experiences (pp. 202-231). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Retrieved January 23, 2012 from http:// digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&con text=historyfacpub

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Johnson, K. R., & Martínez, G. A. (2000). Discrimination by proxy: The case of Proposition 227 and the ban on bilingual education. U.C. Davis Law Review, 33, 1227-1276. Kelly, E. (1970, November 26). Searching for America. Urbana, Illinois: Conference on College Composition and Communication and the National Council of Teachers of English, NCTE Task Force on Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English. Print. Kirklighter, C. (2009). “The History of Caucus Coalitions: Remembering Our Past to Build Our Future.” Presentation at the Conference on College Composition and Communication Convention, San Francisco, CA. Lara, F. (2012, January 7). Racist anti-ethnic studies law upheld in Arizona: Decision highlights need for continued struggle against racism. Liberation News. Retrieved January 27, 2012 from http://pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/racist-anti- ethnic-studies.html Lau v. Nichols, 414 U.S. 563 (1974). Lauren, A. (2013, January 14). 4 Reasons Arizona Needs Ethnic Studies Courses. Care2. Retrieved October 1, 2013 from http:// www.care2.com/causes/4-reasons-arizona-needs-ethnic-studies- courses.html Lawton, R. (2008). Language policy and ideology in the United States: A critical analysis of ‘English Only’ discourse. In M. Khosravinik & A. Polyzou (Eds.), Papers from the Lancaster University Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics & Language Teaching (Vol. 2): Papers from LAEL PG 2007 (pp. 78-103). Retrieved January 11, 2010 from http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/ pgconference/v02/05-Lawton.pdf Lawton, S.B. (2007, November 15-17). Flores, Proposition 203, and English language learners in Arizona. Presentation at the 2007 Education Law Association Annual Conference, San Diego, CA. MacGregor-Mendoza, P. (2000). Aquí no se habla Español [Spanish is not spoken here]: Stories of linguistic repression in Southwest schools. Bilingual Research Journal, 24, 355-367. Medina, C. (2013). “Nuestros Refranes: Culturally Relevant Writing in Tucson High Schools.” Reflections : A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning. Unpublished manuscript.

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Mohanty, A. K. (2009). Perpetuating inequality: Language disadvantage and capability deprivation of tribal mother tongue speakers in India. In W. Harbert, S. McConnell-Ginet, A. Miller & J. Whitman (Eds.), Language and poverty (pp. 104-124). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Nieto, S. (1992). Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education. White Plains, NY: Longman Publishers USA. National Immigration Law Center. (2012, June 25). The Supreme Court Decision on SB 1070: What’s at Stake. Retrieved October 1, 2013 from www.nilc.org/USvAZimplications.html Ortego, P. D. (1970). “Huevos con chorizo: a letter to Richard Ohman.” College English May 12, 1970. Pavlakovich-Kochi, V. (2011). Costs and contributions to Arizona’s economy from “border effect.” University of Arizona, Eller College of Management. Retrieved January 23, 2012 from http://ebr. eller.arizona.edu/arizona_ border_region/border_effect.asp Proposition 203. (2000). English language education for children in public schools: A.R.S. 15, c 7 §3.1. Retrieved March 9, 2010 from http://www.azed.gov/wp-content/uploads/PDF/ PROPOSITION203.pdf Rodriguez, R. (1982). Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. New York: Bantam. Samaniego, R. Y., & Gonzales, N. A. (1999, April). Multiple mediators of the effects of acculturation status on delinquency for Mexican American adolescents. American Journal of Community Psychology, 27(2), 189-210. Sánchez, J. (1993). Acculturative stress among Hispanics: A bidimensional model of ethnic identification. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 23(8), 654–668. Senate Bill No. 1070, 49th Leg., 2d Reg. Sess. (Ariz. April 23, 2010) (as modified by H.B. 2162, 49th Leg., 2d Reg. Sess. (Ariz. April 30, 2010) Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1988). Multilingualism and the education of minority children. In T. Skutnabb-Kangas & J. Cummins, Minority education: From shame to struggle (pp. 9-44). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. Skutnabb-Kangas, T., & Dunbar, R. (2010). Indigenous children’s education as linguistic genocide and a crime against humanity? A global view. Guovdageaidnu/Kautokeino: Gáldu Čála, Journal of

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Indigenous Peoples Rights, 1, 1-122. Retrieved November 12, 2011 from http://www.galdu.org/web/index.php?ohcansatni=Indige nous+children%E2%80%99s+education+as+linguistic+genocid e+and+a+crime+against+humanity%3F+A+global+view&sub mit2=%3E%3E&giella2=eng Task Force on Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English. (1986). Expanding Opportunities: Academic Success for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English. Retrieved October 1, 2013 from www. ncte.org/positions/statements/expandingopportun The William C. Velásquez Institute. (2000, Winter). The state of Latinos in Arizona. Public policy paper, 1(3). Retrieved March 29, 2012 from http://www.wcvi.org/files/pdf/arizona.pdf United States Census Bureau. (2000, May). The Hispanic population: Census 2000 brief by B. Guzmán. Available from http://www. census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01-3.pdf Villanueva, V. (1993). Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English. Weslander, E. (2000, September 25). “Prop 203 would be step back, foes say.” Tucson Citizen. Retrieved October 1, 2013 from http:// onenation.org/009/092500c.html Wright, W. E., & Pu, C. (2005). Academic achievement of English language learners in post Proposition 203 Arizona. Arizona State University, Education Policy Studies Laboratory. Retrieved April 10, 2011 from http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/EPSL-0509- 103-LPRU.pdf Wright, W. E. (2005). The political spectacle of Arizona’s Proposition 203. Educational Policy, 19(5), 662-700. Yamagami, M., & Tollefson, J. W. (2010). Representation and legitimization in political discourse: The campaign against bilingual education. Language Research Bulletin, 25(7), 1-12.

51 Nuestros Refranes: Culturally Relevant Writing in Tucson High Schools

Cruz Medina, Santa Clara University Colonial narratives often characterize Latin@ culture and students as deficient with regard to education. These narratives persist through legislation like Arizona’s House Bill 2281, which outlawed the culturally relevant curriculum of Tucson High School’s Mexican American Studies program. This article argues that culturally relevant student writing that responds to a prompt about dichos or proverbial sayings in Spanish, illustrate rhetorical strategies of subversive complicity when analyzed through a decolonial framework. Written by students at multiple Tucson High schools during the controversy surrounding HB 2281, the student publication, Nuestros Refranes, serves as the site of analysis that demonstrates how students navigate institutions governed by subjugating policy.

Rhetoric and Composition Studies integrally combined with Ethnic Studies that also focus on the literacy of not just Latinos/as but also of the indigenous folk in the United States, could significantly revitalize and change the colonialist nature of discourse and, more important, literacy studies in the Southwest and throughout the country. —Jaime Armin Mejía “Bridging Rhetoric and Composition Studies with Chicano and Chicana studies” 52 Nuestros Refranes | Cruz Medina

n the words of a high school student in Tucson, “Words of wisdom, from those who survived their grimmest days, speak Iin proverbs, or dichos, to live by” (Nuestros Refranes, p. 110). The knowledge transmitted in dichos is inseparable from the beliefs of the people who navigate life’s struggles according to them. Unfortunately, when the education of a people is continually policed and outlawed—as in Arizona, where this student writes—it should come as no surprise that knowledge represents survival in the face of grim opposition.

Latin@ scholars have challenged public and institutional rhetoric of cultural deficiency through the analysis of racist discourse and tropes (Martinez 2009; Nericcio 2007; Pimentel and Velazquez 2009; Villanueva 1993), projects highlighting the history of colonial struggle (Baca 2008; Pérez 1999), and the advocacy of culturally relevant curriculum (Cruz and Duff 1996; Mejía 2004). The recent legislation in Arizona of Senate Bill 1070 and House Bill 2281, which police Latin@ bodies and knowledge respectively, draws attention to the importance of scholarship that responds to oppressive rhetoric that has been reified into policy. By analyzing the writing of Latin@ students in Arizona through a decolonial framework, I examine the student publication This We Believe/Nuestros Refranes as a site of resistance and struggle for education, despite the efforts of ultraconservative politicians to uphold colonial narratives by dismantling programs that serve Latin@s. From the culturally relevant writing by Latin@ students, I identify rhetorical strategies of students for working within and against institutionalizing apparatuses such as the Arizona educational system.

TUCSON, RACIAL PROFILING, AND ANTI-ETHNIC STUDIES BAN During the spring of 2010, the student publication This We Believe/ Nuestros Refranes (2010) resulted as a joint venture between the University of Arizona’s College of the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP), working with both the Tucson and Sunnyside school districts. Because the student populations of these districts are predominantly Latin@, with

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Tucson at 61%1 and Sunnyside at 90%2 respectively, the efficacy of culturally relevant writing for these communities should not be overlooked. Most importantly, Nuestros Refranes reflects the developing worldviews of Latin@s in the Southwest and their strategies for negotiating the enduring colonial legacy. In this discussion, the term “colonial” represents the romanticized narratives of the “West” and “frontier” Pérez (1999) refers to the colonial imaginary (p. 5). These fictional colonial narratives have become conflated with dominant views of history, which in turn authorize recent ultraconservative Arizona policy that continues the colonial subjugation of Latin@s in the Southwest.

Then, Superintendent of Education in Arizona, Tom Horne frames the dominant colonial narrative about culturally relevant curriculum and pedagogy targeted by HB 2281 as “promoting ethnic chauvinism” and not teaching students “to be Americans and to treat each other as individuals” (“Arizona Legislature Passes Bill to Curb ‘Chauvanism’ in Ethnic Studies Programs”). Produced while Horne (2010) publically mischaracterized the culturally relevant Mexican American Studies (MAS) program, the culturally relevant prompt and student writing of Nuestros Refranes extend the work of Cruz and Duff (1996) who argue for the integration of dichos and cultural knowledge of Latin@ students. The following analysis identifies Nuestros Refranes as an example of decolonial resistance and constitutes what Licona (2005) describes as sitios, lenguas y tecnologías de resistencia, y transformación, or the sites, languages and technologies of resistance and transformation in the context of Arizona legislation (p. 105). In the contested space of Tucson, Nuestros Refranes serves as a site of resistance for Latin@ students because their struggle to become educated, challenges the colonial narratives in legislation that not only outlaw successful programs but also call the citizenship of Latin@s into question.

During the writing and subsequent publication of Nuestros Refranes, Arizona’s ultraconservative government enacted legislation targeting Latin@s as a part of the long tradition of subjugation

1 According to Tucson Unified School Districts “Enrollment by Ethnicity” at tusdstats.tusd.k12.az.us. 2 According to “Project Graduation: The Digital Advantage,” a case study by the Sunnyside School District.

54 Nuestros Refranes | Cruz Medina in the Southwest.3 HB 2281 is only the most recent attack on the education of Latin@s in Arizona, which has included segregation, renewed segregation through re-districting, and the dismantling of bilingual education programs despite empirical evidence to the contrary by Proposition 209 (Wright 2005; Rolstad, Mahoney, & Glass 2010; Morales 2012). In Tucson, educating Latin@s with culturally relevant education and bilingual education can be traced to the opening of the first public school in 1868, when instruction in Spanish was a necessity.4 The historical struggle for education in Arizona parallels the broader national struggle against segregation in the U.S. Sal Gabaldon, a Language Acquisition Specialist for Tucson Unified School District (TUSD), notes the ripple effect of desegregation on the education of people of color in Arizona:

[i]n 1979, Tucson Unified signed a desegregation agreement and levied a special tax to fund the cost of desegregation—including the cost of Bilingual Education and Black Studies department. In 1982 legislature approves the Arizona Bilingual Education Act. By the 1990s, the tax accounted for a large part of the district’s budget—more than $50 million, nearly all coming from the state’s coffers. (Morales, 2012)

By 1998, TUSD’s Bilingual Education department piloted “Exito en Progreso,” a program that provided student services, tutoring, and mentoring; it would later serve as the model for what would become the Mexican American Studies (MAS) department, offering student services and studies and teacher training (“Mexican American Student Services Historical Background”). However, by November 2000, Arizona legislators proposed, promoted, and passed Proposition 209, after receiving 63% of votes, which in turn “severely limited schools in terms of the types of instructional programs they are able to offer their ELL[English language learning] students”(Wright, 2005, p. 663). Establishing an anti-Latin@ legislative-bias, Horne ran his campaign for Superintendent of Education in Arizona on the platform of enforcing Prop 209, which dismantled bilingual

3 See Jane Hill’s (1993) article “Hasta la Vista, Baby: Anglo Spanish in the American Southwest.” 4 For a more exhaustive discussion of bilingual education in Arizona, see Sal Galbando’s lecture in D.A. Morales’ video “History of Bilingual Education in Arizona” available on YouTube.

55 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 education programs that disproportionately impacted Latin@s. As a part of enforcing Prop 209, Horne changed the requirements for ELL students, based on the arbitrary average scores provided by test publishers, thereby cutting short reading and writing preparation for those students developing literacy in English (Rolstad et al., 2010, p. 45).

During the 2009-10 school-year, when Nuestros Refranes was produced, Senate Bill 1070 passed, which allowed the local police to question people suspected of being “illegal” for documents proving their citizenship (Soto & Joseph, 2010). From my standpoint as a Chican@, SB 1070 called for the legitimacy of all Latin@s into question, by permitting racial profiling and the heightened policing of brown bodies. Additionally, students with whom I interacted with at the South Tucson high schools, confided that SB 1070 would affect people close to them and would affect the families of friends as well. Soon after the passage of SB 1070, the Arizona legislature then passed HB 2281, a house bill written by Horne (2010) to outlaw courses designed to teach Latin@ students through the implementation of culturally relevant curricula and pedagogy. The reverberations of the colonial narrative in the ultraconservative policy grew louder because of the methodological solipsism that defied the rationale of the state. According to an empirical impact analysis of the MAS program prepared by researchers at the University of Arizona’s College of Education,

MAS students who failed at least one AIMS test initially were significantly more likely to ultimately pass all three AIMS tests (see Table 2). MAS students in the 2010 cohort were 64 percent more likely to pass their AIMS tests, and MAS students in the 2008 cohort were 118 percent more likely to pass….[Regarding] graduation rate, MAS participation was a significant, positive predictor for three of the four cohorts (2008, 2009, and 2010). Students who took MAS courses were between 51 percent more likely to graduate from high school than non-MAS students (2009) and 108 percent more likely to graduate (2008). (Cabrera, Milem &, Marx, 2012, p. 5-6)

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Even though graduation rates and state test scores serve as educational units of measurement, HB 2281 persisted despite the fact the MAS program had demonstrated

sufficient empirical evidence in analyses of two of the three outcomes (AIMS passing and graduation) to reject the null hypothesis (i.e., there is no significant relationship)…[t]hese results suggest that there is a consistent, significant, positive relationship between MAS participation and student academic performance. (Cabrera, 2012, et al. p. 7)

Actively ignoring the positive statistical data about the MAS program, Arizona legislators enforced HB 2281 through economic force leveraged against the entire school district. As State Superintendent of Education, Tom Horne wrote HB 2281 targeting the MAS program, and his predecessor John Huppenthal subsequently enforced the policy by threatening to cut 10% from TUSD’s district funding if the MAS program were not dismantled (Cheers, 2010).

THE STRUGGLE FOR CULTURE IN COMPOSITION STUDIES Like the culturally relevant curriculum taught in TUSD’s Mexican American Studies program, Nuestros Refranes shows how writing that engages with culture, has the potential to improve the education of Latin@s. Unfortunately, there are still scholars who actively advocate against culture in writing classes, by arguing that the issues in discussions of cultural diversity and multiculturalism contain political agendas. In Save the World on Your Own Time, Fish (2008) explains that he begins a writing course by telling students “we are not interested in ideas…except how prepositions or participles or relative pronouns function” (p. 40). By Fish’s definition, the rules of grammar signify the entirety of teaching writing; this definition drastically reduces the scope of the field of composition studies, while imposing an ideology that does not account for cultural difference. While Fish argues that his classes are content-free, he focuses on grammar as his heuristic for improving his students’ writing; however, by emphasizing the rules that regulate and authorize language according to a Standard English ideal, Fish uncritically perpetuates hegemonic ideology. Simply stated, Fish argues “composition courses should teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else” (p. 44). Even

57 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 in Fish’s inclusion of rhetoric, he ignores the ideologies and politics of choosing a rhetorical framework. For educators and rhetoricians, the desire to better educate Latin@ student writers is fraught with cultural implications, due to social and institutional inequalities that many educators must account for as a part of their rhetorical situation.

Fish’s argument is neither new, nor original. In 1992, a similar argument arose in rhetoric and composition studies, in response to the growing number of first-year writing courses moving away from the influence of literary studies to politically-oriented multicultural curriculums. In “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing,” Hairston (1992) attributed the influx of “higher purposes” into composition classrooms as a result of deficient training on the part of graduate teaching assistants (p. 185). Hairston explains that,

[t]oo often they [graduate students] haven’t been well trained in how to teach writing and are at a loss about what they should be doing with their students. How easy then to focus the course on their own interests, which are often highly political. Unfortunately, when they try to teach an introductory composition course by concentrating on issues rather than on craft and critical thinking, large numbers of their students end up feeling confused, angry—and cheated. (p. 185)

While the professional development of instructors remains a perennial issue of higher education, Hairston dismisses politically- oriented issues of diversity as not critical thinking. Demonstrating reductive approaches to cultural diversity, she asks, “What about Hispanic culture? Can the teacher who knows something of Mexico generalize about traditions of other Hispanic cultures?” (p. 190). When Hairston advocates for craft and critical thinking, the student population she envisions, is no doubt, predominantly white, comforted by their reassuring knapsacks of privilege5. However, the demographics of student populations have changed in the last two decades; therefore Hairston’s (1992) argument for teaching critical thinking without culture has less import for spaces like the Southwest.

5 See Peggy McIntosh’s (2003) “White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack.”

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Like Fish (2008), even when Hairston preaches for an absence of politics, her argument reflects an ideology of privilege that does not anticipate the needs of the changing student population. When those in power advocate against culture in education, they further espouse the dominance of white culture, history, and ways of knowing. In the local context of Arizona, the case of House Bill 2281 demonstrates how the silencing of culture negatively impacts the education of Latin@s.

Prior to Fish, Bloom’s (1987) The Closing of the American Mind made similarly reductive arguments about the role of higher education. Bloom squarely comes down against “cultural” texts; instead, he argues for focusing specifically on the “Great Books” tradition. Advocating for an “old, dead, white men” curriculum, Bloom (1987) argues that steps forward in racial desegregation in higher learning via affirmative action contribute not only to the deterioration of the university but also to “the relations between the races in America” (p. 97). By hedging arguments against affirmative action within claims about race relations, Bloom (1987) makes it possible to draw parallels between championing the “Great Books” curriculum and the colonial rejection of programs aimed at countering systemic inequality. Bloom’s (1987) “Great Books” advocacy and Fish’s (2008) “grammar and rhetoric” arguments, dismiss the generative heuristic culture and provides for underrepresented student populations, ignoring students who are disenfranchised by the kind of rote writing instruction that more often occurs in under-funded and over-crowded institutions where innovative instruction lacks support.

The narrow definition of composition that Fish (2008) outlines in Save the World dismisses developments in student-centered pedagogical practices that engage with the cultures of underrepresented student populations. Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) trace the development and reasoning behind culture-oriented pedagogical practices, discussing the transition from responding to culture to the integration of material that reflects the culture of students. Ladson- Billings & Tate (1995) come to the notion of culturally-relevant pedagogy, following Au & Jordan’s (1981) discussion of “culturally appropriate” pedagogy of teachers in Hawaiian schools permitting students to use talk story (as cited in Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995,

59 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 p. 466) and Mohatt & Erickson’s (1981) “culturally congruent” focus on Native American and Anglo “mixed forms” (as cited in Ladson- Billings & Tate, p. 466). Discussing the different forms of curriculum and pedagogy, Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) explain “culturally appropriate, culturally congruent, and culturally compatible— seem to connote accommodation of student culture to mainstream culture…culturally responsive appears to refer to a more dynamic or synergistic relationship between home/community culture and school culture” (p. 467). Even though this discussion is framed by the term culturally relevant, the advocacy to be inclusive of culture stems from the need to better educate and retain diverse student populations—the “grammar and rhetoric only” paradigm that Fish (2008) espouses has already proven inadequate.

In rhetoric and composition, Latin@ scholars (Baca 2008; Mejía 2004; Villanueva 1993) have argued for more attention to rhetoric of the Americas and culturally relevant writing practices for Latin@ students. In his contribution to Crossing Borderlands: Composition and Postcolonial Studies, Mejía (2004) advocates for the field’s integration of culturally relevant material in order to benefit students of color. Specifically, Mejía (2004) argues that these materials possess rhetorical potential for bilingual and bicultural students from the region near the U.S.-Mexico border to reverse the negative effects of institutionalized education. Drawing on dichos as an example, Mejía (2004) asserts that the “truth, of course, is that corridos (ballads), dichos (proverbial sayings), and tallas (jokes) do exist; yet rhetorical studies of these texts remain to be conducted” (p. 175). To succeed in the “contact zone” of southern Arizona high schools, Latin@ students in Tucson deploy strategies of what Medina (2013) calls subversive complicity as they work within spaces of ideological opposition to their success. In a publication of essays written by high school students in Tucson, the purposeful inclusion of dichos in the writing prompt for the student publication follows what Mejia (2004) notes as the current lack of attention given to these kinds of rhetorical productions. Some students use culturally relevant dichos, or proverb-like sayings in Spanish, which represent discursive mantras and truisms that name the strategies they perform. In Nuestros Refranes (2010), the writing illustrates both the use of culturally relevant dichos, and the rhetorical strategies that students practice while overcoming educational barriers.

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DECOLONIAL STRATEGIES OF SUBVERSIVE COMPLICITY In Tucson, colonial narratives framing Latin@s as anti-American and ethnocentric, subjugate and dismiss the accomplishments of students. Still, programs like the New Start summer bridge program at the University of Arizona, a six week academic course with peer- mentoring classes and resident hall activities, represent a model at the programmatic level that serves underrepresented student populations and first generation college students. For more than 40 years, the predominantly Latin@ summer bridge program has helped familiarize students with the university and build confidence by creating classroom and peer communities that continue throughout the school year. Summer bridge programs create decolonial spaces where lessons and discussions among students, peer-mentors, and instructors about issues of race, gender, and class privilege in the university reflect the realities of students more so than during the regular school year when there are few students of color in a given classroom. In this discussion of Latin@s and education, I speak of decolonial theory, writing, and practices as those which work against hegemonic institutions and policies that support colonial assumptions of white supremacy.

In her Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History, Pérez (1999) discusses the writing of history as little more than the transcribing of fictional narratives that validate and are authorized by colonial power. Breaking away from the colonial histories that omit the agency of brown bodies, especially Chicanas, Pérez (1999) theorizes her decolonial imaginary as a method for re-reading and re-writing history in the “time lag between the colonial and postcolonial, that interstitial space where differential politics and social dilemmas are negotiated” (p. 6). As a theory for re-writing Chicana agency into the history of Mexico, Pérez’s (1999) decolonial imaginary provides a generative framework for recovering agency in textual data amid colonial narratives. In terms of the decolonial imaginary, the writing by Chican@s can be seen as the “silences” in response to the dominant, colonial narratives of Horne, Huppenthal, Brewer, and other ultraconservative opponents of Latin@s in Arizona. Pérez argues that “these silences, when heard, become the negotiating spaces for the decolonizing subject” (p. 5). As culturally relevant writing outside the control of legislated curriculum, Refranes

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Refranes (2010) creates a discursive space where Latin@ students reflect their cultural identity while writing in a context apart from discourses and apparatus that frame them as educationally deficient. Nuestros Refranes possesses rhetorical potential while subverting the expectations that are transmitted in colonial narratives about communities with Mexican heritage. By analyzing Nuestros Refranes through the framework of Pérez’s (1999) decolonial imaginary, the rhetorical strategies of Latin@ students can be identified outside of the colonial context created by ultraconservative policy.

For the analysis of culturally relevant writing by Latin@ students, Pérez’s (1999) theoretical framework of the decolonial imaginary makes it possible to identify strategies of resistance to dominant narratives and historical fiction about Latin@s in the Southwest. The publication of Nuestros Refranes by a third-party grant separate from school, functions as the interstitial space that “can help us rethink history in a way that makes Chicana/o agency transformative” (Pérez, 1999, p. xviii). The decolonial imaginary also facilitates the evaluation of discursive productions that challenge dominant deficit narratives about Latin@s and writing given that “writing, for most school children, is nearly always school sponsored and inevitably, therefore, reflects the culture of the school system and reproduces culturally preferred discourse styles” (Leki, 1991, p. 124). As a theoretical framework, the decolonial imaginary applies a method for interpreting and re-imagining the agency of students facing obstacles. The analysis of Nuestros Refranes also provides the space to illuminate strategies of subversive complicity—which I describe in more detail later, though can be described as the practices and approaches for working from within, while working against oppressive systems.

In Nuestros Refranes (2010), one of the main strategies that breaks from writing authorized by colonial standards is the use of code- switching. Code-switching has been defined as “the use of two or more languages in the same conversation or utterance” (Gardner- Chloros, 1997, p. 361). Bridging students’ home culture with school assignments, including the use of home languages, builds confidence, while representing a validation of linguistic diversity that has been previously framed as a deficiency. Discussing the use of code-

62 Nuestros Refranes | Cruz Medina switching in literature, Torres (2007) explains the complexity of the strategy and the variety of access it allows:

Through strategies that range from very infrequent and transparent use of Spanish to prose that requires a bilingual reader, Latino/a authors negotiate their relationships to homelands, languages, and transnational identifications. The strategies they use lend themselves to multiple readings and differing levels of accessibility. (p. 76)

For this reason, code-switching can be seen as a subversive performance of Latin@ culture in a discursive production, especially within an academic institution that schools students in the dominant culture. In the historical context of Proposition 209 and the dismantling of bilingual education, the Spanish language in Arizona has been shown to threaten the cultural superiority of whites in Arizona; therefore, the weaving of Spanish words and phrases within writing in English reinscribes important threads that inter-stitch the conflict of colonial and indigenous languages in the Southwestern linguistic tapestry.

Code-switching is not only something that I advocate for students. Many of the rhetorical strategies of Latin@ students that I identify are in fact terms in Spanish that other Latin@ scholars have re- appropriated from different contexts. One such term that embodies a will to survive while appropriating resources at hand is rascuache. Spener (2010) describes rascuache as, “the sensibility of los de abajo (the underdogs), whose resourcefulness and ingenuity permit them to overcome adversity by stitching together the tools needed to survive from whatever materials they have at hand” (p. 9). Working from within academic institutions not valuing culture, students require the ability to survive, often needing to “make do” with available resources. While Spener (2010) looks at the strategy of rascuache during the journey of migrants, Ybarra-Frausto (1991) demonstrates the applications of rascuache when describing the repurposing of what is at hand and appropriation by artists. As with the other strategies, rascuache fits within the performance of subversive complicity, by appropriating from dominant ideologies in order to challenge the hegemony.

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While the strength of rascuache comes from the actions of an individual, Urrieta’s (2009) Working from Within: Chicana and Chicano Activist Educators in Whitestream Schools focuses on strategies deployed by groups. Looking at collaborative exchanges of power, Urrieta (2009) defines transas literally as transactions, “which in Mexican folk knowledge are strategic and commonly known, but usually clandestine, practices used by people with less power to subvert, or get around, the system” (p. 11). Perhaps more salient to this discussion than transas is the strategy that relies on collaboration among like-minded people, a movida. Urrieta (2009) discusses movidas “as ‘moves’ rather than movements, because moves emphasize the active nature of a movida to carry out a carefully strategized plan” (p. 170). Implementing a culturally relevant writing prompt for Nuestros Refranes was achieved by multiple people working together on the grant, all of whom were actively engaged with the lives, languages, and cultures of the Latin@ students in Tucson. By asking for Spanish dichos in the writing prompt, the grant employees enacted a movida, subverting hegemonic expectations of what student writing should entail.

Urrieta’s (2009) transas and movidas draw attention to the exchanges of power, pointing out the role that instructors can play in helping students who experience marginalization. Similarly, the strategy that perhaps occurs the most in Nuestros Refranes is what Valenzuela (1999) identifies in Subtractive Schooling as the support networks of Latin@ students with “pro-school ethos” (p. 28). Valenzuela characterizes the education of students in underfunded and overcrowded schools as “schooling,” much like the institutionalizing effects of Prop 209 and HB 2281. These students are able to navigate schools that work against them because the students are like-minded about succeeding academically and support one another. All of these strategies reinforce the subversive complicity of those who choose to ‘play the game’ while subverting and working against it.

For Latin@ students, maintaining a pro-school ethos is important in the face of deficit discourses that undergird the colonial narratives about white superiority. In a critical analysis of media, Yosso (2002) notes the desire of her students to prove stereotypical media representations wrong. Yosso (2002) notes a strategy of resistance

64 Nuestros Refranes | Cruz Medina when “students verbalized the drive to ‘prove them wrong,’…[and] show that Chicanas/os can succeed, and overcome ignorant ideas that Latinas/os are inferior to whites” (author’s emphasis p. 56). Proving them wrong names a strategy that motivates students to respond to apparatus of oppression, whether it comes from legislation or other misrepresentative symbolic action. While policy such as HB 2281 portrays Latin@ students in the MAS program as anti-American or ethno-centric, media representations of Latin@ students as bandito gangbangers and sexualized Latinas reinforce similar assumptions about Latin@s as educationally deficient (Yosso, 2002, p. 55).

In this article, one of the assumptions and central arguments for analyzing Latin@ student essays is that writing originating from a culturally-relevant prompt about dichos includes rhetorical strategies for succeeding in school. In Tucson, researcher and educator MaryCarmen Cruz has worked for many years in TUSD, teaching and overseeing projects related to bilingual education and culturally relevant writing, including dichos. An active member of NCTE Latina/o caucus and contributor to English Journal, Cruz continues to mentor teachers early in their careers at TUSD. More than a decade before the writing of Nuestros Refranes, Cruz and Duff (1996) explains that the use of dichos to write “touches on students’ funds of knowledge but also enriches their language skills” (p. 116). I argue that these strategies reflect the consciousness of students who work within while working against institutions governed by oppressive policy; these strategies possess the quality of what I call subversive complicity or the rhetorical performance of “conformist resistance” discussed by Valenzuela (1999), Yosso (2002), and Cammarota (2004). Dichos, as a genre of proverbial sayings and expressions, transmit advice or insight from the speaker to the audience. For the student publication discussed below, students were specifically asked to write about the dicho they thought about or represented their mindset when they experienced obstacles.

NUESTROS REFRANES In addition to the analysis of Nuestros Refranes (2010) using Pérez’s (1999) decolonial imaginary, I write from a unique role of having served on the grant sponsoring the publication of the student essays and from having participated in the editorial process once the essays

65 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 had been written, revised, and submitted. While I did not work with students during the writing process, which created the essays found in Nuestros Refranes (2010), I had opportunities to visit many of the participating schools and to interact with different cohorts of students during the academic year when the book was published. Even though students were aware their essays would become a part of a published collection that is publically displayed6, I refrain from using students’ names because of their ages. Also, I purposely avoid the use of the students’ gender with students so as not to reinforce any socially-constructed assumptions that the marking of gender that could potentially be implied.

Because rhetorical strategies can be performed by students and complicit educators, I begin with the writing of an adult “college coach” because she acknowledges how writing with dichos relates to education. In the introduction to the school, college coach Karen Rosales writes, “‘Dime con quién andas y te dire quién eres,’ [Tell me with whom you hang around, and I will tell you the kind of person you are]…[t]he people you surround yourself with have an impact in your daily life” (Rosales in Nuestros Refranes, 2010, p. 67). Using a dicho that addresses community and importance of aligning oneself with others who share similar stances towards succeeding, Rosales (2010) advises using the strategy of support networks of like-minded students (Valenzuela, 1999, p. 28). As an adult in a position of power relative to the students writing for the collection, the college coach recognizes her agency and ability to inspire pro- school ethos and movidas among students at different points in their academic careers. Considering the different levels of power within a network and community, it should be noted how these strategies and practices apply to people at different levels of power. As both visible and invisible, participants in movidas support networks working together, to accomplish a task that benefits an individual within the movida or the community as a whole.

Rosales’ (2010) writing demonstrates subversive complicity as she praises the writing of students, while at the same time acknowledging the obstacles students face. Rosales (2010) explains that, “[t]he entries you find in this book demonstrate their dreams, motivations, 6 Nuestros Refranes has been archived at the University of Arizona’s Special Collections, where it is available to the public.

66 Nuestros Refranes | Cruz Medina and struggles” (p. 67). The performance of subversive complicity can be seen in the epideictic rhetoric Rosales (2010) employs to garner recognition for the writing, although the inclusion of “struggle” following the positive signifiers of “dreams” and “motivations” alludes to the necessity of resistance. In the rhetoric of the Chican@ Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, also referred to as El Movimiento, the term “struggle” signifies the numerous individual and collective acts of resistance to oppression in white institutions, as discussed in Rosales (2010). Whether the use of the term “struggle” by the college coach was a conscious decision, the term nonetheless echoes the subversive message in the tradition of El Movimiento and alludes to contemporary issues.

For Latin@ students in Tucson, struggle can refer to the individual student’s experience with survival in and out of academic institutions. A South Tucson student in Nuestros Refranes (2010) engages with a dicho which takes on a more literal discussion of survival:

La vida es muy corta. La vida no se termina…Tu la terminas! [Life is very short. Life doesn’t end...you end it yourself!] This is the dicho that my mom always tells me. She tells me this when I make bad decisions and when I expose myself to danger…[my cousin] is involved in gang[sic] and everyday he is a danger to himself. Last month my Tia, my cousin’s mother, went to my mom’s work pleading for help. My Tia asked for some money to send Juanito to another state because there were people looking for him to assassinate him. (p. 36)

For this student, survival is much more tangible than the more abstract notion of succeeding in school. However, the linguistic shift into Spanish in the beginning demonstrates a conscious code- switch. Because the writing prompt from the publication is primarily in English but asks students about the culturally-relevant Spanish term dicho, the potential for the presence of code-switching in the students’ writing increases significantly. However, the presence of code-switching plays an important role in the cultural allegiance and engagement demonstrated in Nuestros Refranes (Ferguson 1971). The students’ rhetorical choice of dicho draws parallels between becoming educated and acknowledging the agency of self-determinism. At the

67 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 same time, the use of the cousin as a precautionary tale reminds readers not only of the obstacles that students face outside of school but also of the systemic inequality that perpetuates when education is not a priority of those in power.

For migrant Latin@ students, culturally relevant writing also creates a space for students to write literacy narratives with the subtext of crossing cultures. In “Receiving and Sharing Kindness,” a student recounts the difficulties experienced when moving from Mexico and not being able to speak English. In a demonstration of the ability to write complicit in Nuestros Refranes (2010), the Mexico-born student responds entirely in English:

[W]hen I first moved here from Mexico; I didn’t know any English and I was scared that I would never be able to learn it. School was a scary situation, but I soon found all those kids who, like me, needed a friend to carry on. We all stuck together and hung on to each other as if we were drowning…During my loner years in middle school…I thought that if I talked I would be punished. (p. 81)

When the student writes about sticking together with other recent migrants to “carry on,” the student identifies the strategy of participating in support networks of students with a pro-school ethos described in Valenzuela (1999). The writer identifies “those kids who, like me needed a friend” (p. 81) as the support network who shared the same experience as the author, continuing in school despite perceived peril in an unwelcoming environment. As in the movida strategy, the students rely on the collective action as a survival strategy for negotiating and successfully overcoming the foreign academic institution.

The experience of “Receiving and Sharing Kindness” in Nuestros Refranes (2010) addresses the topic of immigration in the U.S., a highly politicized subject in light of SB 1070, despite the tradition of migration through the Americas pre-existing colonial presence (Baca, 2008). Language serves as an ethnic marker that Arizona law officials can use while participating in state sanctioned racial profiling. The use of language to police Latin@s is a central issue

68 Nuestros Refranes | Cruz Medina raised in Anzaldúa’s (1987) “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” when she explains, “speaking Spanish at recess—that was good for three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler” (p. 75). Even though the student from Mexico is not physically punished as Anzaldúa was for speaking Spanish in school, the fear of punishment persists decades later as a side-effect of the colonial narrative’s ideology. The impact of SB 1070’s ideology on Latin@s cannot be easily dismissed, especially when Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Education John Huppenthal describes of the effects of immigration as a “nuclear blast of illegal aliens” (McGinnis, 2011).

The language used by policymakers reflects specific ideologies that uphold colonial beliefs about racial supremacy while dismissing the history, knowledge, and culture of non-whites. Comparatively, the language used by Latin@ students and their choice of dichos draw attention to more complex histories of language and diversity within a culture. In Nuestros Refranes’s (2010) “You Can’t Whistle and Eat Pinole,” a student responds to the culturally relevant prompt with a dicho that provokes analysis into the historical trajectory of Spanish in the U.S. The student writes, “No puedes chiflar y comer pinole means that you can’t be doing twenty things at a time” (p. 104). This dicho, which incorporates the coarsely ground flour pinole, could be read as embodying the pro-school ethos strategy—it recommends focusing on doing what’s necessary, foregoing extraneous, and even pleasurable, distractions. Beyond the surface message, the code- switching that takes place in this particular dicho does not possess an exact English translation. The inclusion of “pinole” adds a layer of meaning due to the linguistic mestizaje, the mixing of Spanish and Indigenous language, performed in this dicho. Pinole can in fact be traced to an Aztec or Nahuatl root word. According to the book named Pinole, “[t]he Native Americans gave the Spanish a gift of a ground foodstuff made of acorns, seeds, and grain, which Father Crespi recorded as pinolli, an Aztec word for flour meal” (Marrioti et al., 2009, p. 13). The integration of Spanish dichos in writing assignments reveals added complexities about etymology, indigenous language, and histories of colonialism; additionally, these kinds of hermeneutic practices reinforce lessons about language to students through cultural reference points with which they are already familiar.

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The topic of language frequently surfaces in the writing of Latin@ students experiencing difficulties in school. In Nuestros Refranes’s (2010) “Manifest,” a student describes trouble with English while demonstrating a ‘prove them wrong’ rhetorical strategy. The student writes,

I used to struggle speaking English. I felt as if I was a nobody, as if I was the red vase that screamed to be recognized in the all white room…They would make fun of me and tease me, saying that I would never be able to speak English. I knew I had to find a technique or method to catch up to them and that was my goal. So I started by going to tutoring and putting my free time into studying…I did everything in my power to show them I had a great mind and I had the capability of speaking English. (p. 86)

From the outset, the student’s description mirrors what Anzaldúa (1987) calls linguistic terrorism when writing that “if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language” (p. 81). Unfamiliarity with the English language causes the student to feel like a “nobody,” which is indicative of institutional cultures, where those with the greatest need often receive the least attention. In spite of marginalization, the students’ decision to seek out tutoring despite negative experiences performs subversive complicity; by demonstrating a willingness to work within the system, the student acquires “power to show them I had a great mind” (Nuestros Refranes, 2010, p. 86).

By acquiring linguistic abilities, the student proves wrong those who teased or made the student to feel deficient about cognitive abilities. Challenging expectations, the student overcomes linguistic terrorism by seeking out resources and performing the rascuache strategy that makes use of available resources for survival. In an acknowledgement of success, the student explains, “I’m bilingual and I’m not shy about it. In fact, I see it as a benefit to my education and career…Knowledge makes life easier” (Nuestros Refranes, 2010, p. 86). The student contests the colonial narrative in policy, such as Proposition 209 that frames the bilingualism of Latin@s as a deficit, while embodying the pro- school ethos of subversive complicity that works with others in a movida to become educated.

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The resilience of the students in Nuestros Refranes (2010) deserves recognition not only because of the life obstacles that they recount. These students also deserve recognition for their ability to navigate the underfunded and overcrowded academic institutions in a state where legislators and voters actively work to subjugate Latin@s. One student personifies this sentiment when noting that the important thing to do in life is to take risks “and learning to improve. Push yourself for goals to be reached and always remember never to back down from success. If you never take a risk, you will never grasp on to what you are aiming for” (p. 61). The student’s message of encouragement to succeed serves as a reminder of what is at stake in the struggle for Latin@s to become educated. If successful programs continue to be outlawed and dismantled, then students will imagine fewer and fewer possibilities beyond the limited options that ultraconservative policy outlines for them.

In many ways, Nuestros Refranes (2010) would not have been possible were it not for the transa (transaction) strategy. This publication came about as a result of necessary transactions with administrative power. Serving on the grant funding the student publication, I worked within the institutional systems, performing the transa of volunteering my time, effort, and leadership to co-edit the text with the intention of producing a collection that represents the culture of the students. Up until that point, the grant administrators had been prepared to cut the project of the student publication. For the grant and school administrators, the trade in cultural capital for the production of the book outweighed the allotment of funds for printing and dedicated class periods.

As a complicit collaborator with Tucson high schools, the GEAR UP grant subverted existing controversies about culturally relevant class work by trading in cultural capital of the university and the U.S. Department of Education, which funded the GEAR UP grant. Collaborating with grant colleagues possessing similar viewpoints about integrating Latin@ culture in the publication of student essays, I helped craft a prompt with bilingual Latin@ and non-Latin@ colleagues. Together, the work of my colleagues characterized a movida of working against Arizona’s anti-Latin@ sentiment while serving as complicit representatives of the higher education system.

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‘ILLEGAL’ KNOWLEDGE In a state where HB 2281 outlaws the culturally relevant curriculum of the Mexican American program and Prop 209 dismantles bilingual education, the struggle for knowledge by Latin@s cannot be ignored. In an interview with Lunsford (2004), Anzaldúa explains that knowledge is considered dangerous because of the consciousness it creates:

[O]ne of the ideas that I’m working with is conocimiento, the Spanish word for knowledge, for ways of knowing. Those ideas come to me in Spanish and in visuals. So when I think ‘conocimiento,’ I see a little serpent for counter-knowledge. This is how it comes to me that this knowledge, this ‘counter- knowledge,’ is not acceptable, that it’s the knowledge of the serpent of the garden of Eden. It’s not acceptable to eat the fruit of knowledge; it makes you too aware, too self-reflective. (p. 53)

HB 2281 demonstrates all too well Anzaldúa’s claim in Lunsford (2004) about the self-reflection and awareness that takes place in Nuestros Refranes (2010), which could be perceived as dangerous for Latin@s by those who benefit from subjugating people of color. HB 2281 shades this discussion of culturally relevant writing because of how the bill effectively frames the MAS program as “illegal” curriculum and pedagogy. Subsequently, this bill and similar legislation reaffirm the necessity for the rhetorical strategies of subversive complicity that students perform while gathering necessary skills and information for the strengthening of local communities. Unfortunately, the academic success of Latin@s in Arizona has to remain subversive, without overtly challenging narratives of those in power that police the knowledge about non-white languages, cultures, and histories.

The historical moment that overshadows the authorization of Latin@ identity and education in Arizona informs my experiences as an educator and scholar. Decolonial frameworks create liberatory spaces where student texts can be read apart from colonial narratives that serve larger myths undergirding the subjugation of people of color. While scholars like Fish (2008) argue that writing classes should be without “ideas,” researchers and educators who integrate culture actively contest the schooling and institutionalization that

72 Nuestros Refranes | Cruz Medina frame students of color as falling short of colonial imitation. Mejía (2004) reaffirms the liberatory potential of culturally relevant writing assignments: “[b]y introducing readings and topics these students can more readily identify with, compositionists can offer students a set of problematics which unquestionably have the potential of empowering them” (p. 194). Additionally, culturally relevant material supports students in “negotiating the academic demands of school while demonstrating cultural competence… [and] provide a way for students to maintain their cultural integrity while succeeding academically” (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995, p. 476). The conscious implementation of culturally relevant writing practices enables subversive complicity and the rhetorical strategies that demonstrate the agency of Latin@ students as they navigate academic institutions.

CRITICAL HOPE As important predecessors in this continuing struggle, the past efforts of Latin@ educators should not go unacknowledged. The work of Tucson educator María L.Urquides, often referred to as the “mother of bilingual education,” along with Adalberto Guerrero and Henry Oyama established TUSD’s Bilingual Education program, thereby making the very creation of TUSD’s MAS program possible. At the university level, Roseann Dueñas González established multiple programs serving underrepresented student populations while becoming the first female Mexican American full professor at the University of Arizona. Founding the NCTE Rainbow Strand, serving on the NCTE executive committee, and serving as Latina/o Caucus chair, González received the NCTE Distinguished Service Award in recognition of her leadership that provides a model for coming generations.

Since Huppenthal declared TUSD’s MAS program in violation of HB 2281, there has been community action in the form of Tucson Banned Book Club and Tucson Freedom Summer, a series of events and protests at TUSD board meetings during the summer of 2012. In addition to the journalism of Biggers (2012) that covered Tucson and the MAS program, scholars including Soto and Joseph (2010), Ramirez-Dhoore (2011), and Rodriguez (2011) have issued critical responses to the ultraconservative rhetoric of Tom Horne, HB 2281, and SB 1070. In the realm of public policy, there has been cause for

73 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 optimism. Near the end of 2012, the 1978 federal desegregation order was found to have culturally relevant classes at its core7, prompting members of the TUSD school board to change their position on the MAS program. At the same time, former MAS English teacher Curtis Acosta continued to teach students in an after-school program in Tucson, for which Prescott Community College plans to offer college credit.8 In TUSD, the Lee Instructional Resource Center continues to provide instructors with access to 30,000 items available for use by TUSD educators, including books, journals, artifacts, exhibits, sculptures, art prints, costumed figures, textiles, and videos.9

AN ONGOING DECOLONIAL NARRATIVE The claims and supporting data about the outcomes of TUSD’s MAS students, represent an educational oasis for Latin@ students experiencing institutional oppression. In the New Start Program, I have taught many students from Tucson and South Tucson; in my opinion, the MAS graduates in my classes have been extremely well-prepared and critically conscious, though continuing to experience frustration and sadness over the effects of HB 2281. The perspectives of these students echo Pérez’s (1999) reminder that culture has the potential to inspire “the emergence of a Chicano/a historical imagination that constructs a specific consciousness” (p. xviii). The writing from Tucson at the time of HB 2281 represents the resistance of Latin@s to the rhetoric and policy, framing them as not wanting to learn as they continue to work within and navigate the institutions governed by oppressive ideology. Unfortunately, my students from South Tucson schools reported no personal knowledge or publicized increases in graduation or college enrollment rates, despite the fact that the grant on which I served specifically targeted their graduation year. Still, these students express the same resilience and determination to become educated as the students I taught from those schools in prior years. For many students and educators in Tucson, the effects of texts like Nuestros Refranes (2010) can appear ephemeral—like mirages in an unrelenting, ultraconservative

7 “Could MAS Program Return? TUSD Passes Unitary Status Plan.” News 4 Tucson. KVOA.com. 11 Dec. 2012 Web. 18 Dec. 2012. 8 See Jeff Biggers’ “Freedom College: Prescott School Grants Credits to Outlawed Mexican American Studies Course in Tucson.” 9 See TUSD’s Educational Materials Center website at http://www.tusd1.org/ contents/depart/emc/aboutus.asp.

74 Nuestros Refranes | Cruz Medina landscape—especially when Latin@s are marginalized for the sake of fictional narratives of the colonial frontier. Yet, the history of Latin@s and education in Arizona and the U.S. is one of struggle. And it is a narrative that continues without an end, continually rewritten through the work of activists and scholars and the teachings of educators who resist rhetoric of deficiency in the lives of students, families, and the communities they serve.

Thanks to MaryCarmen Cruz for transmitting community wisdom of Tucson and to the generous feedback of the reviewers.

Cruz Medina is an Inclusive Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow at Santa Clara University, having earned his PhD from the University of Arizona. Cruz’s research interests include multicultural rhetoric and digital writing. His writing has appeared in College Composition, and Communication, and Communicating Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in Technical Communication.

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Gardner-Chloros, P. (1997). Code-switching: Language selection in three Strasbourg department stores. In N. Coupland, & A. Jaworski, (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: A Reader. (pp. 361-375). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Hairston, M. (1992). Diversity, ideology, and teaching writing. College Composition and Communication 43.2, 179-193. Hill, J. H. (1993). Hasta la Vista, Baby: Anglo Spanish in the American Southwest. Critique of Anthropology 13 (2), 145-76. Horne, T. (2010). Arizona House Bill 2281. AZLeg.gov. Retrieved from http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/hb2281s. pdf. Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record 97.1, 47-68. Leki, I. (1991). Twenty-five years of contrastive rhetoric: text analysis and writing pedagogies. Tesol Quarterly 25.1, 123-43. Licona, A. C. (2005). (B)orderlands’ rhetorics and representations: The transformative potential of feminist third-space scholarship and zines. NWSA Journal, 17, 2, 104-129. Lunsford, A. (2004). Toward a mestiza rhetoric: Gloria Anzaldúa on composition and postcoloniality. In Lunsford, A., & Ouzgane, L (Eds.), Crossing Borderlands: Composition and Postcolonial Studies (pp.33-66). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Martinez, A. (2009). ‘The American way’: resisting the empire of force and color-blind racism. College English 71.6, 584-595. Mariotti, J.,Vincent, G., & Rubin, J. (2009). Pinole. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Pub. McGinnis, E. (Producer), & Palos, A. L. (Director). (2011). Precious knowledge [Motion picture]. United States: Corporation for Public Broadcasting. McIntosh, P. (2003). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. In Plous, S. (Ed.), Understanding Prejudice and Discrimination (pp.191-196). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Medina, C. (2013). Poch[@]teca: Rhetorical strategies of a Chican@ academic identity. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. Mejía, J. A. (2004). Arts of the U.S.-Mexico contact zone. In Lunsford, A., & Lahoucine, O. (Eds.), Crossing Borderlands: Composition and Postcolonial Studies (pp.171-198). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

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—-.(2004). Bridging rhetoric and composition studies with Chicano and Chicana studies : A turn to critical pedagogy. In Kells, M., Balester, V., & Villanueva, V. (Eds.), Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity & Literacy Education (pp.40-56). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers/Heinemann. Mexican American student services historical background. (2012). Tucson Unified School District. Retrieved from http:// www.tusd1.org/contents/depart/mexicanam/documents/ background.pdf. Morales, D.A. (2012, July 18). History of Bilingual Education in Arizona.” Video file. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=xFr13dPFmj4 Nericcio, W. A. (2007). Tex[t]-mex: seductive hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America. Austin: University of Texas Press. Nuestros refranes: Words to live by from the class of 2012. (2010). Medina, C., Silvester, K., & Wendler, R. (Eds.). Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona and Sunnyside High School and Tucson Unified School District. Perez, E. (1999). The decolonial imaginary: Writing Chicanas into history. Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press. Pimentel, O., & Velazquez, P. (2009). “Shrek 2”: An appraisal of mainstream animation’s influence on identity. Journal of Latinos and Education 8.1, 5-21 Project Graduation: The Digital Advantage Case Study. (2011). Sunnyside School District. Retrieved from http://www.susd12. org/content/digital-advantage Ramirez-Dhoore, D. (2011). The rhetoric of aztlán: HB 2281, MEChA and liberatory education. Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing and Service Learning, Retrieved from http://reflectionsjournal.net/featured/ Rodriguez, R. (2011). Tucson’s Maiz-Based Curriculum: MAS- TUSD Profundo. Nakum 1.2: 4-38 Rolstad, K., Mahoney, K., & Glass, G. (2005). Weighing the evidence: a meta-analysis of bilingual education in arizona.” Bilingual Research Journal. 29.1, 43-67. School enrollment by gender and ethnicity on any day. TUSD Stats. Retrieved from https://tusdstats.tusd1.org/Planning/Profiles/ curr_enr/anydate/anyenr_front.asp Soto, S. K., & Joseph, M. (2010). Neoliberalism and the Battle over Ethnic Studies in Arizona. Thought & Action, 45-56.

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Spener, D. (2010). Movidas rascuaches: Strategies of migrant resistance at the Mexico-U.S. border. Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 35.2, 9-36. Torres, L. (2007). In the contact zone: code-switching strategies by latino/a writers. Melus: Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. 32.1, 75-96. Urrieta, L. (2009). Working from within: Chicana and chicano activist educators in whitestream Schools. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S.-mexican youth and the politics of caring. Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press. Villanueva, V. (1993). Bootstraps: From an American academic of color. Urbana, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English. Wright, W. E. (2005). The Political Spectacle of Arizona’s Proposition 203. Educational Policy, 19, 5, 662-700. Ybarra-Frausto, T. (1991). Rasquachismo: A Chicano sensibility. In Castillo, R., McKenna, T., &Yarbro-Bejarano, Y. (Eds.), Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985 (pp.155-179). Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles. Yosso, T. (2002). Critical race media literacy: Challenging deficit discourse about Chicanas/os. Journal of Popular Film & Television. 30:1, 52-62.

79 The Eagle Meets the Seagull: The Critical, Kairotic & Public Rhetoric of Raza Studies Now in Los Angeles

Elias Serna, University of California, “(Chican@ Studies) will help in creating and Riverside giving impetus to that historical consciousness which Chicanos must possess in order successfully to struggle as a people toward a new vision of Aztlan.” —El Plan de Santa Barbara (1969)

“When your education is under attack, what do you do?! Fight Back!!...” —UNIDOS chant at April 26, 2011 Tucson School Board Take-Over

n July 14, 2013, a group of education activists in Southern California held Othe 2nd annual Raza Studies Now Conference at Santa Monica College and presented a draft of the Plan de Los Angeles (PLA), a manifesto for spreading Ethnic Studies in local high schools.1

1 Razastudiesnow.com

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RSN logo/arte by Raul Gonzalez/Mictlan Murals.

The Raza Studies Now (RSN) group represents a cross section of Raza education activists in Southern California: some are veteran college professors, adjunct faculty, K-12 teachers, teachers from Semillas del Pueblo charter school in East LA, local community college MEChA students, PhD students, parents and community members. Most joined RSN or attended the conference in response to the struggle to defend the high school-level Mexican American Studies Department (MAS) in Arizona and united to spread the message that Chican@ and Ethnic Studies could create unique experiences with positive results for high school and community college students in Southern California.

This essay looks at rhetorical strategies evident in the civic writing of the RSN group and its connections to the ongoing struggle in Arizona to defend the Mexican American Studies Department (MAS). By drawing parallels and distinctions between California and Arizona, I argue that distinct rhetorical strategies are emerging, which are connected to a Chican@ activist rhetorical tradition, and that these circulate in the realm of nomos (habits, customs). As Susan Jarratt explains, nomos unhinges the privileged rule of logos and “determines behavior and activity through convention.” These uses, strategies, and expressions reflect a Chican@ activist rhetorical tradition in the way they “foreground the perception of shared interests necessary for rhetoric to work” (Jarratt 41).

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For this reason, my essay also makes connections to Cruz Medina’s essay in this collection, “Nuestros Refranes: Culturally Relevant Writing in Tucson High Schools,” which revisits Arizona’s House Bill 2281 and theorizes on the rhetorical strategies active in culturally relevant education, particularly the use of dichos in Nuestros Refranes, a Tucson student publication. Medina makes important observations about the simultaneity of effects of right wing, anti-Latino discourse - SB 1070 and HB 2281 – that “polices brown bodies and minds.” His use of Emma Perez’ concept of the decolonial imaginary to frame culturally relevant education and student writing is innovative, especially his clear explanation of how colonial narratives restrain Raza students within a deficit model. By challenging dominant deficit narratives about Latin@s and writing, “Nuestros Refranes creates a discursive space where Latin@ students reflect their cultural identity while writing in a context apart from discourses and apparatus that frame them as educationally deficient” (Medina).This rhetorical strategy of working within, yet against oppressive systems, is what Medina calls a “subversive complicity” (Medina). Toward the end of my essay, I compare and distinguish between subversive complicity and what I have termed pleito rhetoric, a sort of Chicano parrhesia (fearless, dangerous speech). These rhetorical strategies will continue to be relevant as Chican@ Studies and culturally relevant curriculum and pedagogy increasingly become national issues.

These reflections on the 2012 and 2013 Raza Studies Now Conferences highlight the civic writing and rhetorical tools we sought to exploit in spreading the word and moving the masses. The conferences highlighted key concepts currently circulating in Chican@/Latin@ and Ethnic rhetorics. Like Jaime Mejia’s work that bridges Chicano Studies and Rhetoric/Composition, the RSN conferences – from press releases, digital media, programs, and speeches – also circulated in spaces where rhetoric, education, literacy and the public converge. Like Damian Baca’s concept of mestiz@ rhetoric, we invented from different ways of knowing towards a decolonization of education. Organizers in particular consistently dealt with issues of kairos (the opportune moment, the suitable), logos, and nomos, especially, as we moved to maximize mass collective participation in our mission.

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The conferences were also a collective meditation on public schooling and the purpose of education, culminating in the writing of the Plan de Los Angeles (PLA), a sort of manifesto-guidebook for establishing Raza/Ethnic Studies curriculum at high schools and community colleges. Like the authors in Nuestros Refranes, the RSN group harnessed the power of customs, collective representation, and self- determination. RSN public rhetoric also sought an equilibrium in the dialectical relationship between self-determination and the public (democracy). Through various means - the writing of press releases, facebook posts (and re-posts!), letters to the editor, designing the program, and of course, drafting the Plan de Los Angeles (PLA) – RSN members participated in a civic writing and social gathering that enabled necessary meditation on what writing and education means for Latin@s in the U.S..

BEGINNINGS: STRANGE RUMBLINGS IN ARIZONA As a result of solidarity work with Tucson’s struggle to bring back its Mexican American Studies department after a hostile Republican anti-Latino political campaign2, the Raza Studies Now group (RSN) was formed a year ago to help spread – instead of simply “defend” - Ethnic Studies in high schools (and recently added, community colleges) throughout Southern California. A first conference in 2012 gathered over 100 participants, featured Tucson students and MAS teachers, banned books authors such as historian Rudolfo Acuna, and symbolically if unofficially, continued a tradition of Tucson’s MAS – namely, the Raza Studies Institute for Transformative Education conference (discontinued since the program was dismantled in January 2012). In coalition with Tucson activists, the Bay Area network for Ethnic Studies and others nationwide, the RSN group, centered activities on spreading Ethnic Studies through the conference and the drafting of El Plan de Los Angeles (PLA). This document is currently going through final drafts. Modeled after the historic 1969 El Plan de Santa Barbara and considered a blueprint manifesto for

2 Many educators and activists nationwide and especially in Southern California have rallied around the Tucson Mexican American Studies Program, officially dismantled in January 2012. The statewide AMAE and Association of Raza Educators (ARE) dedicated journals and conferences to the struggle, as have other groups. For an example of Tucson-influenced pedagogical activism see Urban Review (2013) vol. 45, issue 1, dedicated to Ethnic Studies and Banned Books in Arizona, especially Silvia Toscano Rivera’s article “Teaching as a Healing Craft.” See also official website saveethnicstudies.com. 83 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 establishing Chican@ Studies at universities across the country, the Plan de Los Angeles also aims to spark a movement and become a “toolkit,” or a field manual for illustrating how to implement Ethnic Studies curriculums in high schools. The 2012 program quoted from the 1969 document:

“The role of knowledge in producing powerful social change, indeed revolution, cannot be underestimated… it is equally important to recognize that research will not only provide Chicanos with action-oriented analysis of conditions,… it will help in creating and giving impetus to that historical consciousness which Chicanos must possess in order successfully to struggle as a people toward a new vision… (of liberation).” (my italics) (Plan 78)

I believe the term “research” in the above quote can be replaced with “rhetoric.” Ultimately the RSN conference was about developing this consciousness and restoring a critical vision about education and the role of Raza and people of color in their schools. A critical rhetorical vision, as rhetoric scholar Douglas Thomas explains, looks back critically at history, looks at the present for dangers as well as resources, and looks reflectively/flexibly to the future with an eye for ideal visions, dangers and possibilities. I believe this spirit of critical vision was strong throughout the day and continues to guide this movement, as it joins with efforts throughout Southern California and nationally to expand the teaching, content, and pedagogy of oppressed peoples of color in the U.S.,institutionalizing Raza and Ethnic Studies in public K-12 schools.

LOGOS & KAIROS IN EDUCATION ACTIVISM The RSN worked on multiple fronts, and in Aristolelian tradition, was always looking to identify and exploit the available means of persuasion. The press release for the 2013 conference alluded to the logical arguments in a Santa Monica Intercultural district Advisory Committee (IDAC) report, which local RSN members helped write. This logos was reproduced, word for word - as is common with well

84 The Eagle Meets the Seagull | Elias Serna written press releases - in several local newspapers.3 A paragraph quoted the report at length:

The IDAC proposal explains in one section: “Traditionally, students of color are viewed from a deficit perspective in public schools. This historically took the form of Indian boarding schools, segregated schools, Americanization programs, corporal punishment, language discrimination, and exclusion of People of color histories and contributions. Under these conditions, Ethnic Studies evolved from 1960’s student movements demanding a more inclusive, culturally relevant education … tenets include: (a) Self determination (b) Intersectionality as lens to examine the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, language, and immigration status (c) the central role of the student (d) utilization of assets-based approaches to pedagogy, curriculum, and instruction—Community Cultural Wealth. In other words, Ethnic Studies in public schools is grounded in critical consciousness, critical thinking, is authentic, and is responsive to local communities.

The IDAC report borrowed insights from the previous conference, and panelist Cati de los Rios’ insistence that Raza Studies classes be localized in order to connect to and empower local communities. These organizational “short cuts” brought regional struggles into the RSN orbit and reflected a political urgency. The credibility of the education report above alongside a photograph of the first conference, converged with a situational momentum to have a kairotic effect on the press and public discourse.

The first conference in the summer of 2012 was organized in two months and proved to be an effective educational and organizational event. Over a hundred participants interacted with three panels and engaged in multiple workshops that corresponded with chapters of the PLA. The most ambitious parts of the conference were the breakout sessions. Aimed to directly involve participants in the articulation of a collective document, not unlike the Plan de Santa Barbara (in goal 3 See Santa Monica Mirror, digital edition. http://www.smmirror.com/ articles/News/Raza-Studies-Now-Conference-At-Santa-Monica-College- This-Saturday/37985 . Many articles and documents are also available on the official RSN website razastudiesnow.com.

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Raza Studies Now 2012, held at Santa Monica College. Photo by Paulo Freire Lopez.

and impact), we sought to consolidate a common language (nomos) in order to provide unity and impact, to spur a social movement to expand Ethnic and Raza Studies in K-12. The seven break out groups – Curriculum, Pedagogy, Ancestral Knowledge today, Role of the Student, LGBTQ and Allies, Xicana Studies, and Introducing Raza Studies to Schools and School boards – identified special topics to which the conference participants contributed directly (Dreamers and Raza Studies at Community Colleges were added later). This integral process made the conference meaningful and the PLA a profoundly organic, community-involved and broad-based Raza document. As in Santa Barbara over 40 years ago, discussions were moderated, recorded, and incorporated into early drafts of the PLA. RSN meetings continued throughout the year — drafting, discussing, expanding and building a solid plan.

Being anxious, idealistic, and having high expectations, we ran into roadblocks as months went by, and a final product languished. Soon, the next summer was upon us, and we decided a conference was needed to continue the movement and present a draft. This time we started planning four months in advance!

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The Eagle meets the Seagull: LA and Tucson educators gather at Freedom Summer 2012. Attending from LA: Aztlan Underground, People’s Education Movement, AMAE SM- West LA, Raza Studies Now, UCLA, UC Riverside, PYFC (Santa Monica) among others. Photo by Gregorio Duron.

I have long felt that the Tucson struggle to “Save Ethnic Studies” and bring back the recently dismantled, highly successful Mexican American Studies department, is not only a local struggle. While the malicious attack on the program by Arizona republicans caused a crisis of national scope (still due to surface in the 9th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals in the near future), the Tucson struggle is significantly an ideological battle over the future of Chicano Studies as a discipline.4 Dr. Cintli of the University of Arizona goes as far as calling it a “civilizational war.” And as in 1969, 1993 and 1999, the role of the students, community and kairos are once again determining factors that will shape the politics, pedagogy, stability, epistemology and style of Chican@ and Raza Studies in the future.

4 Critical race theory scholar Richard Delgado places the struggle in a civil rights history context. Delgado, Richard. “Precious Knowledge: State Bans on Ethnic Studies, Book Traffickers (Librotraficantes) and A New Type of Race Trial.” North Carolina Law Review, Vol. 91, June, 2013. Pp 1513-1551.

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LOGOS VERSUS NOMOS: PLEITO, THE DISCOURSE OF MEASUREMENT, & THE PLAN DE LOS ANGELES Several differences in the political environment, hegemony, and rhetorical strategy exist between the rhetorical strategies in Nuestros Refranes and the Plan de Los Angeles. While the subversive complicity which Medina theorizes worked for students in the toxic environment of Tucson schools, RSN activists in Southern California opted for a more dangerous speech (parrhesia), a pleito rhetoric at times, which is unapologetic in its address to educational institutions. This speech was more in line with examples of community action that Medina mentions towards the end of his essay: Tucson Freedom Summer, the April 26, 2011 school board take-over by UNIDOS, the Chican@ Literature class at Prescott Community College. Part of the logic of pleito rhetoric is the unwillingness to compromise the collective’s dignity, the refusal to comply with repression, or to teach this compliance to the next generation (the students). In the face of injustice, pleito rhetoric recognizes that if logic (logos) fails to persuade, there is always a Chican@ tradition of resistance (nomos) one can put into play.

Numerous studies including an empirical study by Nolan Cabrera et al and the state-authorized Cambium Report, showed that students taking MAS classes not only closed the achievement gap but surpassed it; MAS students attained higher test scores, g.p.a.’s, and higher college-going rates than all students (including White students). Still, the state shut down the MAS department. This teaches us that logos (logical arguments) is not enough. Ida B. Wells, fighting against lynching of Blacks in the late 19th century, for instance, reminded readers constantly that there often existed something more powerful than law, and that was public sentiment.

Although institutions live and die (usually) by effective statistics— what Ralph Cintron calls a “discourse of measurement”—RSN organizers were well aware that in spite of logical proof, programs like MAS, Semillas del Pueblo (East LA), and community centers like the local Pico Youth and Family Center, were being simultaneously attacked for political reasons, in spite of their success. Our answer to this was community involvement, an un-apologetic rhetoric, and heightening an awareness of historical struggle, which we felt could

88 The Eagle Meets the Seagull | Elias Serna be harnessed for political power. This Chican@ nomos is reflected in passages from the PLA:

We Raza Studies Now, as indigenous peoples, strive to advance and strengthen Raza Studies nationwide. We declare the integrity of our ancestral knowledge systems as a dignified academic journey… The chief influences shaping Raza Studies today are concepts applied from ancestral knowledge, community cultural wealth/capital, Freirean critical approaches, creativity, connection to land, community, self, and diversity… The foundational affective construct that Raza Studies pedagogy is built on achieves humanization through authentic caring. Es una educacion de corazones primero y despues de mentes.5

While a discourse of measurement belittles other knowledge systems6, the rhetoric of the Plan de Los Angeles answers with a nomos that harnesses the revolutionary concept of self-determination, as well as Raza collective memories and legacies of struggle including the Tucson struggle. This pleito rhetoric is perhaps best captured in the anthemic chant inside the April 26, 2011 Tucson school board meeting that was heard across the nation: “When your education is under attack, what do you do?? Fight back!!...”

DICHOS, KAIROS & RHETORICAL VISION In the late afternoon after the 2013 conference ended, a group of participants walked to their cars and to the bus stop. My friend Quimichipilli, “little Mouse” announced that the verdict had just come in finding George Zimmerman not guilty in the murder of Trayvon Martin. Shock and maybe some fatigue set in that night. Protests began the next day, as did social disturbances. The phrases “No Justice! No Peace!” made popular during the 1992 Los Angeles

5 The first draft of the Plan de Los Angeles was handed out at the July 13, 2013 conference. This draft is available on the official RSN website razastudiesnow. com. The final draft is expected by the Fall of 2013. 6 Cintron, Ralph. Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of the Everyday. Pp. 213. Upon reading this amazing text for doctoral exams I connected it, via civic writing, to the struggle to defend the PYFC, a local community youth center, which was put on the City’s chopping block but saved by community protest. See my letter to the editor: http://smdp.com/ letter-not-a-fair-measurement/122595 .

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Uprising, began circulating on facebook in mass media and on the streets. The world began talking again, if tentatively, about race and social justice.

Alongside protest marches were the chants, replete with pleito rhetoric. Here is an appropriate moment to connect back to Cruz Medina’s attention to dichos (sayings, proverbs) in his earlier essay. His inventory of Chican@ rhetorical strategies – which include dichos, code-switching, movidas (clandestine moves), rascuache aesthetics (a Chican@ do-it-yourself), and subversive complicity – is for me, an acknowledgement of nomos and commonplaces operating within a Chican@ rhetorical tradition. His reference of Mary Carmen Cruz and Ogle Burks Duff ’s article “New Worlds, Old Wisdom” explains why the use of dichos in classrooms works to enrich thinking and writing skills:

“… it creates the transition from home culture to school culture. Dichos are the moral teachings of a community. They express the values of a culture and say much about the character of a people. When our students make connections between those values and the work of school, their learning is meaningful.” (my italics) (Cruz, Duff 117)

Insights like these cannot be lost, because in times when communities face crisis’, they must go to rhetorical strongholds, commonplaces found in dichos and protest chants, expressions capable of bringing people together, reminding them of who they are, the struggles they’ve gone through, and the direction they must continue to follow. In moments when logic is manipulated, fabricated or ignored, Raza activists can draw from the well of customs and traditions in order to harness a rhetorical vision that looks back critically and looks forward with hope towards possibility. This is a vision of culturally relevant Raza and Ethnic Studies curriculum in all high schools and a vision of the return of the Mexican American Studies Department in Tucson.

The future work of Raza Studies Now involves harnessing the kairos around social movements calling for related social justice, while not losing sight of specific goals. And maybe the goals may broaden. The

90 The Eagle Meets the Seagull | Elias Serna movement for justice for Trayvon Martin is the same as the recent ones for Oscar Grant, for the several Chicano and Anglo males killed by police in Anaheim (and Oxnard, Hawthorne and other parts of LA and the nation); and this should be connected to Raza and Ethnic Studies. Soon after this, nine undocumented Latino students crossed the border from Mexico into the US and were promptly arrested and locked in immigrant detention facilities in Arizona, kicking off the Dreamer 9 protest. Raza Studies now begins to envision a field of knowledge beyond borders, still becoming, still rooted and relevant, vital in fact to democracy. The undocumented students are a critical mass that Raza Studies needs to center on as it seeks to articulate a vision of what social justice looks like — a world where many worlds fit. It will envision this world, in part at least, rhetorically.

Self-Determination: Justice for Trayvon Rally on 10 Freeway July 20 2013.

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Elias Serna is an English doctoral candidate, A.B.D., at the University of California, Riverside. His work focuses on a Chican@ rhetorical tradition. He also holds an MFA in film-making from UCLA and is a co-founder of Chicano Secret Service, a teatro comedy group. He is active in Raza Studies Now and the Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE). Serna teaches at Cal State University Dominguez Hills, and recently won 1st Prize awards in the 2013 Adam R. Petko Book Collection Competition (UCR), and the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest for a collection titled “The Chicano Movement: Pocho Poems, Posters, Films and Banned Books.”

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WORKS CITED

Baca, Damian. Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print. Cabrera, Nolan, Jeffery F. Milem, and Ronald W. Marx. “An Empirical Analysis of the Effects of Mexican American Studies Participation on Student Achievement within Tucson Unified School District.” UA College of Education, Web. 20 June 2012. Cintron, Ralph. Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of the Everyday. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. Print. Cruz, Mary Carmen and Ogle Burks Duff. “New Worlds, Old Wisdom.” The English Journal. Vol. 85, No. 7, November 1996. 85.1 (1996): Page numbers. Print. Delgado, Richard. “Precious Knowledge: State Bans on Ethnic Studies, Book Traffickers (Librotraficantes) and A New Type of Race Trial.” North Carolina Law Review. Vol. 91, June 2013. 91 (2013): Page numbers. Print. Jarratt, Susan C..Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. Print. Median, Cruz. “Nuestros Refranes: Culturally Relevant Writing in Tucson High Schools.” Reflections. Fall 2013. Mejia, Jaime A.. “Bridging Rhetoric and Composition Studies with Chicano and Chicana Studies: A Turn to Critical Pedagogy.” Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity, and Literacy Education. Kells, Balester, and Victor Villanueva, Eds. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2004. Print. Plan de Los Angeles. Razastudiesnow.com 2013. Web. Day Month Year. El Plan de Santa Barbara. Oakland: La Causa Publications, 1969. Print. Perez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas Into History. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999. Print. Serna, Elias. “Tempest Arizona: Criminal Epistemologies and the Rhetorical Possibilities of Raza Studies.” The Urban Review. Vol. 45, Issue 1, March 2013. 45.1 (2013): Page numbers. Print. Thomas, Douglas. Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically. New York: The Guilford Press, 1999. Print.

93 Poetry

FIELDNOTE Steven Alvarez

Today tutored two fourth graders in tandem, Lili and Maria, our trio reading poems. We shared one book all wondered at an illustration of two curious children peering over the edge where the sidewalk ends perhaps peering into a cavernous gap: And Maria— “Ay dios mio, their perro is going to fall.” Today: poetry. Everyday: poetry. Bueno, vamos a leer. Together let’s go: conjuntos: rhythms bouncing Germanically to some spot where all roads end basta ya no más no street begins

94 Poetry | Alvarez, Garcia, Baca but some nouns growing naranjas and prepositions brillando as crimson crystal y purple pajaros resting on conjunctions y los verbos scattering in wind smelling like peppermint. And Lili— “I think the poem in the fields or the finca.” And Maria— “I think wind and begins kinda rhymes.” “Yeah.” “¡Sí!” Trio of laughter. Conjuntos pues. You like to speak Spanish? And Maria— “With mi mamá and papá, yeah. But not with my teacher.” Your teacher habla español? And she— “Tries to speak to me, but I don’t like to talk to her in Spanish because estamos en la escuela.” When do you speak Spanish? And Lili—“Solamente en la casa or con mis amigos. Pero a veces here too when I talk to Maria’s mom.” And Maria—“Me too, when I talk at home, but I talk to my brother in English and Spanish, but more English.” And Lili—“And sometimes to chamacitos.” But why do you like to speak Spanish with me? And Maria—“Because you are nice, and you speak both.” I think I speak more English than Spanish, como ahorita, verdad? And both—“¡Sí!” And Lili—“See you are doing it, eso me gusta.” Ándale that’s one for the code. Our last stanza and conjuntos we stepped slowly through the measure following arrows over rapid lines back from that grammatical park ojalá que to someday return bringing back regalos from another syntax and dutifully sharing lexicons. What about those arrows and measured walks? And Lili—“Because it’s the camino to the place to see the picture on the front.” Returning to the cover.

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And Maria— “Claro que yes.” And Lili—“To the end of the calles too.” And Maria—“Pobre perro.” Maria and Lili formulated their own poem responses, and they read their poems as they turned their backs to the gap at the end of the calles. And Lili: the parque is like the forest y los arboles son bien verdes and we go there on Sundays sometimes and have barbacoa and we visit Applause from her audience. And Maria: hablo español and English con mi familia y mis padres están orgullosos de mí porque tengo buenas notas y tengo muchas metas y me dicen con ganas mijita porque tu futuro es nuestro futuros. Applause. After this I asked both to write a paragraph comparing the poems. Maria sped through her writing pointing to español in both poems and familia at the beginning of the journey to where the calles end. Lili sighed and stared at her page and Maria would pause and cheer her friend and they both finished their paragraphs together and read them conjuntos. Lili’s mother said hola and Maria and I said hasta luego to Lili and then her mother I asked Maria why she helped Lili. “Because she gets mad that she can’t write and read like me. But I like to help her because she’s my friend.” But you don’t give her the answers. “No because the teacher told me when I help people you don’t give them answers.”

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You like to help people. “Mostly the little ones I read to them because it’s fun.” I think I know what you want to be when you grow up, but what do you want to be? And Maria—“A teacher.”

Steven Alvarez is an Assistant Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. He studies the languages and literacies of Latino families in New York City and Kentucky.

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SHE USED TO SAY By Romeo Garcia

She used to say… Never forget the acento It is part of your identity Y como todos los Mexicanos You need to keep your dignity

Say your first name proud And your last name prouder Throw a grito out loud And represent who you are louder

Take pride in where you are from The Rio Grande Valley is a curious space The border separates some Pero esta tierra has no singular name

Your reality is different from others En la frontera the minority is the majority But on the outside you are perceived as THE “other” They will set you aside with their authority…. They will silence you because you are a minority… They will cut you down with all their might… But you must not let down—you must always fight.

Never forget the acento Say your full name proud With some Mexican might Never forget where you’re from… Always continue to fight!

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Romeo Garcia is a doctoral student (fellow) in the Composition and Cultural Rhetoric program at Syracuse University. His areas of interest are borderland studies (rhetoric, identity, homeland), cultural literacy, and composition theory and practice (literacy narratives). He was born and raised in Harlingen, Texas. He earned his B.A. at Texas A&M University and M.A. at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

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UNA MUJER PARTIDA By Isabel Baca

En un mundo dividido Por un río Lleno de lagrimas Y risas

Una mujer partida En dos Por su familia Y su libertad

Su religión la jala Su patria la llama Dios la ilumina Y su corazón le susurra:

Eres Mexicana Eres Americana Pero más que nada Eres una persona Con dos nombres Dos identidades Y dos llamados a la vida

No te sientas triste No llores Abre tu ojos A las oportunidades

Trabaja duro Llena de orgullo Ama a tus padres Defiende a tus hijos Educate Liberate Y gritale a la vida

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No tengo miedo A luchar con ganas Vivo la vida A cada momento

En nombre de mis padres Con amor a mis hijos Soy Mexicana y con mi acento Enfrento al mundo del otro lado del río

Isabel Baca is an Associate Professor of English in Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her scholarship and publications center on service-learning and community-based writing. In 2012, she published Service-learning and Writing: Paving the Way for Literacy(ies) through Community Engagement, BRILL. A native El Pasoan, Baca was raised bilingually and biculturally on the El Paso, TX- Juarez, Mexico border. Besides being a professor and scholar, Baca enjoys and has published poetry and short stories.

101 “A Clear Path”: Teaching Police Discourse in Barrio After-School Center

Lance Langdon, University of California, This study follows Mike, a police officer in training, as he Irvine runs a Criminal Justice Club at an after-school center in a working-class Mexican@ neighborhood. Employing James Paul Gee’s theories of discourse and identity, the study shows how this club enables the teens to shed the identity of at-risk youths and inhabit the identity of future-cops, a transformation that secures their future within the linked institutions of law enforcement and the public schools. However, because the police and schools help to subordinate community residents, the teens’ new identity sets them against their neighbors. The study describes how Mike and his fellow teacher instruct the teens in how to negotiate this irresolvable structural contradiction through double-consciousness. Drawing on interviews and observations, the author presents the perspectives of Mike and the teens he teaches regarding race, empowerment and justice in literacy education.

[I]t started when I met Mr. Mike.1 He always talked about, “Why do you want to be a cop?” “Because I just want rights,” that’s what I said. I

1 All names are pseudonyms with most chosen by the participants.

102 “A Clear Path” | Lance Langdon just want rights for everyone, you know? . . . Everyone who does bad, they need to pay for what they do. —JT, Two Cities Resident

Like any police force, they exist to protect the property of the rich and to keep down the oppressed. —Elizabeth Martinez, 500 Años del Pueblo Chicano

his is a study of police discourse as it was taught by Mike and taken up by secondary students attending an after- Tschool center in Orange County, California. Mike—who described himself as Chicano—had started a Criminal Justice Club during his tenure as middle school supervisor at this center. By the time of this study, he had begun his training as a police cadet and was returning to the center in a volunteer capacity to oversee the club, which met weekly. I have named the after-school center Barrio and the town Two Cities to recognize the rift splitting the city into two communities: one working-class, predominantly Mexican@ and the other middle-class, predominantly Caucasian (though also Mexican American).2 Mike, who lived and was educated in both, described these places as “two different worlds.”

These worlds come together, though not democratically. Middle- class children who grow up in Orange County quickly learn to rely on Mexican@s to provide the services that support their lifestyle: landscaping, crop harvesting, house painting, home repair, food

2 I follow Octavio Pimentel in using “Mexicano” to emphasize participants’ ties to the country in which they or their parents were born, but amend the term to Mexican@ to foreground women’s presence. “Mexican American” I reserve for third generation U.S. residents. “Chicano” was a term Mike used to convey his liminal identity, saying “We call ourselves Chicanos because we’re not really like the Mexicans over there, but we’re not really American.” I have chosen not to use “Chicano” to describe others in this article, however, both because (as Pimentel notes) working-class Mexicanos infrequently employ the term and because it carries associations with the 1960s Chicano Movement that do not necessarily apply to this center.

103 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 service, childcare, and countless others.3 It is this division of labor, in which Mexican@s are relegated to putatively “unskilled” jobs and members of dominant groups are encouraged to pursue mental work, that leads me to understand the young people at Barrio center not as marginalized but as oppressed. As Victor Villanueva puts it, “Talk of margins and borders” allows the American middle class to deny “its dependence on the underclass to maintain its level of comfort” (57). At the same time, the word “oppressed” calls up Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which lays out an education based in consientizãçao (the building of critical awareness and consciousness). Such education involves the underclass in developing a written discourse that values “unskilled” work—work that, of course, includes the delicate emotional labor of deference among its many prerequisites. Even more crucially, consientizãçao addresses the injustices that debase the standard of living of the working- class, naming those in power and their history of abuses, as well as developing action plans for achieving a true democracy, one in which all members of society have the power to speak to and act upon their collective interests.

This article measures the police discourse Mike taught at Barrio After-School Center against such ambitions. It is anchored in two year’s worth of field observations at Barrio Center, where I served as a volunteer and poetry workshop coordinator and in interviews conducted with several students and staff members, including two formal interviews I undertook with Mike. In what follows, I argue that the police discourse Mike taught is neither a symptom of Mexican@ oppression nor a solution to it but some combination of both, and that the language of police work and the identities it facilitates are sites of productive contradiction. Employing James Paul Gee’s theories of discourse and identity, I demonstrate how Mike’s club enabled the teens to shed the identity of at-risk youths and inhabit the identity of future-cops, a transformation that secured their future within the linked institutions of law enforcement and 3 For a fascinating description of Orange County from the point of view of these service providers, see Frank Cancian’s Orange County Housecleaners. For a recent take on the historical development of Angl@-Mexican@ relations see Gustavo Arellano’s provocative Orange County, which also addresses the conservative political movements that have lodged the OC in the nation’s consciousness as a bastion of conservatism, despite its shifting demographics and politics.

104 “A Clear Path” | Lance Langdon the public schools. Yet I hesitate to describe this transformation as simply “success” because it occurred in institutions that continue to oppress the youths’ working-class Mexican@ community. Indeed, the question of what constitutes success is taken up productively by Octavio Pimentel, who juxtaposes WEA (White European American) and Mexicano standards of success in order to displace the former and value the latter (“Disrupting Discourse”). I argue that Mike reconciled both sets of norms. Because he gave back to this neighborhood as a volunteer, he fulfilled a quality that Pimentel’s informants characterized as successful: being “buena gente” (a good person; a contributor to family and community). Simultaneously, Mike sought middle-class status and wealth in a career as a police officer, which seemed to be what he had in mind when he said that education could help teens at the center to “be successful” and seek “something more” than what they could find in their neighborhood.

For Mike, this success had its costs. Taking on the institutional identity of a police officer (e.g. becoming a cop) necessitated a split from friends and family with whom he shared an affinity-identity, and it threatened to do the same for the young people whom he instructed. Mike and his fellow teacher were aware of this and modeled how to think through this contradiction, guiding the young people as they took on vexed positions as officers-in-training in a society divided by language, race, and class.

POETRY VS. POLICING When I first witnessed Mike leading the Criminal Justice Club at Barrio After-School Center, I was both intrigued and troubled. Mike’s club attempted many of the same learning objectives as the poetry club I had run there for two quarters: we would both explicitly familiarize the teenagers with a new discourse, law enforcement and poetics respectively. Furthermore, in drawing attention to how we had been sponsored by universities in developing our expertise, we imagined ourselves as college-going role models for the students we taught. Mike’s cadets also did a good bit of reading and writing, and in the course of that work, he modeled habits that also happen to be essential to poetry, such as analysis through close reading.

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My poetry workshops drew on knowledge of the public schools that I had gathered during my years as a secondary educator and aimed to orient the students toward success in those schools. Mike, however, taught students how to grapple with the two local institutions he knew best, institutions whose influence on this street was clearer and more immediate than that of the schools: police and gangs. In Mike’s club, students learned not rhyming words but words to describe crimes and police procedures. When they analyzed news stories, they didn’t look to diction for clues on the writer’s tone or examine rhetorical structure to determine the writer’s purpose; instead, they scanned the prose for probable suspects, and they identified the legal channels through which further evidence might be obtained.

My apprehension about Mike’s work arose in part from community literacy scholarship that draws attention to the structural racism and classism of the U.S. criminal justice system. Much of this scholarship involves prisoners as authors in workshops and other forums involving university students and scholars (see, for instance, Reflections 4:1; Rogers; Kerr; Appleman). Less often, publications in public rhetoric address police work explicitly. Linda Flower’s well known problem-solving dialogues, for instance, involve Pittsburgh’s college students, mostly middle-class and white, writing with younger students of color at the Community Literacy Center in Pittsburgh. Together, they develop the younger students’ critiques of the legal and educational institutions that limit their opportunities, including discriminatory police officers. More of an anomaly is Ben Kuebrich’s I Witness: Perspectives on Policing in the Near Westside, which includes the voices of police officers in dialogue with local residents on an issue of common concern: a plan to put surveillance cameras in place on a street corner where drugs are bought and sold. Kuebrich anticipates my study in that he interviews a cop from the block, Lori Billy. Ultimately, however, Billy’s institutional identity as a police officer trumps the affinities she feels for her Westside neighbors; she is, for instance, impassive when her fellow officers flout the law but indignant when Westside residents do the same.

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MIKE’S STORY Mike offered his students a more ambivalent perspective, one rooted in his onetime identity as an at-risk youth and shaped by his current one as a police officer in training.

Mike grew up on the same street as the Barrio Center but two miles north. Both sections of the city are under the same gang injunction, which in the name of safety abbreviates the rights of residents by making illegal many activities that gangs engage in, such as group assembly. Once when I asked Mike about how his neighborhood compared to the one that housed the center, he said, “It’s the same.” In the other interview he said that where he grew up was possibly even rougher, with more graffiti and alcohol abuse and a more pervasive gang presence. Mike said that in high school his male cousins had gotten involved in the gang lifestyle, and he too was on his way. He bounced around to four different schools, including the continuation school. He said,

I didn’t really have a lot of good role models. Growing up in a neighborhood like this all you see is the older kids hanging out with a bad crowd. So, you didn’t really see a lot of going to college. Or anybody really talking to me about college period. So you really didn’t have a lot of motivation . . . I flunked out my whole freshman year. I just didn’t see the importance of education.

When he was sixteen Mike’s father wanted his family to move out of the neighborhood because he saw that Mike was “messing up, getting into fights.” His parents, who both work –“My dad’s a handyman and my mom cleans houses,” he reported – were fortunate enough to have the means to buy a home. I was able to visit that home when Mike invited me to the party his parents threw him when he graduated from the police academy in the spring of 2012. The house is just a mile away from Barrio After-School Center, but I found myself agreeing with Mike’s assessment of the two sides of Two Cities as “two different worlds.” In an interview, Mike emphasized the peace of his new neighborhood: “I don’t hear yelling in the middle of the night. I don’t hear fighting. I don’t hear the cops at night. I don’t hear the music blaring at every hour.” Mike was happy that his younger

107 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 sister was growing up in this new neighborhood, where she didn’t have to face the same challenges he had.

But it wasn’t only the move to a wealthier neighborhood that provoked Mike’s change in direction. A teacher at the continuation high school also tapped his potential. “He was like us,” Mike said of the man. Whether that meant he was Mexicano or not was not clear, but it was clear that the teacher treated his students like human beings, had respect, and tried to relate to them. It was while taking this teacher’s class that Mike found Two Badges: The Lives of Mona Ruiz, which recounts Ruiz’s life as a “gang chola, high school drop-out, disowned daughter, battered wife, welfare mother, student, and policewoman” (publisher’s description). The book showed him that law enforcement was a respectable outlet for him to seek the action he otherwise would have found as a gang member. “We’re not really that different,” he said. “We seek adrenaline, we play with guns, we look for drugs.” With his teacher’s help, Mike completed his work at the continuation school and returned to graduate from the school where he’d begun as a freshman, determined to become a police officer.

In fulfilling that dream, Mike moved on from the community center where I had found him, joining the police department in a nearby city. But he returned to lead the Criminal Justice Club and to mentor younger students, whom he counseled against forming affiliations with those in this neighborhood who were headed for trouble. On the afternoon of one of our interviews, for instance, Mike noticed young men gathered together in the alley behind the center, drinking. He commented that the students “see the twenty year-olds drinking alcohol . . . the graffiti, the tagging . . . and they want to do that, they want to imitate that.” However, he said he guided the teens toward a different path:

I try to tell them. I shared my experience with me being at the lowest of the low: going to continuation high school, being kicked out of regular high school. I told them . . . I know what it feels like to not have that path toward a good education.

When he spoke at the graduation ceremony held for Barrio students, Mike explained that his college ambitions had saved him from life as

108 “A Clear Path” | Lance Langdon a criminal. He recalled, “I try to tell them from my experience that education does benefit you one way or another.”

But in fact Mike ended up showing the students that education had benefitted him in a very particular way: it allowed him to become a police officer. And by schooling the teens in the discourse of policing, Mike’s Criminal Justice Club naturally sparked the students’ desire to adopt the same institutional identity, despite Mike’s protests that such was never the goal of the club.

“I GOT THEM THINKING LIKE LITTLE DETECTIVES”: BUILDING POLICE IDENTITY IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE WORKSHOPS Following the earlier work of linguists Krashen and Terell, James Paul Gee posits a difference between learning and acquisition. Gee suggests that discourse communities work not by teaching novices the rules of the discourse explicitly—that would be learning—but by allowing them to work as apprentices under and alongside those already fluent in the discourse in a process of acquisition. Mike’s Criminal Justice Club, then, led the teens not just in learning the language of police officers but also in acquiring the discourse of police work. It did so by leading those teens who chose to participate in the club through activities that asked them to read, write, analyze, and act as police officers.

Like Gee, I focus on “discourse” as a kind of master category for the ways of doing, valuing, believing, and speaking required of a given identity (“Literacy”). In what follows I also bring to bear insights from Gee’s work on identity, which has turned from discourse as an all-encompassing category to “discourse identity” as one of four kinds of identities: nature identity, institutional identity, discourse identity, and affinity identity (“Identity”). The last three are all relevant to Mike’s Criminal Justice Club, for that club was quite effective in getting students to recognize themselves, and be recognized, as a certain “kind of person”: future cops. A “kind of person” is Gee’s term for identity, what I would call a social role, a “type” that is recognizable by others and which invites them to react accordingly. Roughly speaking, Gee argues that institutional identities are tied

109 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 to jobs, discourse identities to language and other signs, and affinity identities to group practices (“Identity” 3).

Mike’s criminal justice club was and was not about training young people to accept the institutional identity of the police officer. Institutional identities are defined by the exercise of power, and it’s important to note that at the time of this study, not any of the members of the club, Mike included, was invested with the actual power to act as police officer cops (though Mike would be commissioned as an officer a few months later). Yet it was the existence of this institutional identity—the fact that people in Two Cities acted as police officers with all of the privileges and responsibilities of that job—that lent much of the appeal to the discourse identity that Mike led the young people in acquiring: that of future-cops.

Importantly for Gee, identity is both a way of understanding the self and a means of gaining others’ recognition; the latter proved particularly important for these oppressed teens’ identification as future-cops. For instance, one middle-school student had been targeted by an intervention program that brought together teachers, social workers, medical providers, and – crucially – police officers to consult with the families of “truant” students (i.e. those who didn’t find the public schools worth attending). Being identified as a future- cop meant that the school addressed her truancy by encouraging her attendance at Barrio Center; the Barrio supervisor introduced the young woman to an FBI agent who offered to guide her through college applications. Had the young woman’s identity remained the default identity of Mexicanas in her neighborhood, namely “at-risk” (i.e. possibly affiliated with gangs), the school’s course of action may have been more punitive.

The teens came to be recognized as future-cops, as that “kind of person” rather than as “at-risk youth,” not least because they could speak the language of criminal justice, because they had begun to master that discourse. So how did Mike acquaint students with the police discourse that made that future-cop discourse identity possible? To begin with, he shared forms used by police officers such as tickets for moving violations and arrest reports for adults and juveniles. The club read news stories about crime and examined a map outlining the

110 “A Clear Path” | Lance Langdon boundaries of the local gang injunction. They wrote journals outside the club that reflected what they learned in it. The students learned about the legal processes through which evidence could be procured and suspects brought to justice. Learning the vocabulary to describe these processes was key; in the club notebook, which Mike shared with me, I found outlined in 30-point font on 8.5x11 paper, terms such as “warrant”: “a document issued by a legal or government official authorizing the police or some other body to make an arrest.” The most common club activity involved Mike presenting these definitions and asking the students to use them to discuss a local news story about crime. Those crimes varied. I witnessed Mike deliver a lesson about the serial killings of local homeless men, but I also found in the notebook incidents the CJ club had discussed that involved police misconduct, such as the cover-up of evidence by a local police officer. After the club ended, I even witnessed Mike returning to help a student fill out a blood alcohol form that had been assigned in his criminal justice class at school (more on that class shortly).

As rhetoricians, we can understand the police forms—the traffic tickets, arrest reports, and booking approvals that Mike brought in for the students—as specific iterations of the rhetorical genres that enable police discourse and law enforcement action. As such, these police forms elicit in those who fill them out a police subjectivity, an institutional identity that shapes one’s discourse and establishes one’s affinities. True, as Gee suggests and as Mike’s example will show, individuals can work within these institutional identities even as their discourse and affinity identities produce conflicts, but the power of the institutional identity is what makes action within that role possible, and that power requires one to interpret the world in legally legible ways. For a traffic ticket, one must, for example, list the code of the violation and list one’s name as an arresting officer. And one must fill out, along with sex, hair, eyes, height, and weight, a suspect’s race (on each of the forms Mike brought in as examples the suspect’s race was “Hispanic”). The police form offers a viewing of the world in which these categories are salient for marking out and identifying those one interacts with as suspects and criminals.

As Charles Bazerman and others have pointed out, genres are established forms of social action; they are, so to speak, the skeleton

111 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 of the body of power. As such, they have their own motives and values, and by writing within them, we place ourselves to some degree subject to those motives. For example, Anis Bawarshi demonstrates how the genre of the literacy narrative assumes as a truism the power of literacy to transform lives, and he suggests that even those students whose life experiences conflict with that conclusion, find their narratives bending toward that resolution (Chapter 4). Similarly, I argue that in the iterative process of using these police forms, students came to adopt the police gaze in filtering the unpredictable flux of life in their community. Specifically, they came to see their neighbors as potential criminals against whom they might bring the police powers they have practiced adopting.

The teens enrolled in criminal justice also began to see themselves as an affinity group, to some extent aligned against their community. A look at the membership chart of the club demonstrates how under Mike’s leadership, the participants imagined themselves already as a police unit. There we learn that “Squad 1” met “at 1630 hours” in the back room of the apartment. The two staff members, Mike and Gustavo, are listed as “Chiefs.” Three of my poetry students were the “captain,” “lieutenant” and “sergeant” respectively. But the artifact that best makes the case, is that Mike wasn’t simply asking students to write like police officers but to think like them is the “Code of Ethics.” Mike saved two copies of this code in the Criminal Justice binder he handed over to me for my study; each was copied down in the hand of one of his cadets. The students used impeccable spelling, and I quote from their transcriptions at length so as to demonstrate the seriousness with which they were asked to play their roles in this club:

As a Barrio Center Officer, my duty is to serve students. Whatever I see or hear of a confidential nature or that is confided to me in my official capacity will be kept ever secret unless revelation is necessary in the performance of my duty. I will never act officiously or permit personal feelings, prejudices, animosities, or friend ships to influence my decisions. I will constantly strive to achieve these objectives and Ideals & dedicate myself before God to my chosen Profession Role as a Barrio Center Officer. (Strikethroughs in original).

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The last strikethrough and replacement shows the slight change needed to adapt police discourse for use at the community center, to render the “institutional identity” of police officers’ accessibility to the teens, though of course, the power of that identity would be deferred many years and granted only if the teens qualified for that role, as Mike had, by earning a college degree and remaining separated from any gang associates. In the pledge above, what was for the officers a moneymaking “profession” became a “role” for these teens. If the subjects who took this pledge were required to swear “before God,” we would say that the pledge required a commitment of their souls to the police officer’s role. As it stood, the pledge merely required that the initiate promise to remake herself, eternally, for the role—pledging to keep information “ever secret,” to sever friendships with others in favor of loyalty to the force, even to give up the guidance offered by her feelings and orientations as mere “prejudice.” One might say that the genre of the pledge exists to disrupt one’s affinity-identity as a member of a community (in which one is lodged by feelings that emerge from and feed affiliations) and to reinitiate one’s subjectivity in the police force.

In real life, Mike had, to some extent, given up his role as a community member when he took a similar pledge and joined the police department. “Some family members have stopped talking to me just for the simple fact that I’m a police officer,” Mike said. “You lose people along the way.” So Mike explained his estrangement from his cousins, who live in his old neighborhood and continue to associate with gang members. Of course, the teens who took this pledge did so merely in their imaginations, and clearly it didn’t carry the same consequences for them. Nonetheless, as an initiation rite into the club, this pledge clearly, demonstrates how police “discourse” asked not merely that students add police language to their existing vocabulary but that they imagine how they might remake themselves by voicing this vocabulary and thereby realign themselves with respect to their friends at Barrio Center and others in Two Cities. For, as Gee reminds us, “Discourses are not just ways of talking, but ways of talking, acting, thinking, valuing” (“Literacy” 530).”

Mike was direct about the way that the Criminal Justice Club taught the teens to think like police officers, to develop what writing

113 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 administrators today are calling the “habits of mind,” but for the police profession. Mike described this process as follows:

We try to take a law enforcement approach to it. And we actually try to solve [the case]. We would actually make a little board. What kind of evidence should we be looking for? What should we do next? If there’s an outstanding suspect we’ll say, “Who do you think the suspect is? Why do you think he did it?”

In the other interview, he elaborated:

We would post up different terms. I remember using the term of the week . . . something to do with law enforcement . . . like, “parole” and then I would have one of the students kind of explain to the group what it was. We had a little crime blog going. We’d talk about different crimes that would happen in the area.… There’s a lot of different things that the kids would see in the news. And I can remember them just coming up to me, [saying] “Can we talk about this this week, can we talk about that?” I’d kind of help them out understanding the process, what happens now. We’ve got to look for this guy. [I’d say,] “Hey what evidence do you guys think they’d use?” And then they’re like, “Well I would use this or I would use that.” So it got them thinking kind of like little detectives . . . [W]e would write down evidence that was found at the scene. And how they’re going to look for [the suspect.] And we would guesstimate when that person would be arrested. One was the homeless guy that was killing people. There was [also] a Hollywood beheadings one that they were trying to guesstimate.

Clearly, Mike’s Criminal Justice Club taught critical thinking skills that many literacy educators would value, all in the real-world contexts that our research suggests makes those skills “stick.” He developed students’ vocabulary. He urged students to use the media to take notice of current events and to suggest topics of conversation, thereby making the club speak to the events that shaped their world and to their own interests. By getting them to understand how the information from those stories would be processed, given police procedures, he gave them a schema with which to read. This meant

114 “A Clear Path” | Lance Langdon considering what tools law enforcement might use to get permission to collect evidence (warrant; affidavit) and to make a case for the criminal’s degree of culpability (mens rea). Thus, the students were not just passively reading but reading for a purpose, interacting with the text not just to comprehend but also to analyze. This analysis required them to “close read,” to sort the news stories for specific details relevant to a given schema. Finally, based on their understanding of those details and the total picture they form, Mike asked the students to make well-supported predictions.

The teens also engaged in the practices of police work that for Gee establish the last identity category: affinity-identity. (Gee argues that this category is increasingly relevant in a postmodern society in which institutions and discourses and the identities they enable, are ever more in flux.) It’s true that Mike did not take this action-oriented approach as consistently, perhaps because it is difficult to enact the actual practices of police membership without first obtaining the institutional identity of the police officer. That is, one can’t act like a cop until one has been commissioned as a cop. Nonetheless, it appeared that the teens came not just to talk like police officers but to feel themselves to belong to that group (hence “affinity”), not least because they engaged in a few of the practices of police: handing out tickets and applying handcuffs. One afternoon, for instance, Mike and the teens filled out the moving violations together, a process local cops call “ripping bluesies” due to the color of the form and practiced handing them out to drivers in the center’s back lot, including Mike’s sister. On another occasion, Mike brought in his police gear and showed it to the dozen students and staffers who were gathered in the center’s front room. Mike talked about what he was going through at the police academy: the push-ups, the tests, the drills, the hazing that was meant to weed out cadets. The center’s coordinator, Ms. Evans, asked most of the questions that elicited this information but students engaged too. Katie, a 7th grade student, tried on Mike’s duty belt, and after Mike was done talking, he showed her how to use the dummy can of pepper spray on the duty belt, and she used it to mock- spray another young man in the face. These actions helped secure Katie’s affinity for Mike and her inclination toward police work, an affiliation that would bear fruit when she later led the club in Mike’s absence.

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Indeed, judging by Katie’s example, Mike was successful in encouraging the students to take on leadership roles, his stated goal for the club. Mike noted that toward the end of his time there at the center, the teens would run the club themselves. This allowed them to meet frequently, not just when the site principal was able to relieve Mike of his supervision responsibilities for the other teens at the center. After Mike departed, Ms. Evans urged Katie, who had been a sergeant in the Criminal Justice Club, to lead the first meeting in Mike’s absence. “Don’t you think if Mike came back he’d want you to keep going?” she asked. Katie agreed. That day, she led a discussion of the case of Trayvon Martin, the young Black man shot and killed by self-appointed neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman. As I watched Katie prepare for that club meeting, it was clear that Mike’s lessons had made an impression. She first looked up the case on one of the computers at the center, using the victim’s name in a Google search and finding an article on the Fox News website, which she proceeded to read to me, surprised that I had not been familiar with the case. Katie then successfully used the criminal justice textbook Mike had left behind as a reference, finding key terms in the glossary and presenting them to the other adults who had run the sessions with Mike. We’ll remember that Mike believed that the Criminal Justice Club taught leadership; even if one grants that the leadership Katie showed in picking out the news topic and leading students through it wasn’t a result of the CJ club–Katie had shown herself to be a self-starter in poetry club as well—it’s certainly true that the club built the confidence in police discourse that was necessary for Katie to feel comfortable exercising those skills.

Mike’s club seemed to have a similar effect on many young people at the center, but as I have mentioned, it also created a more direct effect that Mike had not foreseen but in retrospect seemed inevitable: the teens wanted to become cops. I had designed my interview questions to find out about the students’ home and school literacies, the literacy activities they did at the center, and those they utilized in neighborhood activities like trips to the market. I also asked them about college role models. What I had not expected was that over and over again, I would find them discussing law enforcement. Indeed, perhaps what’s most notable about the police discourse offered in Mike’s workshops, is its power to shape students’ identities: when I last spoke with them, several of the teenagers attending the center

116 “A Clear Path” | Lance Langdon not only had ambitions to enter law enforcement but were already taking steps to complete the formal education necessary to achieve that goal.

Once I began asking around at the center about why so many students shared these ambitions, I found that Mike wasn’t alone in orienting students toward a career in law enforcement. While some students were inspired by extended family members who worked in the criminal justice system—one had an uncle who was a parole officer, for instance—others were influenced by their formal schooling. Criminal Justice, it turns out, was now a class offered at both high schools attended by the community center students. One graduating senior at the center had chosen to commute to a local community college five miles away rather than go to the school that was closer because she had been inspired by a criminal justice class at her school taught by a former police officer.

RACE AND POLICING: IDENTITIES IN CONFLICT Perhaps none of the teens was more touched by Mike’s work at the center than JT, whose words opened this article. Hers was a prime example of how literacy practices about police work played a part in students’ emerging discourse and affinity identities as police officers (although JT sometimes said she’d rather be an FBI agent). The following excerpt from our interview together shows how she retained some of the vocabulary of law enforcement as part of that identity, months after Mike’s departure:

JT: I learned a lot. I learned a lot of new words. Yeah. Grand theft auto, I thought it was a game, but it means like stealing cars. I think we learned about assault. Degree. Oh yeah that you need a, a, what’s it called? An affidavit, an affidavit, and then you need a... I’m think it’s, I’m just going to say permission.

Author (A): Oh, a warrant.

JT: Yeah a warrant. That’s the word.

A: Why did that stick in your head?

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JT: That’s something I want to do.

A: You want to go in people’s houses?

JT: I just want to be the one who finds the clues.

Mike inspired JT to see law enforcement as a career where her nascent social vision could be fulfilled. JT had said in one poem she wrote for my workshops “I dream one day racism will stop,” and from her interview comments, both those presented above and those that began this article, it’s clear that JT was doing the mental labor of a police officer—looking for clues— in order to help rectify the injustices she saw in her neighborhood, though it remained unclear whether she conceived of these rights and violations in personal or ethnic terms. In explaining what she meant when she argued that people ought to have rights, for example, she said, “I just don’t like seeing people have to pass through bad stuff that people do to them, but they are just too scared to get them in jail.”

However, as I indicated by including the Elizabeth Martinez quote alongside JT’s comment on rights, the role of the police in administering justice can be complicated by race and class. Thus, I close the description of the club’s impact by noting what it taught the students about the role that race plays in counting Two Cities residents as criminals or victims. I have noted that for Mike, adopting the institutional identity of the police officer required him to give up remnants of his prior affinity-identity as a gang associate; in this section, I demonstrate how Mike’s gang affiliated identity overlapped with his identity as a Mexicano and how the police identity he took on required him to give up those affinity identities. The students too, I suggest, were asked to imagine themselves doing the same.

In our interviews, Mike described how the neighborhood’s gang injunction meant that teenagers in this half of Two Cities were “harassed.” “[T]here’s a lot of stipulations that teenagers have to go through” with police, he said. “[T]hey get talked to a lot more by law enforcement than other kids in other areas.” Growing up, Mike had been stopped because of the way he was dressed and the people he

118 “A Clear Path” | Lance Langdon associated with. “I don’t want to say racial profiling, but that’s the only thing I can really call it here,” Mike said. When I asked him if such treatment still occurred, his answer was, “sadly, yes.” Recently he had been pulled over “a couple of times,” detained, he thought, because he was “a Hispanic, no hair, bald, in a tinted window car.” Intriguingly, in what Du Bois would describe as double consciousness, Mike now could sympathize with the police perspective on his own shaved head and style: “[W]ith my training now I understand it could be a little shady. I understand it both ways.”

Fortunately, the Criminal Justice Club offered a chance for the students to hear from Mike and another staff member, Carlos, about this issue of racial profiling. By explicitly discussing the role that race plays in police work, they allowed the teens the opportunity to also see things “both ways.” For the teens, this meant that even if they did decide to follow Mike’s lead in getting college degrees and becoming police officers, they would see that work as more than just the technical expertise of “finding clues” or as uncomplicated labor on behalf of justice and rights. For by considering how their race might affect the way that police dealt with them, they would also begin to recognize how race impinged on justice and have the chance to consider appropriate action plans to negotiate that fact. Here was Freire’s consientizãçao.

Carlos, a senior staff member who works at the regional level, is a forty-something father of two with a gentle, steady demeanor. On this particular day of the Criminal Justice Club, Mike began a discussion regarding the gang injunction, which Carlos helped to lead. I must admit that my expectation was that as an older man and an administrator, Carlos would justify the police perspective. Perhaps I had grown used to his conservative haircut and business dress and profiled him myself. However, it turned out that he too had been detained by police as a youth, and this experience had tempered his support for the wider police powers possible with the gang injunction.

To begin the meeting, JT read an article on a recent arrest of a gang member; the article included a map of a gang injunction that covers the neighborhood in which the teens live. The students held onto the map and identified a few places on it. Mike explained what a “civil

119 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 injunction” was, and at the request of another student, presented definitions of a few of the words from the previous lessons: “warrant,” “affidavit.” Mike explained how the requirements for these could change under a gang injunction. Carlos then asked the teens what they thought of the information that Mike was giving. One or two of them said that they thought the injunction was necessary to keep everyone safe.

Carlos then testified about a time twenty years before when he had been pulled over by the police. “I was in a car with three guys with shaved heads,” he said. “Two of the guys in the car, they had just come back from the army. And the third guy, his head was shaved because he was in football.” None of them had been affiliated in any way with gangs, so Carlos believed that race had played a role in their being stopped. He asked the students to consider this event in weighing whether the civil injunction would affect them positively or negatively and whether or not it was just. Responding to Carlos’s comments, Mike said that while most police officers were fair, some would do what Carlos had described.

I did not ask the students or Mike directly about this event in my interviews, so it is difficult to say where the students came down on the issue of the civil injunction or indeed what their perspective was on racial profiling, a practice that obviously conflicts with the ideals of police justice that JT voiced. What was evident was that Carlos’s presence at the meeting enabled the students to hear from an adult who could testify to police-citizen interaction from the perspective of someone who understood that race had played a role in his being detained and questioned. Carlos’s personal presence and words had an impact that text alone would not have had on the students. By articulating himself as a racialized subject in the community space of the after-school center, Carlos helped to create a shared Latinidad between himself as a Mexican American and his Mexican@ students. Carlos and Mike both sharing similar stories about being targeted, suggests that such spaces do necessary work for students growing up in a society in which race continues to matter a great deal in their chances for avoiding incarceration and pursuing a successful future in civil society.

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CONCLUSION Under Mike’s tutelage, criminal justice discourse became, if not emancipatory, then at least critical. The lesson described above shows Mike and Carlos beginning to teach the teens how to live through double-consciousness as Mexican@ police officers—that is, as members of an oppressed ethnic group who would achieve “success” in a career that required them to renounce former ties. JT and other youths at the center came to identify themselves as members of a law enforcement body that sought impartial justice—citizen rights— even as they developed a language to name how that institution viewed them and other young people in the community as worthy of suspicion and in need of discipline.

I saw how Mike, in this difficult position, accomplished what Lisa Delpit holds as a goal for educators who would school the marginalized in a dominant discourse: “wrest[ing] from it a place for the glorification of their students and their forebears” (553). Delpit quotes Bill Trent in pointing to teachers who successfully promoted their minority students’ acquisition of dominant discourses. Trent says of those teachers, “They held visions of us that we could not imagine for ourselves. And they held those visions even when they themselves were denied entry into the larger white world” (549). Here at the community center, Mike had achieved entry in the larger world of the police force, and there is no doubt that his vision that these students could do the same, influenced the futures they saw for themselves. His success supports Delpit’s point that teachers’ lofty goals, when coupled with their support of students’ skill building, can be a sustaining force for non-dominant students. Even as he shared with me how he had to leave behind those from his prior life who refused to abide by the ways of doing, speaking, and believing required of police officers, Mike showed by his very example and by his use of the local dialect that he could lead a “successful,” middle- class career in the mainstream (White) workforce without forfeiting his ties to this Mexican@ community.

What did end up being worthy of critique, however, was the social structure in which Mike’s lessons were delivered, a structure that paradoxically offered consistent police surveillance of Barrio Center attendees but inconsistent educational support for students who

121 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 would pursue career ambitions outside of law enforcement. This is a system that confines students to a set of possible institutional identities more narrowly circumscribed than those offered to their white, mainstream peers in other neighborhoods of Two Cities; it is a system that links Barrio center and the local public schools in providing oppressed students a vocational education in the language of police work, both through language that makes possible the discourse identity of a police officer and through activities that provoke the young people at Barrio feel they are adopting that identity as a result of their own affinities.

I hope that the frame of discourse has allowed readers to better understand what was at stake as Mike taught the teens literacy. Whereas “teach” and “literacy” might lead us to imagine Mike imparting discrete reading and writing skills through lecturing or exercises, I more often found him encouraging the students to speak, read, and write in the service of translating themselves into the role of police officer. That activity was always inflected by their mutual positioning in the larger socioeconomic realities of the community, specifically law enforcement’s demands for law-abiding citizens. “Discourse” helps to keep those relationships in view, and to understand literate practices at the center as one means through which students constituted their social identities, identities that were shaped in the center but that were understood to translate to social and economic spaces beyond it. For the Criminal Justice Club, literate skill was not, as it was for my poetry workshops, the central educational objective. Yet in some ways that makes the criminal justice activities more compelling, for they foreground the embeddedness of literacy in social practices. They thus reveal, more directly than the discourses in language arts classrooms—which often cover their ideologies under the fig leaf of “skills”—how literacy is always already tied up in social life, in discourse. In shedding light on how the teens at this center were taught to speak, think, and feel as racially conscious police officers rather than potential gang members, I hope to provoke readers’ reflection on how vocational literacies come to be sponsored and for those of us who teach at universities, how we might encounter the off-campus students with whom we work as already embedded in such discourses.

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But the question remains: what are the costs and benefits of such discourses as they already exist at such sites?

On the positive side, we should not ignore community educators like Mike, who donate time to the education of children in stressed neighborhoods, to guiding them, in the terms Mike chose for the graduation speech he delivered that spring, from a “blurry path” to a “clear picture” of their life and to pursuing their dreams for “something more” than the limited job opportunities available to them in their immediate neighborhood.

However, I continue to be suspicious of the police discourse Mike teaches the teens there, inasmuch as police work urges these students to see their neighbors as potential criminals and to accept laws that support a society in which they have limited access to other professional paths. Once again, in this suspicion, I take heed of Freire, who is careful to distinguish between technical education, or education as adaptation to an inequitable neoliberal order, and education as consientizãçao (the building of critical awareness and consciousness), which requires that a subject come to awareness of the historical forces to which she has been subjected, envision an ethical response to those forces, and act upon that vision (112). In a more democratic society, these young people would not be consigned to a subordinate position—or even a police career path—and made to feel responsible for their fate. They would instead participate in an education that valued the identities of their neighbors, even those dressed in gang styles and prepared them just as much as it did their counterparts on the other side of Two Cities to be lawyers, doctors, business leaders, engineers, and the like. It is unfortunate that where Mike saw himself as a college-going role model who urged his students to strive for something more, they saw his job as the only available one and judged that striving for something more, could only mean striving to join the police force. To the extent that Elizabeth Martinez is right and that police protect private property, however unjustly it is acquired, police work is not just a career that offers a way out of oppression but a return to the neighborhood in the role of the oppressor. Mike’s experiences with racial profiling suggest ways in which he continues to find such a critique valid.

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Yet a full look at the criminal justice club reveals that he and Carlos discussed the issue of racial profiling and civil rights with the students. The club thus spoke to this issue with a pragmatic political perspective that the center’s students were likely to find persuasive as they sought to realize their goals within society as it exists, rather than how we might imagine it to be. Villanueva writes that the word revolution “conjures up frightening pictures: not acts of criticism, but acts of violence, undertaken when there is nothing left to lose.” But for the students he discusses as well as for the Barrio students, “there are things left to lose here. There might still be pie” (61); that is, though the system is canted against students of color, it will yet reward some of them, enough of them to make faith in that system something more than bald self-delusion. True, Freire enjoins us as language instructors to pay attention to oppression, to consider “the word” as a tool for both “denouncing the present and announcing the future” (Shor 187). Yet in less prophetic moments, young people must also find ways to speak to the discourses that govern their lifeworlds and to speak within them; as I learned in the two years in which I was an intermittent guest at the center, police work is one of the most evidently powerful of these.

Lance Langdon is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at UC Irvine. His dissertation, Feeling Engaged: College Writers as K-12 Tutors, addresses university-community partnerships he has initiated in his composition and literature courses with after-school centers and schools educating Chican@ and Latin@ youth. At the centers, he examines Spanish-English biliteracy, the modeling of ethnic affiliations and vocation by mentors, and the emotional dynamics of collaborative poetry writing workshops. On the college side, he investigates how college writers’ opinions on educational inequality shift as they research and teach in these settings.

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WORKS CITED

Appleman, Deborah. “Teaching in the Dark: The Promise and Pedagogy of Creative Writing in Prison.” English Journal 102.4 (2013): 24–30. Print. Arellano, Gustavo. Orange County: a Personal History. New York: Scribner, 2010. Print. Bawarshi, AniGenre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2003. Open WorldCat. Web. 24 June 2013. Bazerman, Charles. “Ch 13: Genre as Social Action.” The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis. 1st ed. Ed. Michael Handford and James Paul Gee. Routledge, 2012. Print. Cancian, Frank, and Julieta Noemi Lopez. Orange County Housecleaners. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Print. Delpit, Lisa D. “The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse.” Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Ellen Cushman et al. Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2001. Print. Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. “Strivings of the Negro People.” The Atlantic Aug. 1897. The Atlantic. Web. 3 July 2013. Flower, Linda. Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Print. Freire, Paulo. “From Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” The Critical Pedagogy Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Antonia Darder. New York NY: Routledge, 2009. Print. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Indignation. Paradigm Publishers, 2004. Print. Gee, James Paul. “Identity as an Analytic Lens for Research in Education.” Review of Research in Education 25 (2000): 99. CrossRef. Web. 11 Oct. 2013. —-. “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction and What Is Literacy?” Literacy: a Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Ellen Cushman. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. Print. Kerr, Tom. “Writing with the Condemned: On Editing and Publishing the Work of Steve Champion.” Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling, and Activism in the United States. Ed. Katy Ryan. University of Iowa Press, 2012. Print.

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Martinez, Elizabeth. 500 Anos Del Pueblo Chicano / 500 Years of Chicano History. Albuquerque, New Mexico: SouthWest Organizing Project (SWOP), 1990. Print. Pimentel, Octavio. “Disrupting Discourse: Introducing Mexicano Immigrant Success Stories.” Reflections 8.2 (2008): 171–196. Print. Rogers, Laura. “Diving in to Prison Teaching: Mina Shaughnessy, Teacher Development, and the Realities of Prison Teaching.” Reflections 8.3 (2009): 99–121. Print. Ruiz, Mona. Two Badges: The Lives of Mona Ruiz. Arte Público Press, 1997. Print. Shor, Ira. A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming Education. South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, 1987. Print. Villanueva, Victor. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. National Council of Teachers of English, 1993. Prin

126 Public Art, Service- Learning, and Critical Reflection: Nuestra Casa as a Case Study of Tuberculosis Awareness on the U.S- Mexico Border

Eva M. Moya, University of Texas at This case study describes the Nuestra Casa (Our House) El Paso Initiative, an advocacy, communication, and social mobilization strategy to increase tuberculosis (TB) awareness & Guillermina G. through a public art exhibition hosted at the University of Núñez, Texas at El Paso. This work describes this multi-disciplinary University of Texas at initiative that cut across academic boundaries to engage El Paso faculty, students, and community members in service-learning and community engagement efforts. Nuestra Casa reached diverse audiences, including school children, farm workers, promotoras (health promoters), university students, educators, persons affected by TB, and public health officials in Mexico and in the United States through education, critical reflection, and a call to action.

uberculosis (TB) remains a major global health and social problem. The Tdisease ranks as the second leading cause of death from an infectious disease globally, after HIV (WHO 2012). Although most cases of tuberculosis can be treated, every minute, four people die from the disease and fifteen more become infected worldwide (Harrington et al., 2011). According to a 2012

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World Health Organization (WHO) report, there were nine million new cases of tuberculosis in 2011 and 1.4 million deaths.

Tuberculosis typically affects the lungs but can also affect other parts of the human body. The disease is spread through people who have the disease (active pulmonary) expelling bacteria when they cough. People with diabetes and HIV are more susceptible to tuberculosis, and men are more likely to become infected with the disease more than women. Tuberculosis is also more prevalent among adults in economically productive age groups (CDC 2010). If tuberculosis is not treated, a high mortality rate is probable.This is a case study that describes the Nuestra Casa (Our House) Exhibit, an advocacy, communication and social mobilization strategy to increase the awareness of tuberculosis (TB) through public art as a medium for education and social engagement. This work describes the genesis and the evolution of this project, as a multi-disciplinary initiative that cuts across academic boundaries to engage faculty, students, and community members in service-learning and community engagement efforts. The goal was to extend beyond the traditional communication frames associated with academia to critically engage diverse audiences, including school children, farm workers, promotoras (health promoters), university students, educators, persons affected by TB, and public health officials. This project was in alignment with the University of Texas El Paso’s (UTEP) mission, to ensure access, along with a commitment to excellence reflected in academic rigor and by preparing students to make significant contributions to their professions, their communities, and the world. Critical to the Nuestra Casa exhibit was the participation of students through service- learning efforts, which helped the Nuestra Casa project become an eleven-month initiative in a museum setting, reaching more than 25,000 visitors from January to December 2012. The Nuestra Casa initiative provided multiple communication events that helped make tuberculosis and its social-economic and environmental ties, a more visible health disparity along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The authors’ collaboration in the 2011 Nuestra Casa Project took place as part of a continued collaboration of an earlier Nuestra Casa Tuberculosis awareness project that took place at UTEP in the fall of 2009. At this time, Eva Moya was a doctoral candidate

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researching tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS as part of her dissertation. In the fall of 2011, the authors collaborated in an interdisciplinary project to help mount an exhibit at UTEP’s Centennial Museum to bring awareness about Tuberculosis on the U.S.-Mexico border. Dr. Moya, a professor in UTEP’s Department of Social Work, led the initiative of bringing colonia-type homes, typical of dwellings occupied by Tuberculosis patients in modest income communities to the UTEP campus. Others participating in the project were Dr. Guillermina Gina Núñez from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Dr. William (Bill) Wood from the Centennial Museum and Chihuahuam Desert Garden, Dr. Arvind Singhal and Dr. Lucia Dura from the Department of Communications, Dr. Silvia Chávez Baray from the Department of Social Work, and Jennifer Rodriguez and Azuri Ruiz from the Center for Civic Engagement at (UTEP).

This interdisciplinary effort was made possible in great part to the participation of students from various disciplines including social work, anthropology, health sciences, and communication. The students involved in the project learned how to use ethnographic methods, such as participant observation and qualitative data analysis, and museum fundamentals such as mounting and facilitating a museum exhibit. During their service-learning experiences, students gained valuable health science research experience, as well as critical thinking and communication skills. In her final paper, Sheila Droustas, an undergraduate student at UTEP reflected, “this project allows for students to learn and be completely aware of TB. It allows for students to know how such problem can affect border cities.” Students indicated that their service-learning experiences led to a deeper understanding of the social stigmas and social inequalities associated with Tuberculosis. Diego Davila, an undergraduate student noted, “I decided to participate in the Nuestra Casa Initiative because I like the idea of being part of a museum exhibit that would involve a public health issue. I decided to volunteer because I wanted to do something that involved meeting new people, learning new things, and getting out of my comfort zone” (End of the semester service-learning report 2011, personal communication on file with authors). Through this awareness, students and participants of the exhibit expressed a need for more public health education.

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The exploration and analysis of social-economic factors contributing to TB created a heightened sense of social responsibility among participating students, faculty, staff, and community partners. Critical components to the success of this initiative involved the collaborative process, which focused on engaging audiences of various social- cultural, linguistic, and educational backgrounds, through effective communication using various forms of literacy: video, photos, wristbands, postcards, handouts, and other tools for reflection. This work provides a description of the Nuestra Casa exhibit and how this initiative developed over the span of one year to engage students, faculty, and staff across the disciplines in a university setting with the intent of engaging diverse audiences in education, advocacy, and social change.

The engagement of students in this initiative also involved working with multiple forms of communication or multi-modal literacies, which included social media such as Facebook, Youtube, and a museum as a critical space for engaging others in dialogues and actions addressing health inequities and social justice on the U.S.- Mexico border. The Nuestra Casa exhibit included pictures, videos, and participants’ responses to the exhibit, public health information flyers, bracelets, commitment index cards, Youtube videos, Facebook, and a website. The use of social media became an integral part of the organizers’ efforts to use various forms of communication, to inform the public about the museum exhibit and for reaching more people across class, educational, professional, and national boundaries.

Among the most significant outcomes of this work has been the engagement of participants in the evolution of this project and in the co-creation of knowledge through engagement and interactions that elicited responses and actions towards dispelling social stigmas of Tuberculosis, poverty, and health inequities on the U.S.-Mexico border (Moya et al, 2012). As Mario Loya, a UTEP student who visited the exhibit, noted:

After visiting the Centennial Museum and spending a good amount of time learning about the Nuestra Casa exhibit, I was able to enhance my knowledge about tuberculosis. Through the eyes of victims of this horrific condition, I have opened

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my eyes and my heart to understanding them and being able to comprehend what a person must go through when diagnosed with tuberculosis. There were various observations I took into account when walking into the Nuestra Casa exhibit, among those were the space and how the different things and artifacts were located, the emotional and moving quotes around the exhibit and of course, the stories of the unfortunate. (Personal communication on file with authors “Observations at the Centennial Museum,” Fall 2012).

EDUCATION, ADVOCACY, AND SOCIAL CHANGE: TUBERCULOSIS ON THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER Health and disease are unequally distributed across populations. Tuberculosis for example, is more likely to impact low income communities of color and in the U.S.-Mexico border region; this means Mexican-origin populations. The U.S.-Mexico border is at high risk of elevated TB and HIV incidence, due to socioeconomic stress, rapid and dynamic population growth, mobility and migration (Finch et al. 2001; Moya, Loza & Lusk, 2012; Moya et al., 2013). Singer and Baer (2012) define health disparities as “disproportionate or excess morbility, mortality, and decreased life expectancy as well as unequal access to health care and other health-supportive resources in disadvantaged groups in society or in the world at large” (p. 176). Understanding and challenging these health disparities requires the use of multiple forms of literacies to reach audiences as learners, as co-producers of knowledge, and as agents of social change.

The Nuestra Casa Project focused on bringing awareness to the various aspects associated with Tuberculosis as a highly stigmatizing and taboo disease. This project was significant in making the invisible visible, by providing visual representations of the housing and living conditions associated with poverty, marginalization, and unequal development on the U.S.-Mexico border (Núñez and Klamminger 2010; Núñez 2012). The built environment has direct consequences on the health and well-being of low-income and ethnic communities such as Latinos (Moya et al., 2013). In this project, museum participants were able to examine various layers of the built environment in which people living with tuberculosis: the household, the community, and in this project in particular, the

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U.S.-Mexico border region. Living in close proximity with a person with tuberculosis is likely to expose family members to the virus. Consequently, crowding and higher densities of people living in condensed spaces with limited ventilation is likely to contribute to the greater vulnerability of low-income communities.

This project is also noteworthy, given its regional, national, and international impacts. Regionally, on the U.S.-Mexico border, this project travelled from El Paso, Texas to Cancun Quintana Roo, Oaxaca, Tijuana, B.C., Reynosa, Tamaulipas Mexico and Atlanta, Georgia. The exhibit travelled to the 40th Union World Conference on Lung Health: Poverty and Lung Health in Cancun, Mexico, December 3-7, 2009, which brought together health professions from various countries. In Atlanta, Georgia, the Nuestra Casa Exhibit was located in the Center of Disease Control and Prevention Global Odyssey Museum, where TB controllers from all over the United States and more than 3000 guests toured the exhibit. Data analysis of the responses to the Nuestra Casa exhibit in Atlanta indicate visitors’ messages of sympathy, fear, love, and the need for more awareness, social justice, social action, advocacy, and cultural- social connections (Sheila Droustas, service-learning undergraduate student and museum co-curator 2012). One visitor of the exhibit, who studied at Duke University at the time, named Marcus noted: “This exhibit inspired me to research TB on my own to better understand the causes, effects, and how it damages the body. Now, I want to be a scientist and work for the Center for Disease Control.” These responses by visitors in Atlanta are significant, given the rise of immigrant populations in the southern United States, who are more likely to face discrimination and social stigmas that are likely to contribute to barriers in health care access and provision (Berdhal et.al 2007; Redstone Akresh 2009.) Future researchers should examine the fears and stereotypes associated with the increased immigration in the South and how immigrants and non-immigrants engage one another in negotiations of health care.

SHORT BACKGROUND OF THE NUESTRA CASA EXHIBIT’S FIRST VISIT TO UTEP IN 2009 Nuestra Casa resulted from the need to reinforce public health efforts for the prevention and control of tuberculosis in Mexico. The

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Nuestra Casa (Our House) exhibit was a traveling exhibit designed to promote the awareness of tuberculosis. The goals of the mobile exhibit were to fulfill the social commitment to recognize and put into perspective the TB problem, to increase the political will to improve prevention efforts, to show how the disease was being addressed by public health officials, and to reduce the stigma and discrimination experienced by the persons affected by TB. Another key goal of the Nuestra Casa exhibit was to reach various audiences, including decision makers, health care providers, and the public in general as a call to action to get people involved in taking concrete steps to prevent the spread of TB and to reduce the number of cases and deaths caused by the disease. This initiative stemmed from the need to reinforce the advocacy, communication and social mobilization efforts for the prevention and control of TB in Mexico and in the United States (Moya 2009).

The exhibit was built in the form of a three-dimensional house or “shack” to reflect the life and stories of people affected by tuberculosis, their surroundings, and their expressions of everyday life dealing with TB. The images and testimonies within the exhibit communicated a number of topics, including family, social stigmas, poverty, faith, and hope. The exhibit was intended to represent a low income household in a colonia (neighborhood) from the U.S.-Mexico border. Colonias represent uneven development on the margins of large urban centers throughout the U.S.-Mexico border. These settlements are prone to poverty, and in particular, lack solid and liquid waste disposal services. Interestingly, colonia homes much like the exhibit were visible along the Interstate I-10 directly across from UTEP.

Realizing that the community and real-life situations of persons affected by TB was necessary if efforts to combat the disease were going to be effective, a novel approach was developed through “The Shack.” Damien Schumann, a photojournalist and committed social activist from South Africa, first constructed “The TB/HIV Shack” in 2007, to recreate a typical South African low-income dwelling, to raise awareness about the settings in which TB and HIV/AIDS coexist. The Shack was presented at important national events, including the 38th

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Union Conference on TB and Lung Health in South Africa in 2007 and the 2008 AIDS Conference in Cancun Quintana Roo Mexico.

During several months of planning and field work in 2009, Schumann collaborated with people affected by TB and TB Photovoice participants, health providers, public health authorities, and community based organizations in five border cities: Tijuana, Baja California; Reynosa and Matamoros, Tamaulipas; Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua; and El Paso, Texas. Schumann documented the experiences of people living with TB, their families, their medical providers along the border, the social and environmental conditions that contribute to the development of the disease, and sharing the positive factors of the surroundings. These visits and interviews resulted in demonstrating the poor living conditions, limited ventilation, and limited access to health care facilities. The testimonies and photographs Schumann gathered became part of the mobile exhibit, which also contained personal items from individuals affected by TB who expressed their goal of sharing their experiences so that “other people not live through what they had suffered.”

As a public art exhibit, the Nuestra Casa project exposed the social realities and environmental conditions of TB. By creating an exhibit in the form of a “model-home” for TB, participants were able to learn from the stories and testimonies of people living with TB. These narratives had different themes, including stories of sadness, alienation, faith, resilience, and empowerment. The images and testimonies of people with TB also provided insights not easily accessible to the public, including images of the medications TB patients take, the physical deterioration TB has on the human body, and the items associated with the day to day management of TB treatments, such as face masks, gloves, syringes, and personal care items.

Nuestra Casa is a movable house mainly constructed out of wood and materials easily found in colonia communities. It is easily dismantled and can be transported in sections or panels. The entire exhibit collapses down for transportation in a small moving truck. It is assembled in a few hours, following the guide manual and video with complete instructions. The house consists of a living room, kitchen,

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Image of Nuestra Casa. Photo courtesy of Eva Moya. 2010.

bathroom, a hallway or Corridor of Hope (Camino de la Esperanza), and a small patio at the main entrance. In this setting, the life stories of persons affected by TB are presented in the forms of images, videos, and household items. Standing, its dimensions are approximately 33 x 23 feet and its height is 9.5 feet. For shipment, the disassembled panels and the furniture require three pallets of 8.5x5.7 feet and 6 feet in height. In addition, the tin roof panels are 3x13 feet.

USING A CLOTHESLINE TO ENGAGE PARTICIPANTS AND CAPTURE THEIR REFLECTIONS When Dr. Eva M. Moya first gathered her collaborators to introduce Damien Schuman’s Nuestra Casa to her colleagues at UTEP in 2009, the collaborating faculty discussed ways of engaging broader audiences in critical reflection. Through a creative and collective brainstorming session, Guillermina G. Núñez recommended the addition of a tendedero or a clothesline that would capture the exhibit’s visitors’ thoughts and opinions after walking through the exhibit. The goal was to engage the audience immediately after they had walked through the Casa and were exposed to the images, stories, and various “artifacts” providing messages of the devastating impacts of tuberculosis on the human body, on families, on children, on people with HIV, on caretakers, and other people most affected by

135 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 the disease. Moya suggested that remnants of white linen cloth left over from a previous project be used for the trapitos (pieces of cloth). One undergraduate student, Priscilla Portillo, printed out words in bold such as “hope,” “justice,” “disease knows no borders,” in laminated sheets added to the tendedero to highlight dominant themes represented in the exhibit’s participants’ responses. The trapitos were critical for capturing the emotional and cognitive elements of the exhibits’ visitors/participants. As one visitor from Oaxaca, Mexico noted, “Nuestra Casa me tocó el corazón. Me abrieron los ojos a esta enfermedad. Que bueno que vine a ver esto.” (Nuestra Casa touched my heart. You opened my eyes to the illness. So glad I came by to see it).

The participants of the Nuestra Casa exhibit were invited to provide their reflections on white pieces of linen cloth. The comments and reflections were collected at each Casa tour site in Mexico and the United States and were later coded as representative themes for each city. In Mexico, the Nuestra Casa exhibit was displayed in Cancun, Tijuana, Oaxaca, Reynosa, and,in the United States, the exhibit was displayed in El Paso, Texas and Atlanta, Georgia at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

NUESTRA CASA’S RETURN TO UTEP AFTER A BINATIONAL TOUR IN 2011-2012 In 2011, the Nuestra Casa exhibit was brought back to the Centennial Museum at UTEP by Dr. Eva M. Moya, with support from the director of the CDC Global Odyssey Museum. The Centennial Museum is located in a strategic location on campus at the corner of a heavily transited intersection, leading to the Undergraduate Learning Center and the university’s library. Students were asked to help conduct content analysis in the 2011 fall academic semester, and in January 2012, Damien Schumman, Dr. Eva M. Moya, the staff at the museum, and volunteers mounted the Nuestra Casa exhibit at the Centennial Museum. The exhibit was on display from January 17th to December 21, 2012. The return of the exhibit was significant in helping to reignite the community’s interest and engagement in Tuberculosis awareness and public health education efforts. The exhibit of a shantytownstyle home located inside the gallery was an eye-opening experience for more than 25,000 annual visitors. The

136 Public Art, Service-Learning, and Critical Reflection | Eva M. Moya & Guillermina G. Núñez

Image of trapitos on the tendedero (exhibit participants’ reflections on the clothesline), courtesy of Eva Moya. Note bold typed messages on the tendedero contributed by Priscilla Portillo, UTEP undergraduate student, 2009.

exhibit housed images and video testimonies of people struggling to survive TB while living in impoverished conditions. Counters at the entrance of the exhibit and sign in sheets were used to keep track of the number of visitors at the museum. As former Centennial Museum director, Dr. Bill Wood, indicated, “Thousands of people

Inside of the Nuestra Casa. Photos by Damien Schumann, artist and creator of the exhibit, 2009.

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The Nuestra Casa exhibit and the trapitos as tools for reflection and community/participant engagement at UTEP. 2009. The Nuestra Casa photo on left was taken by UTEP Communications office and the trapitos photo on the right was taken by Eva M. Moya.

learned about the continuing problem of TB and the social stigma that people with TB suffer by visiting UTEP, walking through the doors of the Centennial, and looking at the exhibition” (Velarde 2012). As one anonymous Spanish speaking exhibit participant noted, “La comunicación es importante. Por miedo a preguntar hay muchas personas que mueren. Muchas felicidades por darnos a conocer a cerca de TB” (Communication is important. Due to the fear of asking, many people die. Congratulations for letting us know about TB).

Traditionally, museums are places where artifacts are on display behind cases that limit the visitors’ interactions. The exhibit allowed for the creation of a space that brought members of the community together to learn about, confront, and deal with difficult issues. The Nuestra Casa exhibit went beyond the confines of the museum and engaged individuals in the community and across the globe, thanks to the power of electronic and print media, social networking, and community engagement (Valdez 2013). Social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have allowed people to share images and provide feedback on the exhibit. The project’s website, NuestraCasaInitiative.net, continues to provide a constant source of information, where visitors can find a brief history of Nuestra Casa, a photo gallery, and a call to action after the exhibit’s conclusion. The

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Nuestra Casa Initiative videos that were produced by Diego Davila, a senior digital production major from UTEP, has received more than 500 views, while the Nuestra Casa Youtube video describing the initiative’s development by artist Damian Schumann, has more than 900 views. Other online media outlets such as RioGrandeDigital.com and www.comminit.com/democracy-governance featured stories about the exhibit’s efforts to educate the public about TB. UTEP’s student newspaper, The Prospector, published stories about Nuestra Casa in its print and online edition on Blip.tv (see Watts 2012). The report included reactions from UTEP students, including Jesus Sambrano, who credits Nuestra Casa with creating awareness about TB as a disease that is associated with developing nations and not as prevalent in the United States.

The various communication channels used in Nuestra Casa helped reach a broader audience than many academic journal articles and books. The multiple forms of communication which included stories, press releases, and media tips on the UTEP website about the project have received more than 10,000 hits. The story, New Museum Exhibit Touches on TB, is one of the most popular searched articles on UTEPNews.com, the University’s official news feed. News stations KFOX 14, KINT 26 and Telemundo interviewed the project’s organizers and ran stories that reached audiences on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The community impact of the Nuestra Casa exhibit also went beyond the University of Texas, El Paso’s Centennial Museum as a “mini” version of Nuestra Casa and was displayed at the Mexican Consulate General of Mexico in El Paso for three weeks and was seen by hundreds of visitors. The exhibit was also part of the 25th International AIDS Candlelight Memorial Vigil, which received attention from local media, including the El Paso Times. The Casa’s visit to the Mexican Consulate in El Paso was critical in developing a partnership between the Consulate and UTEP, who is now co- sponsoring the Ventanillas de Salud (Windows to Health), an effort that places a health promoter within the Consulate to inform and engage Mexicans living in the El Paso del Norte border region.

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THE A,B,C,’S 1, 2, 3 OF CRITICAL REFLECTION AND ACTION THROUGH TRAPITOS The Nuestra Casa became a service-learning opportunity for students enrolled in Guillermina Núñez’s and Eva M. Moya’s courses and students enrolled in other courses who sought service-learning opportunities. As a faculty collaborator to this project, Núñez provided training on qualitiative coding and critical reflection. Students were instructed in identifying key themes throughout the analysis of 840 pieces of cloth (trapitos) with museum participants’ comments and reflections written on them. As Sheila Droustas, an undergraduate student who did her service-learning on this project, indicated:

I was assigned to team Atlanta with Jesus Z and Veleria M. Each team was given a city with which to work. Each city had a different number of inspirational quotes. These phrases were transferred to a jump drive by a member of the Nuestra Casa team. The information on the jump drive had approximately three hundred quoted responses from the Atlanta, Georgia exhibition of Nuestra Casa. We read all of them and organized them by themes. The nine themes we found from Atlanta were: Awareness, Call for Social Justice, Call for Social Action, Advocacy, Cultural or Social Connection, Sympathy, Fear, and Love. We thought these were worthy of being hung in the UTEP Centennial Museum at the new Nuestra Casa exhibition. There were three people in our group, and we each picked twenty-two quotes. We had a total of four hundred and thirty-two trapitos with fifty four strings each with eight quotes or trapitos on them. We also looked up data on the city of Atlanta, Georgia. Josias C. is one of the other students working on this project. He put together a Casapedia. For each of the cities that the traveling exhibit visted, he put facts on the city together. We accessed the Casapedia through a link they gave us. We analyzed what we knew about Atlanta and we did research on our own as well. This research was incorporated into our final papers.

Student groups were divided to work on organizing and coding the trapitos collected from participants who had walked through the exhibit at the various locations inidicated earlier. They were to examine the

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trapitos in the form of “notes from the field” to then organize and quantify repeated themes using qualitative codes (Murchison 2010; Wolfer 2007). The goal was to examine the responses elicited from Nuestra Casa participants from the six locations the exhibit had travelled to and then to present the key themes or “findings” in a smaller version of the original exhibit inside UTEP’s Centennial Museum. The quotes were significant indicators of how people responded to Tuberculosis and to images and messages expressed within the exhibit. One exhibit visitor/participant noted,”I am now rethinking my career path so that I can do research to contribute to the efforts to combat TB. Also, I want to go abroad so that I can actively help out” (anonymous reflection written on a trapito during the Nuestra Casa exhibit in Atlanta, Georgia.)

Núñez also instructed students on the A,B,C’s 1, 2, 3’s of critical reflection as proposed by Welch (1999), which involves reflection on affect or emotions, behaviors, and cognition about self, community, and society at large. As students were reading and organizing the trapitos with the participants’ responses and reflections on Nuestra Casa, they were asked to reflect on the most compelling quotes written and images drawn by the participants at the six locations (for additional details on the applications of the A, B, C,’s 1, 2, 3’s of critical reflection in service-learning, see Núñez 2012). The students’ reflections were continuously and reiteratively incorporated throughout the mounting of the exhibit in the Centennial Museum in 2011. This reciprocal engagement of students, faculty, staff, and community partners with the materials generated by visitors from the various locations motivated students to want to know more about Tuberculosis and the communities where this disease is more likely to spread. In their analyses, participating students and faculty reflected on the vulnerability and the inequities that impact low- income colonia residents. One key observation students discussed is that colonia residents living on the outskirts of cities in non-metro areas are less likely to have access to health care (see Berdhal et. al 2007 for a discussion of Tuberculosis exposure and barriers to health care impacting Latino communities in non-metro areas).

The impact of Nuestra Casa Initiative on the exhibit’s participants and collaborators was visible in the critical reflection and analysis done

141 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 of the trapitos. In September of 2011, Nuñez facilitated a training workshop to teach students how to qualitatively code trapitos. Students were divided into teams and each team was assigned a location in which the exhibit had previously travelled to. Students were asked to list and quantify the quotes and key themes represented in the trapitos, to then select a representative sample to help mount the next step of the Nuestra Casa Museum exhibit at UT El Paso’s Centennial Museum. After coding the trapitos, the team of student researchers worked with Eva Moya, Damien Schumann, and museum staff members to mount the Nuestra Casa Museum Exhibit for the spring of 2012.

The museum exhibit included a sample of trapitos from various locations where Nuestra Casa had been exhibited. These representative samples were organized and mounted on long pieces of cloth in the form of long strips. These strips were organized to create a “forest” of strips to represent trees or vines hanging from the ceiling — each representing a sample of common themes, quotes, and images. These hanging strips of clothes were at times overwhelming to go through, read, and digest. They were part of the path to Nuestra Casa and were meant to be a visual invitation and challenge to audiences to engage in the issue of Tuberculosis awareness. As UTEP undergraduate student, Mario Loya indicated:

I noticed in how the exhibit was spaced and distributed, the strings (trapitos) hanging from the ceiling that described people’s stories and inspirational words about the exhibit. The way in which these strips were placed created a sense of protection to the exhibit that was located behind it (the house replica of a person with tuberculosis). It seemed that the strings of trapitos worked as a defense mechanism that one is encountered with almost instantly when entering the exhibit. One enters into a world of protection, without first knowing what the exhibit is all about. This tells a lot of people who have entered the exhibit beforehand, for it tells that there exists compassion and the will to improve and help these victims of tuberculosis (2012 personal communication on file with authors).

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Materials on TB were also available in the form of handouts to provide visitors with additional information on the disease. For example, one of the handouts was cut in the form of a lung, and had information in Spanish and English about how to prevent TB. These various materials were evidence of the project’s organizers’ efforts to employ multiple forms of communication to engage people of various literacy, educational, and linguistic backgrounds.

Common themes expressed in the trapitos by the exhibit’s participants included outrage towards social-economic injustices impacting health, the need for more education/awareness, empathy towards people living with TB, and a heightened sensitivity to the physical and social stigmas and repercussions of living with TB. Some of the most powerful quotes came from people who had lived in similar conditions in poverty, right across from UTEP in Ciudad Juarez. One trapito read, “This is a similar house to the one I grew up in right across the border.” Another one read, “My tia (aunt) lives in a house much like this one; it’s hard to believe the similarities.” The trapitos helped capture evidence of compassion and empathy that spoke to the faith and motivation participants felt as they went through the exhibit. Expressions of faith and motivation, such as “Que Dios los ayude y los bendiga” (God help you and bless you), and “Know you are not alone, your strength and determination act as inspiration to others.” Many comments expressed outrage that this disease is still impacting the poor and the most vulnerable. One of the most poignant messages on a trapito read: “It is not until someone in Congress gets TB that people will begin to care about this disease.” The trapitos became a sounding board for people of various professions and life experiences from health professionals, university students, farm workers, health promoters, and school-age children.

Visitors to the museum and collaborators who participated in the Nuestra Casa exhibit engaged in dialogues about the role of education, public health, advocacy, self-care/human agency, access to care, social inequities in health care, the role of poverty, awareness of risks, hope/ faith-shared empathy, expressions of sympathy and well-being, and encouragement (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJTyOry- KSI for a short video of Nuestra Casa participants, organizers, students, and survivors). Participants expressed wanting to learn

143 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 more about TB and wanting to take precautions to avoid being exposed to TB. Some discussed specific behaviors and recommended steps to prevent TB such as hand washing, covering one’s mouth when coughing using an arm and not hands, and informing others about TB. As part of the exhibit, participants were also invited to fill out postcards as personal commitments of personal action, commitment, and willingness to participate healthy practices (e.g. covering mouths, seeking medical care, etc.). The relationships that were developed through this effort contribute to what Cella, Rivera, and Rinaldo (2011) refer to “a tactical orientation” that is “grounded in hope as a critical, active, dialectical engagement” that is “composed of many voices” (p. 3). The museum became a critical space for community engagement and critical reflection, and for deliberating future actions on a personal, familial, community, regional, and binational level for the students, faculty, staff, and people living with TB, public health officials, and many others involved.

CONCLUDING REMARKS AND FUTURE RESEARCH EFFORTS The need to explore multiple forms of venues, literacies, and forms of public engagement is critical for bringing about public health education and ultimately structural social change. Participants reflected on the presence of the exhibit as a critical component to change. As one visitor/participant noted, “The spirit of change starts with your presence here at Nuestra Casa” (Anonymous participant at the Union International Conference on Tuberculosis and Lung Health, Cancun Mexico, 2009). As Singhal notes, “Nuestra Casa is one of the finest examples of how a university connects with a community on an important public health issue and does so with the engagement of the students, faculty, and with aesthetic sensibilities and curating performativity,” (as quoted in Velarde 2012). Accompanying the exhibit were education, research, policy and service activities in support of the Nuestra Casa Initiative, which garnered the support and collaboration of students, faculty, TB survivors, and other members of the community interested in issues of health and social justice. The initiative also garnished significant attention from the media and the off-campus community and has received a regional award and a national award nomination at the time of this publication.

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Future research efforts that involve interdisciplinary teams bring out the various forms of research and communication assets that can be applied to reach broader and more specific audiences. Although as academics, we are well aware of the benefits of publishing academic products such as books and journal articles, the reality is that the majority of the people we wish to engage does not have access to these materials. This is as Eva Moya often indicates, “a call to action to invite others to become uncomfortable,” in seeing misunderstood, stigmatized, and shadowed populations currently living with TB and HIV. These vulnerable populations are most often impacted by structural inequities and poverty that can be mediated when we create awareness and public responses to health disparities.

To engage the public in issues pertaining to public health, socially stigmatizing diseases, and social inequalities, scholars are required to think and act beyond traditional forms of communications most often associated with academic-knowledge production venues such as journal articles and books. This project has taken a public health concern such as Tuberculosis, which has been traditionally associated with “developing countries,” and has exposed the social and ecological realities of this disease to people in various formats, languages, and images, reaching multiple audiences of various literacy levels and areas of expertise. This effort is a testament that museums, community settings, and diplomatic settings such as consulate offices, can develop opportunities to open up to and engage populations previously ignored and underserved. This initiative also placed TB and the persons affected by TB in public forums, on political and social agendas, and as a priority health concern. This exposure of Tuberculosis information created sensitivity and a heightened level of awareness among participants and research collaborators that did not previously exist in the El Paso del Norte border region. Nuestra Casa is an example of what can be done when public health, art, communication, the social sciences, education, and communities come together to bring about social justice and social change. Future researchers are invited to consider exposing other socially stigmatizing and taboo health issues and concerns through engaging and reflective art exhibits that make use of multiple channels of communication, such as photography, video, fabric, and other forms of graphic arts to reach audiences of multiple language and literacy levels.

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Eva M. Moya is a native of the U.S.-Mexico border. Eva, (Ph.D. University of Texas at El Paso, 2010) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Work at the University of Texas at El Paso. A specialist in U.S.-Mexico and border health, she has more than 30 years of professional experience in the border region. Dr. Moya has published a number of papers on health disparities and infectious diseases in México and the U.S.-Mexico Border Region. She is the co-editor and co-author of the Social Justice in the U.S.-Mexico Border book (2012). Her expertise includes border health; tuberculosis and stigma, HIV/AIDS, Photovoice, intimate partner violence, sexual and reproductive health, and community health workers. Eva conducted studies throughout the world during her tenure as a Kellogg National Leadership Fellow.

Dr. Guillermina G. Núñez-Mchiri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at UT El Paso, where she teaches courses in cultural anthropology, urbanization, food and culture, and applying anthropology via engaged research projects in the community. She is originally from Salinas, California and grew up as child of migrant farm workers crossing borders between the U.S. southwest and Mexico. She received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Riverside in 2006. Dr. Núñez-Mchiri was the recipient of the 2012 University of Texas Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award. In 2013, she became the Provost’s Faculty Fellow for Civic Engagement at UTEP and a Faculty Fellow for Innovation and Change for the Southern Education Foundation.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We wish to thank the number of people and organizations who have made the Nuestra Casa Exhibit and initiative possible. Initiative Partners and Planning Team: Dr. Silvia Chávez Baray, Diocesan Migrant & Refugee Services, UTEP’s Department of Social Work, Dr. Lucia Durá, Department of English and the Social Justice Initiative, Azuri Gonzalez and Jennifer Rodriguez, Center for Civic Engagement Director, Dr. Eva M. Moya, Department of Social Work and Project Concern International, Dr. Guillermina “Gina” Nuñez-Mchiri, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Raquel del Consuelo Orduño, TB Photovoice, Damien Schuman, Artist, Designer & Photographer, Dr. Arvind Singhal, Department of Communication and the Social Justice Initiative, Rocio Sarahi Solis, Center for Civic Engagement, Dr. William “Bill” Wood, Centennial Museum and Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Kaye Mullins, Centennial Museum, Dr. Kathleen Curtis, College of Health Sciences and Dr. Diana Natalicio, UTEP President and sponsor.

Student Leaders: Michelle Alvarado, Enrique Botello, Josias Castorena, Patricia Odette Carrete, Diego Dávila, Sheila P. Droustas, Erick Fontanez, Karla Luján, Raquel del Consuelo Orduño, Rocio Sarahi Solis, Crystal Ulibarri, Jesus Zambrano, Efren Solorzano, Marcela Verona, Lorelie Moya, Leah Diaz, Eurydice Saucedo, Centennial Museum photographer, Laura Marquez, Guadalupe Marquez, Valeria Mendoza.

Community Partners: Alliance of Border Collaboratives (ABC), Project Concert International (PCI), - USAID Mexico, Mexican Consulate in El Paso, TB Photovoice, Solución TB (Strengthening Observe Therapy) Linking Up Community-Based Integrated Outreach Networks for TB Control), Programa Nacional de Tuberculosis Secretaria de Salud (CENAVECE), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Global Odyssey Museum, RESULTS International, Heartland National TB Center, City of El Paso Department of Health, International AIDS Empowerment, Centro Sin Fronteras, Pan American Health Organization, and Texas State Department of Health and Human Services.

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VIDEOS TO LINK TO THE JOURNAL’S WEBSITE:

Nuestra Casa Project (Updated in 2013). http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=HJTyOry-KSI. Produced by Diego Davila and Dr. Eva Moya.

Nuestra Casa Initiative. Youtube video produced by Diego Davila, UT El Paso. Uploaded January 13, 2012. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=JGm8hfH4Nbc

Nuestra Casa. Tuberculosis Advocacy. Uploaded November 14, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddguIAKNBDs

Union World Conference 2009: Nuestra Casa. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=VZ8cKc1I__Y

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REFERENCES

Berdahl, T. A., Kirby, J. B., & Torres Stone, R. A. (2007). Access to health care for nonmetro and metro Latinos of Mexican origin in the United States. Medical Care. 45(7), 647-654. Cella, L., Rivers, N., & Rinaldo, M. (2011). Re-assessing sustainability: Leveraging marginal power for service-learning programs. Reflections. 10 (1), 1-22. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2001). Preventing and controlling tuberculosis along the U.S.-Mexico border: Work group report. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, 50(RR1), 1-12. Web. Accessed September 5, 2009. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr Centers for Disease control and Prevention (CDC). (2010). Retrieved October 26, 2010, from CDC Tuberculosis Statistics: http://www.cdc.gov.tb/report.htm Davila, D. Mi Casa es Tu Casa: The Nuestra Casa Experience. (2011). Final paper on service-learning experience for introduction to cultural anthropology. Unpublished document on file with authors. El Paso, TX. Droustas, S. (2012). Our House: A Place of Inspiration and Hope. (2012). Final service-learning/co-curator report for Anthropology 3358: Ethnographic Methods. Unpublished manuscript. El Paso, TX. Finch, B.,H., Robert A., Kol, B., & Kolody, B. (2001). The role of discrimination and acculturative stress in the physical health of Mexican-origin adults.” Social Sciences and Medicine. (23), 399- 429. Print Harrington, M., Morgan, S., & Syed, J. (2011). Tuberculosis research and development. Stop TB Partnership, TB/HIV Project. New York: Treatment Action Group. Print. Loya, M. (2012). Reflections of the Nuestra Casa Exhibit. Anthropology 3358: Ethnographic Methods. Personal communication on file with authors. Moya, E. M. (2009). Nuestra Casa handout on the origins of the exhibit.. Moya, E.M., et.al . (2013). U.S.-Mexico Border (La Frontera): Challenges and opportunities in rural and border health. In Charlene A. Winters, PhD, APRN, ACNS,-BC (Ed.), Rural

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Nursing: Concepts, Theory and Practice (4th ed.). Springer Publishing. Moya, E.M., Loza, O., & Lusk, M. W. (2012). Border health: Health inequities, social determinants and the case of Tuberculosis and HIV. Social Justice in the US Mexico Border Region. Netherlands: Springer Science. Print. Murchison, J.M. (2010). Ethnography essentials: Designing, conducting, and presenting your research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Nuestra Casa-Tuberculosis Advocacy. Youtube Video: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddguIAKNBDs. Nunez, G. G. (2012). Writing while participating: Incorporating ethnography in service-learning across the curriculum. In I. Baca (Ed.), Service-learning and writing: Paving the way for literacy (ies) through community engagement. (83-105). Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Nunez, G. (2012). Housing, colonias and social justice in the US Mexico border region. In M. Lusk & E.Moya (Eds.), Social justice in the U.S. - Mexico border region. (109-125). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer Science. Nunez, G. G. & Klamminger, G. (2010). Centering the Margins: The Transformation of Community in Colonias on the U.S.-Mexico Border. In K.Staudt, C.M. Fuentes, & J.E. Monarrez Fragoso (Eds.), The Paso del Norte metropolitan region: Global inequalities, cities, and citizens at the Mexico-U.S. Border. (147-172). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Redstone A., I. (2009). Health service utilization among immigrants to the United States. Population Research and Policy Review. 28 (6), 795-815. Singer, M. & Baer, H. (2012). Introducing medical anthropology: A discipline in action. 2nd. Ed. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Tuberculosis Statistics: http://wwww.cdc.gov.tb/statistics/tables. htm Valdez, D.W. (2013, July 5). UTEP Professor leads vorder TB awareness campaign. In El Paso Times. http://www. elpasotimes.com/news/ci_23602439/professor-leads-border-tb- awareness-campaign. El Paso Times. Accessed July 27, 2013. Velarde, J. (2012, Jan. 10). New museum exhibit touches on TB.” Utepnews.com. http://newsuc.utep.edu/index.php/news- latest/114-new-museum-exhibit-touches-on-tb

150 Public Art, Service-Learning, and Critical Reflection | Eva M. Moya & Guillermina G. Núñez

Watts, A. (2012, Feb. 6). Nuestra Casa’photos bring stories alive. The Prospector. Updated, Friday, May 17, 2012. Accessed at http://www.utepprospector.com/nuestra-casa-photos-bring- stories-alive-1.2768638 Accessed September 10, 2013. Welch, M. (1999). The ABCs of reflection: A template for students and instructors to implement written reflection in service- learning.” NSEE Quarterly, 25(2), 23-25. WHO. (2012). “World Health Organization’s 2012 Report on Global Tuberculosis Control.” Retrieved August 6, 2013, from World Health Organization: http://www.who.int/tb/publications/ global_report/en/ Wolfer, L. (2007). Real research: Conducting and evaluating research in the social sciences. Boston: Pearson.

151 Artwork by Dr. Adam Webb

Dr. Adam Webb, Coordinator of Online, When I draw, I focus on how people interact with one another Hybrid and Distance in some small yet meaningful way. I emphasize the negative Teaching at Arizona or white/empty space around the characters I draw and their State University environment. I do this not only to make the characters “stick out,” but also to help create a separate personality for the environment, such as the sky, trees, the sun, clouds, houses, and buildings. I use geometric shapes to emphasize how the characters in their environments are “perfect” in their own way. For instance, I use the circle to portray the idea of a generational connection and bond between the individuals within a family and circles of friends. I show not only spatial depth in my drawings but also emotional depth, such as by portraying the characters’ feelings for one another, the rituals they engage in and their attitudes. The shading techniques that I use help to compliment, add texture, and “color” the characters and their environment.

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154 Artwork by Dr. Adam Webb

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156 Artwork by Dr. Adam Webb

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Adam Webb was born in Corpus Christi, Texas. He earned his M.A. in Rhetoric and Composition from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in 2007. In May of 2013, Adam earned his Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Texas at El Paso.

158 The Power of Plática

Dr. Francisco Francisco and Miguel’s research agenda is centered in Guajardo, educational leadership and community development. University of Texas Pan Their work is interdisciplinary and is situated within the American intersectionalities of identity formation, race, class, gender, & Dr. Miguel Guajardo, plática and story. In operationalizing this work, Guajardo Texas State University in and Guajardo employ an epistemological construct congruent San Marcos with their research partners that challenges higher education to engage in research that privileges the lives of youth, elders, and the organic leaders from the community.

PLÁTICA AS ETYMOLOGY e haven’t shared a permanent residence in more than 30 years, Wsince we were kids growing up in the rural town of Elsa, a few miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. We’ve been teachers during most of that time, living hundreds of miles away, working in both K-12 and higher education institutions in rural and urban environments. We can draw discernable differences from our personal and career

159 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 trajectories, but there are mostly commonalities palpably tethered through an elongated plática we’ve been engaged in since we were very young. We talk daily, platicamos, on the phone; we travel to the same conferences; and we pursue similar research, service, and teaching agendas, all of which we develop together through plática. We tap plática as a chief modality for our work, because it makes sense to us culturally, politically, ontologically, and epistemologically. It is at the root of how we work and live our lives.

We learned plática—an expressive cultural form shaped by listening, inquiry, storytelling, and story making that is akin to a nuanced, multi-dimensional conversation—from our parents, Angel and Julia1. We find the formative learning moments in our childhood, as we recall being awakened through the stimulation of two important senses: one was the aroma of coffee, as Julia devotedly prepared the daily pot of coffee for herself and Angel; the other was the sound of their sweet mellifluous voices, as they engaged in their daily plática. Angel was a laborer: he dug ditches, plunged us into the migrant labor stream, worked at a sugar mill, and finally retired as an elementary school janitor. Julia stayed at home, raised four boys, and nurtured the neighborhood support system for us, and for other children. They conducted their business as a matrimonio, as parents, and as members of the community through plática; that’s what they modeled.

To be sure, our academic training has yielded good skills in forms that closely resemble plática; there are examples such as the Socratic method and critical conversations. Our socialization through plática shaped us differently, however, as cultural, historical, and political beings. The process wasn’t simply to help us understand how to think critically, how to ask the right question, or how to find the logic in an argument. Rather, it was to help us understand why we lived part of our childhood in the migrant labor stream, why we lived in federal housing for eight years before our parents bought a lot in a start up colonia on the outskirts of our rural hometown. Plática injected stories that made historical characters come to life. When engaged in plática, we learned you have to pay attention to the story, to the form of the story, to the environment surrounding the story; you have to pay attention to the question, to the form of the question, and to context. Plática helped us get to know our parents 1 In this text we use Papi and Mami interchangeable for Angel and Julia.

160 The Power of Plática | Dr. Francisco Guajardo & Dr. Miguel Guajardo well, ourselves well, and our neighbors well. We believe it was the best training for how to build healthy relationships, how to work well in the community, and how to work in higher education. We see plática as personal, relational, provocative, and dynamic. Plática poses opportunities to co-construct spaces and to explore important issues as we work on getting to know each other. The way our parents taught us, plática was not typically used to fix issues but to learn about them, as we learn about ourselves and about each other. Plática spaces are co-constructions, where conditions are manifest as collaborative and interdependent. Our parents showed some urgency about these conditions, because they were key to allow relationship to flourish, and trust to build within relationships. When the climate is created, plática brings relationships and issues to life.

PLÁTICA AS INQUIRY In our brand of research we use plática as a tool for collecting data; some data sets come as stories, as cuentos, or other narrative forms. Because plática requires a level of relationship building, we enter community in a way that honors community member stories, rather than through the classical approach of moving into a community to extract information. Our approach to inquiry is based on invitation first, followed by multiple one-one pláticas, then by small group pláticas. We find that pláticas beget other pláticas.

We recently organized an oral history project on living braceros— Mexican laborers who came to the United States as part of an international guest worker program between 1942 and 1964. Our father was the lead researcher on this project, as he taught college students how to find braceros that resided in communities across South Texas. He taught students that through plática they could gain leads to braceros. When students found the braceros, they were then taught to fashion oral histories through the use of plática. Faculty members, students, and elders engaged in more than 25 oral histories, or platicas, for this research project. We subsequently organized a conference to celebrate the life and legacies of these laborers, produced a documentary, published findings, and most importantly built relationships between college students and braceros.

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Our father was the quintessential community based researcher; he understood history, learned context, and knew how to make himself vulnerable enough to invite open and honest plática that yielded stories with depth. He did this by sharing his own stories, while he framed insightful questions that took plática to specific moments in history. Through this process, braceros shared many stories in public for the very first time. The plática method has been a powerful tool for a relational inquiry process.

PLÁTICA AS PEDAGOGY Our parents were at their best when they were teaching. They were our best teachers when we were kids, when we were in college, and they continued when we raised our own children. As master pedagogues, they had critical tools within reach. Mami would use the word of the lord, la biblia, as the text to inform the latest lessons; and in case this did not cover all experiences facing mankind. Papi would privilege the lessons he had faced en la universidad de la vida; in an autobiography he penned in 1988, Papi wrote about having been a student in the greatest university this world has to offer, La Universidad de la Vida.

It’s important to note that Mami never went to school, while she was raised in rural Tamaulipas, Mexico, and Papi went up to the 4th grade in a rural school in San Felipe, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. But their understanding of literacies through the Bible and through lived experiences shaped their curriculum and instructional approaches. These sources provided the materials for the next lesson. The constant pedagogical tool was the plática, which made sense to us at every level. Plática was performed in language we understood, through an expressive cultural form that felt natural, and in a way that was respectful and affirming. It was a teaching and learning experience that conferred great privilege to our lives, the lives of our children, our students, and our communities.

Plática becomes critical pedagogy when it yields action. The deliberations and lessons developed through plática emerge as new knowledge that informs the work we do as we engage in a process for community change. This can manifest itself in the form of

162 The Power of Plática | Dr. Francisco Guajardo & Dr. Miguel Guajardo curriculum development, community planning, or simply supporting students in preparing for college.

PLÁTICA FOR COMMUNITY BUILDING & DEVELOPMENT ¿De que te sirve la educación, mijo? As kids we were frequently prompted to reflect on the question: what is the use and utility of your education and development? As we have reflected on our years of learning, we have understood that la educación was much more than what we experienced in classrooms at the schoolhouse; to the contrary, much of our deepest learning took place around plática. The question of utility pushed us to the realization that there is a purpose for the knowledge being created and shared, the ideas being provoked, and the relationships that became products of the daily plática. These realizations place the question of “so what?” at the core of our development. The plática and its product become what inform the emergence of a community building and development framework that informs our service, teaching, and research agenda. The origin and purpose for our personal and professional work are apparent. Our parents laid the groundwork by modeling the importance of plática. It’s akin to a family heirloom, but this is an intensely functional heirloom, even transformational, as we employ it as a principal tool for how we lead our lives as brothers, husbands, fathers, teachers, and citizens.

In other contexts we might call it dialogue, conversation, or perhaps storytelling; all important modalities we also use. But in our Mexican American cultural and historical context we are much more drawn to plática. It makes more sense, feels more real, and speaks to us in ways that helps us build relationships and community more respectfully. We have used this practice to guide organizations, lead public information campaigns, shape school curriculum, and even push higher education institutions to behave more humanely. But the most important reason to use plática is to honor the memory of Papi, to help Mami live her life with the dignity she deserves, and to help our students and their families experience the same privilege we have been blessed to know.

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Francisco Guajardo is the third son of Doña Julia and Don Angel’s four sons. He teaches in the Department of Educational Leadership at the University of Texas Pan American.

Miguel A. Guajardo is the second of Doña Julia and Don Angel’s four sons. He teaches in the Education and Community Leadership Program at Texas State University in San Marcos.

164 Chicanas Making Change: Institutional Rhetoric and the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional

Kendall Leon, Portland State University This article draws on an archival case study of the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN). Building on my experience as an activist and working in communities and institutions, I argue that it is valuable to examine and translate the histories and practices of organizations like the CFMN to learn the rhetorical abilities we need to operate and make collective change as both part of and outside of publics and institutions. To make this argument, I analyze how Chicanas of the CFMN incited change by writing, theorizing, and making an identity through what might be considered mundane and programmatic writing.

t still always surprises me when I realize that things in my life that I thought Ihappened by pure coincidence in fact, had been building up to this moment and to this place. I am sure many of you can relate to those “aha” moments when your breath is literally suspended as you become aware that the path you have been on was always meant to lead you here. One time this happened was during my dissertation defense when I realized that perhaps I hadn’t been lost all along, and

165 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 that I had resisted giving up any piece of me in order to make this academic thing work. My dissertation braided together all of the pieces of me that on paper looked disconnected and centered on an archival case study of one of the first Chicana1 feminist organizations, the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN). As I had been involved with community and non-profit organizations, I wanted to focus on collectives. As someone who orients to the field through organizational writing, it was also important to me to expand where we turn to for evidence of theorizing and identity making. Through this research I was able to build from the ground up, a theory of a Chicana rhetoric and to extend the making of Chicana to programmatic writing and the building of an organization (Leon, Building a Chicana Rhetoric).

Another “aha” moment happened when I was interviewed by a writer from the newsletter for a people’s self-help type of housing program, which allowed low income people to purchase and build their own homes in their communities. To participate in the program, potential homeowners had to fall at or below 80% of the area’s median income level. For those of you not familiar with these types of programs, the way many of them work is that a group of prospective homeowners who meet the criteria are placed together in a group. The group then collectively builds their tract of homes. The homes are located near and often directly next to each other. I was being interviewed because this program is what allowed my Mom to build a house for my three siblings and I when I was five years old.

Our house was located in a racially diverse and socio economically depressed community, constituted largely by Hmong, Latina/o and African-American families. The neighborhood is located right in the center of the city. But, in a pretty obvious act of ghettoization, the city drew boundary lines around this area to exclude the neighborhood (and the poor and predominately brown skinned people in it) from receiving funds for things like sidewalks and access to other city services. Instead, we were considered “county,” despite the fact that

1 Throughout this article, I utilize “Chicana” when referencing the CFMN’s work in building an organization and an identity to better reflect their discourse and the context. I also use “Chicana” in relation to a “Chicana rhetoric” to remain consistent with the terminology I used in the work that I am referencing. Otherwise, I utilize Chican@ to queer its usage.

166 Chicanas Making Change | Kendall Leon we were smack dab in the middle. This neighborhood had its own name that included “town” in it so it really sounded and felt like it was a separate place: It was (and still is) known as “the bad area” to outsiders. I remember when my Mom let me play basketball in the fifth grade and when I participated in the GATE program, I had to bus to other schools because our neighborhood school didn’t have either. I was the only Latin@ from the “poor school.” Many of the kids who I became friends with in these programs at different schools were not allowed to come over to my house because of where I lived. Yet, to this day, this is the area that I feel at home and supported by the people around me. For many of us, our neighborhood and the people in it became extended family members, which was strengthened by the fact that some of the few owner occupied homes (like ours) were built as part of the people’s self-help program.

During that interview for that newsletter, I discussed how in building our houses together, we were building communities. This community building happened in part through the stories or what we might call pláticas, all of our families told together, as the adults struggled to complete the houses, while working one or more jobs, perhaps a single parent like my Mom, with kids scrambling around each other, watched by a rotating slew of older siblings. While I was answering the interview questions, it dawned on me that it was this experience that led me to my interests in working in and later studying collectives. The learning and the relationships that I remember from this place, this place that I turned to for support and protection, were about doing good for your community and peoples; in essence what scholars like Octavio Pimentel have identified as buena gente,. According to Pimentel, buena gente is a feeling of connectedness and a related “desire to put the needs of ‘others’ before oneself ” (174). The purpose of getting any kind of institutional education was not just about individual status but about how you could leverage what you learned or got access to for the greater good. And while I was still in my neighborhood, I did my best to uphold that part of the deal.

But, when by sheer luck (and really, in my case it was and that’s a whole other story!), I ended up in this other place—the university—I found myself constantly trying to reconcile what always felt like

167 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 disparate parts of who I was and what I was committed to. As Miguel and Franciso Guajardo point out in their writing on this schism, working in the university can further distance us from our home communities and our commitments to the public good. They ask of those who survive and remain in the institution: “what does one keep, what does one give up, what does one sacrifice, and how does one adjust in order to contribute to the public good?” (73). How do we maintain our responsibilities to our home communities while also meeting the expectations for us as academics? Within the university, we are often further limited by what we study and how the bodies we inhabit—and those of the theorists we cite. Just like the city drawing boundaries around the neighborhood I grew up in, we are living the same ghettoization and disjuncture in our field: communities cannot teach us about institutions; the theories of only some people are applicable to all; and if we identify ourselves as Rhetoric and Composition scholars of color, it necessarily means we are given the authority to write about and care about only certain topics or issues.

This is what I experienced in graduate school (what I still experience, several years later as a faculty member), trying to find mentors who get the different parts of me, trying to find out how to navigate this place and figuring out how to make my various commitments and interests mesh together and to make sense to others. This became even more difficult as I shifted my scholarly focus to writing program administration and professional writing. In doing so, I have experienced a disconnect between this interest and my commitment to Chicana rhetoric and Latin@ communities. For instance, as I looked at research on institutional rhetoric and writing program administration, I found little that reflected a commitment to Latin@ communities and rhetorics. When I have shared my research on the CFMN, especially with crowds of people who want me to talk about their poetic writing, their individual leaders, or their more explicitly “activist” performances; or when I have attempted to connect what I learned from their organization to being (materially and intellectually) in an institution and to writing program administration, I am often asked: what does archival research on a Chicana feminist organization have to do with this?

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And this leads me to another one of those “aha” moments. In talking about this organization with these different audiences, what I have come to realize is that this is the task for us who want to make change—to do the work of rhetorical translation and connectivity. This is precisely the type of ability that I was able to learn from the CFMN through their conscious decision to build an extensive and thorough archival collection so that as past CFMN president Eva Couvillion writes, “we all can refer to it when dark days loom large and we wonder why we are involved anyway” (CFMN’s “President’s Message”). In a letter to the past national presidents, Beatrice Olvera Stotzer also wrote of the value for future generations in establishing the CFMN archival collection: “This will in effect give historians a legitimate research mechanism which can be added to the data on the Chicana feminist movement. We can only speculate on the immense value of the information that Comision [sic] will contribute” (“Letter to Past Presidents”, 1).

What I want to share with you is an account of the CFMN doing just this type of work to make change, enacting an ability that we learn through stories to connect past and future, as well as community sites and institutions. I want to ground this account in a knowing and know how that is developed out of our material lives. Many scholars have described this grounded, strategic and connective practice. For instance, Chela Sandoval identifies this as “differential consciousness,” an ability to “read the current situation of power” and to choose how to respond in a way to push at, or transform the situation. According to Sandoval this is an ability that is “a survival skill well known to oppressed people” and enables coalition building (60). Similarly, Gloria Anzaldúa, describes “conocimiento” as a holistic process of inner and connective work that enables us to build bridges and make change (“now let us shift”). Finally, Delores Delgado Bernal names her “mujerista sensibility” as one that necessitates putting oneself in relation to others and maintaining “a commitment to social change.” As part of enacting a “mujerista vision,” one has to “cross borders, learn from history, place a priority on collectivity, take care of onself, and be committed to social transformation” (136). Regardless of what it has been called, it has been named. And it has been practiced, as evidenced in the CFMN’s building of a Chicana organization and its respective archival collection.

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Figure 1: Copy of a CFMN logo

Started with a series of resolutions drafted at the 1970 National Chicano Issues Conference in response to the Chicanas in attendance who felt their issues were being excluded from existent activist movements, the CFMN grew to become a leading collective in the Chicana movement. Figure 1 shows a copy of a CFMN logo that was used for brochures and other publications.

Although the CFMN is most known for their activist work protesting the forced sterilization of women of color2, and many of their leaders became well known as individual activists whose writings have been referenced and anthologized, much of their work was in fact programmatic and archival3. This work included documenting the 2 Their participation culminated in the landmark case Madrigal v. Quilligan in 1978 and this case has been written about in and outside of rhetoric studies (see for example, Enoch 2005). 3 It should be noted that the CFMN also included copious copies of writings by other collectives and individuals involved with the Chicana movement broadly, such as activists, academics, as well as policies and legislation that were pertinent to the movement and their communities. I write of these documents as part of the rhetoric of the CFMN as they chose to include them

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Figure 2: Copy of a Board of Director’s Flow Chart building of an organization and the making of a collective identity. As part of my commitment to making connections with histories, I think it is valuable to have a broader sense of how Chicanas have incited change by writing, theorizing, and making an identity. To understand how change occurs, I had to be able to look outside of what might be expected of me as a Chican@ scholar in Rhetoric and Composition—I looked away from the poetic writing and more public performances and instead, researched programmatic writing like the organizational flow chart in Figure 2. This writing was frequently mundane, and often looked like marginalia and small notations on the archival documents.

From my experience as an activist and working in communities and institutions, I know that change is often achieved through subtle shifts in behind-the-scenes practices that in order to be recognized require adopting different heuristics. I think this is especially true for Latin@s as we experience being constructed as non-actors in the

in their archival collection, and to reflect that this is at once a story about an organization as it is about making an oppositional identity and movement.

171 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 world of what we might label as “public rhetorics,” as if to denote that there is something inherently accessible about such spaces. In other words, for the CFMN, as well as for myself and other Chican@s in higher education, being Chican@ means we are faced with constructions of Latina/Mexican women as not rhetorical in these public and institutional spaces; our challenge is learning how to change this. In response, I argue that it is valuable to examine community-based groups and to listen to histories like the CFMN and Chicana rhetoric broadly, as a way to learn about the rhetorical abilities we need to operate as both part of and outside of publics and institutions.

In my previous writing about this organization, I have discussed two rhetorical practices that the CFMN adopted that reflected and built Chicanidad: La Hermandad (or Chicana sisterhood) and re- envisioning the past to instantiate a historically organizing Chicana (see Leon “La Hermandad”). In this article, I focus on a story told through the archival collection that centers on the CFMN and their affiliate organization, the Chicana Service Action Center (CSAC). This story traces their involvement with accessing and developing employment training for Chicanas, specifically with the California Employment and Training Act (CETA). I examine this story in two ways: first, in the moment as indicative of the ways that Chicanas responded to a historical absence of their experiences in employment training discourse; and second, as indicative of a strategy of action which demonstrates the movement of collective change as working slowly through the nuanced internal work of an organization that was often not visible as public a act.

“Spanish origin persons are included in the white population!” —CETA/Manpower and Employee Training Programs

..just recently, in looking, for example, at publications that the Employment Development of the State of California puts out, over 150 publications for this past year, only three or four had any kind of statistics relating to minorities period. And some of those didn’t even have statistics for minority females. I ask you, how can a job training program such as CETA, such as the Job Training Partnership Act be

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developed around the needs of these women when we don’t even know what they are. What are their characteristics? —Maria Rodriguez, MALDEF attorney and collaborator with the CFMN, Testimony before the California Legislature Senate Committee on Health and Welfare and Assembly Human Services Committee, “In the matter of: The feminization of poverty”

In the above epigraph, taken from a document in the CFMN files, Maria Rodriguez4 alludes to a vexing problem that Chicanas faced: a historical erasure of the experiences of minority women that manifested as a lack of statistical employment data. In turn, this altered the ontology of what “minority women” could be and do. To be more specific, as you will see in the following story of the CFMN’s involvement with employment training programs, this absence of statistical evidence of the experience of “minority women” resulted in a lack of federal funding for employee training programs for “minority women” because an exigency had yet to be established. The CFMN and their partner organizations existed to redress such absence in the public discourse on employment. These interventions took place though the invention of public issues, in debates about defining the problems at hand, and through strategic behind-the- scenes work that slowly redressed the physical absence of Chicanas in public spaces.

To tell the story about the CFMN’s involvement in employment training initiatives, I am going to set up three scenes for you5. Scene one provides some context, exigency if you will, for pursuing employment training as a Chicana organization. This scene relays

4 The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) worked with the CFMN to file the lawsuit against the forced sterilization of poor women of color during the 1970’s in Madrigal v Quilligan. 5 It should be noted that I have constructed this story based on the archival research only. Therefore, as with any story of history, this is constructed by the documents the CFMN included. Adopting the movement of Chicana rhetoric to work connectively, as part of my methodology, to construct each scene, I did not adhere to a strict linear chronology; instead I drew upon documents that were included in the collection and connected them thematically. This approach also better reflects the CFMN’s deliberate arrangement of their archival collection. Instead of a chronological organization, the CFMN elected to arrange the collection to mirror the structure and function of the organization (Guide to Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archives 1967-1997 ).

173 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 the way that being such an organization meant inventing the issue to begin with. Scene two also provides some context and it relays the “crisis” of this moment for the CFMN. In scene two I focus on a representative sample of texts and actions that are more public: the activist performances that are externally focused and attempt to respond to misconstructions of Chicana identity. Scene three follows a different story that happens at the same time as the first two scenes. While the CFMN forwarded a public strategy to address an issue, at the same time, they enacted a rhetorical knowing and practice that strategically addressed the source of the contention. This is the scene in which I see evidence of differential consciousness in action and to which I turn for a rhetorical education on how to be in institutions.

SCENE ONE: CHICANAS NEED EMPLOYMENT TRAINING—CREATING A PROBLEM AT HAND During the 1970’s, Chicana identity became more widely circulated; its emergence and circulation was a response to the realization that there was a lack of experiential stories told that had real consequences. At the same time, the country had a growing need for employment training programs, with a push to train workers in the skilled trades. Prior to the inception of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), the Department of Labor began collecting and distributing statistics on the employment needs of their populace. In their needs assessment report, Department of Labor’ s fine print noted “Hispanic populations are included in the white population” (as cited in Flores, “Speech”). As Maria Rodriguez pointed out in her testimony that I used to introduce this case study, the experiences of Hispanic populations, especially Latina women, were not being specified in the data collection and reporting on employment training programs. According to the CFMN, having their lives collapsed within a category of people who were not visibly or linguistically marked in the same way meant that their concerns were not seen as issues. As a result, no one recognized the need. The problem of the availability of jobs or barriers to securing jobs was not seen as a problem for Latinas because their experiences were not accounted for in data collection. Materially, without these statistics to identify a need, the CFMN was unable to obtain federal funding.

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Chicanas affiliated with the newly formed CFMN recognized a need to tell stories about accessing employment for their own communities. They knew they had to respond to a historical absence of numerical accounting in order to later redress the issues that they would reveal with their own community-specific data collection. In other words they needed to invent a problem that seemingly did not exist. The CFMN made the invention of this problem part of their organization’s mission, which in turn built a trajectory for the organization.

As such, the CFMN decided to conduct their own needs assessment that targeted Latina women. A lengthy questionnaire in the CFMN files dated April 11, 1972 included questions about children (when born and how many); about marital and employment status; formal education received; current childcare arrangement; if the respondent had dropped out of school and the reasons for this; past participation in a job training program and the success of this participation; and interests in receiving training and in what field (Mexican/Chicana women’s survey). Now these questions were strategic—they asked about their experiences accessing employment and being employed. They asked about their lives holistically—as women, as mothers, and as wage earners. From their needs assessment, they created two related physical centers that were affiliated with the CFMN: the Chicana Service Action Center (CSAC) and El Centro de Niños, a bilingual and bicultural childcare center. The Chicana Service Action Center, founded in 1972, is an organization located in Los Angeles.

In its earliest iteration, on paper the CSAC was a project of the CFMN. However, in its operation, it was, presumably, the CFMN (until it later split into a separate entity due to disagreements between staff and board members and the realization that the center would best exist on its own). Although it became a separate entity, a relationship persisted due to shared people and historically because the CSAC files are part of the CFMN archival collection6. 6 Because there is such a significant overlap and sharing of resources (including people) between the CSAC and the CFMN during this time period, it is difficult to distinguish boundaries between the organizations, and therefore, the locus of rhetorical action. In addition, the leaders appeared to intentionally elect to speak on behalf of one of organizations based on an awareness of ethos and audience. Whenever these boundaries are made clear, I will use the appropriate organizational attribution; however, when the

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Figure 3: Copy of a Chicana Service Action Center flyer

As a result of building these two centers, the CFMN was able to talk to the clients these two centers served. They listened to women relay stories about prevalent assumptions that were effecting members of their communities to obtain employment. One was that the model utilized by available employment training services, which were presumably accessible to all, were really geared toward Anglos and more frequently, Anglo men. For example, when accessing employee training, women in their community were being referred to secretarial and office work—which posed a problem for some monolingual and/ or bilingual women as it relied on particular language use and on unspoken cultural norms about office behavior.

boundaries are not made clear I will use CSAC as the identifier when it is clear that the physical employment-training center is being discussed; everything else will be identified as the CFMN.

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Further, the only apprenticeship training programs that paid apprentices were in the skilled trades—carpentry, plumbing and so forth. As former CSAC director Francisca Flores pointed out in a later letter to an Edna Olivia, a research associate at the University of Texas, the clients they worked with at the CSAC were unable to access the apprenticeship programs that were federally or state funded. Flores wrote, “these programs are restrictive and ‘controlled’ by the employers hiring the persons (men or women) that are eligible to be trained by the unions in the various industries. It cannot honestly be said that the unions are waiting breathlessly to receive women into the various crafts” (1). In this same letter, she shared some startling statistics on women in the Department of Labor sponsored programs: “Total number of women in California Apprenticeship Program as of January 1980 is 4.1%. Hispanic and Black women, each group, constitute .004%. Total number of minority women in this program are .008+%! (2 of 3)7.

Accessing these apprenticeships was proving to be impossible for women in general. This was compounded by the fact that Latina women needed paid employment training. However, this was not even considered an issue because of the stereotypical construction of Latina women. As CFMN representatives pointed out in their publication “Chicanas and the Labor Force,” in spite of the construction of Latina women as submissive housewives supported (and controlled) by Machismo husbands, many of the women they saw were single heads of household. In their monitoring in CETA’s administration and implementation, the Chicana Rights Project of MALDEF filed an administrative complaint against the city of San Antonio on the basis that the city failed to equally include Mexican American women in their programs (Hernández)8. The design of CETA intake forms that disallowed women from selecting “head of household” was one

7 Although almost a decade after the CFMN and the CSAC began working to address employment issues, I think the numbers are telling. Flores also must find the statistics to be shocking, as evidenced by the exclamation mark. We can only surmise how much lower the numbers would have been in the early 1970’s. 8 This case resulted in an increase of minorities and women in San Antonio’s CETA programs. See also the Chicana Rights Project’s summary CETA: Services to Hispamics and Women for more information on the impact of CETA on Mexican American women, as well as on their participation in the program.

177 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 way that women were not adequately represented in the program participation data. Just as the Department of Labor data collection enveloped the Hispanic population into the White population, intake forms used in employment training programs concealed a reality that women, and more precisely minority women, faced as they sought employment9.

To combat this problem, the CSAC and CFMN shifted an invisible issue in institutional discourse on employment into existence through statistics. These findings were also presented by Yolanda Nava to the California Commission on the Status of Women in “The Chicana and Employment: Needs Analysis and Recommendation for Legislation.” In this document, Nava identified a disjuncture between a reductive stereotype and construction of Latina women and the reality that many Latina women were working outside of the home. The CFMN and the CSAC as organizations were being built around the contention that, first, employment statistics did not include information on women and minorities (let alone minority women); second, that training programs did not make available “non traditional” jobs to women in general that would allow for large number of Latina women who were heads of household to support themselves on one wage; and, third, that training programs geared toward women did not factor in language, cultural differences, or expectations in workplace settings10. In response, then, the CFMN 9 In her later “Testimony at a Department of Industrial Relations Fair Employment Practice Commission” Francisca Flores responded to guidelines the Department intended to implement to remedy sex discrimination. Flores argued that the guidelines did not address the institutional myopia on employment as only about labor. Rather, she states, it “begins at the institutional level” in a failure to educate bicultural children (1). 10 It is important to note that the CFMN/CSAC also explained the difference between an Anglo feminist approach to employment counseling, and that developed by and for Chicanas. In “Employment Counseling and the Chicana,” CFMN leader Yolanda Nava outlined this difference. She explained that the CSAC built transitional steps for employment training (i.e. place in small offices where Spanish is spoken), and addressed other issues like family planning. One example was mothers of some of the young women they worked with indicated to the CSAC staff that they were not comfortable talking about family planning but said they were fine with the CSAC employment counselors discussing it with their daughters as long as they were able to “use discretion.” In other words, employment training for Chicanas was much more expansively addressed by the CSAC (Encuentro Femenil)

178 Chicanas Making Change | Kendall Leon created a public problem through their data collection and by writing about these research findings in various reports. As a result, they garnered the ability to argue for federal funding.

SCENE TWO: ENTER THE COMPREHENSIVE EMPLOYMENT AND TRAINING ACT (CETA) OR, NOW WE HAVE A DIFFERENT PROBLEM The CFMN, then, effectively created a public problem: that Latinas were employed outside of the home and needed to access employee training programs. However, the problem at hand shifted. In 1973, the Federal government passed the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act to provide funds for employment training programs as well as job opportunities in the public sector. The implementation of the CETA Act opened up the ability to have a discussion about employment training and created available funding for collecting statistics more broadly. The CFMN acted on this exigency by submitting a request for funding for a special survey of female, Spanish speaking participants in programs authorized under CETA. On the back of a letter in response to their request, a CFMN member left a record of their research and action plan: “1. get L.A. statistics on monolingual women who work in L.A./on welfare/heads of households 2. on some groups who have limited English who need ESL 3. U.S. school young women—poor language skills/to identify/ outreach/recruit/refer/and/or/train—one year/place on job” (Note on back of letter to Pierce Quinlan, re: Reply).

Using this research and action plan, the CSAC secured Department of Labor contract #4047-06. One purpose of the contract was to collect statistics on female, Spanish-speaking participants in CETA funded programs administered by the Manpower project11. The CSAC and CFMN shared these statistics in multiple texts such as booklets, presentations making recommendations at legislative hearings, and the well-known and reprinted presentation: “The Needs of the Spanish Speaking Mujer in Woman-Manpower Training Programs.” Anna Nieto Gomez delivered a version of this report as a presentation at a Manpower symposium. Gomez began her presentation of this report by stating that the initiative was brought by women attending the Manpower seminar, in response to the fact that the “federal 11 The Manpower project was an employment staffing and job training provider that received federal CETA funding in the 1970’s.

179 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 programs are only sensitive to minority groups or to women, it was felt that the needs and issues of Spanish speaking women have not been addressed” (1). If women are addressed, Gomez claimed, it was only along a white/black breakdown, without considerations for other minority women. Accordingly, Gomez called for further research to study the “socioeconomic factors related to the Spanish Speaking women in the labor market” and to develop effective policy that included utilizing community resources (1). Gomez pointed out that many of the training programs developed by Manpower required little English speaking abilities, such as in the skilled trades. As such, Gomez posited that it would make sense to create bilingual and bicultural curriculum to train women in traditional and non- traditional jobs for women, since, given their statistics, there was a “heavy concentration of Spanish speaking women” in “low-paying traditional jobs” that require little or no English speaking language abilities (2).

What Gomez subtly made apparent was the interesting “logic” of the Manpower training programs. If most of the programs did not require English-speaking abilities, then why did they not use bilingual trainers? Also, the jobs that these women were able to access were interestingly paid a lot less than the traditionally male jobs that required similar English speaking abilities. Thusly, Gomez argued, it would behoove the Manpower project—a project dedicated to providing employment training for everyone to improve their lives— “to train and/or upgrade monolingual women into both traditional and non-traditional jobs for women” (2).

In addition to distributing statistics and recommendations to government agencies, another purpose of the CFMN’s Department of Labor contract was to recruit women to participate in a pilot program “through personal contacts, clients who came in [and] referred neighbors” and by using connections with other community organizations and Spanish-oriented media (Department of Labor Contract). As described in her presentation to the Manpower project, the pilot program would create “bilingual/bicultural Spanish speaking, self-development program designed to increase positive attitudes towards women in the labor force and to also expose myths of working women as well as identify the socio-economic importance of women’s

180 Chicanas Making Change | Kendall Leon roles in society” (Gomez 3). This program would approach employment training for Chicanas holistically, meaning that they would include, among other things, a staff of bilingual trainers, access to bicultural child care, vocational training in the trades, communication skills development, and counseling for families and co-workers to facilitate their understanding of the “cultural and economic work patterns of the Spanish Speaking woman” (Gomez 6).

Using the data from their own research and the recommendations they made to the Manpower project, the CSAC ran a pilot program in which they provided culturally appropriate training to meet the needs of Chicanas. The results of their pilot program was that 46% of the women they worked with were placed; 18% were pending placement in jobs or training programs; 9% were referred to agencies; 19% of the cases were closed, and 8% were still pending (MAPC proposal). The CSAC sent the evaluation of their pilot program and the statistics that established the success rates of their program to the local Manpower Area Planning Council along with a request for funding through the CETA ACT to have culturally appropriate trainers given the identified need. In the proposal, the CSAC/CFMN identified to the planning council that current Manpower employment training programs did not meet the needs of Chicana women in terms of employment training: “Skills training and supportive manpower services tailored to the needs of Chicanas are almost non-existent. A lack of skills, age, testing, stereotypes, racial and sex discrimination, all contribute to the plight of the Mexican American woman/ women” (Manpower Area Planning Council (MAPC) Proposal iv). The CFMN further contended that the trainers that CETA funded through the Manpower project that the Chicana Service Action Center could access for their clients were all Anglo men. Therefore, they applied for CETA funding from the Los Angeles Manpower Planning Council to work with Manpower to design employment- training program geared toward Chicanas, using trainers who could deliver culturally appropriate training.

The result? The CFMN/CSAC were denied further funding12. The reason? Not lack of success, and not inability to establish a need (what used to be the problem). Rather, the Manpower Council denied 12 The CFMN were welcomed to access to use the job trainers provided by the Manpower program—these trainers, CFMN charged, were all Anglo men.

181 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 them funding because the term Chicana was deemed “discriminatory.” The Council argued that because the CSAC identified Chicanas as the community they would be serving, and that they were operating as a Chicana Service Action Center, that they could not give them funding because they were discriminating against other groups. A flurry of rhetorical activity ensued. Testimonies were given at various government committees, and a general public outcry by the CFMN and CSAC took place: much of this in public hearings and others in the front-page editorials of their newsletters13. In one newsletter column titled “A Rose by any other Name…” CSAC director Francisca Flores shared with her reading audience that the Manpower board felt the use of the term Chicana was discriminatory. She wrote that at a later meeting with Manpower’s appeals committee, they expounded on their decision stating that their proposal only “singles out Mexican women to be served…They said, furthermore, the CSAC proposal was feminist!” (emphasis in the original, 1). What is interesting here is that, according to the article, the CSAC and CFMN explained to the commission that 80% of the people in their geographic neighborhood were Mexican American or Chicano, so they were reflecting the background of people who live in the area. In rebuttal, the Manpower Council committee pointed out that Anglos also lived in the surrounding area and were thusly being discriminated against. Therefore, Flores wrote, “With that little stroke of statistical genius the CSAC contention was dismissed” (1).

Whereas before the Anglo population was deemed the universal norm for employment statistics—and it was statistically sound to subsume Hispanic populations in the white population—now the Anglo population was pulled out as being excluded. Small details like the definition of who receives federal funding and based on what criteria often found in the small typeface of government forms and other professional writing documents, help us understand that the implicit issue was about not wanting to give money to the organization because of the people they served. While the training Further, access to job trainers alone would not comprehensively address all the web of conditions that mediated access to employment for Chicanas. 13 See Flores’ “”Testimony Before Joint Committee on Legal Equality” and her testimony “Regarding Proposed Guidelines for the California Fair Employment Practices Commission on Sex Discrimination,” as well as CSAC published booklet titled “Chicana Status and Concerns,” as just a couple of moments where these issues were explicitly or implicitly discussed.

182 Chicanas Making Change | Kendall Leon programs funded by the government up until that point were in fact exclusionary and catered to English speaking Anglo males as the CFMN had proven, they appeared to be inclusive, unmarked, and cohered to the government’s guidelines.

In response, the CSAC and CFMN wrote appeals to representatives in Sacramento. These appeals claimed that traditional Manpower training programs were not prepared to effectively train bilingual women (particularly in the skilled trades), that Chicana was not discriminatory, and that the naming was not as relevant as the actual services provided. At some point, it is noted that the CSAC employed the ACLU to work on their behalf. Included in the archives are various letters written by the ACLU to government officials, which argued that the Manpower committee had a “mistaken notion of discrimination.” In one letter they wrote that if “if such legally erroneous and uninformed view were prevalent among the members of your council, serious damage could be done to the Los Angeles County participation in the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act” (Ripston, 1 of 2).

Further, the CSAC asked the CFMN members and supporters to attend CETA related meetings whenever possible (Letter to Comision [sic] Femenil Members 2 Dec 197414). In another newsletter column titled “A Sequel” Francisca Flores detailed one such meeting with the city of Los Angeles to discuss their denial of funding from the city Manpower Advisory Board. According to Flores, the majority of this meeting was spent discussing “terminology” and not the reasons why they were denied funding. At these meetings, then, the definition— or perhaps more accurately, the signification—of Chicana and of discrimination continued to be a source of contention. In other words, consensus over the meaning of Chicana, or what constituted the actual problem at hand, could not be reached.

SCENE THREE:A DIFFERENT STRATEGY TO THE PROBLEM AT HAND Now, it is not clear to me, based on my archival research, if the aforementioned lawsuits filed were successful, if public debates resolved the meaning of Chicana or determined whether it was discriminatory, or if these debates settled what constitutes a 14 Sent internally December 2, 1974.

183 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 discriminatory term to begin with. To be honest, I am not interested in following their outcomes. Because what we do know is that something shifted—we see it in the fact that the CFMN have in their records receipt of CETA funding received after having been denied it because of the usage of “Chicana.” To see this though, as a researcher, I had to adopt a different methodological heuristic. I had to turn away from following the actions and exciting rhetorical performances of individuals in order to notice the CFMN’s behind- the-scenes connective work that eventually un-did the public problem at hand. This connective work, I argue, displays a type of knowing that Sandoval articulates as the differential: a knowing of how one is read as a Chicana and an ability to respond in a way to undermine power configurations.

Betwixt the rhetorical activity mentioned that is documented in the public arena, it becomes apparent in the collection that the CFMN employed a different type of strategy: to circumvent the issue of the term Chicana to begin with. This work happened less publicly and more in the nuances of their organizational work. A1972 press release from the Women’s Bureau of Labor about the secretary of labor working to open up jobs to women lists names of representatives (Brennan Pledges). The list includes the name of one woman with a perhaps visibly Latina name. The name is underlined—Carmen Maymi—with a phone number written next to it (Note written on Brennan Pledges). A few months later, Yolanda Nava of the CSAC and CFMN sent a letter to Carmen Maymi. The letter appears to be a follow up to a conversation they have had. In the letter, Nava inquired again whether the CFMN will have input on the “above matter” (presumably the Bureau of Labor working to increase employment opportunities for women). She also asked about the chances for getting a Chicana appointed to one of their boards. At the end of the letter, Nava includes a “CC” to the Secretary of the Department of Labor along with a note (for Maymi to also read) which states that she just wanted to make sure that their office had statistics with the numbers of Mexican and Latina women to demonstrate why they should have representatives on their board (2 Nov. 1973 Letter). This represents a very tactical way, I think, of pointing out the absence of Mexican and Latina women on the board and then alluding that this absence must be an ill informed decision due to a lack of research on

184 Chicanas Making Change | Kendall Leon their part. Because, surely if they knew the numbers, someone would have been appointed.

We can infer the effectiveness of such a not-so-subtle hint by a later letter from Yolanda Nava to Alan Cranston, forwarding resumes of women to appoint to the Women’s Advisory Committee to the Department of Labor and an additional letter sent the following week to a Pamela Faust of the Commission on the Status of Women with the resumes of 17 qualified Chicanas to recommend for appointment (30 Aug 1973 and 1 Sept 1973 Letters). There are several other examples of such work in the archival collection—of newspaper clippings reporting on various government happenings or issues related to employment to reports from US Department of Labor. Many of these documents include some kind of notation of rhetorical activity—names underlined in newspaper articles, stars next to names, someone has written, “call.”

After being denied funding from Manpower, an internal memo was sent between the CSAC and CFMN board members. In the memo, the board members raised questions about the members of the Manpower Area Planning Council Board of Directors15. In this memo, the board asked about the composite of the Manpower Council, specifically in regards to the selection process and who made the selections. The purpose of this memo was to begin to strategize within their organization. Publicly, they were continuing their outcries in response to being deemed discriminatory; inwardly they were developing a plan that worked at the foundations of the Manpower Council.

Following this internal strategizing, the CFMN sent a letter to Carlotta Mellon of the California State Governor’s office. Mellon was apparently in a position to recommend people for appointment to government boards, including the boards that neglected to include statistics of Mexican/Latinos in their accounting and including those that determined funding requirements for employment issues. In response, Mellon sent a memo to the CFMN. In it, Mellon summarized a discussion she had with the Governor’s office on behalf

15 Nov. 1974, “Memorandum re: Refunding of the Chicana Service Action Service a project of the Comision Femenil Mexicana Nacional.”

185 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 of the CFMN. She stated that there was “a commitment to bring many Chicanas into government” and to do this they “wanted to receive resumes so that we could consider Chicanas for appointment.” Furthermore, Mellon wrote that she also “had receive[d] loud and clear their [the CFMN’s] message of retaining Chicanas in their existing positions and that if any were to be replaced it would be with other Chicanas” (3).

It should be noted that the people the CFMN contacted were not the actual elected officials or the chairs of these committees; rather they were more often than not, the assistants or secretaries to the officials. The assistants were the people responsible for previewing the mail and forwarding necessary mail—including resumes—up the chain of command. It seems that the CFMN and CSAC leaders developed relationships with these people who then would work as allies on their behalf. Through this relationship, they were able to get government officials to agree to not only appoint Chicanas to boards but also to replace any current Chicana members with other Chicanas in order to ensure ongoing Chicana representation.

With this strategy in play, there is evidence of later letters sent from Mellon to then, CFMN president Chris Fuentes, thanking her for recommendations for appointments to a range of government boards. One board mentioned is the California Employment Training Act Council, the very group who funded the Manpower Planning Area Council and who denied funding to the CFMN for being discriminatory. We then see in an editorial for the Chicana Service Action Center 17 Feb. 1975 newsletter, a congratulations to Corinne Sanchez, Administrative Assistant to the CSAC, for being appointed to the board. She would not be the last Chicana from the CSAC or the CFMN to gain access to the CETA council16. In other words, Chicanas strategically gained access to the board governing the allotment of CETA funds. Tellingly, CETA funding was later reinstated to the CFMN. A Sept/Oct newsletter column noted, “[on] October 15, 1975, the Chicana Service Action Center, Inc. met with the State Manpower Council to officially sign the state CETA contract which has been awarded them” (“Chicana Center Signs State 16 In fact, in May 1975, Francisca Flores was appointed as a chairperson for the newly formed Chicana Coalition’s Manpower Committee (“Francisca Flores. . . appointed as chairperson,” CSAC Newsletter 19 May 1975).

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Contract”). This funding reinstatement happened even without them changing their name from a Chicana Action Center. The members of the CFMN must have known that an agreement over the definition of Chicana could not be reached because of a historical absence of Chicana women on these government boards. Instead of arguing about whether “Chicana” is exclusionary, these Chicanas worked connectively to get appointed to the boards, thereby ascertaining power to actually change the terrain of the discussion. The result is that they effectively made an issue (exclusionary terminology) a non-issue.

Their strategies for accomplishing this happened within their organization and between people and can be realized through paying attention to the rhetorical activity visible in the marginalia on their programmatic documents. During these less public moves, these Chicanas operated with government officials to imbue spaces with Chicana ideology and Chicana presence, so that Chicana became an active part of the policy-making and makers. While they may have lost the public battles of employment training programs, Chicana as a point of contention had less of a rhetorical impact in regards to access to CETA funding. This was achieved from a different approach to activism, through practices that are perhaps equally explicit but operated in less public spaces. The CSAC and the CFMN began to focus on leadership development, and by doing so, placed other Chicanas or like-minded people on the boards and commissions that made decisions that had real impacts on whether or not the CSAC and CFMN could provide the services the knew were vital to their community.

CONCLUSION Such strategizing evidenced in the CFMN’s work to address employment training for Chicanas can be understood as a way of knowing and acting that emerged from being disempowered in institutions. But, the CFMN and CSAC were also aware that they had to be able to access government funding for their services. Knowing that they would not be able to reach a shared understanding of the actual problem, the CFMN worked strategically and connectively to redress the situation at hand. This is not to say that the CFMN and CSAC stopped their public protestations against the discrimination

187 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 claims, or that their testimonies and fiery speeches did not continue to be part of their Chicana activist repertoire. Rather, they developed a rhetoric that was at once responsive and effectual; public and internal; activist and institutional. And they effectively made these seeming contradictions productive as they worked toward an end of garnering federal funding to redress an absence of employment training programs for Chicanas, as well as an absence of Chicanas on federal and state labor boards.

Many of us can relate to seeing absence in institutional spaces. So how do we change this? Part of the challenge for us and for our allies is to do the work of translations across time and space: as we can revision history to enable new futures, we also can turn to the work of community organizations to learn about institutions. In this way, we can obviate the reductive binary between institutions and communities that are based on a static subject and space. Had I only sought out the performances of Chicana rhetoric that seemed Chicana or activist, I would have overlooked a significant portion of what the CFMN archived and what they considered important to becoming and acting as a Chicana organization. This work included making connections, often within institutions. Likewise, had I only looked at existing scholarship on institutional rhetoric, I would have missed learning from communities whose practices I wish to adopt and reflect in my own work. Each time a Chican@ like myself learns from the CFMN and shares their stories (or of other community organizations), we can create new histories and lineages of change makers. In doing so, we can continue to carve spaces for our commitments into this place of higher education.

Kendall Leon is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Portland State University’s Department of English. Her research interests include cultural and community rhetorics, service learning and research methodologies.

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Anzaldúa, Gloria E. “now let us shift...the path of conocimiento... inner work, public acts.” this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation. Eds. Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Ana Louise Keating. New York: Routledge, 2002. 540-78. Print. Bernal, Delores Delgado. “La Trenza de Identidades: Weaving Together my Personal, Professional, and Communal Identities.” Doing the Public Good: Two Latino Scholars Engage Civic Participation. Eds. Kenneth P. Gonzalez and Raymond V. Padilla. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2008. 135-148. Print. Chicana Rights Project of MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund). CETA: Services to Hispanics and Women. July 1980. Series IX, Box 57, Folder 2. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. Chicana Service Action Center. Chicana Status and Concerns. 1974. Series V, Box 38, Folder 11. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. —-.“Chicanas in the Labor Force.” Encuentro Femenil. 1.2 (1974): 1-7. Series IX, Box 56, Folder 7. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. —-. “Chicana Center Signs State Contract.” Chicana Service Action Center Newsletter 22 (Sept-Oct 1975): 1. Series IX, Box 53, Folder 7. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. —-. “Corinne Sanchez. . . appointed to California Manpower Services Council.” Chicana Service Action Center Newsletter 22 (17 Feb. 1975): 1. Series IX, Box 53, Folder 6. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print.

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—-. “Francisca Flores. . . appointed as chairperson.” Chicana Service Action Center Newsletter 22 (19 May 1975): 1. Series IX, Box 53, Folder 6. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. —-. Letter to Comision [sic] Femenil Members. 2 Dec. 1974. TS. Series V, Box 70, Folder 7. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. —-. Manpower Area Planning Council (MAPC) Proposal. 1973 Sept. 28. TS. Series V, Box 38, Folder 8. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. —-. Memorandum to Members, “Re: Refunding of the Chicana Service Action Center a project of the Comision Femenil Mexicana Nacional, Inc.” Nov. 1973. TS. Series IX, Box 53, Folder 10. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. —-. Mexican/Chicana Women’s Survey. 11 Apr 1972. TS. Series V, Box 41, Folder 13. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. Copy of a Board of Directors Flow Chart. MS. Series I, Box 2, Folder 7. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional. Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. Copy of a Chicana Service Action Center Flyer. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional. Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. Copy of a CFMN Logo. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional. Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California

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Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. Cortera, Marta. Letter to Francisca Flores. 11 Apr. 1980. TS. Series V, Box 69, Folder 7. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional. Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. Couvillon, Eva. “President’s Message.” Aug. 1982. TS. Series I, Box, 5, Folder 2. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. 1-3. Department of Labor. Contract #4047-06. 14 August 1973-15 August 1974. Series V, Box 38, Folder 8. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. Flores, Francisca. “Chicana Service Action Center.” 18 Mar. 1975. TS. Series IX, Box 53, Folder 6. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. —-. Letter to Edna Olivia. 20 May 1980. TS. Series V, Box 69, Folder 7. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. —-. “Regarding Proposed Guidelines for the California Fair Employment Practices Commission on Sex Discrimination.” TS. Series V, Box 38, Folder 11. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. —-. “A Rose by any Other Name. . .” Chicana Service Action Center Newsletter 15 (Nov. 1974): 1-3. Series IX, Box 53, Folder 6. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print.

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—-. “A Sequel.” Chicana Service Action Center Newsletter 16 (Dec. 1974): 1-2. Series IX, Box 53, Folder 6. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. —-. “Testimony at Department of Industrial Relations Fair Employment Practice Commission.” 1974. TS. Series III, Box 31, Folder 3. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. —-. “Testimony Before Joint Committee on Legal Equality.” TS. 12 August 1974. Series V, Box 42, Folder 12. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. Gomez, Anna Nieto. “Chicanas and the Labor Force.” CSAC reprint from SOMOS, March 1980. Series IX, Box 53, Folder 9. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. —-. “The Needs of the Spanish Speaking Mujer in Woman- Manpower Training Programs.” TS. Series V, Box 42, Folder 3. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. Guajardo, Miguel and Francisco Guajardo. “Two Brothers Doing Good.” Doing the Public Good: Two Latino Scholars Engage Civic Participation. Eds. Kenneth P. Gonzalez and Raymond V. Padilla. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2008. 61-81. Print. Guide to Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archives 1967-1997 [Bulk dates 1970-1990]. University of California, Santa Barbara Davidson Library. Department of Special Collections, California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives. CEMA 30. Santa Barbara, CA. Print. Hernández et al v Cockrell et al. SA 76 010. San Antonio, TX. 1979. Research Guide to the Records of Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, 1968-1983. Collection Number M0673.

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Stanford University. Libraries. Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives. Web. 22 October 2013. Leon, Kendall. Building a Chicana Rhetoric for Rhetoric and Composition: Methodology, Performance, and Practice. Diss. Michigan State University, 2010. Print. —-. “La Hermandad and Chicanas Organizing: The Community Rhetoric of the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Organization.” Community Literacy Journal. 7.2 (Spring 2013). Print. Mellon, Carlotta. Letters to Chris Fuentes. TS. Series III, Box 30, Folder 3. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. Nava, Yolanda. The Chicana and Employment: Needs Analysis and Recommendation for Legislation. 10 Feb. 1973. Series V, Box 38, Folder 6. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. —-.“Employment Counseling and the Chicana.” Encuentro Femenil. Date Unknown. Series IX, Box 56, Folder 7. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. —-. Letter to Alan Cranston. 30 Aug. 1973. TS. Series I, Box 11, Folder 11. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. —-. Letter to Pamela Faust. 1 Sept. 1973. TS. Series I, Box 11, Folder 11. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. —-. Letter to Carmen Maymi. 2 Nov 1973. TS. Series IX, Box 62, Folder 1. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print.

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Note written on Letter from Francisca Flores to Pierce A. Quinlan, re: Reply. N.d. MS. Series V, Box 69, Folder 1. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. Note written on Brennan Pledges ‘Partnership with Women’ to Open up New Jobs. N.d. MS. Series III, Box 31, Folder 8. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. Print. Pimentel, Octavio. “Disrupting Discourse: Introducing Mexicano Immigrant Stories.” Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Community Literacy, and Service Learning 8.2 (2009): 171-196. Print. Ripston, Ramona. Letter to Mayor Doris Davis. 19 Nov. 1974. 1-2. Series III, Box 32, Folder 8. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Rodriguez, Maria. In the Matter of: The Feminization of Poverty. Testimony before the California Legislature Senate Committee on Health and Welfare and Assembly Human Services Committee. Series III, Box 30, Folder 20. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Print. Stotzer, Beatrice Olvera. “Letter to Past Presidents.” N.d. TS. Series I, Box 5, Folder 6. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print. Women’s Bureau. Brennan Pledges ‘Partnership with Women’ to Open up New Jobs. 30 May 1973. N.p. Series IX, Box 62, Folder 1. Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional Archival Collection. CEMA 30. UC Santa Barbara California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives Special Collections, Davidson Library, Santa Barbara, CA. Print.

194 Review: Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia. Edited by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González and Angela P. Harris. (Utah State UP, 2012) Iris D. Ruiz, University of California, If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be Merced crushed into the other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive. —Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Out in the middle of nowhere, there lies a bundle of buildings and in this bundle of buildings lies a space to discuss sensitive subjects safely. The door opens, the class begins, the time passes and the question gets asked: “How do you feel when someone calls you a wetback?” Blank stares look back at me. White faces, brown faces, delicate faces and perturbed faces look up at me, but one face stood out eager to speak. She answers, “It hurts, I don’t know, it’s like . . . it makes you feel bad . . . I don’t know why (her voice starts to tremble) . . . .” She looks at me intently and her eyes well-up with tears; she looks at me as if I can save her. I feel that I can’t, at least not the way she wants me to. The hour grows late, and she begins to step out of the door out into the vast space of grass, but then turns around and enters, instead, into my space. She wants help and, yes, I think I CAN help her.

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This event recently took place in one of our very own ivory towers in the midst of an almost omnipresent belief that we are living in an era of post-racialism, and that race is no longer a factor to be taken seriously. We live in an era of anti-Affirmative Action, where the resounding narrative is that no one is deserving of preferential treatment regardless of their last name or skin color. After all, the President is African American; he made it to the top and that means ANYONE can. Those who vehemently disagree with this position are forced to be on the defensive and explain why the President’s racial identity has nothing to do with discriminatory practices in wider U.S. populations and institutions such as higher education. Indeed, the academy is exacerbating the plight of women academics of color in the 21st century as starkly illustrated in Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academics. Presumed Incompetent reveals, to a striking and sometimes shocking degree, that within our most treasured educational institutions, racism is alive and well.

The editors of Presumed Incompetent work within the context of U.S. institutions of higher education, which are still vastly unequal and operate in a society that is also unequal. By extending critical race theory’s aim to highlight the complex role of race in seemingly objective contexts, this book adds a gender framework for understanding the contradictory culture of the academy. The study focuses on the ‘counterstories’ of women of color through a compilation of narratives told by women who have encountered various forms of racism in the academy, most especially pronounced during the process of achieving tenure. Although the culture of the academy is perceived as free, nurturing, and a place where many see the possibility to achieving a more egalitarian society by being “a mechanism for change,” the editors claim that the university is impervious to change “. . . because of its power structures are designed to reproduce themselves” (7). Traits that remain constant and inhibit such change, according to the editors, are brilliance, rigor, seriousness, rationality, and objectivity because these traits have no color. However, as this book shows, there is a dominant culture in the academy, and that culture is not one that reflects women of color. Indeed, the voices of women of color are often silenced and, therefore, left silent in the realm of civic and public rhetoric.

196 Reviews

Yet, these voices often speak directly to the mission of the Reflections journal, which is to both foster and feature public rhetoric and civic writing and to highlight contributions of individual voices. Such a mission continues to bring marginalized female voices out of the cracks and crevices of tradition and silence. For example, one of the book’s contributors, Carmen R. Lugo, who writes of being treated as a “Prostitute, A Servant, and a Customer Service Representative” even though she is a college professor, while Sylvia Lazos breaks the silence that surrounds the tenuous process of student evaluations and the role of gender and race in their outcomes. As it paves the way for important dialogue, this book deserves wide and varied attention due to both its subject matter and the possibilities it provides for intervention for other women of color.

Through the inclusion of fifty or more female voices who are often silenced in annals of academia and its scholarship, this critical text challenges most recent critiques of university social dynamics, which are centered on economic plight and increasing fear of university corporatization. Although Presumed Incompetent might get relegated to the margins of academic scholarship if the poignant and honest testimonies are poorly received, the book forges ahead based upon two premises: (1) “The culture of the academy is still extremely white” and (2) “American colleges have embraced the business model” (6). For the editors of this volume, these premises are tantamount and become the backdrop for examining racial dynamics in the 21st century university, where more women of color resent but still experience racial discrimination. Women of color faculty experience discrimination based upon inhibiting racist and sexist stereotypes that have been resulted from being born in and/or working in a country whose history is severely tainted by imperialist ideologies, a past that has created a world of uncertainty for those that have been the victims of such ventures.

The book is separated into five parts: 1) General Campus Climate: explores how academic institutions create an inhospitable climate for women faculty of color faculty and shows that hostility also derives from stereotypical beliefs held by students and other faculty members, 2) Faculty-Student Relationships: examines the social environments of aspiring academics and the challenges that women faculty of color

197 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 faculty experience in the classroom, 3) Networks of Allies: examines the supportive (and not-so-supportive) relationships that academic women of color form at work, 4) Social Class in Academia: analyzes class consciousness and bias in higher education, and 5) Tenure and Promotion: grippingly shares candid stories of women faculty of color faculty dealing with their own paths to tenure and beyond. Many of the women who tell their stories in this section were hired, promoted, and given or denied tenure in ways that violated normal campus procedure. There is also a sixth portion that discusses the stories not shared due to fear of institutional retaliation: “A Note on the Silences Shouting from Within This Anthology.”

Furthermore, four interrelated themes are explored in each one of these sections “that place the contradictory predicament of women of color faculty in a larger historical and cultural perspective” (3): “Negotiation of Identity,” “Link between Agency and Structure,” Academic Culture,” and “Mechanism for Change.” These are all themes and topics that need revisiting in an academic environment that is transitioning into one of being in service to a corporate ideal in its daily operations. Presumed Incompetent addresses this transition as a result of financial threats, resulting in a greater threat to the 21st century university, as a space of equality and justice. Instead, the university is now considered to be a place where one can buy an experience that might lend itself to a decent job while being entertained. One of the contributors to this volume, Carmen R. Lugo- Lugo, author of, “A Prostitute, A Servant, and a Customer-Service Representative: A Latina in Academia,” bluntly refers to herself as serving in the role of a “customer service representative” instead of a professor. She states, “I was teaching at a history juncture marked by the relentless corporatization of the university, a process that has turned teaching into a marketplace (or shopping mall of sorts), where students feel like self-entitled customers and faculty and staff are forced to play the roles of either clerks . . . or customer service representatives” (41). Lugo-Lugo’s chapter deals with a complex of issues, such as corporatization of the university as a context that brings a unique dilemma to women academics of color who study subjects such as race, class, and gender in the academy. Her pedagogy risks being seen as faulty, insignificant, and disposable (41). For Lugo- Lugo, the reality of being a Latina academic is that she expected to play the role that everyone else expects her to play: the commodified,

198 Reviews sexy, and hot Latina (43). Lugo-Lugo argues that the university is embracing a business model, and as an institution, increasingly closes its doors to potential benefactors of a higher education and a better life. She writes that “ . . . it would be just a tad easier to be able to talk to students about race relations, racial inequality, and racism without having to contend with an institution that puts a price tag on me, my class, and my lectures” (49).

Through a myriad of voices such as Lugo-Lugo’s chapter, Presumed Incompetent shows that other women faculty of color faculty experience microagressions (3), which are subtle or blatant attempts at punishing unexpected behaviors, such as acting like a true intellectual instead of a seductress, in the case of Lugo-Lugo. Interestingly, one kind of microagression written about in the “Faculty/Student Relationships” section by Sylvia R. Lazos, comes from students. In her chapter titled, “Are Student Teaching Evaluations Holding Back Women and Minorities: The Perils of “Doing” Gender and Race in the Classroom,” Lazos discusses the unconscious biases of students who have stereotypical behavioral expectations from their female professors of color (173). Lazos writes that numerous studies show how the process of students evaluating professors is fraught with unexamined social influences and biases. Furthermore, the evaluation of minority professors can be a source of stress that is beyond their outlined job description and expectations: cultural and gender stereotypes often influence the way that students evaluate their professors and this type of microaggression is one that operates from a presumption that when a minority professor walks in the door, he is or she is presumed not to be well credentialed (176). What’s worse is, if she is not attractive, most likely her ratings will more than likely be lower than if she is attractive. Microagressions, such as the expectation of beauty are not, however, objective indicators of the professor’s performance and cause unnecessary stress.

Microaggressions and contradictory experiences are present within the confines of the university as Presumed Incompetent effectively communicates. A democratic, leftist university, for example, does not trump skin color or one’s last name. Presumed Incompetent demonstrates through its first person accounts that faculty of color experience unequal treatment on many different levels. For example,

199 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 a female African-American academic is expected to fulfill the role of a mammy in Angela Mae Kupenda’s “Facing Down the Spooks” (20). A Latina scholar is afraid of being perceived as too smart and fears backlash or rejection. Women of color are often expected to play the role of the token representative for one’s race in Yolanda Flores Niemann’s, “The Making of a Token: A Case Study of Stereotype Threat, Stigma, Racism, and Tokenism in Academe” (336). Given these stories, it is obvious that women of color are often disrespected by fellow students, and student evaluations are evidence that some romanticizing and stereotypical attributes are projected upon women of color professors. These types of experiences also lead to differential tenure procedures all within the environmental realities of a hostile campus climate and the list goes on.

Unequal treatment, unequal opportunity, and unequal status equal continued discrimination for women faculty of color faculty, even when they possess the same scholarly credentials as their white male and female peers. Thus, Presumed Incompetent effectively validates that the “ivory tower” is a not free thinking university. Instead, it, The Ivory Tower, perpetuates the current social order of inequality, and it does so by selectively discriminating against academic women of color. However, as most of the contributors agree, all hope it not lost; the Humanities still exist even while facing continuous criticism and attacks by business model advocates who do not understand the value of a humanities education. Amidst this current attack, the Humanities are a place where students go to learn more about themselves and gain a creative view of the world around them—and universities need women faculty of color to teach creative views of the world.

This compilation of personal counter stories, Presumed Incompetent, holds tremendous potential to transform the academy. The experiences shared are possible lights for women of color who experience similar indignities. For example, women of color might approach their unique circumstances with more grace, instead of remaining in the dark and stumbling through the rigors of tenure, by reading the experiences and suggestions of others before them. They will be free to contribute their unique knowledge and perceptions, unhindered, and help higher education meet the demands of an ever-changing

200 Reviews world. After all, racism is alive and well in the United States, and it is a topic that needs to be examined in a safe place: Presumed Incompetent provides us with that space, and it should be reflected upon by those who are committed to the transformative powers of civic rhetoric.

Currently a Lecturer for the Merritt Writing Program at the University of California, Merced, Dr. Iris Ruiz has a PhD from the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation is titled, “Shattering Glass Mirrors: A Case for Historiographic Theory in the Composition Classroom”. Her current interests include: First Year Composition and Critical Pedagogy, Advanced Writing Curricula, Critical Historiography, Latino/a Literature, Historical Rhetorics of Conquest, and Transcultural Rhetorics. She is also the current Lead Editor of the University of California, Merced Undergraduate Research Journal.

201 Review: Esmeralda Santiago. Conquistadora. (Vintage, 2011)

Lisa Roy-Davis, Collin College rom 2007-2009, I designed and led an oral history project focused on gathering Fthe stories of recent immigrants to Collin County, Texas. Students in my first- year writing courses learned interviewing techniques before gathering stories from local volunteers. We built an archive of interviews that the students then used to connect the act of preserving narrative to civic work. We discussed oral storytelling as an act of public rhetoric and how further interpreting these texts through writing reveals the lived experiences of subaltern voices. Students did not have to go far to find these voices, both within their own families and the community. Many returned from their interviews with unexpected insights. For example, nothing could have adequately prepared one of my students for a moment during an interview with a Zambian immigrant. The man asserted that what Americans don’t understand is that but for the Atlantic ocean, the entire population of Zambia would be on its feet walking towards the U.S. The image of that

202 Reviews mass migration was a clarifying moment that focused the student’s writing for the rest of the semester. What stories had this man left behind, my student wrote, that might possibly never be heard? Who could tell those stories? Through this work, students began to see their writing as civic work and preservation.

One text that could have provided my student with a model of recovering lost voices is Esmeralda Santiago’s 2011 novel Conquistadora. Set in mid-19th century Puerto Rico, Conquistadora marks a significant turn in Santiago’s writing career. Her previous books, When I was Puerto Rican, Almost a Woman, and the Turkish Lover explore immigration, identity, and abusive relationships through nonfiction memoir. Conquistadora, on the other hand, ventures into historical fiction.

Based on nearly a decade of research, Santiago creates a sweeping epic of life on Hacienda Los Gemelos, a mid-19th century Puerto Rican sugar plantation. The central character Ana becomes the mistress of Los Gemelos after being captivated by the journals of her conquistador ancestor. Rather than just focusing on the twists and turns that take Ana from Spain to Puerto Rico, however, Santiago develops Ana’s story by weaving the lives of the plantation slaves into the narrative. Imagining their stories before their arrival at Los Gemelos and tying their fate to Ana’s once there gives voice to the subaltern while also raising important questions about recovering lost voices. Through creating this portrait of a working sugar plantation in 1850s Puerto Rico, Santiago lays claim to the project of recovery as a descendent of slaves herself.

In Santiago’s capable hands, Ana as conquistadora becomes the perfect vehicle for creating a complex heroine and recovering the lost voices of enslaved Africans in Puerto Rico. Ana realizes early that she craves adventure and freedom from stifling formal Spanish society. To make her wishes come true, she marries Ramon Mendoza Sanchez, who has a twin brother, Innocente. The twins stand to inherit los Gemelos, and Ana convinces them to move to Puerto Rico to be involved in the day-to-day affairs of the estate. Once there, the twins take advantage of the fact that Ana cannot easily tell them apart, so they take turns sharing her bed and her affections. Ana also

203 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 quickly discovers that she knows more about directing the business of the plantation than Ramon or Innocente. The slaves catch on to this evolving dynamic as their daily duties put them in close proximity to the three people in charge. As the relationship between Ana and the brothers intensifies, the slaves take notice and quickly begin to realize that their own fates are entwined with Ana and the twins.

While the soapy start to the novel makes it seem that the plot will follow a conventional bodice-ripper arc, Santiago subverts reader and genre expectations by developing details about the living quarters, work duties, and the histories for several of the key workers on whose lives Ana’s dream of land ownership relies. Santiago doesn’t shy away from the human cost of Ana’s fascination. As Santiago connects the slaves’ lived experiences to class hierarchies and the hidden slave trade in the islands, Puerto Rico’s slavery history figures prominently in these background stories. Several of the slaves arrive at los Gemelos through kidnapping and deceit. For example, Ana’s personal maid Flora is kidnapped from Africa and sold and transferred between several Caribbean islands before finally arriving in Puerto Rico. Flora, sensing discord between Ana and the brothers, becomes Ana’s comforter and caretaker. But her placement between the three eventually leads to her involvement in the breakdown of Ramon and Ana’s marriage. The disruption in the marriage is thus intricately connected to the disruption of Flora’s life in getting to Los Gemelos.

Another key character is Siña Damita, the midwife of the plantation who delivers the slaves’ babies as well as the children Ramon and Innocente father with the slaves. When Ana refuses to travel a day away to see a doctor to have her own baby, Siña Damita delivers Miguel. As midwife to so many children, Siña Damita’s story intersects with many of the slaves on the plantation. It is her deep love for her own children however, that eventually leads her into terrible peril when her son commits a murder while trying to escape. His death at the hands of the slaveowners nearly leads to her own. She survives, although she becomes one of the first casualties of the cholera epidemic of 1856. The epidemic wreaks a terrible toll on the workers and families at los Gemelos, and Santiago doesn’t spare readers the terrifying details of the devastation. Although not all of the slaves are as richly drawn as others, Santiago excels at suggesting

204 Reviews their full potential as artists, healers, and caregivers in their capacities on the plantation. These deeply felt portraits of slave existence force the reader to confront what the slaves’ lives could have been if each were left to fully explore their complete human potential.

Reviews of the novel in the popular press tend to elide the richness of the slave stories and instead focus on Ana’s complexity as a main character. Partly, this is because Santiago does not romanticize Ana. Although Ana shows glimpses of being sympathetic to the lives of her slaves, she never makes a full turn towards humanizing them through emancipation even though slavery has long been outlawed in Europe and nearly finished in the U.S. Reviews also tend to highlight Santiago’s turn toward historical fiction as a means of creating a strong female plantation mistress. In doing so, the nearest genre example becomes Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind (a comparison Santiago strongly resists). In an interview for the Brooklyn Public Library series “Gotham: Writers in the City,” Leonard Lopate asks Santiago if the process of writing historical fiction “which is inventing things” differs from writing memoir, “which is writing about real life” (Santiago). Without hesitation, she connects both projects, since both forms of storytelling spring from the same desire to hear the stories no one tells. For Santiago, that means creating her ancestors’ stories through the slaves’ characters.

With Conquistadora, Santiago moves to reclaim historical fiction for the project of recovering lost voices. Although memoir and oral history interviews provide strong first-person possibilities for students to understand experiences outside of their own, fiction still remains one of the most generative vehicles for imagining lost and untold stories. Conquistadora further suggests that historical fiction may be the genre best suited for this type of recovery work. Santiago here assembles a vast and complex body of research into a coherent and understandable story. In doing so, she directly suggests that lost voices must still be imagined in order for the project of recovery to continue. By closely examining her carefully wrought narrative that caps a decade of diverse research, students could be guided through unpacking the possibilities of recovery work that historical fiction makes possible. My archive project would have greatly benefited from student engagement with Conquistadora. Santiago’s strong

205 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 correlation of the slaves’ imagined lives entwined with the history of slavery and sugar production in late 19th century Puerto Rico has resonance for projects that seek to recover stories and further imagine the ones that remain untold.

Lisa Roy-Davis is Professor of English and past Royden L. Lebrecht Endowed Chair for Scholarly and Civic Engagement at Collin College. As chair, she directed an interdisciplinary oral history research project collecting and digitally archiving the stories of immigrants in Collin County. Her most recent publication is “I Am Not Lost in America: Reading Identity through a Postpositivist Realist Framework in the Works of Judith Ortiz Cofer” in Rituals of Movement in the Writing of Judith Ortiz Cofer from Caribbean Studies Press, 2012.

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WORKS CITED

Santiago, Esmeralda. “Gotham: Writers in the City, Esmeralda Santiago.” Interview with Leonard Lopate. Brooklyn Public Library. YouTube. 2011. Web. 10 Sept. 2013

207 Review Essay: Texts of Consequence: Composing Social Activism for the Classroom and Community, Edited by Christopher Wilkey and Nicholas Mauriello. (Hampton P., 2012)

Unsustainable: Re-imagining Community Literacy, Public Writing, Service-Learning, and the University, Edited by Laurie Cella and Jessica Restaino.(Lexington Books, 2013)

Amy Rupiper Taggart, North Dakota State pproximately ten years ago, I taught University a graduate seminar on community- Aengagement in composition studies. That course exposed graduate students to the lively and burgeoning discussions surrounding service learning, civic rhetoric, activist and participant action research, and even the beginnings of what is now a deep pool of scholarship on community literacy projects, programs, and theories. The students were interested and engaged, but a challenge emerged in our discussions, one with which I was sympathetic: Where were the stories of failures and mistakes? Surely

208 Reviews these complicated, politically enmeshed approaches to teaching and research couldn’t always be the sunshine and roses the texts that we read seemed to suggest. To borrow the title of one of the books under review here, where were the texts of consequence about the struggle inherent in community-based work? I don’t want to oversimplify; most success stories in our scholarship are offered with cautions, but the dominant narrative at that time was of triumph: student empowerment, community improvement, educational benefit, even programs that last. Subsequently, Brooke Hessler and I proposed and co-edited an issue of this journal on revising service learning and community engagement projects and programs, to put the spotlight both on mistakes that led to improvements and on mature practice. We learned much from our colleagues’ thoughtful visioning and revisioning of community-based work, but that issue was a small drop in a large pond of scholarship. There are still success stories (as there should be) in community engagement but with the addition of Texts of Consequence and Unsustainable to the field, there is also more of serious conversation around mistakes, failures, missteps, and constraints.

UNSUSTAINABLE Taking as its leaping off point Paula Mathieu’s important Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition, Unsustainable addresses the relatively unfulfilled desire for failure stories, accomplishing two critical things for the field. First, through story after story, it offers us a view inside the struggles surrounding program and project “failure,” disruption, and marginalization and how often those struggles and closures are rooted in contextual constraints, not in obvious failures on the part of the university partners. Second, it reinforces Mathieu’s suggestion that sustainability may not be the most important or operative criterion for success in community- university partnerships. Sometimes the right choice, the rhetorical or tactical choice, is to end a program, project, or partnership when the need changes or constraints become overwhelming.

In Tactics of Hope, Mathieu challenged the notion that to be truly successful and valuable, community-based efforts should be sustainable over the long-term (a position advocated by such literacy scholars as Linda Flower, Shirley Brice Heath, and Ellen Cushman). On the

209 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 surface, it seems obvious that an effective community project should persist and its participants should seek longevity. The Pittsburgh Community Literacy Center is one such model of continued, careful, and long-term partnership between university and community, and its work is exemplary. Yet Mathieu—and, in turn, the authors of Unsustainable—suggests that this might not be the only model of success, that sometimes projects need to die or evolve radically to meet new needs, and that forcing longevity might sometimes mean doing harm. Mathieu differentiates between a “tactical orientation” to community partnership, which is rhetorical, flexible, and organic, and a “strategic logic,” which proceeds “as if the university were the controlling institution determining movements and interactions” and “seek[s] objective calculations of success and thus rel[ies] on spatial markers like sustainability and measurable student outcomes as guidelines of success” (xiv). She argues that we lose the possibility of deft and collaborative (even collective) responsiveness if we assume all programs must be sustainable and conventionally measurable.

In effect, Tactics of Hope makes it possible for a certain genre of failure and challenge story (that of unsustainability) to come out of the proverbial closet. In four parts, Unsustainable foregrounds those stories and reinterprets the measures of success. Restaino, Cella, and the collection contributors do not throw out the notion of sustainability; rather, they broaden its definition.

We wholeheartedly agree with Ellen Cushman and Linda Flower: practitioners need to begin with a sustained commitment to the community, to bring an expectation for engaged and responsive dialogue, and to plant our feet firmly in the community. However, we would like to suggest that practitioners and community stakeholders alike need to understand and accept the variety of risks inherent in a community literacy project. Second, we believe that both partners need to recognize the need for flexibility as the projects evolve (2).

To illustrate this philosophy, Part I: Short-Lived Projects, Long- Lived Value highlights four programs that were shut down by forces outside the university and community partners’ control and helps readers to see the positive traces left in people and spaces. In this section of the new book, Mathieu’s contribution, “After Tactics,

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What Comes Next?” extends her tactics argument by examining her own experience with street papers, Kids2Cents and Spare Change. Here, she suggests that projects stop, start, restart, and go on sometimes with and sometimes without university partners, and that this flexibility is sometimes essential for agile activist work. As we start to see in this collection, sustainability might look more varied than linear and relatively static continuity. Yet she does not discount the possibility that institutionalization—sustainability of a more traditional type—and some strategic planning might be the right choice for some: “My advocacy of tactical approaches rests on the importance of personal relationships for helping begin projects, but larger university structures can be critically useful in helping sustain such projects over time” (25). This notion of a wider range of possibilities for action, activism, and productive persistence is a common theme across the two books reviewed here.

Though Unsustainable advocates for work that does not start at the university or root itself deeply in bureaucratic institutional frameworks, sometimes it is impossible to escape the hold of institutions, as Paul Feigenbaum, Sharayna Douglas, and Maria Lovett’s discussion of the Algebra and Young People’s Projects shows. The authors suggest that questions of strategy versus tactics, institutionalization versus relation often cannot be separated; their work existed in what they call the “crawl space” in between. In “Everyone Loved It and Still It Closed,” Emily Isaacs and Ellen Kolba recount a tale of a highly successful project—measurable, frugal, innovative—that nonetheless was shut down because, they think, it was not institutionalized enough. And Steve Parks describes a well- intentioned publication project that met with community resistance because of how the community was represented; nonetheless, the university partners learned much about the necessity of shifting the locus of control from the university. Through all of these projects, readers gain a view of the mark left on communities and universities by projects that are gone, and the experiences will likely ring true for practitioners who have done this kind of work for decades (they did for me). The project that no longer exists informs current teaching, volunteerism, and other community projects and programs because the people and institutions they occupy go on.

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In Part II: Community Literacy: Personal Contexts, the contributors offer insight into the competing priorities of academic life that often mitigate against the best community work. Tom Deans suggests that though community literacy scholars wish to remain as engaged as ever, often the constraints of their job and life responsibilities as they parent, move, become senior scholars and even administrators can be at odds with sustaining and developing programs outside the institution. Michael Donnelly offers the tale of what can happen if one doesn’t step away from the intense work of community partnership; as a pre-tenure Writing Program Administrator, Donnelly was unable to successfully juggle all of the parts of his job and the community work: he was denied tenure. One of the most salient questions he raises about that experience is about the valuing of community-based organizing and educating work such as his street paper experience in the tenure and promotion process. He had spent much time building a street paper and it was not valued (at least not much) in his tenure bid. He calls on senior faculty and administrators to find ways to value this kind of work and cautions junior faculty about the kinds of roles they might productively play pre-tenure. Drawing a comparison between her changing work and her father’s roving dentistry work in Mexico, adjuncts such as Karen Johnson feel the strain of moving from institution to institution—a lack of rootedness means new, more tactical strategies (“mobile sustainability”) are necessary. While she ultimately found and took a tenure-track position, Johnson found ways to see herself as the key to sustainability rather than the institutional permanencies she couldn’t create as an adjunct. These work conditions, too, are rhetorical constraints worth acknowledging and facing as problems to be addressed rather than guilty secrets to hide.

In Part III, both Lorelei Blackburn and Ellen Cushman (“Assessing Sustainability”) and Hannah Ashley (“The Idea of a Literacy Dula”) suggest that relationship building and relational learning are effective tactics for community work. It is in the “going wrong” of the People’s Writing Project that Blackburn and Cushman discovered the necessity of a simultaneous relational and product orientation instead of a product-primary orientation. Projects can even draw strength from marginal status and relationships on the limen: Ashley sees tutors in a high school writing center as working with high

212 Reviews school students in a kind of dula role, helping the students give birth to mestiza rhetorics.

Finally, in its focus on local programs with global implications, Part IV addresses the field’s ever-increasing concern with globalism and transnationalism. In the projects highlighted here, among them a student project to improve education for Gambian girls and women in Gambia and the US and work with Sudanese diasporic writers in Phoenix, readers can see the ways tactical approaches can be transgressive and transformational in larger rhetorical spheres, though sometimes we wish they would move more quickly and be more predictable. Jennifer Clifton’s discussion of work with Sudanese diaspora in Phoenix suggests that groups such as these are so deeply out of place and seeking identification and relation in the midst of conflict, that new methods, alternate discourses are needed. Community partners in these fluid, changing, shifting landscapes need to recognize that “rhetoric is a stochastic art,” one whose outcomes are not predictable (228). Thus, new collaboratively developed responses become necessary because no previous models are a particularly good fit. Further, through arguments such as Elenore Long’s, we gain insight into invention practices that draw on what she terms “authenticating conventions” and “rhetorical conventions” (210) and work collaboratively, “creating and naming together new tools and testing and refining them in new situations” (221).

Surprisingly, this collection about programs that proved “unsustainable” does not preclude hope and optimism for community work. Emily Isaacs and Ellen Kolba’s story about the Writer’s Room Program that showed demonstrated student success over its eighteen years but was shut down anyway is unfortunate, yet Isaacs and Kolba could see enduring effects in the schools. The introduction even offers a hopeful anecdote from Mathieu’s experience: “In the midst of this writing, Paula Mathieu received an email from the folks at Spare Change, her former community partner, asking her back, hoping to renew what had appeared to be a failed relationship” (14). In her conclusion, Jessica Restaino emphasizes the give and take, the pull of university and community need, the continued challenge not to fail and to find these alternate, shared spaces where effective

213 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 work can happen. From the tensions, she claims, many questions (re)emerge. I concur with her evaluation: “[T]his book is meant to serve as a launching pad for further work, for various and creative approaches to the inevitable fact of unpredictability as it is inherent in even our best ideas and our most exciting collaborations” (261). And in the Afterward, Eli Goldblatt reminds us that “Nothing we do is permanent. Setbacks and disappointments can sustain us as much as achievements if we manage to hear compassion’s necessary music” (266). Failure isn’t entirely failure, after all, if we can learn from it. What readers may be left with after reading this collection is a sense of contingency and the importance of attentiveness in community- based work, as well as a new set of interpretive lenses to evaluate their own programs.

TEXTS OF CONSEQUENCE Unsustainable addresses a fairly focused question: How can we resee programs through the lens of tactical, rhetorical sustainability? Its purpose is to help us to see this concept of tactical orientation in action through situated program narrative and to begin to reinterpret our valuation of program impact. Texts of Consequence offers a complement to the first book. While it, too, responds to the call of Tactics of Hope at times, it emphasizes alternatives and successes. Even interpreting success differently in this collection seems possible because of our increasing sense of alternate possibilities. The chapters represent a diverse mix of research methods, insights, and locations, from historical to programmatic to project and classroom, and many add to the conversation about the relative merits of relational and institutionalized activism. On one level, Texts of Consequence suggests that activism through literacy is and should be a central concern of composition studies broadly. On another, it offers additional visions of the widening continuum of “success” in this arena, offering theoretical entrée into understanding and producing activist rhetoric even as it introduces readers to projects and syllabi that reflect activist goals. Chris Weisser puts it nicely in his foreword to the collection, “The collection is inherently useful in its focus on informed, theoretically grounded action rather than the binary of detached analysis or decontextualized pedagogy” (xiii). The book is historical, theoretical, practical, praxis. And the last two items in this list are important: In his introduction, editor Christopher

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Wilkey encourages readers to move beyond the cultural critique so central to cultural studies and critical pedagogy and to work toward activist action. Wilkey suggests that composition studies for too long focused on developing students’ critical skills instead of their activist and public rhetorical skills. He critiques both critical pedagogy and cultural studies for not engaging directly in the public sphere, an argument which may to a degree reduce these bodies of thought but which has some teeth when it comes to practice. His call, and the call of the collection, is to link literacy instruction and the public sphere more fully, and to recognize the good work already being done in this arena: “By connecting literacy education directly to the broader struggle for progressive social change writ large, we come to not only imagine a more just and equitable society but also put into action the literacy practices necessary for its fulfillment. In doing so, we need not shy away from claiming activism as central to our work as compositionists.” Each of the chapters offers us a view of some dimension of that “central” activist work.

The two historical essays that open the collection suggest that both backward and forward looking are essential to an activist stance. Through her detailed examinations of composition studies’ organizational responses to cold war rhetoric, government funding, and VietNam era activism, Beth Huber offers a view of the field itself as enmeshed in activism well prior to the “social turn.” Richard Marback and Patrick Bruch analyze President Obama’s rhetoric to suggest what the forward-backward stance can look like, rhetorically. Together, the two essays seem to provide a bridge from strategic to tactical approaches, as we see the role our institutions play, the ways we must take them into account as we plan and simultaneously see how activism is served by flexibility. That flexibility is highlighted in the highly rhetorical responses of our national organizations in the Cold War era, some of which Huber analyzes for their now cringe worthy adherence to the crisis and values rhetorics of the time.

The tightly connected chapters in Part II offer a model of grassroots institutionalization, a seeming contradiction, as Juan Guerra and Michele Hall Kells add to their existing work: The authors capitalize on students’ diversity and meet them where they are in a Writing Across Communities (WACommunities) effort. Guerra’s chapter,

215 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 in particular, helps readers to understand that activism needn’t be oriented toward a particular ideology, a relief to those who take seriously Maxine Hairston’s critique of the activist classroom as potentially oppressive to students. Taking up the torch passed by such scholars as Mary Louise Pratt, Gerald Graff, and the collaborative team of Linda Flower, Elenore Long, and Lorraine Higgins, Guerra suggests educators should guide students to participate in “deliberative discourse” (97) across cultures and to see language as contextual, subjective, and intersubjective.

Less a formal program than an initiative, WACommunities then draws on Guerra’s concepts of “transcultural repositioning” (90) and deliberative discourse to foster discussions relevant to varied communities, instead of reinforcing disciplinary norms and structures, as a traditional WAC program might do. Kells puts it this way in her discussion of WACommunities at the University of New Mexico: “Without reflexive action, WAC risks functioning as an enabling mechanism of dominant discourses, socializing new writers into established systems without cultivating critical awareness of the ways that literacy practice can reinforce inequitable social orders” (139). WACommunities, as presented here, complicates the potential for an either/or stance relative to institutionalization and grassroots efforts. Intra-institutionally, WACommunities seems to be driven as much by students as by faculty, yet it has garnered some funding and support not possible without institutional buy in. Further, it draws, even in name, directly on the history of literacy institutionalization that is Writing Across the Curriculum.

Drawing heavily on Harry Boyte’s concept of a development democracy and resonating with the student-activist spirit of WACommunities, Linda Adler-Kassner’s chapter suggests that practitioners should commit to a model in which people, including students, are “citizens now,” working to shape and challenge dominate culture, not simply concede to it. She contrasts this conception of the kind of “agency, identity and actions” possible for individuals and groups with what she sees as a more “technocratic” version of democracy represented in many of the guiding documents shaping our understanding of literacy and literate practice (for instance, Common Core, the Spellings Commission, and the American Diploma

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Project). Adler Kassner traces this notion of student citizens acting from their lived experience in many of the models of community engagement already in practice in our field. All three thinkers in this section—Guerra, Kells, and Adler-Kassner—reconceive students as activists in their own right, not citizens teachers must develop and later see come to life (the latter of which bears shades of the banking model of education in which we fill the “empty” students). However, importantly, Adler-Kassner helps us to see what we work against in the public documents shaping our instruction. She recommends: “If we want to create spaces for students and faculty to develop and exercise agency and identities different from those outlined within the boundaries of that larger eruv [boundaries for action shaped by university tradition], we must come up with real ways to extend locally based models to the more diffused space of ‘the university’ and demonstrate what these models do—in theory and in practice” (172). WACommunities is just one such locally based model.

In the final, robust section on “Composition Studies and Community Activism,” readers are exposed to a range of praxis centered on a few key themes: finding loci of agency for action, situating agents in relation to dominant culture, tying action to ethics, and the importance of relationship as process and possibly even product of community-university work. In these chapters, too, readers will find models for pushing against the efficient but passive production of educated people. Kristie Fleckenstein opens the section by developing the rhetorical concept of “preparing a face” to examine the tension between performing normative culture “symbolic syntheses” (Kenneth Burke) and pushing against that culture so as to capture agency for oneself or for collective agitation. Fleckenstein claims that “preparing a face emphasizes the possibility of choice and action in the midst of cultural and historical constraints” and shows us how some imitation empowers its practitioners to action (though she acknowledges that the imitation of preparing a face can be the performance of oppression, as well) (188). Like the invention approaches proposed by Long in Unsustainable and by Long, John Jarvis, and Diane Deerheart Raymond in this collection, Fleckenstein’s contribution is to expand “our repertoire of strategies” for social change rhetoric (200).

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In “Rant, Rave, Write” Tobi Jacobi describes an advanced undergraduate course in which the students learn about and participate in zine culture with the riot grrl movement and its documents as models of countercultural rhetorical action. In this context and project, Jacobi suggests there is much potential for examining problematic gender stereotypes and roles. However, she doesn’t shy away from suggesting that the zine project does not magically transform her students. Reading her project through the lens of the strategic and tactical, institutional and rhetorical understanding of community work, we can see how the zine work is somewhat compromised by its relationship with the university. Jacobi highlights that zines are typically grassroots initiated, open form, and are not dictated by academic standards; yet the students working on the zines come to the project through a course, a portal that reshapes all experiences. Like so many of the projects discussed in these two collections, we are left to see that constraints are part of the activist project, that we should not passively accept them, and that practitioners are challenged to recognize the good left behind, even when imperfectly situated.

The spirit of the tactical approach may also structure and inform student learning in community settings. Candice Rai, Megan Marie, and AnnMerle Feldman draw on neo-Sophism’s suggestion that “provisional, situated, communally derived knowledge is the best we can hope for in lieu of Platonic truths, which either do not exist or, if they do exist, we cannot access” (238) to suggest that students should work to develop not just “rhetorical competency” but also a sense of rhetorical ethics that is situated in kairotic moments. They push against work whose ends seem only to be creating “good workers.” In apprenticeship-style work environments, they suggest, students can be encouraged and supported in discovering the situational ethics appropriate to both getting work done and making change for the better.

As in the graduate class I briefly described at the beginning of this review, David Coogan’s graduate students engaged in community- based work as part of their graduate course work, and “Envoys of Inquiry: Graduate Students in the Public Turn” gives them voice and provides a window into the kinds of rhetorical work possible even

218 Reviews in graduate settings. Through the four projects reflected on in this chapter, readers learn about cautious movements, trust building, and hope in community-based work. The narratives enhance the other arguments throughout this collection about taking care in building relationships and not entering new communities with presumed universal principles and values for action.

Similarly, Ellen Cushman, Guiseppe Getto, and Shreelina Ghosh extend Cushman’s prior argument that a praxis of new media must involve all stakeholders in a complex process of mediation, not just the technological media chosen but the values, knowledge, and assumptions held by participants in the process. Community organization (the Allen Neighborhood Center) and Second Life examples illustrate that new media community projects must be social as well as instrumental—ignoring the social mediation dimension may mean audience, purpose, even genre failure. This kind of project failure could be seen quite clearly in the attempt to teach the classical Indian dance of Odissi in a Second Life environment and in the absence of master-student relationship and presence. When extracted from this essential part of the experience, the instruction is a thin shell of its typical self.

The closing chapter of Texts of Consequence by Elenore Long, John Jarvis, and Diane Deerheart Raymond brings the themes and discussions of these two books together, coming full circle back to a vision of the marriage of strategic approaches and tactical responsiveness. The authors discuss a project based in the Nipmuck people’s efforts to be recognized as a legitimate tribe by the federal US government. The exigency of being turned down led the tribe and Jarvis’s class at Bay Path College to co-create a documentary, highlighting the Nipmuck tribe’s ability to be “invisible in plain sight.” The complexities of entering a conversation where so much rhetoric had failed required a new approach. The Documentary Project partnership was thus rooted in intercultural inquiry principles developed at the Community Literacy Center by Flower and her colleagues, allowing the partners to draw strength from tested practices, such as the “story behind the story” strategy, “rivaling,” and “critical incidents” (328-29), but these principles and

219 Reflections | Volume 13.1, Fall 2013 practices were adapted and augmented. To solve the most tangled of rhetorical problems, the toolbox must be large.

In the end, Texts of Consequence’s call to activism that cross- cuts disciplinary, institutional, and cultural dimensions is nicely complemented and even complicated by the presence of a book such as Unsustainable. While Texts of Consequence advances the suggestion that activism is a many-dimensioned good, long worthy of scholarly and practitioner attention in composition studies, Unsustainable and even a portion of Texts remind us to be attentive to risk through dialogue and reflection, through tactical, in-the-trenches care given to our work. We can only understand our field through its continuum of successes and failures, and if we learn one thing from these books, it should be that no one method or model will suffice for rhetorical intervention in social problems.

Amy Rupiper Taggart is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of English at North Dakota State University, formerly Director of First-year Writing. Her research focuses on issues in composition pedagogy, including community-engagement, formative assessment, student and teacher reflection, and teacher preparation. Her articles have appeared in multiple journals and collections. She co-authored the textbook Research Matters with Rebecca Moore Howard and co-edited the Guide to Composition Pedagogies with Gary Tate, Kurt Schick, and H. Brooke Hessler.

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WORKS CITED

Cushman, Ellen. “Sustainable Service Learning Programs.” College Composition and Communication 54.1 (2002): 40-65. Electronic. Flower, Linda, and Shirley Brice Heath. “Drawing on the Local: Collaboration and Community Expertise.” Language and Learning across the Disciplines 4.3 (Oct 2000): 43-55. Print. Hairston, Maxine. “Diversity, Ideology and Teaching Writing.” College Composition and Communication 43.2 (1992): 179-93. Print. Mathieu, Paula. Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2005. Print. Rupiper Taggart, Amy and H. Brooke Hessler. Special Issue on “Rewriting Community Writing and Rhetoric Courses.” Reflections: Writing, Service-Learning and Community Literacy 5 (Spring 2006). Print.

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