CCCC 2005: ReviewReview: B.17 Enriching Ourselves with Personal, Visual, and Historical Latina/o Rhetorics Chair: Victor Villanueva Presenters: Francisco Noe Tamayo-Rico, John Scenters-Zapico, Jaime Armin Mejía The past three years at CCCC, I have especially sought out the sessions on Latina/o topics, which have inevitably proved as enriching as this session’s title suggests. Despite CCCC’s immensity, however, it has not been hard to attend virtually all of them. In the minutes before this session began, conversations circulated the room in Spanish, in English, in Spanish/English, in English/Spanish. One audience member, looking about herself, remarked that all the Latinos present at this Cs must be in the room, and indeed, it seemed the audience of twenty-five or so was almost entirely composed of Latinas/os. Such was the immediate context for the session, aptly opened with Francisco Noe Tamayo-Rico’s presentation, “A Latino’s First CCCC: On ‘Compassionate’ Erasure.” After dedicating the paper to his abuelo, Tamayo-Rico began with a Spanglish poem decrying the “racial project” of assimilation in the majority culture. In his paper, Tamayo-Rico argued that memories must be written in home languages and cannot be translated into standard American English without destroying their meaning, that Spanishes and global Englishes cannot be set aside when writing in academic discourses. In particular, Tamayo-Rico took on a proposition made by Peter Elbow at last year’s CCCC: “Should Students Write in Non-mainstream Varieties of English?” (C.09 2004), which, according to Tamayo-Rico, suggested that narratives related in home languages could be translated into Standard American English as a composition classroom strategy. Tamayo-Rico objected to the use of the bilingual (or multilingual) home language to further the colonial project of conformity to monolingual SAE. He condemned the invitation to write in one’s own language as a gesture to “diversity” only to have that language and diversity erased. Just as Tamayo-Rico insisted on the value of writing in home languages, in “The Message is On the Wall: Using U.S./Mexico Border Murals to Explore Our Cultures of Respect and Race-Blindness,” John Scenters-Zapico argued that the visual rhetoric of outdoor border murals should be read and studied in the murals’ home contexts. When students encounter murals isolated in books or on postcards, they are encouraged to limit their reading to the picture itself, erasing the socio-cultural context essential to understanding the mural, according to Scenters-Zapico. Instead, he argues for reading border murals in the “ZIME”: the zone of intense mural experience. To extend the ZIME, Scenters-Zapico offered two sample projects: a DVD clip that provided a panoramic experience of El Paso murals in their locale and a student web project on a border mural. The student, Becky Rivas, had interviewed various people who were viewing first-hand a large outdoor border mural, “God is Mexican.” The interpretations of the mural, viewed in its neighborhood setting, given in the interviews revealed a variety of complex cultural attitudes. Scenters-Zapico’s presentation demonstrated that experiencing the border murals in their home contexts, freed from the constraints of museum, snapshot or book viewing, fosters connections with the culture and a far richer experience of the visual art. Jaime Armin Mejía’s presentation, “Where the Solitude Ends” also presented the themes of context and perspective, but Mejía set the local—our composition classrooms and the textbooks we use—in a global context. Opening with a reference to Colombian Gabriel García Márquez’s Nobel speech, “La soledad de America latina,” Mejía remarked U.S. Americans’ continual lack of awareness of the experiences of Latin Americans, including ignorance of devastating events in Latin America driven by U.S. capitalism and commercial globalization. “These forces of free-enterprise,” Mejía argued, “exist within our own academic profession and. . . are most visible through the textbooks we use in our composition classrooms.” He offered two specific examples of misleading representations in The Brief Arlington Reader: 1) the juxtaposition of an essay by Richard Rodriguez (without information about Rodriguez’s now openly gay identity or his denouncement of his early position on bilingual education) with a Spanish-language excerpt of a sexist passage from Octavio Paz’s The Labrynth of Solitude in a section on Education, and 2) George Orwell’s ubiquitous essay, “Shooting an Elephant” as an anti-imperialist work. Because in the Reader Orwell’s essay lacks contextual information about its composition (written during the time Orwell was fighting in Spain against the Communists, who had the lifelong commitment of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda), Mejía contends, it fails “to reveal the real nature of today’s postcolonial realities.” Mejía also suggested scholars enamored with the rhetorics of classic Greece, so often assigned in composition classrooms, turn attention to postcolonial contemporary Greece. Such a context for works like Plato’s “Myth of the Cave,” would encourage students to make different, more relevant connections between text and human realities. Mejía closed his presentation with two quotations: a long quote from Victor Villanueva’s 1999 Chair’s address to CCCC, reminding us to remember “the concepts that come of the ex-colonies of Europe. . .the interior colonies of Puerto Rico and the American Indian nations, the internal colonies of the formerly colonized as in America’s people of color, the neocolonies of Latin America” and a short quote from Latin American performer Shakira: “Viva México! Viva Colombia! Que viva nuestra latinidad!” All three presentations were well-received by the audience, who participated in a lively discussion in the remaining minutes of the session, followed by personal conversations with the presenters. The themes and the quality of the papers resonated with other presentations on Latina/o topics I’ve had the good fortune to hear in recent past CCCCs—such as the intriguing work by the presenters of “Visual Rhetorics, Technology and Latina and Latino Politics” (Dora Ramirez-Dhoore, Damian Baca, Maria J. Estrada, Patricia Trujillo D.15 2003) and “Reworlding Composition: Intersecting Indigenista, Indohispana/o and Mexican American Literacies (Dora Ramirez-Dhoore, Damian Baca, Patricia Trujillo E.25 2004), and the readings by Chicano poet, activist and scholar Jimmy Santiago Baca (I.37 2004). And, this “Enriching” session adumbrated—gave further context for—the next day’s featured session, “The Rhetoric of Rememory: Archival Research Among Researchers of Color,” which offered three more exceptional presentations: Malea Powell on her experience as an American Indian researching the documents about and by American Indians; Gail Okawa on her research into the literacy experiences of Japanese immigrants interned during World War II, which included her maternal grandfather; and Victor Villanueva on the rhetoric of Puerto Rican colonization and of colonized Puerto Ricans. I hope that Victor Villanueva, whose stimulating, passionate address received a standing ovation from the large and diverse audience present at the featured session, will understand why I have opted to foreground in this review the less well attended session he chaired the day before and to recall a sampling of the Latino/a sessions from the recent CCCC past. The CCCC sessions on Latina/o rhetorics I have found to be consistently provocative, stimulating, and, yes, enriching. I urge more Cs goers to seek these sessions on the borders, in the center. The gathering at CCCC should be, to borrow the phrase from Mejía, where the solitude ends. |
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