College English - Rhetorics from/of Color, Sept 2004

Focusing on the rhetorical work of definition in the writings of Maria Rentería, Sara Estela Ramírez, and Astrea, contributors in the early years of the twentieth century to the Spanish-language newspaper La Crónica, this essay argues that these writers redefined who the Mexican woman was and what her role in the borderlands of Texas and Mexico could be. Its exploration of their definitional claims historicizes Chicana feminist rhetoric, and examines how their work infuses rhetorics of/from color with concerns of gender and class.

The author challenges the rhetoric of “inclusion” of the voices of people of color, with its implicit reiteration of a hierarchy of center and margin, to suggest instead the more powerful possibilities offered by alliance. The example of Susan La Flesche Picotte, an enrolled member of the Omaha Nation with mixed ancestry and an unconflicted identity, who was able to ally herself with and participate fully in both European American and Indian cultures, illustrates this complex and productive rhetorical approach and its possibilities for what the author terms “survivance.”

Tracing her own efforts to assert her Cherokee ancestry, the author considers what is at stake for the more than four million mixed-bloods in the United States and suggests that individual nations must find some way to acknowledge those who wish to claim their heritage. She argues that finding a way to accept unenrolled mixed-blood peoples will allow indigenous nations to accrue greater political and cultural power in this country.

The author stretches the bounds of what we might think can and can’t be done in Pidgin, both by statement and by example: “Lotta times I get back all kine disorganized papahs dat grammatically no even make sense. But wen I tell da students dat […] I like dem write for fun, I walk around da room and I see lotta da kids stay writing in Pidgin like das da voice dat comes most natural to dem. And I’m looking over their shoulders and I’m all like WOW, dey get ideas. Stay organize. And can understand too.”

Looking at arguments put forth by courts, the State of Hawai‘i, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty activists, as well as constructions of Hawaiianness by Native Hawaiians and Locals on the mainland, the author analyzes a rhetorical shift from celebrations of cultural identity to assertions of nationhood and sovereignty on the part of Native Hawaiians that has at times made nonnative Locals feel displaced in the only “home” they have known. Both groups have had to deal with a legacy of U.S. imperialism and injustice, placing them at times in coalition to confront racism and at times in conflict.

“As if the problem of racism outside of the academy isn’t enough,” the author says, “try thinking about the ways it has informed the very notion of academy and maintains a presence in our academic institutions.” He reflects on his own position in the academy as racialized subject, educand, and educator, departing from Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of an “autoethnography” to engage in a “selfiography,” in the process interrogating not only notions of “blackness” but also the too-often-naturalized assumptions of whiteness.