When Naming Is Not Enough to Unite Us, Rhetorical Subjectivity Might Be

I come to cultural rhetorics by way of literature. In an anthologized essay, “A Personal Reflection of Chican@ Language and Identity in the US-Mexico Borderlands,” writing scholar Aja Y. Martinez argues for the importance of Chican@ Literature courses; she explains that like Gloria Anzaldua and Ana Castillo who both “felt their existence affirmed when reading novels and poetry written by Chican@s” (215), she, Martinez, who was raised and attended university near the Arizona-US border, felt the same but tells us that she did not encounter representation until a graduate-level literature course. The implication, of course, is that students need exposure far earlier than that. As a Chican@ community college writing instructor at a Hispanic Serving Institution with the designation for more than ten years, I saw it as my obligation to ensure our department offered and taught a Mexican American Literature class that was listed in our Academic Course Guide Manual as an option for our Texas two-year institution. I taught the first Mexican American Literature class at our southeast Texas Gulf Coast institution in the spring 2023. As a writing studies teacher-scholar with the credentials to teach literature, I approached this class not only as a literature class but as a writing class and writing group. Because everyone in class identified as minoritized, all students were between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, and the majority of students had never read anything resembling Chicanx literature, I wanted to know, what happens when minoritized students are first exposed to literature that (better?) represents their experiences? What happens to their ideas? How do they speak them? How do they listen? What happens to their writing? What happens to their identity construction? And finally, what happens when their instructor’s positionality is as a self-declared Chican@? At the national level, our country is currently signaling out Critical Race Theory and all accompanying ethnic and minoritized studies claiming that no one should have to feel uncomfortable in a classroom. While most of the conversation has centered on K-12 classrooms, at the macro-level, Governor DeSantis’s “anti-woke” crusade is causing people and state governments across the nation to question whether they should follow suit. A by-factor is eight state bans on Critical Race Theory education. In sixteen states, the process of trying to pass the same law is underway. While the bulk of the current controversy concerning cultural, ethnic, and minoritized studies center on K-12, DeSantis’s hostile takeover of New College, a public university until recently known for its progressive, sexual minority-friendly culture, shows what is possible when a conservative governor uses his power to “operationalize a ‘top-down restructuring’ of the school’s curriculum and culture.” This presentation is a call to action for all Chican@s, Chicanx, Xicanx, Latin@s, Lantix, Latine, Hispanics, BIPOC, and all allies and minoritized peoples: We are abundant in our cultural capitals, and we can construct, appropriate, author, and operationalize our own cultural rhetorics. What happens when writing teachers stretch, pull, and break the borders of their disciplinary silos and see all spaces as spaces of contact where justice can happen? What I witnessed is that the literature writing classroom provided the means by which my students rhetorically listened and wrote themselves into dignified ways of being and knowing.