Reclaiming Composition for Chicano/as and Other Ethnic Minorities

A Critical History and Pedagogy

Iris D. Ruiz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137536730
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Vergleichende Erziehungswissenschaft

Winner ofHonorable Mention for the 2018 Conference on College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award

This book examines the history of ethnic minorities particularly Chicano/as and Latino/as--in the field of composition and rhetoric; the connections between composition and major US historical movements toward inclusiveness in education; the ways our histories of that inclusiveness have overlooked Chicano/as; and how this history can inform the teaching of composition and writing to Chicano/a and Latino/a students in the present day. Bridging the gap between Ethnic Studies, Critical History, and Composition Studies, Ruiz creates a new model of the practice of critical historiography and shows how that can be developed into a critical writing pedagogy for students who live in an increasingly multicultural, multilingual society.

© The Author(s) 2016

Iris D. RuizReclaiming Composition for Chicano/as and Other Ethnic Minorities10.1057/978-1-137-53673-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Iris D. Ruiz¹

(1)

Merritt Writing Program, University of California, Merced, Clovis, California, USA

End Abstract

Reading Composition histories and scholarship is like reading Shakespeare. I can’t see myself, and, oftentimes, I can’t see my friends or those who look like me. We don’t look like the authors who wrote them. We are not white men. I can’t see my history. It’s buried in there somewhere, they tell me, but where? I try to imagine myself in it, but it’s hard. I’m not a princess or a queen. I’m not white. I’m not a fairy; I’m not a witch. I do get a glimpse at what I might look like in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” I see a hint of myself alluded to in the presence of Caliban, but I’m not a cannibal, and my relation to Caliban’s Puerto Rican reference is very dim. Plus, unlike Shakespeare, I don’t talk or write in Early Modern English nor in sonnets and couplets (though they are beautiful and articulate). The same tension happens when I’m reading Composition histories. The language of this history does not represent me, and I can’t imagine myself there in the Harvard halls walking to my next writing class (first-year composition [FYC]) , in Harvard classrooms looking studiously at the distinguished white-male professor, or even in the Harvard bathrooms getting refreshed for my next class (and, no, not even cleaning them). So I suppose it is a bit worse when reading Composition histories in comparison with Shakespeare’s plays because I don’t see myself even implicitly referred to in any of the “characters” of these histories. The more I can’t imagine myself there, the more I wonder why I’m not there. Is there something wrong with me? Why can’t I hear how my voice would sound if I asked the professor, “What do you mean that rhetoric started in Greece?” Wait a minute, I can’t ask that, because I’m not there. No, I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine any of this because I’m not even implicitly there. I’m not alluded to in the words, the phrases, the dates and the events, or in the critical discussions of “changing demographics” and the changing political landscapes. I continue, however, to read the histories of the field I’m engaged in because I want to be there. I want to be worthy of Harvard; I want to show that I understand this history, that I know it. I know that slaves helped build Harvard and that they were often the backdrop of the University as freedmen, once emancipation was offered, ¹ but where were the Latinxs: those who look like me with similar backgrounds and last names? Surely they were around; I mean, we were here before Harvard. So I know we were around. Maybe it’s just an oversight. It’s not really a blind spot, is it?

So, I keep reading. In grad school they gave us James Berlin, David Bartholomae, Patricica Bizzell, and Kenneth Burke to read. Graduate Seminars in Composition and Rhetoric, however, often saved the marginal scholarship (those written by People of Color [PoC]) for the last week (if there was time to get to them). In 1999, there were three scholars of color whose work I read toward the end of the course, no, four that I can think of: Victor Villanueva, Juan Guerra, Norma González, and Ralph Cintron. Finally, a hint of myself and my experience had surfaced, but were there more? I was the only Latina in many of my grad seminars, so I always felt awkward asking. I needed a mentor, but no Latina Comp/Rhet people were around. No, not at the Master’s or PhD level. What was going on here?

I held on to the books authored by Latinxs in Comp for dear life. They were my salvation. They were my oxygen when I needed to come up for air, when reading theoretical taxonomies or reading about how students like me must invent the University (like magic) if we were to be counted and seen in the University. We had to imitate—imitate that which we read at the undergraduate level and the discourse of Composition theory at the graduate level (at the beginning of the seminars, not the end—the colored scholarship). Graduate students do have to imitate forms, even if assumed to have mastered the discourse of the field. They have to follow conventions—the “They say/I say” rules of academic discourse in order to gain entry into the profession of Composition Studies, even when they don’t see themselves in the history of the field; this is a common phenomenon but not regarded as any kind of real literacy violence, nor as Gloría Anzaldúa would say, “linguistic terrorism.” Victor Villanueva was the only one brave enough to challenge these rules; he played with genre and format, even tone in Bootstraps. But we read him at the end. Why? Was he marginal? Could I write like him and not be marginalized? Imitation of academic discourse is one thing I “mastered” as a graduate student, but I wondered, who was I imitating and were there more Latinx Compositionists? So the impetus for this book is the obvious discord between my personal experience and the requirements of initiation into academia, specifically into the field of Composition Studies and Rhetoric. Today, I continue to look through tables of contents of various publications associated with the field, specifically for names that look Latinx, like mine.

Sadly, a present survey of the field shows little change over the past decade. People of Color (PoC), including Latinx, Composition scholarship are limited in quantity and often deal with a narrow set of topics: linguistic diversity issues such as English as a Second Language (ESL), translingualism, Generation 1.5, and, now, historical recovery work has begun (Ramírez (2015), Baca (2008), Pimentel (2015)) and they are still read at the end of the semester, if there is time. Where are PoC in the theoretical realm, the realm of the unmarginalized, the realm of the serious, structural conversations, such as research methodology and Composition Studies history that ultimately influences the way Composition gets taught and talked about? We’ve shown that we can master the discourse, and everyone knows that these conversations are important in an increasingly diverse society where the Latinx population is growing rapidly. PoC influence the ways the field changes, evolves, grows, and gets reconceived. Where are PoC in Composition’s History? Are they there implicitly? No. They are invisible. Composition histories, even “critical” Composition histories, do not account for PoC, and it is not until we look at other geographical locations and educational institutions not found in traditional histories of Comp Studies that we find hints of what literacy meant for PoC when these histories seem to originate in the late nineteenth century.

***

With the above inquiries as the motivation for entering PoC’s or other “ethnic minorities” into traditional histories of Composition, this book argues that nineteenth-century-based histories of Composition Studies do not account for PoC, especially Latinx, and that post-civil rights Composition Studies still shows signs of excluding PoC in its main scholarly journals (Journal of Advanced Composition, College Composition and Communication, and Composition Studies) with the exception of “special issues.” Looking at these two historical moments, as this book does, it is apparent that PoC are almost unaccounted for in over a century in the field. These two moments reveal rhetorical blind spots (Ramírez 28). These blind spots call for rhetorical recovery that reveals the growing presence of Latinxs in Composition and Rhetoric programs. We are not only growing in numbers in society at large; now, we are also in the field as scholars, researchers, professors, administrators, adjuncts, and leaders. We are here to stay. Latinxs are now in the halls of Harvard as students. This is a fact, while there are also Latinxs (very young ones) sitting on the bus awaiting shelter in a warehouse and court decisions regarding their welfare and possible deportation. While at least one of us sits at the Supreme Court, others of us are crossing the border, fleeing that which threatens those human rights we are fighting for in our courts every day. While many of us have crossed borders to be here, many of us were already here before Harvard was built. Our experiences are multifaceted, some more tumultuous and violent than others. We seek justice, but to achieve that, we must first be recognized for our historical contributions, our present contributions, and our continued, growing presence here in the USA.

Missing from traditional histories of the field from a Compositionist of Color perspective, I wanted to know where these PoC were. Indeed, they were reading, writing, printing, and distributing their own newspapers while holding town meetings, country-club and civic-club meetings during this time. Where are their literacy histories? How do they figure into the history of our field? When they were not present in postsecondary education, what were they doing to develop their composing skills? How can their experiences effectively inform Composition theory and pedagogy?

While the first part of this book looks at Composition’s history tied to late-nineteenth-century renditions of the Harvard history to account for the absence of PoC, the second part considers the state of our field after the Civil Rights Movement and the growing presence of students of color. It seeks to examine how the field responded to those changes in terms of its scholarship and pedagogical attention to civil rights gains of both African Americans and Mexican Americans. For example, different theories of writing were formed after the Civil Rights Movement as a way to meet the challenges new students brought with them to the writing classroom challenging traditional writing models, such as what we have come to know as “current-traditional rhetoric.”

With the passing of civil rights and the era of open admissions came the cognitive model (Flower and Hayes), the process model (Peter Elbow), the epistemic model (James Berlin), and the post-structuralist/postmodern model (Sharon Crowley and Gloria Anzaldúa, as introduced into Composition Studies by Andrea Lunsford in a “special issue” of JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory called “Exploring Borderlands: Postcolonial and Composition Studies”). These were defined and disseminated through Composition publications and classrooms; however, one still sees a vast absence of scholars of color within the field in the midst of these changes, and Composition scholarship paid little attention to understanding students’ cultural backgrounds. Most Composition scholarship that deals with PoC concentrates on how current teachers should not accommodate ethnic minority students’ literacy practices and focuses on how students should accommodate universities’ literacy standards and teachers should teach process writing models that will educate students on how to imitate standard academic English as a means of initiation into the University (Bartholomae, Elbow, Shaughnessy, Flower and Hayes, Vgotsky, Delpit, and Heath). There were a variety of approaches available to “initiate” new students of color into universities during the era of Open Admissions, but their individual and group cultural identities, histories, rhetorical practices, and learning styles were not widely considered, at least not in the field’s scholarship.

Victor Villanueva would agree with my assessment of the field’s inattention to PoC. He insightfully argues in “Rhetoric, Racism, and the Remaking of Knowledge Making in Composition” that PoC were only implicitly included in some of the major scholarship of the field in the mid-1980s. More explicitly, he indicts Stephen North’s The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (1987) for not accounting for PoC in his taxonomy of research methodological communities in the field of Composition. While North identifies eight key methodological communities—practitioners, historians, philosophers, critics, experimentalists, clinicians, formalists, and ethnographers—each one written about in a chapter noting their entry in the field, he also reveals and critiques their underlying assumptions and common procedures, and lists the kinds of knowledge the community has contributed to the field. In North’s book, Villanueva sees that there is not one scholar of color who contributes to this foundational disciplinary text. He wonders why this huge blind spot has not been accounted for, even while North included Shaughnessy, Perl, Sommers, and Graves, who were obviously working with students of color. Specifically, Villanueva states,

North was seeking to explain research methods, with the people intended as illustrations of methods. And folks of color were implicit in those examples: the students that Shaughnessy, Perl, Sommers, Graves looked at, worried about, studied, tried to help. But that they were in fact students of color seems only implicit, never fully developed. (2)

Villanueva starts to uncover this blind spot in the field and its foundational works. This book is discussing the making of knowledge in a field to legitimize its disciplinary strong hold and reputation with its own distinct field of inquiries and methods but at the cost of doing what many disciplines have done in the past, ignoring the subjects taught by those fields during this time period.

Blind spots, thus, are not uncommon. If they were, then there would be no need for historical recoveries or for critical race theorists who look beyond that which is written to locate the missing voices. In this case, those voices would be Composition scholars of color or those that wrote about students of color and their linguistic particularities as they related to the evolution of Composition at this moment, such as William Labov, Roseann Dueñas González, and Geneva Smitherman. Villanueva critically argues why it might have made some kind of sense to have left these important scholars out, but had they been included, this blind spot would not be so vast:

And conscribed by a field, he would not discuss Smitherman (1977) or Roseann Dueñas González (1983), as active as they were in composition studies during the same decade that North observes. Smitherman and González are linguists. And maybe, in his choosing to stay focused on compositionists, he can’t discuss William Labov (though Heath and Scribner and Cole do turn up in The Making of Knowledge, the linguistic anthropologist and the two psychologists, more white folks studying those of color; one tires of being a subject and a specimen)…Labov’s great (even if obvious in retrospect) contribution to language research methodology was his pointing out that the cultural and racialized make-up of the researcher affects the research outcome. (4)

Wow, had that last insight about Labov been considered in the North’s book, how might it have been accepted and read? How might pedagogy have been altered if Labov’s insights were given credibility in North’s book? Villanueva notes that North was conscribed by a field and that this is why he could not account for these inclusions; however, what could he have accounted for within the field if he wanted to account for PoC? This is a subject for another book and some of it will be covered herein; however, North is still guilty of the negation of PoC, nicely put, and he is not the only one.

This negation is not only one of people but of writing pedagogy and practices. Notably, the personal essay has seen its criticism (see Bartholomae (1995), Holdstein and Bleich (2001), and Villanueva (2004)) and has been accused of being nonacademic, while there is constant preference for academic discourse associated with a disciplinary respect for “current-traditional” rhetoric. A field’s preference for scientific and academic discourse supports the need for North’s book to demonstrate that the research of Composition Studies can be seen alongside other disciplines that adhere to respected scientific research methodologies that claim objectivity and reliability. However, the personal narrative is seeing its way back into writing across the disciplines as a way of communicating the fact that research is positional; that is, research is performed by a researcher, and there are no predetermined structures which make science fall outside of the realm of the personal observer—the scientist. Science cannot be carried out or explained by a detached observer; the observer is always attached to the observation with his or her personal experience as a part of the observation. Because of this attachment, “Personal Academic Discourse” provides a way of discovering the lives and experiences of students of color and can inform Composition Studies, but it did not count as a serious methodology in North’s book. How is that? Villanueva argues that scholars and students of color can’t just do “science” that ignores the personal because the personal is their science:

The men and women of color who pulled this profession into the world of Personal Academic Discourse, of storytelling mixed with evidence of various other sorts have been pointing to what so many others see, that understanding humanity’s humanity can best be attained with how we articulate our understanding. This is our “science,” not to be relegated to the Scholars resisting composition’s ties to literature in English departments, not to be relegated to the Historians who are tied to a rhetoric that rises Adam-like out of Athens and then Rome, inevitably tied to the story of European expansion, when we would all of us have had our own rhetorics. (16)

Villanueva gives North the benefit of the doubt, however, and acknowledges that the limits of North’s available scholars had to stay narrow because in legitimizing a field’s modes of inquiry, North could not simply make claims to all types of research methodologies that fell outside of the realm of how an “emerging field” made claims to making knowledge for a specific part of the University curriculum: Composition Studies and FYC. Personal academic discourse was not part of this trend. North could have, however, accounted for how the field had been impacted by the ethnic varieties that were also contributing to the legitimacy of our field, for without students of color and those that challenge the middle-class meritocratic University makeup, our field would not have evolved as it has today. For example, we can now consider the complicated genesis of what we can critically consider as falling under the realm “rhetoric” and histories of rhetoric. We can now legitimately look to the Americas, to the indigenous, to the African American, to the Chicanx, or to the Puerto Riqueña to inform new understandings of rhetorical functions and histories. Maybe if North were to rewrite his notorious book today as Villanueva has imagined,

he would no doubt [have] acknowledge[d] not just ethnography but the symbolist ethnography of a Clifford Geertz and, likely, the rhetorical ethnography of a Ralph Cintron. And he would likely acknowledge the artistically-rendered research of Personal Academic Discourse. And I would hope, he would recognize the current work on the rhetorics historically tied to people of color. (16)

Like Villanueva, I seek to contribute to the tradition of recovering that which has been lost through the exclusion of PoC in histories of the field and subsequently in the scholarship of the field. While I turn to the inclusion of African American voices to highlight ways African American Composition scholars have approached their absence in traditional histories of Composition, my emphasis ultimately falls on how to better account for the absence of Latinxs in these histories and in the field in toto. Furthermore, I am Latina, and I have resided in the Southwest and West my entire life, including the duration of this research study, which took place in the state of California, a state with one of the largest Latinx populations.

To gain an idea of the vastness of Latinxs in the present USA, the 2010 U.S. Census Bureau reports that 37.6 % of the State of California’s total population is composed of Hispanics, or Latinxs, of any race, and in the span of 10 years from 2000, this population grew almost 28 %. In San Diego, where I carried out my research, 32 % of the population is composed of Latinxs, 28 % of whom are designated as “Mexicans,” with 55.7 percent of the city’s population speaking Spanish and English. As the 2012 U.S. Census Bureau reports, the language spoken more often by Americans other than English is Spanish. Yet, despite this large Spanish-speaking population, many of our educational institutions still practice English-only curricula, except for “magnet” schools where educational experiments are carried out without looking closely at what is needed to enable the Spanish-speaking or bilingual populations of California and, more specifically, San Diego, to be successful in higher education. While these statistics are county-specific, California is a border state and these demographics are roughly representative of most California counties.

Today, Latinxs are the majority population of the entire state. I go into some of these demographic details about Latinxs in the USA periodically throughout the book because race and identity politics are going to serve as lenses of analytics throughout; I acknowledge that even though race is a biological fiction, it is a socially induced category which creates a burden for many PoC and has specific economic opportunities and material rewards and losses associated with each racial category. Many people, however, disagree with this position and instead argue that we ...