Debra la tardita in her America, of late

un pensamiento por Rudy Ch. Garcia

I know of a little girl whom I call Debra here who struggled to get to school on time. Her record on tardiness steadily grew worse. From a minute or two to five and ten minutes and then half an hour; soon she didn't show up to school at all some days. But not because she was sick.

She inevitably came in with disheveled hair, sometimes displaying frustration and helplessness over her lateness. Her teacher had talked with her and her older sister about what was going on. From the little I'd heard, Debra seemed to be a very capable student who loved learning about the world around her, and threw herself into improving her academic skills. Despite whatever went on in her life that made her late, she maintained an optimistic smile and seemed a happy child.

Unfortunately, in the real world, Debra's mom worked two low-paying jobs, like a lot of Spanish-speaking and other parents, with or without papers. One job required the mom to leave the house at four a.m., with Debra's siblings responsible for somehow getting everything ready and everyone to school on time. It hadn't been working out well.

In that same world, Debra's dad hadn't been born in the U.S. He'd gone through hells to relocate here from another country, like so many on the planet these days. He didn't come to sell drugs or covet and steal others' possessions nor to underbid millions of Americans also desperate for meaningful work. He finally found some manual labor that he worked hard at, often as many hours or more than Debra's mom.

Debra's teacher, whom I've known for years, never considered the child an "at-risk" student. She became instead a bright spot in that teacher's day, a child who often giggled as she wrote small stories, who orally expressed herself quite remarkably for a six-year-old, and eagerly tackled math and more, especially her learning of English.

Her teacher told me that one morning she pulled attendance up on the computer and there stood an X by Debra's name, indicating she'd be missing school again. The sidebar explanation read, "Dad arrested."

Debra's teacher cried.

On the other hand, Obama's minions carved one more notch on their hundreds of thousands of deportees list, more even than his supposedly more evil predecessor Bush had extradited from their workplaces and homes and communities and families. The Republican-Democrat political machine added one more statistic to their tally of see-how-many-illegals-we-catch? And the millions of ignorant American citizens who blame Debra's dad instead of American politicians and corporations for their unemployment, college-loan bills and underwater mortgages, went to bed thinking that arresting Debra's dad would magically turn their own plunging lifestyles around.

Debra's life certainly got turned around; more like, upside down. Getting to school on time will not be the major problem in her life anymore; worrying about her dad replaced that. Wondering how well she is learning English may no longer be an immediate goal for her; that will depend on where she winds up attending school. Why butterflies can fly and how many colors there are in a rainbow might become relegated to the back of her small, growing brain. And I dread to think how long her giggles will be overshadowed by new burdens in her life.

I didn't know Debra well enough to cry. But I have taught children from her background for many years. Most good teachers in this country know that all the Debras and Daniels can and do learn and succeed, if given the educational opportunities. The biggest thing they are at risk of here is being tested to death.

Anyway, not that politicians will care much, anymore than they worry about the human repercussions of their money-driven acts, but I'm using this occasion to remove my name from the registered voter list. Our citizenry is committed to following self-destructive bills, amendments and political parties that are eviscerating our souls. Very little on this year's ballot, and nothing in the next presidential ballot is aimed to stop our dive into deeper mediocrity. However, I'll keep myself on the listservs that might announce when it's time to Occupy Our Country.

I don't hope Obama reads this. Nor will I send it as part of any letter/Email/twitter-sending campaign. Those who know better, are already informed. Those who don't, shouldn't be cause for wasting time. But despite my remarks above, I don't feel sorry for Debra. My empathy for her, and abstractly with millions of U.S. immigrant children in similar straits, also makes pity inappropriate.

So I can't end this on a sad note, however dismal Debra's future may sound. I've seen too much of children's regenerative powers, their instincte for finding new cause for giggling in situations where we adults might fall into depression. No, it doesn't always happen that way.

But every morning, children in the millions rise from their bed, sofa, mattress or blanket on the floor or ground, and using their powers of some magnificent magic, push aside the fact that the country they're growing up in lacks so much humanity that it prides itself on legally taking their parents from them. Although children sense at many levels if they're of the "wrong" color, speak a "lesser" native language and live more impoverished than the majority who can afford to text-and-twitter, their eagerness to chase a butterfly into the pages of a book or scan a rainbow for magic bigger than themselves doesn't cease beaming from their developing minds. And makes some teacher somewhere remember why all the searches for truth can't be stifled. Nor for some kind of justice.

Even if the child rises as collateral damage in a nation so far from where her father now struggles.

Que viva! our species' capacity to reconstruct ourselves, even if not as magically as all the Debras innately create new dreams to keep themselves giggling, and surviving. And even if they sometimes can't help being late for school.

es todo, hoy,
RudyG

Putting it all together drawing by S.D. Hillberry, of which I own a print.

Damián Baca, Scripts for Liberation

Damián Baca works at the intersection of rhetoric, comparative writing systems in Mesoamerica/later America, and globalization. Generally, he looks to cultures in Latin America, the Caribbean, and U.S. Latinidad as a lens through which to complicate and inform two correlative domains of inquiry:

1) The disciplinary formation of the study of alphabetic writing as it emerges during a crucial period of Western territorial annexation, and

2) The imperial complicity between "racialized" subjectivites and economy, from the development of the transatlantic commercial circuit in the sixteenth century to the present stages of global capitalism.

Baca is especially interested in the rhetorical potential of post-Occidental reason - an invitation to theorize with, against, and beyond inherited patterns of thinking that emerged in Western Europe under capitalism. In place of merely challenging the Western Rhetorical tradition from a so-called "alternative" cultural locus, his work examines how and why the current study of Rhetoric and Composition becomes an unquestioned alternative to the immense global plurality of communicative forms and knowledges that remain obscured. He perceives these inquiries as having substantial implications for the politics and ethics of research, teaching, and curricular reform.

Author Bio:

Damian Baca, assistant professor of English at the University of Arizona, earned his Ph.D. from Syracuse University in 2006. He is a member of the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) and serves on the council's Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English.

Baca is a recipient of the NCTE Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color scholarship, and was supported by the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program during his years as a graduate student. His research and teaching areas include Chicano Chicana Rhetoric & Poetics, Comparative Technologies of Writing, Rhetorics of Mesoamerica/Colonial Mexico and the U.S./Mexico Border, Globalization, Colonial/World-Systems Analysis, Digital Humanities, and Ancestral Literacy.

Baca is author of Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing (New Concepts in Latino American Cultures Series) Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. He is also lead co-editor of Rhetorics in the Americas: 3114BCE to 2012CE with Victor Villanueva, scheduled for publication in late 2009.

He is currently preparing his third manuscript on pedagogical resistance to inherited patterns of thinking that emerged in Western Europe under capitalism. A native of New Mexico and descendant of Sephardic Crypto Jews (primarily through his matrilineal line, Espinosa), Baca regularly conducts research at the National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation and numerous other locations throughout the region. Additional information is about Baca is available at http:/u.arizona.edu/~damian.


2008 Palgrave Macmillan Press Release for Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing:

Conventional scholarship on written communication positions the Western alphabet as a precondition for literacy. Thus, pictographic, non-verbal writing practices of Mesoamerica remain obscured by representations of lettered speech. This book examines how contemporary Mestiz@ scripts challenge alphabetic dominance, thereby undermining the colonized territories of "writing." Strategic weavings of Aztec and European inscription systems not only promote historically-grounded accounts of how recorded information is expressed across cultures, but also speak to emerging studies on visual/multimodal education. Baca argues that Mestiz@ literacies advance "new" ways of reading and writing, applicable to diverse classrooms of the twenty-first century.

La Bloga's discussion with Damian Baca

How would you describe your career arc?

I trace my present inquiries back to my training and experience in graduate school. The teaching of college writing is a practice that is claimed by Rhetoric and Composition, a discipline within the larger field of English Studies. On one hand, the discipline focuses most of its attention on writing activities in controlled academic spaces with histories firmly embedded in the thinking of ancient Athenians, Roman imperialists, Aryan-Germanic philosophers, and descendants of Puritan immigrants. On the other hand, Rhetoric and Composition proclaims that writing is more or less a life-long activity that is relevant in multiple ways and for multiple cultural situations. So a notable predicament arises -- how can scholars make authoritative claims about (and thus teach) the "diversity" of writing while simultaneously surrendering to an outdated and culturally provincial historical fantasy?

My point of departure from the discipline has become two-fold. First, while the discipline's governing gaze remains fixed upon a linear "Greece>Rome>Europe>North America" global trajectory, I'm committed to questioning pre- and post- conquest legacies on our own continent. While conventional academics theoretically look back across the Atlantic to the West and Europe, I aim to think from the South, from Mesoamerica, colonial Mexico, and the U.S./Mexico borderlands. And not surprisingly, Rhetoric and Composition is structured upon the largely unquestioned ideology that Western Roman alphabetic symbols comprise the foundation of writing and literacy. But this is not my foundation.

Indeed, our continent tells an "other" narrative, one of a plurality of graphic marks that produce Olmec calendrics, Maya hieroglyphs, Aztec pictographs, Inca quipu knotted cord systems, Chicana Chicano iconography, and Zapatista digital communications. A truly hemispheric and global plurality provides precisely what Rhetoric and Composition experts have yet to grasp: historically-sound and theoretically grounded accounts of multiple and conflicting writing systems in the Americas, the Caribbean, and beyond. I believe such accounts foster perspectives that are better suited for our contemporary world problems of perpetual warfare, territorial occupation, economic exploitation and systemic poverty, and the politics of communication across cultural borders.

Why this area of study?

Good question. Why study and teach writing? My interest is driven by a conviction that critical agency and justice cannot emerge from a single overarching rhetorical tradition upon which all civilizations across the globe must follow. In this spirit, I practice and teach writing as a political and creative art, an art that involves building theoretical frameworks, analyzing and developing concepts, and thinking beyond the sentence-level to critically reflect upon larger, underlying structures. This is why instead of "teaching writing as production" or "teaching texts as consumption," I tend to think in terms of teaching through inquiries associated with legacies of conquest and resistant discourses that challenge global powers of our day.

A series of interlocking life-changing events, from the colonial break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to Al-Qaeda attacks of September 2001 complicate --among other things-- isolationist narratives that recast Western civilization as separate from the world rather than part of it.

The political and ethical potential of my work, I hope, might provide space for enlarging the harmfully narrow frameworks that academics use to study and teach written language and literacy. In addition to an increased awareness of, for example, transnational migrations, fundamentalist faith systems, and multinational corporations, a more global concept of writing might likewise call into question the foundations of the humanities and social sciences.

When and where do the Americas and the Caribbean become literary, literate, and rhetorical? According to whom and with whose definitions? Should North Atlantic imperialism dictate the historical and creative imaginary of the rest of the world? I prefer looking to wider geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts for rethinking hemispheric and world history. Building a wide-angle transatlantic view is helpful in teaching beyond the provinces of Athens, Western Europe, Massachusetts Bay, the British colonies, and toward a global past and global present.

How are writing technologies and disciplinary lenses already embedded within transnational processes of oceanic trade, migration, and industrialization? How can writing specialists better understand the plurality of writing systems, empires, and trade networks that thrived in
the Western Hemisphere long before European occupation? How have these earlier commercial networks set the stage for our current era of technoglobalism, human trafficking, and unregulated capitalist expansion? As a teacher, these inquiries impact multiple scenes of learning, teaching, and institutional leadership, from hallway conversations to seminars, from faculty search committee meetings to conference presentations. The classroom is merely one space where learning,teaching, and writing happen.

What is the significance of specific constructs of language in Chicano contexts?

There are so many writers who've influenced my thinking about language and rational thought. Lucha Corpi, Sandra Mar?a Esteves, E.A. Mares, Rosaura S?nchez, Ben S?enz, Aurora Levins Morales, Demetria Martinez, José Antonio Burciaga, Manuel Mu?oz, Laura Pérez, and numerous others. The late Gloria Anzald?a and her groundbreaking Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza also comes to mind. Borderlands adds significantly to our understanding of Chicana Chicano politics of language, I think, by advancing a new strategy of imagination and invention?the critical invention between multiple discourses and the memories that are embedded in those discourses. Mexican Spanish, Spanglish, Cal? and Pachuquisma, Tex-Mex, English variations, Nahuatl fragmentations, Espa?otli.

I see this intervention as a powerful rhetorical tactic, but one that is often confused with the mere encounter between different cultures and worldviews. Numerous writers have shown that Chicana Chicano discursive experiences are far more complex than this. For example, Anzald?a employs nepantla as a concept of borderland thinking. Nepantla, which can translate as "the space between two oceans," is a Nahuatl expression coined in the early sixteenth century in the aftermath of European invasion, rape, genocide, and conquest. The first generation of children from Mesoamerican mothers and Iberian fathers recognized that "authentic" pre-European ways of life were impossible to recover. At the same time, the Spanish colonial world of brutal Christianization was not a suitable alternative.

Nepantlism, then, is a strategy of thinking and speaking from a border space through multiple kinds of expressions and oppositions. Inventing and communicating from nepantlism, suspended between paradoxical frames of reference, was first a possibility in the mind of the Mesoamerican, not the Spaniard. Both worlds experienced and negotiated cultural difference and linguistic "diversity," yet the Spanish colonial administration had no equivalent to the Nahuatl nepantla. Anzald?a's border thinking is a distinct articulation that emerges from the underside of colonization, from the perspectives of the subjugated and silenced. These Chicana Chicano articulations undermine and revise Western conventions of communication by enacting "new" memories, subaltern recollections in which splintered Mesoamerican and other language practices are strategically reconfigured and embroidered within our post-Columbian world of colonial and global power. Moreover, our culture has no need to accept either/or linguistic binaries. Anzald?a, like so many others in our community, reveals U.S. linguistic assimilation debates for what they are?outmoded ideas and false dilemmas.

What are some future areas of study?

In early 2009 I'll complete a book project I've had in mind for a few years now, Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114BCE to 2012CE, an edited manuscript under contract with Palgrave Macmillan. I believe this will be a groundbreaking collection, the first of its kind, as it extends the culturally provincial study of Western Rhetoric into an introduction to pre-Columbian rhetorics of the Americas. The book addresses an understanding of discourse meant to persuade within Pre-Columbian civilizations; that is, in presenting the rhetoric that coincided with but was not influenced by Greco-Latin ones.

Each contributor provides glimpses into what those indigenous rhetorics might have looked like, how they are tied to culture and conquest and, perhaps most importantly, how their influences remain.

The collection brings together scholars from Rhetoric, American Indian Studies, American Studies, Mesoamerican and Latin American Studies, Art History, and Comparative Spanish Literatures, among other disciplines. I approached Victor Villanueva, Director of American Studies at Washington State University, to step in as co-editor for the project. Victor?s an amazing person and an award-wining scholar whose contributions to Rhetoric and Composition studies are too numerous to list here. I'm blessed to be working with him, and blessed to work with such a wonderful group of scholars.

Lisa Alvarado

Malinche's Daughter, Michelle Otero, and Juan Felipe Herrera

Michelle Otero is the author of Malinche's Daughter (Momotombo Press, 2006), an essay collection based on her work with women survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Artful Dodge, Puerto del Sol, Upstreet, Brevity, and Metamorfósis, a Spanish-language anthology published by the National Hispanic Cultural Center. Her awards include a Fulbright Fellowship, an Association of Writing Programs Intro Journal Award, and fellowships from the Anderson Center, the McCune Foundation, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

Otero is a founding member of The Women Writers' Collective, an El Paso-based group that showcases the talents of women writers and artists while raising awareness of women's issues. In Albuquerque, she performs with Las Meganenas, a repertory theatre troupe that uses performance to raise awareness of issues facing Latinas. She holds a B.A. in History from Harvard University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Vermont College.

Michelle was the inaugural recipient of the "Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship." She received $1,000 and was residence for one month this June at the Anderson Center at Tower View in Red Wing, Minnesota. This annual distinction is the result of a new partnership between the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame and the Anderson Center. The aim of the initiative is to identify and support a Latino or Latina writer who is working on a first full-length book, and for whom a one month writing residency would suppose a crucial boost in this endeavor.

Praise for Malinche's Daughter:

In Malinche’s Daughter, Michelle Otero twines the intellect of a Fulbright fellow, the heart of a powerful woman, and the lyricism of a poet. This astounding debut collection of essays limns the author’s journey to Oaxaca, Mexico to guide a writer’s workshop for women survivors of sexual assault. In the process, Otero confronts the pain of her own childhood as well as cultures—north and south—which have been deaf to women’s voices. Here, Otero’s voice sings with profundity, soul, and spirit. Malinche’s Daughter will be heard, lauded, and widely read.

—Sue William Silverman

Artfully written, the stories in Malinche’s Daughter take us to Mexico and back, but it is also a trip to the past and to spaces of conflict and tension, finally coming home to that space where we are “born and re-born.”

— Norma Elia Cantú

My take: If you crave a complacent end-of-summer read of seafoam and sunshine, this is not the book for you. But if you want to encounter essays that burrow underneath your skin, haunt your dreams, be you man or woman, read Malinche's Daughter. In it, Michelle speaks what cannot be spoken about female reality, about family pain, about the transgression of the body and its ultimate healing.

As a survivor, I was transfixed with her account of her abuse by a neighbor. But I was more deeply transfixed by the sharp, bright pain of reading the truth, of feeling the words rise off the page and pierce my heart.

Michelle is not a confessional writer. She is a liberatory one -- for me, for other survivors, for other women, for any sentient person who understands that silence here is death. The brilliance of this slim volume is that Michelle is brave enough to sacrifice part of herself in the writing, in the telling, and shows us by the strength of her words that rebirth awaits.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Mucho mas de Juan Felipe Herrera -- The New York Times is finally catching up to what we already knew...Check it out here, here and here.

187 REASONS MEXICANOS CAN’T CROSS THE BORDER
Undocuments 1971-2007.

HALF OF THE WORLD IN LIGHT
New and Selected Poems.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/books/review/Burt2-t.html?pagewanted
=1&ei=5070&en=55523f1bbe9c4bad&ex=1218859200&emc=eta1

Lisa Alvarado

A late sharing of a Valentine

"Use the content-rubric to rate the students' writing from 0 to 2: zero if their response lacks an introductory thematic sentence and closing statement, 1 if they show evidence of either."

As I tried following these instructions during an after-school staff meeting, I found it impossible to determine whether my first grader A___'s writing in Spanish lacked theme and closure, or contained both, for that matter. But my confusion wasn't due to what she'd done or her lack of trying.

In her five months of struggling in room 103, A__ had regularly filled a half-sheet of paper with letters she carefully scribed while sounding out each syllable. And although her lettering was wonderful, in fact her compositions were unreadable, oftentimes even to their author. That hadn't stopped her.

Problem was, A__'s written words lacked most of the vowels, some consonants, and each of her lines normally contained only one space separating two long clusters of indecipherable prose. At the same time, such work showed improvement since she'd entered first grade almost unable to read.

"Zero if the response lacks an introductory--" I repeated to myself. How could I know if it did? She might have a strong thematic sentence and an even better closure, but I was expected to give her a zero simply because I couldn't decipher her heroic compositions. I was tempted to leave an N/A, which translated as "not observed," but then I would have had to explain my veering from the grading system.

During those five months A__ had managed to reach a 6 reading level, which put her on the path of failing to reach grade level by the end of the school year. I had worried about her in other ways, wondering if her belabored development was a sign of ADHD, dyslexia, or an even more serious learning disorder.

Teachers worry about such things, sometimes more than they should. For various reasons, every year we have kids who can't, won't or don't make it. We don't reach them. It's not just in writing; it's in every subject and can even encompass their growth as little human beings.

Anyway, A__'s prospect of going on to second grade with skills, abilities, and knowledge she'd need to survive, much less prosper, didn't seem likely. I would need to "staff" her, which would mean a meeting with a team of professionals to determine how best to meet her needs, since her teacher hadn't been able to do it.

I didn't mind the implicit idea of failure in this, since I know I'm no master teacher. It was the implicit branding of A__ that I dreaded. She and her parents would suffer the too common stress and even humiliation of a student diagnosed as failing.

Given her and my situation, I'd begun having her sit regularly with others at my table, instead of writing independently.

One morning she asked, "Cómo se escribe Hawaii?" I wrote it on a note for her, even though spelling U.S. states wasn't how I had intended to help her. When she showed me her completed sheet, I was surprised she hadn't done the usual half-page. There were only five lines. Less than thirty words. But each one was spaced. Almost no letters were missing. And I could read them. A__ had made a qualitative leap! We celebrated her achievement that day with song, dance and chants.

But A__ wasn't done.

A couple of days later she wrote seven lines. While the spelling and spacing was about the same, she had added something new. Sentences. With capitals and periods. Even the lone sentence that wasn't grammatically perfect was close to.

A__ who was at level 6 in reading had made a syntactic leap that those at level 16 had only begun to tackle, in some cases not as successfully. We celebrated again, only harder. A__ had become not just the class model for persistence, but also our model for something higher--writing excellence.

The composing of a few five-word sentences may not sound like major achievement, but in this case it was sufficient to affect a heart that often gets hardened by the job of teaching in U.S. classrooms. I felt good.

But she wasn't done.

For our Valentine's party, we worked like Santa and his elves do on the 24th, in our case, getting the kids' cards for their parents ready. I'd sent blank cards home for parents to make one for their kid, and my plan was to have each parent and child share theirs in front of the class.

As they took turns reading aloud, I realized I didn't know what the kids had written, even though I'd helped them with revisions. I'd been too much editor and not enough listener. Some of the more advanced ones had created some great, even beautifully poetic pieces, which I wish I could share, but can't since you're not a part of room 103.

When A__ finished reading to her father, I realized again that I hadn't heard what she'd read. All I'd heard was her loud, proud voice smoothly and unhesitatingly enunciate every word, from beginning to end. To me, the content, though intelligible, wasn't the most important thing.

When I looked at the faces of the parents who didn't know of A__'s past, I so much wanted them to know what she had struggled through, what her achievement amounted to.

I began explaining the significance of the words that she had very fluidly read to them, how wonderful it was that she could even read her own words, and how proud they should feel for her. I was only able to mutter out half of this as I made my way to where we'd posted a display of A__'s recent gains. I did manage to point to it. That's the most I'm capable of while crying.

One by one the parents approached to examine her work, nodding and talking amongst themselves. I couldn't make out what they said because I was all choked up with my own heartfelt pride in her.

Unintentionally, A__ had accomplished one more thing. I'd challenged the class to write something so excellent it would make their parents cry, promising a prize to whoever succeeded. But all the parents had succeeded in holding their emotions back. Only the teacher had succumbed. By default, A__ had won the prize.

I lay claim to A__'s reading as my best Valentine, which makes it worth a lot higher than a 2 on a content rubric. Teacher's prerogative. That's all I wanted to share.

But then again, A__ may not be done yet.

© Rudy Ch. Garcia 2008