Special Issue of Across the Disciplines

Anti-Racist Activism: Teaching Rhetoric and Writing

Past guest contributor Aja Martinez has an article in an interesting special issue of Across the Disciplines: A Journal of Language, Learning, and Academic Writing.
Her article "Critical Race Theory Counterstory as Allegory: A Rhetorical Trope to Raise Awareness About Arizona's Ban on Ethnic Studies" is informed by the Critical Race Theory methodology of allegory, which Martinez uses to create a composite story that addresses rhetoric around the recent Arizona legislature.
 

I appreciate that Martinez draws on classical traditions in rhetoric despite the interdisciplinary style and methodology:
"Following Plato's method of devising a setting reflective of contemporary social issues and depicting characters that can be easily associated with real public figures, Arizona's anti-immigrant/Mexican/ethnic studies climate provides dramatic context in which to stage an allegory about immortality. In the allegory, immortality represents the privilege to extended life and in essence existence verses lack of access (for the non-privileged) to immortality and thus imminent erasure/extinction of an entire culture, people, and way of being."

From the website:
Guest editors: Frankie Condon, University of Waterloo, and Vershawn Ashanti Young, University of Kentucky
Despite widely circulated pronouncements of the death of racism in the U.S. following the election of President Barack Obama, politicians continue to appeal to race as a means of galvanizing their (predominantly white) bases, legislation across the States taps into deeply held racist beliefs and connects those beliefs with notions of citizenship and national identity, and efforts are underway nationwide to limit the ability of teachers and students to study the history of race and racism in the U.S. as well as the cultural and scholarly production of artists and intellectuals of color. This special issue helps meet a pressing need to continue and deepen a critical dialogue about race matters, particularly in classrooms that take up the pedagogical aims of synthesis, analysis, argumentation, persuasion and presentation, in short, the teaching of rhetoric and writing.

See also the edited collection on code-meshing by Martinez and Vershawn Ashanti Young:

Great Colllection Available in June

Coming Soon from National Council of Teachers of English Publishers!
Aja Martinez, blog contributor/educator/writer extraordinaire, has a co-edited collection called Code-Meshing as World English coming out with Vershawn Ashanti Young June 2011.

Contributors include: Gerald Graff, Asao B. Inoue, Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner

From the description on NCTE's website:
"

Although linguists have traditionally viewed code-switching as the simultaneous use of two language varieties in a single context, scholars and teachers of English have appropriated the term to argue for teaching minority students to monitor their languages and dialects according to context. For advocates of code-switching, teaching students to distinguish between “home language” and “school language” offers a solution to the tug-of-war between standard and nonstandard Englishes. This volume arises from concerns that this kind of code-switching may actually facilitate the illiteracy and academic failure that educators seek to eliminate and can promote resistance to Standard English rather than encouraging its use.

The original essays in this collection offer various perspectives on why code-meshing—blending minoritized dialects and world Englishes with Standard English—is a better pedagogical alternative than code-switching in the teaching of reading, writing, listening, speaking, and visually representing to diverse learners. This collection argues that code-meshing rather than code-switching leads to lucid, often dynamic prose by people whose first language is something other than English, as well as by native English speakers who speak and write with “accents” and those whose home language or neighborhood dialects are deemed “nonstandard.”

Presenting Guest Blogger Aja Martinez

Three Generations Pocha
By Aja Martinez

My grandpa, Alejandro Ayala Leyva, is an oral historian. I’ve been raised on the stories he tells about his life and in this way I first encountered the word “pocho.” He told me a story once about being born and raised until age five in Los Angeles, and his memory of being loaded up with his parents and four younger siblings onto a boxcar during the Great Depression and sent “south” back to Mexico. 

My grandpa says his dad had “enough sense” to get the family off the boxcar when they stopped in Nogales, Arizona because as he recalls his father told the kids they were American citizens and had “no business” in Mexico. As my grandpa grew up in Nogales, a small town that splits the border with Nogales, Sonora, he encountered Mexicanos who accused him of being “pocho” in the way he spoke Spanish. I was surprised to hear this because from my perspective, being raised third generation American, with no access to Spanish-speaking fluency because my parents had the Spanish beaten out of them when they went to school, I thought my grandpa’s Spanish sounded pretty legit.

I felt like I was maybe the first generation to embody “pocho” qualities such as my lack of Spanish-speaking skills and a way of presenting myself that got me accused of “trying to be white” by some Chicanos I attended school with. So to hear my grandpa say that he too faced these accusations I began to really wonder about this word and what it means. Does “pocho” mean acting white? Does it refer to those of us affected by American ideology and values? One American value I subscribe to is education, and it seems the further I go in academia the whiter I become to Chicanos from my family and ‘hood I grew up in.

So my ideas on “pocho” as a concept have to do with becoming white as you become educated. I think of movies like Mi Familia and The Barbershop where there are characters that are the "educated" ones in the family and are written into the films as sellouts and pompous idiots who are ashamed of where they come from and have something to learn from their less-educated but more wise castmates. I think this portrayal is unfair and to paraphrase my brother from another mother, Cruz Medina, education, instead of making you less connected with your culture has the potential to provoke a lot of us to have consciousness and conversations about culture that we might not have the space to think about were it not for education.  

 
But the “scholarship” boys like Richard Rodriguez in Hunger of Memory, and also more public figures like the Clarence Thomases of our nation embody the real-life versions of these fictional characters written into Latino and black films. And the messages they promote about assimilation and selling out are pervasive to a white American public hungry for poster-child minorities. Thus the film characterizations, and I don't like the equation these films promote which goes something like this: ethnic + education = sellout wannabe white, and in our case the “pocho.” I've been called a “pocho” in this sense, because to some of my family the more educated I become the more white I am, which from their point can definitely have its advantages with the ultimate pitfall being that they still think at the end of the day that I’m “trying to be white.” 

However the advantages to my education for my family are that I'm viewed as someone with the authority of a the doctor when they need one, I'm viewed as someone with the authority of a lawyer when they need one, I'm viewed as someone with the authority of a the teacher when they need one; education represents all these “authorities” to these particular people in my family, however this presentation and way of communication that I possess is both powerful when they need me on their team but a threat when they feel the need to reassert the fact that I'm, as George Lopez puts it, still "not shit," and that they can still "kick my ass." You know? 

So I think this relates back to the idea of the “pocho” and those characters from films like Mi Familia and The Barbershop. Those characters are put in these films to remind us brown folk that we can get our educations but that we need to be wary of getting too tangled up in white American hegemony, and I get it, and I also get those portrayals read onto me and my education. And I don't like it, I'm uncomfortable with it, but I also understand.

Be sure to check out the Collection Aja Martinez co-edited:

 
Read Aja Martinez' College English article:
http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/CE/0716-july09/CE0716American.pdf