Guest Speaking via Skype at University of Central Florida

Spoke with Dr. Gabriela Raquel Rios' Cultural Rhetorics Seminar

I am really grateful that Dr. Rios at the University of Central Florida invited me and Aja Martinez to speak about our research related to Tucson, SB 1070 and HB 2281. I began by discussing the concept of subversive complicity which is something that surfaced throughout the article as what the students used to navigate Tucson schools. At the same time, I found myself working within the grant in a similar manner that supported the publication of the book Nuestros Refranes, for which I published the article "Nuestros Refranes: Culturally Relevant Writing in Tucson High Schools."

(screenshot of Dr. Rio's seminar)

Dr. Rios makes a great argument about multimodal compositions not needing to be at the service of the written text, which is what happened with the use of dichos and trying to engage students with culturally relevant curriculum--the text had to ostensibly be for the service of the publication because the grant needed tangible outcomes.

This work came out of a year long GEAR UP grant—even these kinds of grants that are extremely necessary tend to be marginalized when it comes to  grad work—hard to show on lists of classes taught on CV when schools want to see you’ve taught an array of classes; in rhetorical theory, the influence of power is fairly prevalent to where I hear and think it’s somewhat fitting that rhetoric can be defined as “the available means of persuasion in a given context and the movement of power through discourse.“

(link to Reflections journal)

How those in power portray the marginalized population—how colonial narratives—or as CRT defines them—majoritarian stories—have an impact on how education funds, policy written, and allotments budgeted. Aja's article "Critical Race Theory Counterstory as Allegory: A Rhetorical Trope to Raise Awareness About Arizona's Ban on Ethnic Studies" speaks specifically to the majoritarian stories that are told in Arizona and other spaces that uphold narratives about people of color that portray them as lacking.

I also added that my book Reclaiming Poch@ Pop: Examing the Rhetoric of CulturalDeficiency came from kernels of what I talk about with regard to pop culture and the pop culture artists like Lalo Alcaraz who identify as pocho or pocha—came from struggles in Arizona that would either short-shrift or completely misrepresented in local and national news.

.