This online writing environment digitally archives the embodied rhetoric, issues and projects that relate to me as Associate Professor at Santa Clara University and Bread Loaf School of English faculty. E-mail me at: cnmedina AT SCU DOT edu.
More Pedagogical Praxis with Technology
So I'm interested in the intersections of race and technology, especially with regard to Latinas/os and technology. Here is yet another example of something I will use in class. My avatar looks strangely like my father, but the accents are a dig at the assumption that British accents are somehow reifications of education and an ideal for Others to fall short of.
I had the chance to attend Pres. Obama's appearance here in Tucson yesterday. On my way out, a reporter with a recording device asked me for my response and I told her that it was a beautiful event, but it was unfortunate that it came about because of tragedy. I explained that Tucson and Arizona are in need of healing because we are in a conflicted and contested place. Too quickly, sides go on the attack when wounds are still fresh.
(photos by Amanda Wray)
What I found frustrating being attendance was the flippant attitude of college age people who treated the event more like a concert than a moment for healing. Raised consciousness is a process. We have hope that those who lacked the understanding of gravitas might reflect on the event as one step towards critical consciousness. As the saying goes, every saint has a past and every sinner a future.
Mexican Immigrant Returns for Mayoral Race in Mexico
(photo by Janet Jarman for The New York Times)
From the New York Times: "The candidate, Juan Navarro, is a Mexican immigrant with homes in Queens and New Jersey, and his electoral goal is an office 2,200 miles away: the mayoralty of the small city of Serdán, Mexico. Mr. Navarro, a legal resident of the United States, has made his expatriate identity a major theme in his platform, saying that his experiences as an up-by-his-bootstraps immigrant have taught him hard lessons that would make him a sensitive civic leader in Serdán, his hometown."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/nyregion/02mexican.html?nl=nyregion&emc=ura1 The Danger I'm all for hometown boy makes good stories, but we see how success stories for people of color can become a part of the bootstraps myth when politicized. It's difficult to say whether Juan Navarro champions himself with the bootstraps myth, or whether he has been labeled by this terminology by others. However, whenever someone is isolated as an example of having pulled themselves up by his or her bootstraps, the people who have either directly or indirectly contributed to Navarro's success are dismissed. We could benefit from hearing more about his family, or perhaps about the community in which he lived while in the U.S that helped him succeed.
Reality Mirroring Art With the passing of SB1070, I genuinely hope that this politicized issue is only that: a political ploy to get McCain and Brewer reelected by the conservative majority. Immigration is a much more complex issue that requires reform beyond turning Arizona into a police state. I am glad to see Obama has criticized the immigration bill that will potentially ruin many lives for political gain of few. Which leads me to film Born in East L.A., in which Cheech Marin plays a Mexican American wrongfully deported to Mexico because he is unable to provide a green card during an INS raid. In this scene, we see that SB 1070's provision to provide documentation hasn't previously proven to have a track record as a panacea for immigration reform.
Undocumented laborers, like everyone following the flow of capital, will respond with innovations to work the system in much the same way that global companies pursue higher profit margins by switching to countries with cheaper labor forces, with no regard for human rights violations. Arizona's economy is in the tank and the conservatives in power know that if they support any anti-immigration issue, they'll get the votes they need. It's the unfortunate reality of politics and power using fear to motivate the majority without concern for what happens to communities.
Following up with my previous post on Spike Lee's talk at the University of Arizona, I wanted to illustrate an interesting point Lee made regarding representation in his film Bamboozled. He commented that he wanted the film to provide an example of not just how African Americans have been portrayed, but also how negative representations of women, Asians, Native Americans and other marginalized groups are perpetuated in the media.
During the Q&A session, someone asked what they called the 'obligatory question' about Lee's criticism of Tyler Perry's films and movies for their perpetuation of some hurtful stereotypes. Lee pointed out that from that interview, people have focused on his negative remarks, even though he complimented how Perry has created his own audience and his business savvy. Lee said that he understands that everyone doesn't have the same tastes, but he also understands that there are overlapping fans who like his work, and those who like Perry and other filmmakers like John Singleton.
This is an issue that Native American writer Sherman Alexie addresses in his essay "I Hated Tonto (Still Do)", in which Alexie writes about enjoying cowboy and Indian movies even though the representations of Native Americans were stereotypical. Alexie writes, ""Well, it's better than nothing."Yes, that became our battle cry."
A theory in Cognitive Sciences explains this phenomenon as the members of the group preferring a negative representation rather than a feeling of invisibility. As the Damon Wayans character in the trailer explains, selling positive representations of marginalized groups in film can be extremely difficult. In his discussion Spike Lee explained how he had to seek alternative funding for Malcolm X, and how he hasn't been able to get other epics about other prominent African Americans green lit to be made.
The heading above comes from an article by the same title, written by sociolinguist Mary Bucholtz.
Since I just meditated on "Stuff White People Like", it seems to follow logic that I should mention the scholarly work that has addressed similar linguistic choices aligned with the ideology that accompanies white privilege.
In Bucholtz's article, in which she interviews the students at a high school who self-identify as 'nerds' and speak in a super-standard form of English that integrates scientific discourse, Bucholtz explains, "engaging in nerdy practices may itself be a form of white privilege, since these practices were not as readily available to teenagers of color and the consequences of their use more severe"(96).
True, SWPL isn't referring to itself as a book for nerds, or for people of privilege, but Bucholtz' findings seem to point to a connection between the availability of these choices and privilege.
"The Whiteness of Nerds" also points out that while these linguistic practices of high school students, who self-identify as 'nerds', further distance themselves from their African American counterparts, Bucholtz doesn't make claims to say that this isn't necessarily a conscious strategy of the nerd students.
Separating themselves from the African-American population was "not necessarily an intended consequence...nerds defined themselves in opposition to both coolness and blackness" (94)
