Delci's Journey with Cesar Chavez

Coming Together to Remember
As a part of the Social Justice Advocates program, Eduardo Delci spoke about his "Journey with Cesar Chavez" this afternoon in the Cesar Chavez building, a great topic considering the recent issue in Texas education.

Growing up in a small farming community in Chandler, Arizona, Delci graduated from college, joined the Peace Corps in Ecuador, before returning to the U.S to work for what is now Americorp in New Mexico. His goal there was to work with farm workers to alleviate poverty by strengthening economic base through implementing community credit unions.

Delci worked with Maria Rufo, who connected with Chavez's wife Helen, who served as treasurer of the Farm Worker's Union, at a central valley California meeting for credit union organizers.
Delci explained that at the time, from 1958-1965, many agriculture laborers only earned $5-10/week, and the credit unions asked for $1.50 membership fee that went into a savings account. The money that the credit union accrued went towards loans of around $15o that went to home renovations, including the installation of indoor plumbing and refrigerators. An interesting aspect was that Chavez advocated for the build up of these credit unions in a faith-based manner, asking laborers to put in 10% of their earnings, which seemed to draw on the Catholic religious baseline that many migrants shared.
More than anything, Delci emphasized Chavez' nonviolent resistance--a strategy that is often overlooked given the amount of violence associated with the business practices of teamsters and union busters. Delci also pointed out the importance of understanding how large an organization that Chavez led farmer workers against--with California's economic power, it needs to be understood how much economic and social power the agriculture producers and industry possessed.

When Chavez endured his hunger strike of 25 days, he was protesting Arizona legislature that attempted to make peaceful protests illegal assemblies. The Arizona representative at the time, Jack Williams, was compared by Delci to Joe Arpaio.

U of Arizona Conversations in the Humanities

More Unsettling Certainties

From the website:

Sensual Productions: Pictures, Poems, and Performances

Presented by the College of Humanities in its New Series
Unsettling Certainties: Conversations in the Humanities

Tuesday, March 30, 6:00 – 7:30 pm
Helen S. Schaefer Building (UA Poetry Center), 1508 E Helen Street

This multimedia panel of feminist scholars and performance artists will explore visual, sonic, and embodied landscapes to consider the ways in which cultural productions can be understood as sites of knowledge production and contestation. The program, moderated by Adela C. Licona, will begin with a performance art piece by Denise Uyehara, excerpted from her interactive performance installation, the Senkotsu (Mis)Translation Project, which examines the U.S. occupation in Okinawa. Irène d'Almeida will talk about her work in searching out and collecting oral poetry produced by women among the Fon people, a major ethnic group in southern and central Benin. Sandra K. Soto will provide queer readings of some of the most provocative and surreal photographs taken by the internationally renowned Mexican photographer, Graciela Iturbide, widely known for her stunning black and white photographs of everyday life of indigenous peoples (mainly women) in rural areas, particularly of the Zapotecs in Juchitán, Oaxaca.

New World Tropes

Nepantilism

This is but the beginning of an unpacking of the Aztec/Nahua term 'nepantilism'--as a trope, it captures the lived contradiction Anzaldua identifies as being a part of the mestiza consciousness. As someone interested in the rhetoric that the study of the New World possesses, I'm using this space to map some of the ways that I begin to examine the theoretical power of this trope when further developed as a theory for conceptualizing inner and outer conflict.

From Chapter Seven of Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera:

“In a constant state of “nepantilism,” an Aztec word meaning “torn between ways,” la mestiza is a product of the transfer of the cultural and spiritual values of one group to another. Being tri-cultural, monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual, speaking a patois, and in a state of perpetual transition, the mestiza faces the dilemma of the mixed breed; which collectivity does the daughter of a darkskinned mother listen to?”(78)

Teaching controversy analysis, I feel like Nepantilism could serve as a generative title, re-naming the assignment in a way that reframes it as something more culturally situated, a practice I hope encourages student engagement. As academics, or even for burgeoning academics, developing a sense of an academic identity might feel as though being torn in a different direction than the pre-college self--nepantilism might help conceptualize the inner turmoil one feels submitting to certain practices over one's cultural ways of being.

I found this interesting Slideshow by artist Isis Rodriguez, which integrates the notion of Nepantla, and Rodriguez has a really interesting gallery on her site that's worth checking out.

The Counter Pop Evolution, English Corregido

View more presentations from Isis Rodriguez.

AEI Lags on Racializing Data

How We Ask Questions

In no other area than statistical data is it of the utmost importance how we write the research questions that frame the analysis and lead us to the conclusions we desire.

In the table below, found on the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research website, we see how the title "Hispanic Graduation Rates Lag Whites' at all Levels of Admissions Selectivity" skews how we look at the data in such a way that the concept of 'lagging' nags at us as we attempt to construct knowledge from the 'unbiased' data.


The point that seems most salient, and one that I hope they unpack more, is:

"The gaps between white and Hispanic graduation rates are smaller at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). This is not due, however, to higher Hispanic graduation rates at HSIs but to the tendency of these institutions to have below-average white graduation rates. HSIs do about as well as non-HSIs with similar admissions criteria in graduating their Hispanic students."(Kelly, Schneider, Carey)

Given the data that white students graduate at lower rates at HSIs, should we not be problematizing the impact of student representation on graduation rates since even white students suffer from issues of retention when they are underrepresented on campuses?

It seems difficult to escape the paradigm that views Latino/as as lacking when even the data meant to address issues of retention continues to perpetuate this non-generative discourse.

Update: What happens when we factor in economics?
Let's look at some of the data that critics like Christopher Newfield (162) and Scott Jaschick brings in when addressing the economic disparity between academic institutions of privilege, as opposed to those institutions that might qualify as HSIs:
2007 Endowment

Institution Endowment Per Student

Harvard University $34.6 billion $1,730,000

Yale University $22.5 billion $1,951,000

Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/18/endow

Literacy Archive On-line

Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives

While I was at 4Cs in Louisville, Kentucky, I had the opportunity to take part in a digital literacy archive project put together by the Ohio State.
A description of DALN from the website:

"The DALN invites people of all ages, races, communities, backgrounds, and interests to contribute stories about how — and in what circumstances — they read, write, and compose meaning, and how they learned to do so (or helped others learn)."

I did mine on a computer's webcam, so I imagine you might be able to do the same & I encourage anyone to register and submit. It's a really interesting project and something that's designed to be used in classrooms, as a part of helping students to understand that the acquisition of literacy varies.

Interview with fellow Scholar for the Dream

Amazing Experience
Just got back from 2010 Cs and have had a moment to reflect, and I feel like this year's Cs was a really amazing experience. Presenting for the first time, and of course winning a Scholar for the Dream award contributed immensely because it allowed me to meet so many other great scholars.
Below, I'm embedding an interview that Dr. Carlos Salinas conducted with Fernando Febres about his award winning presentation, in partnership with Memorial Award winner Jota Samper, based around the community outreach concept of placing libraries in violent neighborhoods as a means of deterring crime.

Cs 2010 Online Program

Search-able Program

Just checked out this year's CCCC program on-line, and I like the move they made with the cover design--not what you might expect.


Found my name a couple times in the program, so I'm getting excited.

http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/b00ec6aa#/b00ec6aa/74

http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/b00ec6aa#/b00ec6aa/230

I'm honored to be a Scholar for the Dream recipient, so now I just have to make sure my presentation is extra, extra ready.

Keynote at SLAT Roundtable

Keynote at SLAT Roundtable Matsuda Talks Voice

New media and technology make a point of announcing themselves as making the collapse of time and space capable, so I'm doing my best to counter that process by posting late on a presentation I saw a week ago.

Last week at the Second Language Acquisition Teaching Roundtable, Paul Kei Matsuda delivered the keynote speech on "Voice and Discursive Construction of Identity."

As I have previously posted, I had the opportunity see Dr. Matsuda speak alongside Peter Elbow at the 2009 CCCC convention, and was impressed by not only his presentation skills, but also the ability to engage a ballroom of convention attendees.

Interested in the construction of voice, Matsuda pointed out the difficulty of defining voice because of its connection with content and style. It raises the question of "if you can't define it, then you can't teach it." This arises with those instructing English language learners because so much of voice tends to be its deviation from the norms of academic discourse.

One of the interesting points Matsuda makes about voice is that is the quality that makes impersonation possible.

Matsuda also presented examples of variation of voice in Japanese bloggers, demonstrated through the swapping of the watashi and washi in Katakana by a female blogger who used the more masculine washi in recreations of dialogue with her husband, creating a humorous tone through cognitive dissonance and the juxtaposition of linguistic norms.

Reporting on a broader case study, Matsuda discussed the experiment he ran with editors of academic journals who, on the whole, recognized that they tended to create images of writers in their minds as they read texts, based on voice and other features. Some claimed to be able to recognize sex, age and race.

Matsuda recommended that when teaching voice to English language learners: Teach the principle behind voice—point out certain examples, show how it can mark writing; if non-native maintains solidified usage, then it sounds like its bringing in a potentially new perspective to the subject.

I asked Dr. Matsuda if he had any advice on the development of voice when presenting, but he said that would another entire presentation in and of itself, although he did mention a lot of speakers preferring to use the phrase "in a nutshell."

In a nutshell, I'm planning on keeping this in mind at this year's Cs.

Diversity and Inequality round table

Teaching Composition to English Language Learners

Hosting a round table about teaching practices for second language students, the D&I put together a panel of teachers with experience teaching abroad and with English language learners in the U.S. Some of the concerns addressed were grammar vs. content, popular culture, the impact of understanding the culture of the student population, the role of phonics, and the assumptions about teaching in other cultures.


For the most part, the panel tended to agree that, as with most classes, engagement is an important factor. Grammar with English language learners is the same as with most composition students in that if it is the focus without context, students won't necessarily feel any more comfortable performing the language. One participant noted that she'd attended a conference presentation that statistically documented gains in classes with grammar as the focus vs. a class with content with the focus, showing marginally higher gains in the grammar-focused class--the participant noted that this was a single study, and not a ringing endorsement for grammar-based class content.

The consensus on the use of pop-culture was similar in that participants agreed that the more interested the students were in the material, the more success that the activities tended to have. With regard to music, it was recommended to ask the students to bring in their own music, or make suggestions about music in English that could be used in exercises to test recognition of vocabulary. At the same time, the participants were also open to bringing in their own choices of music and letting the discussion take its own direction, just as long as the emphasis is placed on dealing with the issues that the students bring up, even if not completely by design of the instructor (the example discussed began with a piece of music by Miles Davis spawning a discussion about Michael Jackson).



The topic of phonics accompanied a discussion about the varieties of literacy. One of the participants cited working with students who were not literate in their own language, in the sense that they did not know the grammar of their language, so it was difficult to draw a comparison to English. In this case, some of the most basic of motor skills can be addressed in order to build to discussions of grammar--something as simple as spending time on the alphabet can be much more beneficial than practical, yet much too advanced, worksheets.

A participant joked about English as being "not an ordinary language because of all its exceptions--we don't speak grammatically correct, but that's what makes it an extra-ordinary language."

Thanks to round table participants Jake Levine, Katie Silvester and Cassie Wright.

Defaced: A Found Archive

What is said when no one's looking

Here's the link to a video for a showcase of defaced images, which Coriana Close created as an intimate installation showcase. Beginning with the issue of identity and representation, Close displays what she found as she encountered what is expressed in anonymous discourse and how it demonstrates how race continues to be spoken of.

Twitter and the Fractured Sense of Community

Jameson and the Post-Modern Question of Cynical Fragmentation

This might be the wrong way to address the fact that I'm going to experiment with Twitter in the next class I teach, but the idea came to me as I was reading Chela Sandoval's "Fredric Jameson: Postmodernism is a Neocolonizing Global Force." So maybe I had the passing thought before reading about the impact of the electronic/technological revolution on the ability to frame criticisms of the dominant discourse, but I wondered if technology could still be used as a method of bringing back together some of those communities fractured and silenced by technology. Almost all students have cell phones or access to computers, so what kind of impact can we have when collapsing distances of space and time via 140 character tweets to students, prodding them to think about generative classroom themes outside the classroom? This endeavor might have an invasive quality to it, so I'll continue to reflect on it before I make it a part of classroom participation.

If I do follow through with this, I'll be sure to have an anonymous survey available to students so they can evaluate the pros/cons of the collapsed time vs. community building potential. I will be sure to leave some space for comments/opinions, which I will use to gauge whether or not it is something I will continue with for the entire semester. Starting with Jameson's criticism, it might very well sound as though I'm anticipating negative results as a part of some greater self-fulfilling prophesy against an over-reliance of technology in the classroom, but as an educator, I would have little motivation to isolate and discredit a new media object if I didn't believe there could be a potential positive effect on the knowledge building community of the class.

Leslie Silko's Reading

Vine Deloria, Jr. Distinguished Indigenous Scholars Series

(Leslie Silko & myself at the book signing following her reading)

Presented in part with the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Arizona, Leslie Marmon Silko spoke to a crowded lecture hall about the influence of Vina Deloria Jr. on her life and writing, reading pieces from her novels Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead.


Silko noted that when Deloria's Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto came out, it was at a time when many Native American voices had been silenced, and even though Silko said she had yet to decide to pursue a career in writing, Deloria inspired her. Having also began a study of what she described as "Anglo American" law like Deloria, Silko wanted to follow Deloria's work of advocating for Native rights.

After completing three semesters of her study of law, Silko felt as though she could better criticize inequalities through the mask of fiction. Her recent writing has revolved more around nature after having lived in the Tucson mountains for the past 30 years--she jest something to the effect of, 'after all, what's more subversive than writing about grasshoppers?'