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Acknowledgments
He thanks Cara Finnegan, Billy Johnson Gonzalez, and Laura Friddle for intellectual engagement with this essay.
Notes
1. See, for example, Damián Baca, Mestiz@ Scripts, reviewed here; Damian Baca and Victor Villanueva, “Introduction,” College English 71 (July 2009): 561; Angharad N. Valdivia, ed., Latina/o Communication Studies Today (New York: Peter Lang, 2008); Victor Villanueva, “On the Rhetoric and Precedents of Racism,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Atlanta, GA, March 24, 1999.
2. See, for example, Fernando Pedro Delgado, “Chicano Movement Rhetoric: An Ideographic Interpretation,” Communication Quarterly 43 (1995): 446–54; Richard J. Jensen and John C. Hammerback, “‘No revolutions without poets’: The Rhetoric of Rodolfo ‘Corky’ Gonzáles,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 46 (1982): 72–91; John C. Hammerback and Richard J. Jensen, The Rhetorical Career of César Chávez (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003); Ruby Ann Fernandez and Richard J. Jensen, “Reies Lopez Tijerina's ‘The Land Grant Question’: Creating History Through Metaphors,” Howard Journal of Communication 6 (1995): 129–45; Michael Victor Sedano, “‘Chicanismo: A Rhetorical Analysis of Themes and Images of Selected Poetry From the Chicano Movement,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 44 (1980): 177–90. This work is especially important for making visible how rhetorically active and powerful was the participation of Chicana/os during the Civil Rights era. Such work helped counter the prevailing notion that Mexicans in the United States are a passive, submissive population.
3. Examples of key works by these two scholars include Federico Subervi-Velez, The Mass Media and Latino Politics: Studies of US Media Content, Campaign Strategies and Survey Research: 1984–2004 (New York: Routledge, 2008); Rosa Linda Fregoso, Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
4. As Angharad Valdivia has pointed out, Latino Communication Studies remains largely outside Communication Studies. She argues that LCS “must make a space, for the table participants may not be so willing to welcome newcomers” (3). See Valdivia, “Is My Butt Your Island? The Myth of Discovery and Contemporary Latina/o Communication Studies,” in Latina/o Communication Studies Today, 3–26.
5. See, for example, Delgado, “Chicano Movement Rhetoric”; Hammerback and Jensen, The Rhetorical Career of César Chávez; Jensen and Hammerback, “‘No Revolutions’”; Sedano, “Chicanismo.”
6. See, for example, Margaret R. LaWare, “Encountering Visions of Aztlán: Arguments for Ethnic Pride, Community Activism and Cultural Revitalization in Chicano Murals,” Argumentation and Advocacy 34 (1998): 140–53; Bernadette Marie Calafell and Fernando Pedro Delgado, “Reading Latina/o Images: Interrogating Americanos,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (2004): 1–21; Fernando Pedro Delgado, “Chicano Ideology Revisited: Rap Music and the (Re)articulation of Chicanismo,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 62 (1998): 95–113.
7. See, for example, Damián Baca, Mestiz@ Scripts, reviewed here; Jessica Enoch, Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865–1911 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2008); Don Paul Abbott, Rhetoric in the New World: Rhetorical Theory and Practice in Colonial Spanish America (University of South Carolina Press, 1996); Julie A. Bokser, “Sor Juana's Divine Narcissus: A New World Rhetoric of Listening,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40 (2010): 224–68; Michelle Hall Kells, Hector P. Garcia: Everyday Rhetoric and Mexican American Civil Rights (Southern Illinois University Press, 2006); Susan Romano, “The Historical Catalina Hernández: Inhabiting the Topoi of Feminist Historiography,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37 (Fall 2007): 453–80.
8. Valdivia, “Is My Butt Your Island?,” 4.
9. “US Chapter of the Latin American Rhetoric Society: The Proposal.” Available at http://sites.google.com/site/societyoflatinamericanrhetoric/latin-american-rhetoric-society-us-chapter/proposal-in-english.
10. Susan Romano, “‘Grand Convergence’ in the Mexican Colonial Mundane: The Matter of Introductories,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40 (2010): 72.
11. This division is somewhat artificial when it pertains to the Baca and Villanueva edited volume.
12. Rhetoric of the Americas can trace part of its intellectual lineage to the Latin American Subaltern Studies group, an important research collective largely unknown to English speaking academics.
13. Some important work already has been done by US and Latin American writing scholars like Mya Poe from the United States and the writing literacy group at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla—(BUAP) headed by Verónica Sánchez and Fátima Encinas in Puebla, Mexico. Other active writing research groups exist in Brazil, Argentina, and Columbia. See Saul Santos, ed., EFL Writing in Mexican Universities: Research and Experience (Tepic, Nayarit, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Nayarit, 2010).
14. Rhetorical studies as a whole needs more nuanced, grounded histories that account for how indigenous populations have interacted with structures of governance. See, for example, Florencia Mallon's Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906–2001 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
15. While Baca cites credible sources in support of his account, his interpretation of Mexico's Independence movement on page 47 possesses two key errors. Baca's suggestion that Miguel Hidalgo, along with other criollo elites, organized a wide-scale (i.e., unified) independence movement is a common oversimplification. This inaccuracy is more or less forgivable since it is borne out of mainstream accounts that have conflated complex events and tendencies into a unified national history. However, it is Baca's claim that Hidalgo worked with Agustín Iturbide to implement a new government in 1821 that is more egregious. Hidalgo had been dead since 1811, so there is no way he could have been able to work with Iturbide as Baca claims.
16. Structuralist critics, as Jolanta Drzewiecka and Rona Tamiko Halualani point out, have grown skeptical of the “celebratory ‘unraveling’ of cultures and the continual ‘mobility’ of people and capital that concepts like ‘mestiza consciousness’” purport to further. See Drzewiecka, “The Structural-Cultural Dialectic of Diasporic Politics,” Communication Theory 12 (2002): 345. David Harvey has gone further to suggest that “flexibility” is exactly the modus operandi of late capitalism and a major adjustment on the part of global capitalism and contemporary forms of governance. See Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
17. René Agustín De los Santos, “Latin America in the Global Rhetorical Imaginary,” unpublished manuscript presented at the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America conference, Philadelphia, PA.
18. As Cara Finnegan was gracious enough to remind me, there have been recent cross-disciplinary musings on the need to establish closer relationships between communication rhetoric and composition rhetoric. For example, see the exchanges among William Keith, Michael Leff, Steven Mailloux, Thomas Miller, and Martin Nystrand in the pages of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, volume 30 (numbers 2, 3, and 4) and volume 33 (number 1).
19. While both collections have numerous examples, readers may be most familiar with the case of Cesár Chávez and his use of El Plan, a distinctly Mexican political genre, to guide the construction of his Plan of Delano. See, for example, John C. Hammerback and Richard J. Jensen, “Ethnic Heritage as Rhetorical Legacy: The Plan of Delano,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 53–70.
20. The creation of the ALR in 2008 marks an important moment for the study of Latin American rhetoric and communication. The ALR is the first hemispheric society devoted to the study of rhetoric in and about Latina/os and Latin America. Since March 2010, four major conferences devoted to rhetoric in Latin America have been sponsored by the ALR. These conferences have taken place in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, with two others in the planning stages for 2012 (Brazil) and 2013 (Argentina and Chile). The US Chapter of the ALR is headed by René Agustín De los Santos. For more information, please see uslara.org.
21. There remains the lingering issue of language that some scholars have used to ground their lack of interaction with fellow American colleagues. Unfortunately, given the strong legacy of mono-lingualism in this country, this remains a strong obstacle.