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Abstract
Examining the nascent rhetoric of the Young Lords Organization's (YLO) 1969 “garbage offensive,” this essay argues that the long-standing constraints on agency to which they were responding demanded an inventive rhetoric that was decolonizing both in its aim and in its form. Blending diverse forms of discourse produced an intersectional rhetoric that was qualitatively different from other movements at the time. As such, the YLO constructed a collective agency challenging the status quo and, in some ways, foreshadowed more contemporary movement discourses that similarly function intersectionally. Examining the YLO's garbage offensive, then, presents rhetorical scholars with an opportunity to revise our understanding of how marginalized groups craft power through rhetoric.
This manuscript is derived from a chapter of the author's dissertation, directed by John Louis Lucaites. Portions of the manuscript were presented at the National Communication Association's 90th Annual Convention in Chicago, IL, and as part of the Department of Communication and Culture's 2004 Robert Gunderson Award in Public Culture lecture.
This manuscript is derived from a chapter of the author's dissertation, directed by John Louis Lucaites. Portions of the manuscript were presented at the National Communication Association's 90th Annual Convention in Chicago, IL, and as part of the Department of Communication and Culture's 2004 Robert Gunderson Award in Public Culture lecture.
Acknowledgments
Research was made possible through the financial support of the Indiana University Graduate and Professional Student Association and the resources of El Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at Hunter College, City University of New York (especially Jorge Matos). The author thanks John Louis Lucaites, Robert E. Terrill, Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Yeidy M. Rivero, Lisa A. Flores, Bernadette Marie Calafell, Nathaniel I. Córdova, Dylan Wolfe, Suzanne Enck-Wanzer, David Henry, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this essay.
Notes
This manuscript is derived from a chapter of the author's dissertation, directed by John Louis Lucaites. Portions of the manuscript were presented at the National Communication Association's 90th Annual Convention in Chicago, IL, and as part of the Department of Communication and Culture's 2004 Robert Gunderson Award in Public Culture lecture.
1. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1963), 232.
2. Agustín Laó-Montes, “Niuyol: Urban Regime, Latino Social Movements, Ideologies of Latinidad,” in Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York, ed. Agustín Laó-Montes and Arlene M. Dávila (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 141–42.
3. See Antonia Pantoja, “Puerto Ricans in New York: A Historical and Community Development Perspective,” Centro Journal 2, no. 5 (1989): 21–31; Carlos Rodríguez-Fraticelli and Amílcar Tirado, “Notes Towards a History of Puerto Rican Community Organizations in New York City,” Centro Journal 2, no. 6 (1989): 35–47.
4. For an account of the narrative and an attendant critique of docility, see Juan Flores, Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity (Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 1992), 13–60.
5. The History Taskforce of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies offers an explanation of the economic conditions of Puerto Ricans on the Island and in New York (and the relationship between the two) in History Task Force Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Labor Migration under Capitalism: The Puerto Rican Experience (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979).
6. While “Nuyorican” tends to be a term descriptive of a population (people of Puerto Rican descent who live in New York City), “Boricua” encompasses the description and adds a political edge. Derived from the original Arawak/Taino name of Puerto Rico (Borinquen, meaning Land of the Brave Lords), the term “Boricua” has been adopted as a politically charged, culturally nationalist term for Puerto Ricans. Being similar to the movement from African American to “Black,” or Mexican American to “Chicano,” “Boricua” historicizes the Puerto Rican colonial experience through a shift in signifier. I will, however, switch more or less freely between “Boricua,” “Nuyorican,” and “Puerto Rican” in this essay.
7. Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman, “One Year of Struggle,” Palante, July 17, 1970, 12–13.
8. For good introductory texts on Puerto Rican history, see James L. Deitz, Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); History Task Force Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Labor Migration; Manuel Maldonado-Denis, Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic Interpretation, trans. Elena Vialo (New York: Vintage Books, 1972); Kelvin A. Santiago-Valles, “Subject People” And Colonial Discourses: Economic Transformation and Social Disorder in Puerto Rico, 1898–1947 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); José Trías Monge, Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
9. Quoted in Cheryl Geisler, “How Ought We to Understand the Concept of Rhetorical Agency,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2004): 13.
10. I am thinking of different social movement organizations that do not operate principally through speech or writing. This might include different feminist, GLBT, or environmental movement organizations.
11. Leland M. Griffin, “The Rhetorical Structure of the ‘New Left’ Movement: Part I,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 50 (1964): 127.
12. James R. Andrews, “Confrontation at Columbia: A Case Study in Coercive Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 55 (1969): 16.
13. Herbert W. Simons, “Requirements, Problems, and Strategies: A Theory of Persuasion for Social Movements,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 56 (1970): 8.
14. For a comprehensive history, see Charles E. Morris and Stephen H. Browne, eds., Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest (State College, PA: Strata Publishing, 2001). For a history critical of dominant trajectories, see Kevin DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (New York: Guilford, 1999).
15. Michael Calvin McGee, “‘Social Movement’: Phenomenon or Meaning?,” Central States Speech Journal 31 (1980): 233.
16. “Social imaginaries” combine attentiveness to the explicit political doctrines (e.g., liberal democracy and socialism), social habits/practices (e.g., voting and protest), and symbolic systems (e.g., myths, narratives, and images) in a manner that highlights the “ways of understanding the social.” They “become social entities themselves, mediating collective life.” To put it differently, “social imaginary” is one way to talk about the hegemonic structuration of the social in manners that informs and is informed by political discourse and habitus. See Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 4. On contemporary discussions of the social imaginary, see Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 191–213; Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 91–124; Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Public Planet Books (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
17. Leland M. Griffin, “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38 (1952): 187.
18. Bernadette Marie Calafell and Fernando P. Delgado, “Reading Latina/o Images: Interrogating Americanos,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (2004): 18. See also Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse,” Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 19–46; Fernando P. Delgado, “When the Silenced Speak: The Textualization and Complications of Latina/o Identity,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 420–38.
19. 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. Griffin, “Historical Movements,” 188.
21. Griffin, “‘New Left’ Movement,” 127.
22. Andrews, “Confrontation,” 10 and 12–13.
23. Robert L. Scott and Donald K. Smith, “The Rhetoric of Confrontation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 55 (1969): 7.
24. Simons, “Requirements,” 8.
25. Franklyn S. Haiman, “The Rhetoric of the Streets: Some Legal and Ethical Considerations,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 53 (1967): 99–114; Parke G. Burgess, “The Rhetoric of Black Power: A Moral Demand?,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 54 (1968): 122–33; Franklyn S. Haiman, “Nonverbal Communication and the First Amendment: The Rhetoric of the Streets Revisited,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (1982), 371–83.
26. Andrews, “Confrontation,” 12–14.
27. In another work, co-authored with Wayne Brockriede, Scott again recognizes the importance of non-verbal rhetoric, but proceeds to focus only on the verbal because there is “much more difficulty in giving a decent account of nonverbal elements than of verbal.” See Robert Lee Scott and Wayne Brockriede, The Rhetoric of Black Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 2.
28. McGee, “‘Social Movement’,” 243. See McGee's Van Zelst Lecture for an example of his focusing on extra-linguistic rhetoricity. Even there, however, McGee's attention is on “performativity” generally, not on specific examples of body rhetoric in action. Michael Calvin McGee, “On Feminized Liberty” (paper presented at the Van Zelst Lecture, Evanston, IL, May 1985).
29. Griffin, “‘New Left’ Movement,” 127.
30. John W. Bowers, Donovan J. Ochs, and Richard J. Jensen, The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1993), 1–2. A good example is in Bowers et al.'s initial discussion of nonviolent resistance in the early mainstream civil rights movement. Suggesting that agitators use “their bodies as symbols of their extremely strong convictions about laws and customs” places bodies in a subservient position to the “convictions” that are expressed verbally (40). Of all the specific agitation tactics they identify, only five (of the nearly 30, by my counting) do not incorporate the verbal; but all five are to be evaluated for their instrumentality vis-à-vis verbally motivated strategies.
31. Simons, “Requirements,” 8.
32. Kevin DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 141. The charge of instrumentalism is one that DeLuca and Peeples explicitly deny but, nevertheless, may fall victim to given statements like the one quoted.
33. Alberto Melucci, John Keane, and Paul Mier, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), 12.
34. Simons, “Requirements,” 2–3. Simons has developed this leader-centered theory further in subsequent publications.
35. John C. Hammerback and Richard J. Jensen, “The Rhetorical Worlds of César Chávez and Reies Tijerina,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 44 (1980): 166–76; Richard J. Jensen and John C. Hammerback, “Radical Nationalism among Chicanos: The Rhetoric of José Angel Gutiérrez,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 44 (1980): 191–202; Richard J. Jensen and John C. Hammerback, “‘No Revolutions without Poets’: The Rhetoric of Rodolfo ‘Corky’ Gonzales,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 46 (1982): 72–91; John C. Hammerback, Richard J. Jensen, and Jose Angel Gutierrez, A War of Words: Chicano Protest in the 1960s and 1970s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985); John C. Hammerback, “Jose Antonio's Rhetoric of Fascism,” Southern Communication Journal 59 (1994): 181–95; Hammerback and Jensen, “Ethnic Heritage,” 53–70; 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; John C. Hammerback and Richard J. Jensen, The Rhetorical Career of César Chávez, 1st ed. (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1998).
36. See, for example, Victoria J. Gallagher, “Black Power in Berkeley: Postmodern Constructions in the Rhetoric of Stokely Carmichael,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87 (2001): 144–57; Scott and Brockriede, The Rhetoric of Black Power; Charles J. Stewart, “The Evolution of a Revolution: Stokely Carmichael and the Rhetoric of Black Power,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 429–46. An exception to this is Parke Burgess's essay on Black Power. See Burgess, “The Rhetoric of Black Power: A Moral Demand?,” 122–33.
37. On Hammerback and Jensen, see Hammerback and Jensen, “Rhetorical Worlds,” 166–76; Jensen and Hammerback, “Radical Nationalism,” 191–202; Jensen and Hammerback, “No Revolutions,” 72–91; Hammerback, Jensen, and Gutierrez, War of Words; Hammerback, “Jose Antonio,” 181–95; Hammerback and Jensen, “Ethnic Heritage,” 53–70; Fernandez and Jensen, “Land Grant,” 129-45; Hammerback and Jensen, The Rhetorical Career of César Chávez. On Delgado, see Fernando Pedro Delgado, “Chicano Movement Rhetoric: An Ideographic Interpretation,” Communication Quarterly 43 (1995): 446–54; Fernando Pedro Delgado, “Chicano Ideology Revised: Rap Music and the (Re)Articulation of Chicanismo,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 93–113; Delgado, “Silenced Speak,” 420–38; Fernando Delgado, “The Rhetoric of Fidel Castro: Ideographs in the Service of Revolutionaries,” Howard Journal of Communication 10 (1999): 1–14; Calafell and Delgado, “Reading Latina/o Images,” 1–21.
38. Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 274–89; Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 91–111.
39. For example, DeLuca, Image Politics; Kevin DeLuca, “Unruly Arguments: The Body Rhetoric of Earth First!, Act up, and Queer Nation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36 (1999): 9–21; Kevin DeLuca, “Articulation Theory: A Discursive Grounding for Rhetorical Practice,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 32 (1999): 334–48; Kevin Michael Deluca and Anne Teresa Demo, “Imaging Nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the Birth of Environmentalism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17 (2000): 241–60; DeLuca and Peeples, “Seattle,” 125–51; Janis L. Edwards and Carol K. Winkler, “Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima in Editorial Cartoons,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 289–310; Cara A. Finnegan, “The Naturalistic Enthymeme and Visual Argument: Photographic Representation in the ‘Skull Controversy’,” Argumentation and Advocacy 37 (2001): 133–50; Cara A. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and F.S.A. Photographs (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003), Cara A. Finnegan and Jiyeon Kang, “‘Sighting’ the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 377–402; Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Dissent and Emotional Management in a Liberal-Democratic Society: The Kent State Iconic Photograph,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31 (2001): 5–32; John Louis Lucaites, “Visualizing ‘the People’: Individualism and Collectivism in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 269–89; John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman, “Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Political Culture,” Rhetoric Review 20 (2001): 37–42.
40. Dwight Conquergood, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” The Drama Review 46 (2002): 146.
41. For an excellent example of this attitude, see Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” in Feminist Legal Theory: Readings in Law and Gender, ed. Katharine T. Bartlett and Rosanne Kennedy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991), 57–80. Crenshaw writes, “Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated” (58). See, also, Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241–99; Angela Harris, “Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory,” in Feminist Legal Theory: Readings in Law and Gender, ed. Katharine T. Bartlett and Rosanne Kennedy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991), 201–34; Cheryl I. Harris, “Critical Race Studies: An Introduction,” UCLA Law Review 49 (2002): 1215–39.
42. Ono and Sloop, “Vernacular Discourse,” 40.
43. Scott and Smith, “Confrontation,” 8.
44. Ronald Walter Greene, “The Aesthetic Turn and the Rhetorical Perspective on Argumentation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 35 (1998): 19–29. The division between “influence” and “constitutive” models of persuasion and identification are set up in the first couple of pages and extended throughout the essay.
45. Joseph P. Fried, “East Harlem Youths Explain Garbage-Dumping Demonstration,” New York Times, August 19, 1969, 86.
46. Pablo Guzmán, “La Vida Pura: A Lord of the Barrio,” in The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora, ed. Andrés Torres and José E. Velázquez (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 155.
47. Sadly, a trip to New York City today verifies the same tendency, even if it is not as pronounced. Affluent, predominantly white areas like much of the Manhattan borough are blessed with regular, efficient garbage collection. East Harlem, still overwhelmingly Latino (including people of Mexican and Dominican descent, in addition to the Puerto Rican majority) continues to face less regular garbage collection and street cleanings. The police presence, on the other hand, is much more visible on 106th and Madison (East Harlem) than on 50th and Madison (a wealthy business center in Manhattan).
48. Young Lords Party and Michael Abramson, Palante: Young Lords Party, 1st ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 8.
49. “Sociedad de Albizu Campos” translates as the “Albizu Campos Society.” Pedro Albizu Campos was the Harvard-educated co-founder and leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party in the 1930s.
50. Unless otherwise noted, as in this sentence, all references to the Young Lords will refer to the New York Young Lords, who are the focus of this study. I limit my focus to the New York group because they were the most explicitly political group, had the greatest effect on Nuyorican radicalism, and were the only group involved in the garbage offensive.
51. Young Lords Party and Abramson, Palante, n. pag and 73–74. The New York group eventually split from Chicago in 1970 because they felt Chicago “hadn't overcome being a gang.” The Young Lords Organization then became the Young Lords Party—a name and mission they retained until changing into a different, decidedly Maoist organization in 1972. See Guzmán, “La Vida Pura,” 157, 67–68.
52. Miguel Melendez, We Took the Streets: Fighting for Latino Rights with the Young Lords (New York: St. Martins, 2003), 93. This kind of quasi-intellectualism bears some similarity to the SDS, which makes sense both because of the YLO's temporal proximity to SDS and Juan Gonzalez's involvement with SDS at Columbia after Mark Rudd ascended to national leadership. For another account of such intellectualism, see Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, rev. trade ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1993).
53. Guzmán in Young Lords Party and Abramson, Palante, 74.
54. Quoted in Melendez, We Took the Streets, 94.
55. This means of going out into the community taps into a tradition of “community organizing” at least as old as Saul Alinsky's work in the 1930s. Although not published until after the “garbage offensive,” see Saul David Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1971). This tactic was certainly similar to those used by SNCC in the South and SDS in New York and New Jersey in the 1960s (Juan Gonzalez, as mentioned in a previous footnote, had been active in SDS leadership at Columbia before helping form the Lords).
56. Quoted in Melendez, We Took the Streets, 95.
57. Melendez, We Took the Streets, 96.
58. The closest they come is in volume 1, no. 4, where there are several small news pieces about the garbage offensive. Even here, however, the narrative remains fragmented, disjointed, and (by nature of there being several pieces) repetitive. Palante was originally sold on street corners and subway stations in El Barrio, the Bronx, and the Lower Eastside. It was eventually sold at newsstands throughout New York City in addition to the more interactive means of distribution.
59. Conquergood, “Performance Studies,” 146.
60. See McGee, “Fragmentation,” 274–89. Also see DeLuca, Image Politics, 147–55.
61. “El Barrio and the YLO Say No More Garbage in Our Community,” Palante 1, no. 4 (1969): 19.
62. Quoted in Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, Urban and Industrial Environments (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 165–66.
63. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Practice (London: Verso, 1985), 125.
64. Guzman, “One Year,” 12.
65. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 5. For an account of the narrative and an attendant critique of docility, see Flores, Divided Borders, 13–60.
66. Guzmán quoted in Young Lords Party and Abramson, Palante, 75.
67. DeLuca uses “mind bomb” to reference the explosive psychological effect image events have on collective consciousness. For an introduction to the term, see DeLuca, Image Politics, 1–22.
68. Guzman, “One Year,” 12.
69. Melendez, We Took the Streets, 105.
70. Ministry of Information, “Pigs Oink in Fear as YLO and the People March Thru the Streets,” Palante 1, no. 4 (1969): 17.
71. Quoted in “El Barrio and the YLO Say No More Garbage in Our Community,” Palante 1, no. 4 (1969): 19.
72. Guzman, “One Year,” 12.
73. One might object to my use of “space” in this essay given that the rhetorical scholarship on social movement(s) does not point to a similar construction. While this it mostly true, DeLuca is an exception. For DeLuca, “space” is aligned with the strategic practices of those in power (e.g., legislative and legal space) and “suggests an impersonal geometrical region known through the rationalized, objective methods of science” (76). He suggests a need to focus on “place” which is “a particular locality of which a person has an intimate knowledge derived from passionate attachment and caring inhabitation” (76). I understand his desire to focus on “place” rather than “space” (especially given the definitional game he plays), but his division between the two relies on a false dichotomy. While the advances of social movement certainly emanate from particular places, social movement (even if scholars like McGee and DeLuca do not explain it this way) seems to be directed at the (re)formulation of cultural or discursive spaces in which terrains or fields of intelligibility are constructed and reconstructed. In this sense, to talk about the Young Lords as constructing a space is meant to draw attention to two things: first, the Lords redefine the barrioscape to make it an acceptable location for contestation and dissent; second, and more importantly, the Lords help to constitute a “people” who could, contrary to popular and academic characterizations, be political (an agential change). My position seems, moreover, to be more in line with Michel de Certeau's explanation of space as “practiced place.” See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117.
74. Johanna Fernandez, “Between Social Service Reform and Revolutionary Politics: The Young Lords, Late Sixties Radicalism, and Community Organizing in New York City,” in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980, ed. Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodward (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 255–85.
75. Carl Davidson, “Young Lords Organize in New York,” Guardian, October 18, 1969, 6.
76. Melendez, We Took the Streets, 109. I am not oversimplifying Melendez's account, here. This is as far as his read of the purpose and significance of the garbage offensive goes.
77. Bowers, Ochs, and Jensen, Agitation, 1–17.
78. Augustín Laó, “Resources of Hope: Imagining the Young Lords and the Politics of Memory,” CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 7, no. 1 (1995): 37.
79. Laó, “Resources of Hope,” 37.
80. Guzman, “One Year,” 12, emphasis added.
81. A survey of the primary literature on Black Power, the Black Panther Party, Students for a Democratic Society, and others makes this evident. See Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (London; New York: Verso, 2002). By “devil figure,” I allude to Richard Weaver's notion of an ultimate term that carries a negative force. A “devil term” is the dialectical counterpart to a “god term,” which Weaver defines as “that expression about which all other expressions are ranked as subordinate and serving dominations and powers” (212). See Richard M. Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1985).
82. Iris Morales, “¡Palante, Siempre Palante! The Young Lords,” in The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora, ed. Andrés Torres and José E. Velázquez (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 213.
83. Marta Moreno, speaking of the Young Lords, reminds us of the importance of “this group of young men and women of color who made significant impact on history. Inequalities in the areas of culture, education, prison reform, housing and health care came under their careful scrutiny and systematic attack. Significant changes directly resulted from their efforts.” See Marta Moreno, “The Young Lords Party, 1969–1975; ‘Publisher's Page’,” Caribe 7, no. 4 (1983): 2. It is ironic that, given the importance of the Lords recognized by Puerto Rican scholars, there is so little written about them. Writing broadly about scholarly attention to Puerto Rican movement(s), Andrés Torres argues, “The historical record on this experience is almost nonexistent. Even within the ‘social movements’ and ‘diversity’ literature, we find barely a mention of the Puerto Rican contribution to the insurgency that changed the United States.” See Andrés Torres, “Introduction: Political Radicalism in the Diaspora—the Puerto Rican Experience,” in The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora, ed. Andrés Torres and José E. Velázquez (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 1.
84. This, in part, is what led Edwin Black to critique neo-Aristotelian critics; it is certainly part of Maurice Charland's motivation behind his work on Quebec. See Edwin Black, Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965); Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 133–50.
85. See Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric,” 133-50. See also McGee, “On Feminized Liberty,” 1–31; Michael C. McGee, “In Search of ‘the People’: A Rhetorical Alternative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 235–49; Michael Calvin McGee, “The ‘Ideograph’: A Link between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 1–16; Barbara A. Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of Différence,” in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, ed. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill (New York: Guilford, 1999), 232–46; Greene, “Aesthetic Turn,” 19–29.
86. José Esteban Muñoz makes a similar point vis-à-vis the constitutive potential of Latina/o performances today. He writes, “The performance praxis of US Latina/os assists the minoritarian citizen-subject in the process of denaturalizing the United States’ universalizing ‘national affect’ fiction as it asserts ontological validity and affective difference.” See José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho's The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs),” Theatre Journal 52 (2000): 72.
87. Ramón Grosfoguel, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, and Chloé S. Georas, “Beyond Nationalist and Colonialist Discourses: The Jaiba Politics of the Puerto Rican Ethno-Nation,” in Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism, ed. Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Ramón Grosfoguel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 30–31.
88. Negrón-Muntaner and Grosfoguel, Puerto Rican Jam, 31.
89. For an analysis of Puerto Ricans’ modern colonial status, see Ramón Grosfoguel, Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 4–5.
90. Ono and Sloop, “Vernacular Discourse,” 20.
91. Kenneth Burke, “Definition of Man,” in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 3–24.
92. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 29.
93. Lisa A. Flores, “Creating Discursive Space through a Rhetoric of Difference: Chicana Feminists Craft a Homeland,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 153, footnote 8.
94. Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(S) (London: Verso, 1996), 121.
95. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 2–3.
96. Conquergood, “Performance Studies,” 147.
97. Lucaites, quoted in Geisler, “Rhetorical Agency,” 13.