On Disinvention: Dr. Ersula Ore and the Rhetorics of Race at the US–Mexico Border

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how the grounds of Américan rhetorical studies shift when scholars address the Black subjects and bodies that dwell in the space of the US/Mexico border. I argue that when scholars study the space of the US/Mexico border via Mexican-American regimes of recognition and develop a thinking of the political from these regulatory rhetorical commonplaces, not only do they prevent themselves from coming to grips with the full complexity of the rhetorical terrain of the borderlands, but they risk reproducing a mestizocentric political legacy that has historically taken shape through the exclusion of Blackness. I explore the consequences of mestizocentrism (the normative, geocultural assumption rendering the space of the US/Mexico border a Mexican/Mexican American space) by analyzing the rhetorical resistance to the 2011 ethnic studies legislation in Arizona in juxtaposition with Dr. Ersula Ore’s arrest on the Arizona State University campus. I conclude by offering three provisions for what I hope will yield yet more options for a socially just Américan rhetorical studies.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Christa Olson for her care and guidance in helping me revise this article toward its current form. I thank LuMing Mao for his encouragement and support. I also thank Brendan O’Kelly for reading through previous drafts.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use quotes around the signs “alien” and “illegal immigrant” because I want to analyze the language used by the legislation while signaling to the reader that I, myself, condemn grammars of white supremacy.

2. Although the bill was the first of its kind to be signed into law, similar bills were introduced in Arizona, Texas, Colorado, and California before Arizona SB 1070 (García 1982; Guidotti-Hernández 2011; Lim 2017; Ono and Sloop 2002).

3. There can be no doubt, of course, about the violence and impunity that Mexican and Mexican Americans will have faced at the hands of the US-American state. Nevertheless, the persistent framing of migrants as Mexican – and of the ethos of migrancy in the space of the US–Mexico border in general as a Mexican – demonstrates how border space itself has always already been racialized as either Anglo or Mexican/Mexican American to the point that other ethnic minorities are rendered unintelligible (Cárdenas 2018).

4. Foucault writes that power is never given at the outset in any context, but rather is immanent to the mechanisms of its contexts, which “makes it possible to use its mechanisms as a grid of intelligibility of the social order” (1978, 93).

5. If the option is to decolonize rhetorical theory by re-placing it in Latin America, then the operation reproduces a familiar problem: mestizaje cannot provide an alternative to Eurocentrism given that both operate within a field of politics-as-state of exception (Agamben 1998). If rhetoricians are committed to pursuing the politics of an Américan historiographic practice – and as I see it, to asking after the conditions of possibility for thinking beyond a reduction of politics to a choice between states of exception – then it will be necessary to ask after a rupture irreducible to any “epistemic machine in charge of representing the Latin American difference.” (Moreiras 2001, 32).

6. No statute – in state, county, or city code – requires one to produce a driver’s license when requested by a police officer. A statute in the state code does exist (ARS 13–2412, “Refusing to provide truthful name when lawfully detained”), but it says only that a person, must truthfully provide their full name when prompted by a police officer, and even then, only after they have been lawfully detained. The statute mentions nothing about producing a state-issued identification card or driver’s license. I ask the reader to refer to Dr. Ore’s full account of her arrest, in her own words (Ore 2015).

7. In this sense, I pursue a reading practice that Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw calls “political intersectionality,” toward a means to “better acknowledge and ground the differences among us and negotiate the means by which these differences will find expression in constructing group politics” (1991, 1299).