“Their Voice Should Be Allowed to Be Heard:” The Rhetorical Power of the University of New Mexico’s Bilingual Student Newspaper

Abstract

In 1902, the congressional sub-committee on territories visited New Mexico to assess its fitness for statehood. Their subsequent report recommended against statehood, in part because too much Spanish was spoken throughout the territory. This historical moment provided a rhetorical exigency for the students at the University of New Mexico to use their student newspaper as a site for negotiating citizenship in a border space. By incorporating Spanish into their English-language newspaper, these students challenged monolingual notions of literacy and advocated for a multilingual understanding of American citizenship.

Notes

1. I extend my thanks to Elise Verzosa Hurley and to RR reviewers Shirley Rose and David Fleming for their feedback through the revision process and their investment in this work. I am also grateful to earlier readers of this article, especially Susan Romano and Thomas P. Miller.

2. Other scholars have shown the potential of studying the rhetorical practices of this region, however, few histories of writing in academic institutions have incorporated Southwestern institutions or considered the local language practices in border spaces. Ryan Skinnell and David Gold have written histories of Arizona and Texas colleges, respectively, but neither study attended to the linguistic diversity of the region. Juan Gallegos’s 2014 dissertation on New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU) and the students’ role in shaping the institution as a Hispanic Serving Institution shows the importance of understanding the local linguistic context of an institution in order to better understand the scope and meaning of the rhetorical practices of its students.

3. Published in 1857, El Gringo is an account of attorney William Watts Hart Davis’s travels through New Mexico as a circuit court lawyer. Throughout this narrative, Davis describes the customs and traditions of Nuevomexicanos as primitive and backward, and reduces this population of people to a series of race-based generalizations, and he showed his audience, by constructing a portrait of a population with exotic customs and characteristics, how much Nuevomexicanos differed from the “civilized” Anglo world.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Leahy

Elizabeth Leahy is an assistant professor in the Library and director of the Writing and Communication Center at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. Her work is featured in Praxis: A Writing Center Journal and in the collection WAC and Second Language Writers: Research Towards Linguistically and Culturally Inclusive Programs and Practices. She can be contacted at [email protected].