Más América: New Scholarship on Latin America in Composition and Rhetoric

Recent signs, from the new US chapter of the Latin American Society of Rhetoric to presentations at national conventions, suggest that U.S. composition and rhetoric scholars have recognized the exigency of turning our attention south of the Rio Grande. Emerging work on Latin America addresses our field’s common concerns: literacy (Romano’s “Tlaltelolco: The Grammatical-Rhetorical Indios of Colonial Mexico”), citizenship (Olson’s “Amplifying the Vision of the Nation”), pedagogy (Fontaine and Esquivel’s “An Ethnographic Study of the Written and Spoken Communication of the Children of San Martin, Chiquito, Guatemala”), and political movements (de los Santo’s Nation Building as Rhetoric and Socio-Cultural Activity). This focus on Latin America complements work on the literate and rhetorical practices of Latin American immigrants, Chicanos/as, and Puerto Ricans in the U.S., as well as studies of transnationalism and globalization. This panel presents scholars whose work spans from the Andes to Mexico and from the colonial period to the contemporary moment. It offers a basic introduction to composition and rhetoric scholarship on Latin America and invites further discussion of regions, topics, and periods whose study helps our field better understand itself.

Speaker 1: The Handbook Tradition: Implications for Latin American History

Renewed attention to rhetoric’s handbook tradition supports a practice-centered historiography of particular value for studies in Latin American colonial rhetoric, where sites of religious teaching were primary venues for speculation on the entailments of language and persuasion (Abbott). Featuring two handbooks from Mexico’s colonial period—B. de Alva’s Confesionario Mayor y Menor and M. Perez’s Farol Indiano--I propose that such practice manuals produce new refractions of occidental traditions under significant pressure by racial, cultural and linguistic difference. I explore the hypothesis that American dubia (arguable propositions) arise from religious instructional venues; further, I examine the degree to which broader public discourse (e.g., the Las Casas-Sepulveda Valladolid controversy on the humanity of the Amerindian) draw from or bracket instructional experiences. 

Speaker 2: Illiterate Images: Late 19^th Century Ecuadorian Visual Culture and Marginalized Indigenous Citizenship

It is a commonplace that U.S. literacy requirements for suffrage excluded voters unevenly based on perceived racial status. It will not surprise U.S. literacy scholars, then, that Ecuadorian literacy requirements helped exclude indigenous suffrage until 1979. Unfortunately, even in Ecuador there are few extant archives for studying those literacy requirements. Responding to that lack, this paper turns to the unlikely resource of Ecuadorian visual culture to examine how requirements for suffrage helped establish a pastoral image of indigenous simplicity that normalized indigenous political marginalization. Engaging scholarship on visual culture and citizenship (e.g. Hariman & Lucaites No Caption Needed), I argue that white-mestizo elites, to retain the appearance of republican authority, tried to naturalize the political exclusion of the indigenous majority by establishing a distinction between “nationals” and “citizens.” That distinction was built through images and texts that established a level of “civilization” necessary for citizenship and depicted indigenous people as the archetypes of pastoral a-modernity.

Speakers 3 & 4: “Life is What Happens While You’re Busy Making Other Plans:” Rethinking Tutoring in Guatemala

Our presentation describes what we learned from Guatemalan teachers who share our theoretical views but not our pedagogies. In 2006 we received a grant to establish a tutoring center in San Martin, Guatemala where we have worked as volunteers, ethnographic researchers, and teachers. Our plan, drawn from years coordinating tutoring centers in North America and the familiar  “idea of a writing center,” laid out a peer tutoring center complete with tutor training. A year after presenting the funds and plan to colleagues in Guatemala, we returned to find a different study center from what we had envisioned. Our initial, erroneous reaction was that the study center was as a teacher-centered, exercise-driven facility. After conversations with the Mayan woman coordinating the center, we realized that Vygotskian theories of collaboration, scaffolding, and active learning valued in our North American plan were being enacted in ways well-grounded in Mayan community and culture.  Referencing the work of ethnographers (Heath and Street) and educators writing on the complex history of Guatemalan education (Richards and Richards) this presentation describes what we learned about education and teaching and how this knowledge elucidates the academic experiences of the Central American students we welcome into our classrooms.