Working Class Latinos Invisibility in the American Community College -- Part 2

Part 1

Marginalization and the Rhetorical ecology of Community College Latinos

Though I believe that the site of the community college is one of the nation’s last hopes for a utopian system of equality, the reality is that most often it has adopted multiple practices of postcolonization that other state institutions have practiced for decades. One of these practices is the hidden and implicit labeling of Latinos as “other” for the college’s statistical means of reporting to the state. Lazaro Lima argues in his Latino Body that it was an early identification of Mexican Americans in an 1894 pseudo-ethnographic description that framed Mexicans as “other” because of physical markers, “savage” traditions, and so forth, that demarked these Americans as non-Americans. This otherness continues to this day, though now we must add the complications of limited education, literacy, class, language, and even the imagined reification of “documentation” to maintain this otherness. This weighs still as a racialized legacy in the academy with implied speech codes, linguistic expectations, and the invisibility of multicultural students’ home cultures in almost every way except as token celebrations of “diversity.”

Mission Mural, Mission District San Francisco. By Xelipe, Creative Commons

Not ironically, my research shows that just as “Americans” [whatever that means] continue to impose a rhetorical “otherness” on Latinos, some Latinos accept this otherness and accommodate it to their political use, even on the micro scale, as I will show here via an ecological rhetoric of a single area of north Houston within a literacy enclave, where a Latino public -- already complicated by that historically-politically-laden label -- inhabits a no-man’s land of ambiguous geographies. In this literacy otro lado, north Houston Latino residents have learned to expect their community college to continue the accommodation of a writing course based on their primary and secondary schooling experiences: following cultural colonization they’ve been exposed to for years, they find a course that most often concerns itself with a standardization of language instead of the exploration of language and identity or language and power. Overlooking the opportunity to simultaneously nourish a rich and historic Hispanic material culture while addressing a textual literacy desert which reflects the ambiguity of this liminal geography, such college institutions flounder in their public relations mission statement to meet the educational needs of the community stakeholders. As a white male, I will support my findings with excerpts from interviews and writing samples from Latino students at the local community college regarding their social and academic experiences and rhetorical expectations.

Keith Gilyard in Race, Rhetoric, and Composition argues that we must "theorize race" instead of accepting lore and type, so we can move the construction of race beyond emotive activity so common in our communities into analytic study. Gilyard contends contents that race issues must be inspected "more critically in rhetoric and composition" (ix) to "deconstruct race" instead of denying “that color and ethnicity make all kinds of difference in this nation" (51). Considering that the community college reflects the values of the local working class landscape, this deconstruction must start with the relationship between the racialized student and a bureaucracy that not only identifies its students through multiple generalized demographic scales, but in fact benefits from these students’ bodies through programs such as Title V for Hispanic Serving Institutions. Through writing-as-meaning-making, asking our students to examine their own socio-economic and racialized positions on and off the college campus contributes “to fuller explanations of the racialized disparities we see" (Gilyard 52). Considering that various theoretical positions of the rhetoric and composition course, such as the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, argue that writing is a meaning-making human science, then critically writing about our multiple identities as social constructs and a reflection of our community and its institutional racialization of identity, engages the student and professor in this deconstruction. In fact, Gilyard further explains that professors must examine their own positions of privilege in design, instruction, assessment and feedback. As professors, we begin this self-examination through a deconstruction of our class status, but also through inquiry of our own race and gender, among other markers. This should be done openly, through shared writing and reflective conversation. Though the institution should also engage in this self-reflection, it rarely, if ever does, for it knows that its own power status is at stake.

Most professors and contingent faculty who teach First Year Writing (FYW) at this community college -- and nationwide -- are white; though many come from working class backgrounds (and contingency labor keeps them in the working class), some represent middle class backgrounds. This not unusual in community colleges, where up to 70% of professors responsible for FYW are white and working class. For several years this was my position -- a white male from a working class family background, struggling to balance graduate school with two adjunct loads at two different city college systems -- in effect teaching six sections of FYW each semester to make ends meet. This social class positioning, however, was less evident to the students as I walked into the classroom and as I instructed writing through a dominant cultural and ethnic screen -- my language, fair skin, light hair, blue eyes, dress shirt and slacks seem to represent the white professoriate. I usually use a language approximating what others would call “standard American English,” though sometimes my southern background filters through in my relaxed classroom discourse. I’ve also learned from my students more about their cultural interests, from hip hop discourse and body performance to the “low and slow” car culture of some Latino students who appreciate low-riding culture. Most important, students have taught me much about Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, and Tejano culture, including some vocabulary, body performance choices, music, recent history, and other cultural performances. Being able to listen to these students and nod my head knowingly, however, does not erase my white body presence.

My teaching philosophy recognizes the Students’ Right to Their Own Language statement as well as more recent theory on intercultural rhetorics, including translingualism and codemeshing. I’ve invited scholars from universities across the continent to video conference with my students to discuss multiculturalism and intercultural rhetorics, and students respond positively. This year, when four Spanish-speaking males were engaged in a heated discussion in their small group, I jokingly raised my voice for everyone to hear and accused them: “What have I told you about speaking Spanish in my class?” The boldest, Kevin, responded, “Use it as often as we want!” And he was right. My own Spanish, however, is beginning level -- though I can read student writing, my oral capacity is more humble. These facile representations and allusions to ethnicity hint at the need for a deeper understanding of identity which ethnography in the FYW enables.

Nancy Barron, Nancy Grimm, and Sibylle Gruber in Social Change in Diverse Teaching Contexts argue that the discussion of race and ethnicity is difficult in what most students are taught as a post-Civil Rights era where they the dominant discourse argues is  (throughout the society's schooling) that we have moved past racism and that the U.S. conquered racial institutionalism fifty years ago. Instead, students are taught ideologies such as “colorblindness” -- to see past the very identities that lifelong institutions have sustained. This idealism, they argue, is unproductive and unrealistic, since "once the practice of colorblindness is subverted, classrooms can become subject to unproductive strategies of denial, resentment, and negativity" (2). Importantly many professors are familiar with critical race theory, yet no matter how well informed about theory, no matter how collegial their relations with scholars (and students) of color, the institutional structure interpellates her into the social role of teacher and the historical status that the position holds in western culture -- from the white school marm of the 19th century to Hollywood’s iconic professor. As we enter the classroom, we must remember that "white teachers in this country [...] are subject to a social and political history where whiteness has become a symbol of individual and corporate power, political influence, and academic success" (Barron, Grimm, and Gruber 6). We see this in the demographic disparity of professors of color on university campuses, a demographic datum that does not reflect our student population, yet unfortunately too often represents their life-long schooling experience.

Next:

Language as Identity: An Inquiry into Hispanic/ Latino/ Chicano/ Tejano

References

Barron, Nancy G., Nancy Maloney Grimm, and Sibylle Gruber, eds. Social change in diverse teaching contexts: touchy subjects and routine practices. Vol. 298. Peter Lang, 2006. Print.

Gilyard, Keith. Race, Rhetoric, and Composition. Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1999. Print.
Lima, Lázaro. The Latino body: crisis identities in American literary and cultural memory. NYU Press, 2007.

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