Composition Forum 46, Spring 2021
http://compositionforum.com/issue/46/

Memoria with a Friend of Mine: An Interview with Victor Villanueva

Tabitha Espina

Abstract: In this interview, Victor Villanueva and Tabitha Espina discuss, through a review of Villanueva’s publications, how the teaching of Composition has changed throughout the years to consider the needs and exigencies of the times. Using rhetorical analysis, particularly of purpose and audience, and application of some of Villanueva’s most influential texts, Villanueva and Espina discuss the field’s critical responses to the racial reckoning of this historical moment through translingualism, decolonial pedagogies, agonism, and pluriversality. While Villanueva observes much progress in the field in approaching what he has called “cultural multiplicity,” he interrogates the complexities and politics of Otheredness and critiques the disproportionate burden on academics of color. Villanueva and Espina affirm the significance of memoria as a conceptual framework that, not just includes, but essentially functions rhetorically as the means by which ideas and knowledge are experienced and communicated.

Background: My meeting with Victor began as they always had, couched in laughter and ease and buoyed by affinity and respect, despite the awkwardness of social distancing.

I ask how he is doing, and he pauses pensively, stroking his beard, precisely how I always remembered before he would astound the class with insight and wit. Yet this time, he searches for the right word, and I realize that he has yet to find the treasure of “procrastinate.” I joke that nothing is more symbolic of his prolific, decades-long career than the fact that he does not know the word to what many might consider a way of life. He chuckles when I remind him that at this point in his career, procrastination is just a word for retirement. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tabitha Espina (TE): This interview is framed in celebration among all of us who have admired your work over the decades. Just an opportunity to reflect on who you are and all that you've done.

This is Memoria with a Friend of Mine: An Interview with Victor Villanueva.

At this particular historical moment, with the pandemic disproportionately impacting communities of color and further revealing systemic injustices, the rhetorics of racism are inescapable. Can you speak to that? How has the discourse on race and racism in Composition changed since you first started this work?

Victor Villanueva (VV): I have always seen a concern with racism in the professional organization and its publications. I think it's always been there in terms of my career. I started graduate school in ‘79, probably found my way to what I really wanted to think about maybe in ‘81 or ‘82, when I discovered rhetoric for the first time. And here I am still thinking about it. So, thirty-eight years. And in that time, I've seen a lot of concern about racism. I've also seen some, um, ‘foibles.’ All well intentioned, all well intentioned, but even the really smart stuff kind of fails to see something about the discipline that we're a part of. I mean, for instance, I think of translingualism as a very smart kind of thing, but these are English classrooms in which we do what we're doing, aren’t they? I mean, we can't do the translingual and not do the translingual at the same time. I said that more completely in another article, an article that either came out or is coming out; I'm not sure.

TE: What did luxury to have so many works that it’s hard to keep track!

VV: Yeah, that’s kind of cool. It’s like when you've cited me, though: When did I say that? Where did I say that?

Anyway, I think that there's always been a concern with racism in this profession, sometimes more ... perceptive than others. That's what I wanted to say, ‘sometimes more perceptive than others.’ Like with the orality-literacy thing, for instance; that was really backwards thinking, the cognitive-divide notion that had to do with orality and literacy. That was not very well thought through. The Students’ Right to Their Own Language, of course; that was great. And I understand why Suresh Canagarajah wanted to change it to include more than dialect issues. But the Students’ Right is now an historical document. So, to change it is to really change it—to lose its historicity. And so that gives rise to something like translingualism. [See Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations by Canagarajah and Pedagogizing Translingual Practice: Prospects and Possibilities by Peter I. De Costa, et al. for more about the concept.]

But there's this problem in our business. And I've written about this before. There's a kind of arrogance that I find troubling. Maybe ‘arrogance’ is too harsh. But, for instance, when Freire became a very big deal in our business in addressing questions of poverty and racism, we acted as if nobody else in any other discipline apart from Education cared about these kinds of things. We didn’t seem to think about looking at what socioligists were saying about Freire. Or political scientists. And right now, with translingualism, as brilliant as I do think it is, I think we should worry a little more about the different rhetorics involved, like Keith Gilyard has written [in “The Rhetoric of Translingualism”]. I mean, we are teaching English. We're teaching in English classrooms. We are teaching how to survive in universities, which always causes a problem between the theory and the practice when it comes to dialect and to languages. But it doesn't have to be as grand a problem in terms of rhetorics. We can employ our different rhetorics. But if we're going to do translingualism for real, I’d say we’d better start talking to people in Translation Studies who are also writing about translingualism. There's a whole field out there, folks who have been thinking translingual-ly, as professionals, in their research, and we don't seem to address any of them. So that's the arrogance, I'm talking about—that we get isolated in so many ways.

Now, to answer your question more directly. I fear that these days, in this last year, since last summer, since you bring that up, that racism got overly confined to Black and white issues. Should they be? Well, yes, of course. Black lives do matter. And that ‘All Lives Matter’ knee-jerk reaction is just plain insulting. That all lives matter is a given. And it misses the point, because it's not just that Black lives matter; it’s that Black lives matter no less than others. So, you know, is that an important thing that we need to be addressing? Yes, of course. But now, of late, very recently now, the old bigotry against Asians is on the rise. That it’s an “old bigotry” really matters. Because here again we’re seeing that the general conversations outside of composition studies still cast Asians and Latinos as foreigners. The Asian question becomes, you know, that the pandemic, that COVID, began in China. Well, that says nothing about the Asians who have been on this continent since the 19th century. In the 19^th century, Seattle and Tacoma had riots over the Chinese, even expelled from the cities. The history fails to be acknowledged. We see the same thing with Latinos. There seems to be a forgotten fact here. And that is the Latinos were here before the British were. Not only have we been here for centuries, but this whole notion of the ‘New World’ started with Spanish folks coming here. Now, I'm not really heralding that. I mean, it's not like the Spaniards were very nice. But it's as if we're always the new immigrants. Ponce deLeón landed in the continental U.S. a full hundred years before the Mayflower. I mean, the oldest U.S. city is San Juan, Puerto Rico.

TE: Wow, I had no idea.

VV: 1493: before there was a U.S. So, when the U.S. took over Puerto Rico in 1898—and, well, it's really 1899, but we base the U.S. as ‘owners’ of Puerto Rico based the Spanish-American War that began in 1898. So, when the U.S. took over Puerto Rico, San Juan became an American city. And it had been a city since 1493. So, what is the oldest American city?

So that's the general concern, that somehow or other, to talk about Asians and Asian Americans and to talk about Latinos—I mean, in terms of Asians, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a 19th century thing, is how Asians became part of Puerto Rico and Cuba. When the Chinese were disallowed entry into the U.S.—in the 19th century!—many went to the Caribbean. And then, there are the Philippines and all of Micronesia, for that matter. Yeah, and that one's really funny, because the war was against Cuba, but somehow Puerto Rico, Panama, and the Pacific Islands all became part of the property swap with Spain. Wait a minute! How did this happen? It’s like you go to the laundry to get your coat, and you get, I don't know, twenty other coats for free. So, it troubles me in that sense: that the sudden recognition of bigotry against Blacks and Asians and Latinos and American Indians is an old racist picture.

In terms of composition studies, I worry about the degree to which we continue to be isolated. It’s kind of like “Let Latinos write about Latino (or Latinx these days) stuff.” “Asian Americans and AAPI write about Asian American stuff.” “Black folks write about Black folks.” If there's any kind of crossover, it tends to be—and I'm overstating this. I know that this is an oversimplification. And that needs to be made clear. I know I'm oversimplifying it. But it's how it appears: it’s about appearances. The appearance is that we talk only among ourselves. And the effect of that is that we’ve been tokenized—the token publication of color.

TE: Tokenization.

VV: Yeah. Well, yeah. So, I mean, I worry about decolonial theory, for instance. Why aren't we working together more often? How is it only an indigenous or only a Latino matter? I mean, even when we talk about Black Lives Matter, we separate the continental U.S. from the former slaves of Puerto Rico or the former slaves from Cuba, the whole Afro-Caribbean world. I worry about the ways in which the BIPOC continue to be isolated in the B, the I, and then the rest of us.

But I’m just going off. I mean, to be fair, the undergraduate students I've talked to since then, since last summer, suggests to me that there's a new awareness about racism among the young folk. And I think that I saw more white kids in the streets during the summer than I have seen before. I’ve lived through too many riots: in my block in New York; in my neighborhood in Compton; nearby in South Central. And I just don’t remember white kids then. And maybe they were there, but I don’t remember them. The white kids I remember were fighting about the war, Vietnam, and the racism thing, that was Black folks in the 50s and 60s. And Puerto Ricans we were doing our own thing, thinking of the Young Lords. There was a mixing of Chicanos and Filipinos under Cesar Chávez. But that had agri-business at its center.

TE: And labor. More so about labor.

VV: Right. Labor was where it really was, though also about people of color, but it was more about labor, class. But nevertheless, I think there is a new kind of awareness about the apparent racism that people of color have always known. And I'm glad for the awareness. And maybe, to be fairer than what I said a few minutes ago, that in our profession, there is something more than cheap tokenism. But it is far from the kind of crossover that we need. It seems to me—and I worry that some of that is our own is doing, even our own rhetorics—that crossover rhetorics don't seem to exist all that [much]. And I know that I’m guilty of this too at this stage of my life. I started my career talking and writing about racism and the like, but right these days my scholarly focus is not even really Latino; it's almost exclusively now Puerto Rican and Cuban and Dominican. It's Caribbean. But that's the luxury of retirement. If I were still in front of the classroom, I would have to talk about racism in more general terms. So short answer, I think it's getting better. I don't think it's as “better” as it could be.

One of those things I used to tell students constantly is: If it could be created, it can be dismantled. Racism itself is a relatively new thing. The student impulse is to say, “Well, there's always been races.” Races, yeah, but no, but not racism. There's always been Othering, but othering on the basis of how you look, that's new. And we have some interesting examples.

I do think things are better. I like that even the newspapers now make references to structural racism. But I think that the population, as a whole, continues to think about individual bigotry. It's part of my problem with using the term “white supremacy.” White supremacy conjures up images of the people who attacked the Capitol on January the sixth. White supremacy is too easily oversimplified. I have the same problem with using the word “privilege.” Students tend to associate the idea of privilege with having money. Privilege becomes associated with class, whereas privilege, when it comes to racism, really means the luxury not to have to think about racism every minute of every day, in every interaction with others. That's the privilege. When you're of color, you're conscious of racism always. When you're white, you can be freed from it. That's the privilege.

TE: Thank you, Victor. Well, as we're talking about the history of the Students’ Right to their Own Language, and also about what students can do with this new recognition of how the rhetorics of racism are operating, not just within the composition classroom, but actually seeing it and hearing it and encountering it for themselves, memoria continues to be a concept that resonates with students, particularly as they express their right to their own languages. Even before I came to WSU, when I was teaching composition at home, on the island of Guåhan, it was the concept that I heard resonated with most students, because it allowed students to be able to talk about their experiences and to do so in a way that the academic community might begin to recognize and value.

Memoria continues to be a concept that resonates with students, particularly as they express their right to their own languages, in the composition classroom and in society. Can you elaborate on what it means today for students to reclaim memory—memory of identity in constant (re)formation, memory formed through the generations, memory that colonization wishes we'd all forget? How can we guide students to utilize both functions of memoria, cognition and affect, in their learning and even, perhaps, toward their own healing?

VV: Let me let me let me start out first by saying that I've only known one person who's ever seen the joke in the title of that essay. The title is Memoria is a Friend of Ours. Why didn't I say, “Memoria is Our Friend?” Because in movie-mafia discourse, somebody who is not a part of, but is still a part of ... Okay, let's say you belong to a particular group in the mafia. And you want to talk about something sensitive, and there's another person there, but that other person is also a wise guy, just from a different gang. You would say, “Don't worry about it. He's a friend of ours.” So, it's a street thing that my father mainly learned. He learned a lot of English from the Italians that he worked with at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. So he’d come home with these Italian expressions, you know, like, “Forget about it!” So, I wanted to say that memoria is an important part of what we do. It's not the same as grammar. It's not the same as essay writing, but it's a part of the same family. In part, I did it that way, “a friend of ours,” was in memory of my father. That article was one of two I wrote right after my father’s death. But what I was really getting at is that if you look at the five canons to rhetoric and then talk about teaching writing, we only mention three of the five: invention, arrangement, and style. Delivery isn't there, either. And it should be if we talk about voice. That's the delivery. And memoria should be there too.

That's one thing.

The second thing I want to say is that my intended audience was teachers. I wanted to broaden the idea of memoria in a kind of Platonistic way (which I mentioned in the article, I think). I mean, I wanted to say that to think of memoria is not only to think about personal writing. I don't mean only that. I mean more than that. I'm not thinking centrally about memoir. I mean, yes, the memoir is a part of it. But the idea is, how do we know anything? We know anything—everything—through experience, personal experience, even if that personal experience came from experiencing the ideas contained in a book we read. It still happened to us in the reading; it happened to us. We've gotten so caught up with empiricism, at the Age of Reason—which is so ironic, in that the Age of Reason is the age that brought up racism, that created racism; the Age of Reason is the age that created nationalism. The Age of Reason created some really unreasonable concepts. And yet, there is the idea that we all have, that we can change things with rational, reasonable discourse. I'm doing it right now.

What I wanted to get at is the idea of the rational, that we believe that we can disassociate the personal from our discourse. I doubt that there's anybody who still argues the case of objective newscasting, because we've now become subject to the exact opposite, choosing the news on which network best fits our ideologies. Anyhow, the point is that how we teach writing is still associated with the idea of logic as disassociated, that there can be rational discourse. Yet that is impossible, because how we come to know all is all experiential, all of it. That has to be acknowledged. I don't really care if there's a personal pronoun in the writing or not. What I care about is recognizing that that's the case. It’s all personal, which brings to mind that line in The Godfather, that “it’s not personal”—of course it is!

Logic is not the same as objective. Our writing and the writing we teach is based on relativism, a personal relativism. We ask students to say something like, “I can see the two sides or the many sides of the argument, but my preference is the one I am committed to—this one side.” What we're asking our students to do is to break from the binary, right and wrong, my way or the highway; rather, we’re asking to say “I see that there are these possibilities. But I have a specific intention for this one.” And that intention, that preference, is going to be based on the experiential, whether it’s explained that way or not. It just makes more sense in at least recognizing that this is based on an experience. This preference is based on experiential knowledge, even if the experience was the experience of reading or if the experience was taking part in an empirical venture, an experiment. How one interprets remains personal, experiential.

So, let’s go back to the question of memoir. Bootstraps, for example, was never about memoir. My intention wasn't to do that. My intention was to say, “This is how I see things. And these are the sets of experiences that caused me to see things this way.” And everybody should have that right. Right? So, in Legal Studies, what the argument for Critical Race Theory was is that one’s personal experience should count as testimony. Affirming that your worldview is relevant. See, the thing is that we espouse postmodernity, but we're not truly postmodern, not yet. We’re still tied to modernism, tied to the Age of Reason, tied to a belief in pure logic in language, the rational. Yet it’s modernism that created this particular form of imperialism, thinking of Mignolo. [See The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options by Walter Mignolo for this critique of modernity.] So that being the case, if we're going to actually argue that there's a problem with modernism, and that we need to break away from it, then we also need to break away from the idea that the empirical is everything. And that means acknowledging the experiential, the personal.

TE: Yeah, no, it's a framework. It's a lens by which to see how we approach and articulate the knowledge that we have.

VV: Framework is exactly the right term. We need to have a body of theory that we operate from. Now, you said “conceptual framework.” And that's exactly right. That’s a little different from a theoretical framework. A conceptual framework is how you bring theories together to form a kind of generalized consistency. It’s a disciplinary ideology that you use to evaluate. If you aren’t conscious of your conceptual framework, you're always at risk of being reactionary. And that doesn’t mean the same thing as being reactive. It means reacting in a way that is opposed to change, kind of like falling back on your conservative side. You’ve got to know, explicitly, what your conceptual framework is. And if you can do it as a catchphrase, so much the better. Mine was, and I guess it still is, “Tradition and change for changes in traditions.” See, I will look at the tradition. Yes, rhetoric, for me. Right. So yeah, a conceptual framework, and that conceptual framework can only come out of life. So, you know, “tradition and change for changes in tradition.” I love the tradition. And I think that that is where memoria begins—

TE: As a conceptual lens, rather than just an addition to the canons of rhetoric. And the knee-jerk reaction is that by including the I statement, it's including memoria. But it's not that. It's this conceptual framework, which utilizes all of those rhetorical concepts, but with the understanding that this is informed by my experience—

VV: Great! Yes. Memories—a friend of ours.

TE: Yes, a friend.

In Shoot-Out at the I’m OK, You’re OK Corral, you say that anger and frustration is how the dialectic works and that race, class, and gender struggles involve combat in the contact zone. We have seen a lot of this in recent times. In this era of divisive politics and competing values, across physical and virtual platforms, what does this "dialectic entered into" as a "process of change and reconsideration" look like for you? What is the goal?

VV: Oh, that one actually has a very, very short answer. Because for that, I just go to ... When it was written, contact zones was the big deal.

TE: Pratt’s contact zones. [This is in reference to Arts of the Contact Zone by Mary Louise Pratt.]

VV: But ... yes, that was the big thing. Mary Louise Pratt. At the time, there was the contact zones, and that was very kumbaya. It seemed to me.

TE: It's what people could imagine, at the moment.

VV: Yeah. And even though if you read Pratt or read Bizzell, they do write about the conflicts that occur— that we have to be able to go into those things. [See ‘Contact Zones’ and English Studies by Patricia Bizzell for a discussion of contact zones as a system for organizing English Studies.] But it was kind of the era of ‘Why can't we all just get along?’—which was something Rodney King said after he gotten beaten almost to death. Yeah, Rodney King and George Floyd. Nothing new. And you look at pictures of the 1950s, with the police sicking dogs on Black folks. And using fire hoses on Black folks for marching. Nothing new. What's new, I think, is that the young people are doing more than clucking their tongues at it. More than that, they’re actually getting out there. So that was the context in which I wrote that. But now, you’ve got me thinking about the problem in the current context and the dialectic. The problem right now is that times have given rise to polemics. And so, the anger and frustration is such that there is no communication, no real communication.

TE: There's no dialectic, and instead, we've moved to polemics.

VV: Exactly. And so, the short answer is kind of Burke, Burke's identification and division. If we completely identify, if we simply agree, no need for rhetoric. There is no dialectic; we simply agree. If we refuse to entertain ideas, if we cannot agree about anything, that's pure division; then there’s no room for dialectic, because no one is going to listen. And I'm afraid that's where we are right now. We talk to each other, but we don't talk to the other. So, for Burke, rhetoric takes place, and rhetoric is dialectical, right? And it takes place at the points of overlap between identification and division. I mean, it's a Venn diagram and the place of the overlap is where rhetoric is possible. So, I think the problem that we have today is that there has to be a will or a desire for dialectical interplay. Otherwise, what I said in that essay back then I would no longer agree with. I would not agree with me, given what we see happening right now, which is that anger and frustration has closed down the possibility of the dialectic, rather than opened it up. [Villanueva is referencing numerous concepts from Kenneth Burke, including those found in A Grammar of Motives, Language as Symbolic Action, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, A Rhetoric of Motives, and The Rhetorical Situation.]

The person who I agree with is Chantal Mouffe. [See Chantal Mouffe’s discussion of agonism and politics in On the Political and Agonistics: Thinking The World Politically.] Instead of antagonism having a need for agonism: “Yeah, I really disagree with you. Let's talk about it.” As opposed to: “I really disagree with you. So I don't even want to talk about it.”

TE: And only within that dialectic, only within that overlap, does it become a process for change and reconsideration. Otherwise, it’s not even a possibility.

VV: Yes.

In Maybe a Colony: And Still Another Critique of the Comp Community, you ask those of us in the work of composition to complicate our thinking about multiculturalism, considering its effect on literacy practices and how it reproduces and helps maintain American racial, ethnic, and cultural stratification, as well as gender and class. In the decades since you laid out that problem for us, to what degree do you think we've accomplished the "cultural multiplicity" composition was seeking at that time? In what ways do you think we still have work to do?

VV: Well, I don't think we've accomplished it. I mean, I see a greater possibility for it. You know, I wrote Bootstraps because as I met the folks at NCTE and 4Cs, I realized these were really very good people. And they were very earnest in their desire for a better world. What they were limited in was their range of knowledge, which was experiential. In an overwhelmingly white organization, you're going to have an overwhelmingly white point of view. It just is. Good intentions and all. So if you want to entertain the possibilities of conversations from others outside of that point of view, you have to turn to the people who are there. And the people who are there form such a small percentage, that it ends up smacking of tokenism. Even if that’s not the intention. Is it better now? Yes, it's better now. When I started, when I was a part of the Latino Caucus—which at the time was the Hispanic Caucus—there were three of us. And of the three of us, I was the only one in Rhetoric and Comp.

TE: But yes, we haven't accomplished it quite yet. But at least we're moving towards.

VV: Here's what I have to say about that. I think that multiculturalism is an arcane term. I am glad I don't see that term much anymore. Because it really does take decolonial thinking on both ends. I mean, it takes those who have a particular prestige and privilege to recognize that there's a colonial framework and mind.

TE: And how do we do that work without assumptions of deficiency? It’s like what you said, so many binds. It's great that there's understanding and compassion toward these obstacles, but yet it transforms into deficiency, which affects the work that we do.

VV: And among the students of color and from poverty, then it takes also recognizing the colonial mindset, that's internalized colonialism that we carry. So, I like that our professional conversations are moving more along the lines of recognizing the colonialism at play. You know, the first time I tried to get that essay published, it was rejected. One reviewer wrote that they saw no reason to resurrect Frantz Fanon. Yet Aristotle was also in that essay. The reviewer didn't seem to have a problem with Aristotle.

TE: Yeah. And in that article, you're also critiquing the Comp community. So, in not wanting to bring back Fanon, it was just validating the critique that you had. Well, and the term you use at the time was “cultural multiplicity.” Is that the language that you would use today? Or what do you think it is that we, the Comp community, are trying to do here?

VV: Multiplicity? Yeah, you're right. It's a kind of a real plurality. Real pluralism. That is the goal. And we're nowhere near close to that. Not, I mean, as a society. And as much as I think colleges, NCTE, and 4C’s have grown in terms of inclusion, it's still an overwhelmingly white organization—or both organizations. And to a great degree, it's not their fault, because the teaching industry is still overwhelmingly white.

TE: Yes, it's a reflection, also of those who are doing the teaching. And maybe the word is pluriversal? [See Decolonizing Projects: Creating Pluriversal Possibilities in Rhetoric by Ellen Cushman, et al. and Forward: On Pluriversality and Multipolarity by Walter Mignolo for more on this discussion of pluriversality as a way to decolonize knowledge.]

VV: Yeah. So cultural multiplicity is the language that I used at the time, but as we think about this a little bit more, even thinking about the plurality of that ... Yeah, it's hard to conceive of this idea that I can be both different and the same.

For me, this interview is kairotic, as we meet in a critical juncture for both of us—me at the beginning of my career as an academic of color in Rhetoric and Composition, who would not be if not for Bootstraps, and you reflecting on a most prolific and inspiring career. Bringing back memoria, in your Afterword to Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise: Contested Modernities, Decolonial Visions, you talk about the bind of the “I'm-no-different difference” that foregrounds our decolonial work. How have you managed to stretch and grow within this bind of legitimizing-maintaining-resisting the diminishment-Othering? By the way, dispensa yo', please forgive my awful paraphrase. You articulate this brilliantly in your Afterword.

VV: Well, it's true, though. Not the “brilliantly” thing, but what I’m getting at. What I'm getting at is that I have been Othered, with a d at the end. Not the Other—I have been Othered, through what have been the unintentional ways in which things happen. I'd really care less about the intentional othering. The intentional “otherers” are bigots. I'm not talking to them. And for the most part, that's not who I've known in this business. Ninety-nine percent of the people I've met in this business are good-hearted people. And well-intentioned people. And we have a lot in common. We love language. We all love language. We love the teaching of language. We love thinking about all that's possible through language. But in this racist system, we are racialized. I think what is more important than death: sameness, difference, difference and sameness. So anyway, the short answer is: we are Othered, and we have to address the Othering. And the only way to address it in order to be heard is by Sameness.

TE: That was so well put. And that's precisely what you're talking about in the Afterword. You say that works like Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise move toward that end, but also that we have to engage with the tools of Sameness in order to counteract the intentional, but more specifically the unintentional, processes of Othering. And also differentiating that—that Othered is because it's a process that happens to you. It is, and yet you're recognizing at the same time that we—I don't know. Would you say we contribute to the processes of Othering? Or do you think that we can’t escape it?

VV: Yeah, I mean, you can't take down the master’s house with the master’s tools.

TE: Audre Lorde. [This discussion is famously quoted in The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.]

VV: Right; Audre Lorde, though I’m thinking here very differently than her speech. I’m simply saying that it’s with the master’s tools that I'm going to argue the case. That's the bind we're in. This is how we can close this this conversation between you and me. I see the value in the rhetorical, more than the linguistic. If we're going to be heard in English Studies, we’re going to be heard in English. To be heard in Spanish, well, whose idea is that? You have to deal with Chamorro and Tagalog, right? Whose tools are you going to use there? That's less important, it seems to me, the lingual, the translingual, even translation. What’s important is knowing that what we're dealing with is actually the rhetorics involved. It’s where the power is. It’s saying, “I don't have to say it in the order that you dictate.”

TE: Yes. And I think what gets lost, like you said, is they think that a mere translation of words is what makes something of that culture, but it's actually the epistemology or the experiential. Yeah. There we have it, Victor. Dångkolo na si Yu’os maåse!

Works Cited

Bizzell, Patricia. ‘Contact Zones’ and English Studies. College English, vol. 56, no. 2, 1994, pp. 163-69.

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. U of California P, 1969.

---. Language as Symbolic Action. U of California P, 1966.

---. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd ed., U of California P, 1984.

---. A Rhetoric of Motives. U of California P, 1969.

---. The Rhetorical Situation. Communication: Ethical and Moral Issues, 1973, pp. 263-75.

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