For today you were asked to bring your multimodal creative projects. Let’s take the first 15-20 minutes of class to have some of you present what you’ve produced.
Remember that your rhetorical reflection is due on Thursday (3.29). Refer to the assignment prompt for specific instructions.
Reading Discussion:

In “Queering the Borderlands: The Challenges of Excavating the Invisible and Unheard Author(s)” Emma Pérez explains the decolonial methods necessary in uncovering the stories of unknown historical subjects: mainly queer Chicanxs in Southwestern US.
To do so, she follows borderlands theory through her own methodology: decolonial imaginary.
On page 123, she provides useful definitions relevant to her discussion: colonial ideology, colonial mind-set, colonial imaginary. Like in our last class, she refers to the importance of naming things.
How does her writing correlate to Latina Legacies? How does it differ?
She ultimately asks researchers and writers of histories of sexuality to “interpret documents differently” (124) and to account for the ways in which Western histories o sexuality impacted non-western populations.
“…it is not historical coincidence that the classifications of homosexual and heterosexual appeared at the same time that the United States began aggressively policing the borders between the United States and Mexico. (126)
Gabriela Raquel Rios, critically interrogates the widespread use of the concept
of mestiza in order to point to the settler colonial logics embedded in its proliferation.
While she acknowledges Gloria Anzaldúa’s intentions, i.e. to undo “the logic of racial and cultural purity built into mestizaje in its colonial formations,” (111) she follows other scholars who are critical of the potential to reify a “eugenicist logic of ‘missed-race’ superiority” (110).
To do so, she elaborates the tensions and overlaps within Chicanx and Indigenous Studies, specifically referring to Emma Pérez, but also Walter Mignolo, and Audra Simpson, but also Andrea Smith.
Latin American theorists who espouse mestizaje as decolonial do so because they tend to see the problem of colonialism as something having more to do with modernity than with Indigenous subjects or even indigeneity as a concept…Still, the decolonial option does not seek to resist or undo colonial (knowledge) designs… (117).
On page 119, she highlights the importance of acknowledging the difference between identity politics, and identity in politics, while also explaining that “objectivity without identity is a falsity” (119). How does this assertion affect your own work?
There is a similar critique of universalism (114), which results in the erasure of settler colonial processes: “What disappears in a subjectless critique is the ongoing occupation of Native lands and the genocide of Native peoples” (119).
- How do both Emma Perez and Gabriela Raquel Rios enact a decolonial method, and how do they issue a critique of problematics they’ve identified?