Who am I to tell them to enter the borderlands?

On my first day teaching English 101 here at WSU I knew I was most likely to have students who could identify with me, in that I'm white, have a "mainstream" religion and am affliated with a Western style of education. But then Bob Eddy told us we had to teach our students about the deep-seated pervasiveness of racism in the United States. Okay. I've read the theory. Wait. I'm white. I'm not poor. Who am I to tell them to enter the borderlands in their writing? What authority do I have?

I had my students read "Diving In" by Mina Shaughnessy and "The Silenced Dialogue" by Lisa Delpit. It took a little coaxing and persuading, but I told them, that despite the fact that these articles were written in the 70s and 80s respectively, the views regarding culture clash between student/ teacher were old, but not outdated. However, there are those few that I thought about when I read Andrea Lunsford's questions to Gloria Anzaldua on page 53.
"...they are more threatened than puzzled...Many of my students are from small farming communities...Most of them are Anglo, and they say things like, 'She sounds so mad. Is she mad? And who is she mad at" (53)?

So, on top of teaching them about cultural rhetoric and then trying to drum the mindset of academia into their heads, I attempt to allow them headway in finding their identity in writing. Anzaldua says that identity is simply uniting the labels. "Anzaldua rejects ongoing efforts to label her...Only your labels split me" (Lunsford 43). She sees herself as one person made up of these things.

She says that our culture (the overarching culture of the United States) is such that until she is able to stop translating when she slips into Spanglish in her writing, that her language will be illegitmate (qtd. in Lunsford 45). Academia looks at rhetoric from a stringently Western point of view. As if efficient writing was developed by Aristotle and everything before that was cave scratches. The mestiza rhetoric mindset Lunsford is advocating for allows us to open the door to multiple rhetorics from all over the world, from all cultures.

"The Chinese term most commonly used to translate the English rhetoric is xiuci" (Swearingen 34). Unfortunately I am unable to reproduce the Chinese characters faithfully. "On the one hand, xiu means 'decorate' or 'embellish,' and ci means 'speech' or discourse...' On the other hand, xiu also means 'adjust' or 'make appropriate,' and ci means 'explanation, eloquence, and poetic performance" (Swearingen 34). The true meaning of Chinese rhetoric gets lost in Western translation.
Steretypical views of Asian rhetoric see swirls of flowery language with little comparison to our neat and tidy ethos, pathos and logos. However, Swearingen introduces the diea that further study of "Chinese rhetorical traditions has revealed numerous practices of logic and argumentation, layer upon layer of double meanings and allusions...and layers of meaning that are far more intricate...(Swearingen 33).

So when we (as teachers, instructors and students) walk into a first year composition classroom, we have to come at our lessons with a open mind. In that, I mean, our students write for us with/ through all manners of rhetorics and our job will be much easier if work towards Lunsford's Mestiza Rhetoric.