Research

My research pulls from visual rhetorics and rhetorical ecology to better understand the “engulfing” (Mignolo) processes and epistemologies of coloniality/modernity, particularly racial formation. I work largely with mundane, mass-produced, and mass-circulated texts in community-based archives to trace the production, maintenance, and sedimentation of colonizing narratives into civic infrastructure. How, in other words, local settler stories are made real and the ways their realization affects and infects communities. My work focuses specifically on the experiences of Indigenous, mestizo, Tejano, and Mexicano communities in San Antonio, Texas at the turn of the 20th century and the racializing rhetorics of Anglo American and Anglo European settlers determined to hold them in subordinate socio-economic roles upon which local industrial and tourism economies (still) depend. At this moment, I am focused on vintage souvenir postcards and the work they were made-to do to settle nations on local and international scales.

“The remains must be buried in order to construct the living—as such” (Ballif 143)

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> To construct the living-as-such, the remains must be buried in order.

Since the late nineteenth century, the city of San Antonio has branded itself as a culturally rich tourist destination and center of “Pan American confluence,” yet its bright fiestas mask colonial histories and legacies too long inured. My dissertation/book is a rhetorical examination of the city’s souvenir postal cards as not only evidence of local colonialism and coloniality, but as settlers’ powerful tool made and moved to maintain local logics of domination, management, and control. The project is based on rhetorical analysis of a collection of 300 San Antonio souvenir postal cards published 1904-1917 and offers detailed consideration of their designs, motifs, captions, compositions, titles, messages, templates, colorization, framing, multimedia elements, and more. The first chapter situates San Antonio’s souvenir postal cards as an enormous, powerful, and dispersed settler archive invested in coloniality/modernity. The second chapter traces postcards’ enthymematic mechanic to deconstruct San Antonio’s “Mexican” and “White” relational racial scripts as undergirded by colonial logics and invested in ongoing tourism-based extraction. The third chapter examine souvenir postal cards’ multi-layered, multimedia compositions as spaces allocated and elements elected for particular performances of the nation and non-nation, citizen and noncitizen. Through souvenir postal cards, I argue, scholars can trace the rhetorical production of race in the interest of “taking and making” place. I also argue that postcards’ mass production evidences networked collaboration locally and across imperial Western states to maintain racializing and colonizing epistemologies and superstructures.