In “The Corrido,” Mark Noe’s main point seems to be that, as educators, we tend to compartmentalize students, especially, in Noe’s view, Latinos. Certainly, we expect our students to try on the clothes of academia, as Bartholomae posits. Inevitably, the clothes may not fit initially, but generally speaking, we find that they come to fit us in time. Noe holds that such mimicking leads to assimilation, and implies this is a bad thing, at least for Latinos. While many in mainstream America might feel that assimilation is one of the ideals of a melting pot like America, Noe maintains that what’s needed is to treat students as neither mainstream nor minority, allowing a non-biased assessment of them and their writing. “The best that I can do,” he writes, “is to fashion an invitation that refigures that classroom as a border rather than a boundary” ( 603), that is, an environment where student work is appreciated independent of Western attitudes, such as individualism.
Having lived and taught ESL in Los Angeles more than twenty years, an area where border people, in Noe’s terms, outnumber the Anglos, my own experience tells me Noe’s well-intended thoughts are potentially damaging to those he’s hoping to help. Specifically, I disagree with Noe’s simplistic depiction of Latinos and his assumption that he has the ready remedy.
Key to his philosophy is that people of the border resist assimilation, so he personifies them with the corrido of Gregorio Cortez, an almost mythic figure who stands for those who refuse to be categorized. My experience, though, is that Latinos are not so easily categorized. True, many choose to take what suits them from gringo culture, maintaining pretty traditional values, including speaking Spanish in the home. Indeed, some Latinos in border areas are true nomads, spending three months north of the border, another three south, and so on, so they have little allegiance to the US.
By and large, though, the more non-assimilating Latinos I’ve known are first generation arrivals or visitors. Their children are increasingly assimilating, embracing Anglo traditions, including Ivy League education and the materialistic, corporate life it engenders. In the middle we find a real mix of the two extremes -- for example, young people in community college or at nursing schools who speak “Spanglish”, middle-age housewives proud of their American suburbs who help their kids with homework in spite of a language gap, teenagers who eat tons of junk food, like most American teens, and who are as likely to twerk as to cumbia. Personally, I find that every time I try to typify Latinos in a single adjective or using a single metaphor as Noe does with the rhetoric of the corrido, my inexactitude classifies millions of people inappropriately and offends plenty. Identifying Latinos with Gregorio Cortez is like identifying all Anglos with George Washington’s chopping down the cherry tree. Most Latinos I know wouldn’t care to be described so reductively, especially by a rinche.
Noe says we need to relax the “borders” within the classroom to accommodate Latino writing. He reasons that Latinos “bring an exemplary discourse into the classroom,” calling them “established strategies of discursive resistance” born at the “intersection of Spanish conquest and Ameridian resistance” (603). Here Noe goes beyond his Gregorio Cortez stereotype to portray Latinos as having a natural “resistance” that lends itself nicely to critical thinking in the composition classroom, but how does he know all Latinos possess such talent? According to the above, he seems to believe that such inherent communicative capacity is the result of American Indian culture colliding with Spanish Conquistadors: it’s all due to the reverberations of history. Using this indicator, today’s German youth have a strong propensity to commit atrocities, yet we’ve seen no evidence of this. Rather, this sort of reasoning has the potential, like Noe’s inadvertent stereotyping of Latinos in the person of Gregorio Cortez, to do more harm than good for our Latino students. Even if what he says is true for a portion of the people, it’s just wrong for so many more.
But let’s assume for a moment that Noe’s notions hold water. The real question is whether these students and their families would opt for an adjusted assessment program for composition. My feeling is that some might prefer his plan in the short run, since it’s liable to reduce assessment strictures, maybe boost some GPAs and possibly even promote understanding between the cultures. On the other hand, just as the STROL movement has at times been hotly protested by the very groups it’s sought to assist, so too, there’s the real possibility that Noe’s tack will find angry Latino parents condemning the “dumbing down” of our curriculum for robbing their children of opportunities to be educated and evaluated on the same terms as other students.
It seems to me that there’s a fine line between helping students with an open-minded assessment and encouraging them to retain certain behaviors which could be limiting to them in their college careers and beyond. In the worst case scenario, Latino students under Noe’s curriculum might well find themselves shocked in time when other professors castigate them for work deemed flatly unacceptable -- work that teachers like Noe legitimized and encouraged. Perhaps worst of all, that same student may run into real trouble in the real world when she’s unable to step back objectively and write a business letter that appeals to Anglo recipients on Anglo terms. In this case, would it be fair to lay the responsibility on Noe for his good intentions? Some would say yes. As we saw in the Killingsworth book, when a representative from the dominant ethnic group seeks to speak on behalf of an oppressed minority, the rhetoric can come off pretentious and wrong-headed, even when it’s well intentioned.
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