This article extends the engagement with decolonial theories within Latinx writing studies, particularly by engaging the ways literacy has been taken up within Basic Writing scholarship. In what follows, I argue that coloniality and decoloniality are crucial resources for Basic Writing and literacy scholarship under the larger umbrella of literacy/composition/rhetoric studies, and that in a symmetrical fashion a consideration of Basic Writing and the “politics of remediation” cannot be neglected or ignored within LCR studies’ decolonial turn if the decolonial imperative is to be achieved. To this effect, I advance three core claims. First, that the decolonial turn in LCR studies offers a potent set of resources for resolving core contradictions in Basic Writing scholarship. Second, that the decolonial turn offers Basic Writing scholars an opportunity to connect advocacy for students and student centered resources to larger public conversations about pedagogy and literacy. Finally, I argue that a decolonial turn in LCR studies offers Basic Writing scholarship a way to reconceive of its own historiography so as to overcome its current deadlocks.

The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine & Resistance is a critical contribution to the field of rhetoric and composition. Chvez's book demonstrates queer coalitional work as it examines heteronormative cistems of oppression that have disempowered and marginalized migrant bodies and folks of color since the early AIDS epidemic. 1 However, before engaging with Chvez's work, it is important to note that Ryan Mitchell, Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College, has also written a review about this book. In his review, Mitchell provides a strong account about the parallels to current events, as well as articulating Chvez's ability to add to archival histories by "shifting focus from the work accomplished by mostly white, mostly middle class, cosmopolitan AIDS activist groups . . . . [and] draw[ing] from queer of color, migrant, and feminist traditions to recover an alternative history of AIDS, one that is attuned to how the epidemic affected (and continues to affect) those on the borders of civic and national belonging. " As Mitchell illuminates, Chvez's work adds to archival work by amplifying a historical perspective that captures racialized migrant bodies and moves away from centering White bodies, organizations, and perspectives. Building from Mitchell, I also see this book queering heteronormative institutionalized cistems of oppression to signify white supremacy's dominance and its violence against marginalized, disempowered, and ignored bodies. 2 As my review suggests, this text argumentatively informs readers about perspectives, identities, and literacies that are not often discussed in dominant heteronormative educational and archival scholarship.

In rhetoric and composition, much of the research on Black college students of the 1960’s and 1970’s has uncomplicatedly tied these students to basic writing historiography and left under-challenged the representational politics that positioned them as the products of open admissions and marked them as politically militant but underprepared and/or remedial in their literacy practices. Extending our purview beyond open admissions and basic writing, this article applies pressure to these disciplinary trends by turning to the extracurriculum and recovering the political literacies of the student-activists of the Black Liberation Front International (BLFI), a Black student organization at Michigan State University from 1968 to 1975. For Black students such as the BLFI activists, there were nonacademic political spaces that provided them with opportunities to learn and practice literacy for political aims. This article focuses on one of these sites of literacy education—a place the BLFI activists called The People’s House. Drawing upon archival research and oral history, the author recounts how the BLFI activists’ relationship with the Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James created the contexts for them to organize reading groups at The People’s House, where they developed a form of critical reading praxis that enhanced their abilities to engage reading as a political, rhetorical, and epistemic act. The collaborative writing the BLFI activists composed at The People’s House is also constructed as a site for translingual production, where they practiced how to use the linguistic and discursive resources they had available to them to attend to the rhetorical and material aspects of writing.