During World War II, the US Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) and the Walt Disney Company produced a series of educational films promoting literacy, hygiene, and American (US) values for distribution across the Americas. Through these films, literacy was to move across borders in service of inter-American cooperation. That movement, however, also reinscribed the distance between a modern, powerful, literate United States and a stagnant, resistant, illiterate “other America.” The program’s insistence on film as a pedagogical tool imagined the United States as a site of technical modernity in contrast to its American neighbors. Working in light of recent scholarship addressing how literacy controls and constrains movement, this essay considers the effects of literacy for literacy's others—in this case, the population of what the OIAA termed the “other American republics.” It highlights the American assumptions that circulated within the literacy films and became enmeshed with the reading and writing skills they claimed to provide. Examining how film moved literacy practice and ideology across national borders, this essay demonstrates how thoroughly the contexts and the media of literacy's movement shape the consequences of its transmission.

Late-colonial New Spain was awash with conflicting energies: American-born Spaniards (Creoles), like their North American counterparts, felt a growing desire for independence, yet needed their identification with Europe to cement their sense of superiority over the racialized indigenous, African, and mixed-race lower classes; the Enlightenment brought new fervor for scientific exploration and gave intellectual heft to the desire for independence, yet also facilitated administrative reforms that increased the Spanish monarchy's intervention in its subjects' lives. In the midst of this ferment, there appeared a popular but short-lived genre of art whose depictions of life in New Spain provide a powerful image of the rhetorical role of the colonial body. This article examines how that genre, casta painting, used topoi of family, publicity, and science to constitute and comment upon its moments' racialized common sense. The article suggests that taking seriously the rhetorical contribution of these artifacts contributes to a more complex understanding of Enlightenment rhetoric, particularly in the Spanish Americas.

In her essay “For a Politics of Love and Rescue,” anthropologist Virginia Dominguez reflects on a conference for which she was the keynote speaker, writing, “there was…generosity in their deliberat...