In early June 2013, a group of rhetoric and composition scholars gathered in Lawrence, Kansas, to take part in a comparative rhetoric seminar, part of the 2013 Rhetoric Society of America Summer In...

Because evanescent oral phenomena present hermeneutical and representational dilemmas, orality remains an elusive and underestimated force in histories of rhetoric. This essay raises the profile of orality by attending to its cultural value and political resonance in historical and modern Latin America. In the encounter period, both the indigenous and the Europeans express preferences for the oral in legal, religious, and political contexts. In the modern period, a progressive political class adopts the oral as medium of choice for strengthening and diversifying civil society. Following theorists Diane Davis, Steven Mailloux, and Walter Ong, this essay treats orality as a relational phenomenon potentially instructive in a twenty-first century climate where recognizing the “presence” of Latin America is a political and ethical priority.

“Grand Convergence” introduces Mexican colonial rhetoric by way of a short text that is partial to clerical ideology and that eclipses a rich tradition of Amerindian medical rhetoric. Noting distinctions between Burke's theory of the representative anecdote and New Historicist uses of the “detail,” it explores the suitability of the text as an introduction to Latin American rhetoric historiography. Part two of the article examines contemporary scholarship on colonial Mexican rhetoric for its reductions and deflections.

This article asserts the viability of key topoi in feminist historiography: first, to establish presence for everyday women rhetors, and second, to explore ramifications of their positioning within variant historical narratives. Catalina Hernández was one of six European women recruited to Christianize indigenous girls immediately following the military conquest of Mexico. Her letter to the civic judicial council seeking autonomy for her community of women teachers was perceived as sufficiently dangerous to warrant its deletion from the historical record and the subsequent “disappearance” of the writer herself; only excerpted accounts of Catalina's writing remain. I seek the historical Catalina Hernández in the sophistic mode, assaying four motives and four contexts for the production and reception of her letter.

This essay focuses on the grammar–rhetoric–composition program at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlaltelolco, a sixteenth–century institution of higher education in Mexico, to argue for a more amply conceived set of colonialist beginnings for American composition. As an emergent site for North American composition–rhetoric, Tlaltelolco launched phenomena familiar to contemporary scholarship, for example composition-rhetoric as attractor for public debates about race and class, as sponsor of debased curricula for people of color, and as re–enforcer of linkages among color, class, aptitude, and local discourse practices.