Writing and rhetoric along the U.S.-Mexico border
This article explores the rhetorical patterns of writers along the U.S.-Mexico border. The article first explores the complex history of the border region, and grounded in this cross-border history, the article rejects border theories that privilege the local and U.S. view. Instead, based on the Human Capability Approach, this article explores five "functionings" or typified rhetorical patterns or genres on the border and examines how writers along the border are capable of working in a variety of these functionings. It grounds this analysis in health communications but ends by discussing how different Spanish-English multilinguals manifest different variations of these five functionings based on their individual rhetorical and cultural histories.
Tejano Arts of the U.S.-Mexico Contact Zone.
The fact is that theories about the nature of writing, writing development, the uses of writing, and the process of writing, cannot be said to correspond to external reality broadly if these theories do not account for the experiences of over half of the world's population, the half that can be placed along the bilingual continuum and classified as fluent and functional in two languages. Guadalupe Valdes
Archaeology and mud wall decay in a West African village
Abstract A detailed study of the processes of deterioration of mud walls and of the physical evolution and devolution of a contemporary West African village is seen to facilitate the location of decayed mud structures at a nearby archaeological site. Various climatic and pedological conditions at the site make it unlikely that such walls will be discerned. The archaeologist wishing to obtain the fullest and least biased picture of the settlement configuration of the ancient community should therefore heed all the inferential lessons to be had from a focused ethnographic investigation. Given similar climatic situations and practices of house construction, taphonomy and ethnographic analogies may both be necessary for a valid reconstruction of an archaeological settlement.