In this dissertation, I examine the individual and collective subject positions of U.S. Central Americans by analyzing both their representation and exclusion in cultural texts, which include a wide variety of poetry, film, zines, memoir, and social media platforms. Writing about Central Americans in the U.S. has led me to consider key characteristics of transnational identity-building: dislocation, affective (non)belonging, migration barriers, cultural negotiation, and diasporic storytelling as resistance. Through this analysis, I engage with storytelling as a survival tactic and an everyday practice that U.S. Central Americans use to negotiate their cultural and material (non)belonging within dominant narratives that dehumanize them. I draw from a range of interdisciplinary approaches, especially cultural rhetorics, rhetorical theory, writing studies, film theory, Central American Studies, and queer theory. This project works to broaden the category of Latinx Rhetoric as it’s currently theorized in Rhetoric and Composition Studies. By unpacking how U.S. Central Americans compose identity through specific rhetorical strategies, I suggest how the specificities of one’s individual and collective identity must be attended to in order to truly make space for marginalized voices/bodies within our discipline.
Read
