Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 1 (2022)

Arriving, Becoming, Unmaking: Stories of Arrival at an HSI Writing Center

Sonya Barrera Eddy
Texas A&M University – San Antonio
Writing.Center@tamusa.edu

Katherine Bridgman
Texas A&M University – San Antonio
Writing.Center@tamusa.edu

Sarah Burchett
Texas A&M University – San Antonio
Writing.Center@tamusa.edu

Juan Escobedo
Texas A&M University – San Antonio
Writing.Center@tamusa.edu

Marissa Galvin
Texas A&M University – San Antonio
Writing.Center@tamusa.edu

Randee Schmitt
Texas A&M University – San Antonio
Writing.Center@tamusa.edu

Lizbett Tinoco
Texas A&M University – San Antonio
Writing.Center@tamusa.edu

Abstract

This article works to center the conversation between administrators and tutors to make visible the labor of collaboration and understanding as we engage with the topic of our individual arrivals at our Writing Center at Texas A&M-University San Antonio, a Hispanic Serving Institution. The conversation is the framework for touching on the concepts of arriving at our identities and becoming who we are as individuals and scholars. This conversation highlights the complexity of the recursive process of unmaking who we thought we were so that we can arrive at who we would like to become, in our individual lives, situational identities, and how we navigate our unique institutional system.

Arrival to our Writing Center by tutors and administrators is an act that invites both becomings and unmakings. Our experiences of arrival connect us to the many arrivals, becomings, and unmakings that have occurred on the celebrated and contested land on which our writing center is situated. Our university resides on the Yanawana, the homelands of the Payaya, Coahuilteca, Tonkawa, and Lipan Apache (Santos, et al). Once part of the Mission San Francisco de Espada, A&M- SA is situated on a site of colonial violence that emerges from the Spanish missions. It is land that has at various times been part of Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, and most recently the United States. Geopolitical borders have moved back and forth across this land for six centuries.¹ It is land that holds histories of conquest, colonization, subjugation, and segregation and is deeply entwined with coloniality. 

Our Writing Center is implicated in these histories through the role it plays in current manifestations of the settler-colonist project, a project that used education to discipline and subjugate.  We encourage our tutors to arrive with their whole selves, to engage with our efforts to divest our center of unexamined biases and notions of what it means to be a “good writer,” and to engage with us in a process of becoming and unmaking that works to disrupt the broader settler project we are called upon by the university to continue. As educators and administrators, we have tried to unmake the White Mainstream English (Baker-Bell) narrative and policing of languages that it requires and make our writing center a place that resists the neocolonial becomings around us through our unmaking that disrupt the institutional becomings which surround us and in many ways bring our Writing Center into being.  

Institutional Becomings

Our University is becoming one of the fastest growing universities in south central Texas. Texas A&M University-San Antonio (A&M-SA) is a space of becoming with an institutional vision to develop “a national reputation for fostering equitable learning experiences and outcomes, and increasing influence as a catalyst for social, cultural and economic impact” (University Vision Statement). Established as a land-grant university in 2009, A&M-SA is located in a historically underserved section of south San Antonio once described as a “degree desert” by our local newspaper (Foster-Frau 2016).  The “degree desert” of the south side reflects larger dynamics of racial and economic segregation that have resulted in “portions of our population [that] have been denied investment for generations” (qtd. in McNeel). A&M-SA seeks to disrupt these dynamics of racial and economic segregation through its mission of educational access and transformation with a mission statement that opens with the promise to “transform[...] lives, our local community, and those to which our graduates return.”  

The university serves a student population that is approximately 72% Latinx or Hispanic-identifying and about 77% first in their family to attend college (A&M-SA “About”). Our student population is also closely tied to all branches of the US Military with one in six students being affiliated with the armed forces. San Antonio is also known as Military City USA, and is home to four military installations (Randolph AFB, Lackland AFB, Fort Sam Houston, and Camp Bullis) representing each branch of the military. These demographics frequently generate excitement about the investment, transformational potential, and expanded access to higher education that A&M-SA brings to the south side and San Antonio more broadly. 

Maps such as the one above often become emblematic of the broader project of becoming the university has embarked on. The large new buildings, the maze of walkways, the expansive windows looking out onto the surrounding landscape all celebrate the growth of a university poised to transform the students and communities it serves. At the same time, Melquiades (Kiado) Cruz reminds us of the violence masked by such glossy images, writing “a map serves to define a certain spatial reality, one that does not necessarily correspond to the reality of those who experience it. It creates an abstract idea of a space that is not part of a lived landscape, and fails to acknowledge flows, movement, and ways of being” (421).  Maps such as the one above put a glossy sheen on the colonial legacy of our university that is not only reflected in our Mission Revival architecture, but also continued in our encroachment onto the Yanawana (Santos, et al). Maps such as this capture what Romeo García reminds us when he writes that “[w]riting centers function within a tapestry of social structures, reproducing, and generating systems of privilege” (32). Each of us within the Writing Center is an active agent of this tapestry. As such, we seek to disrupt our complicity through our unmaking of entrenched notions of what writing centers do and unexamined behaviors that discipline student writing.   

Everyday Unmakings: Disrupting Complicity

To engage with the unmaking of preconceived notions about writing and writing centers that are rooted in coloniality, we must recognize what they are and from whence they arise, which can be entangled with our location within “the larger ecosystem of the university” (Camarillo). As we do this work, we must learn to be “suspicious of [our] own imbrication, [our] own complicity, within the Academy, an institution predicated on Western European ideas and values” (Powell 2). Our work in the writing center bears witness to the “cultural bomb” that continues to echo across our university as minoritized students “are asked to distance themselves from their names, language, and heritage in order to assimilate to the dominant group—White European Americans (WEAs) (Santa Ana; Shaheen)” (Pimentel and Wilson 126). Through this process of assimilation, many of the students we work with are instructed to come to the writing center for help as part of a broader colonizing pedagogy of the university that asks them “to view their pasts as one wasteland of achievement from which they should distance themselves” (Pimentel and Wilson 126). Writing centers often willingly participate in this distancing through our “failure to explicitly name and grapple with [the field’s] politics, which has contributed to our often precarious positioning in the academy and has made us unintentionally passive facilitators of a host of unethical practices'' (Greenfield 44).  In particular, writing centers are often expected to be – and have often gladly filled the role of – acculturating influences within the university as we enact “an ideology of individualism not only shapes writing center discourse but also races writing center practice, making it inhospitable to students who are not white” (Grimm, “Retheorizing,” 76). This acculturation frequently becomes a justification for our own existence as acculturation “becomes a means not only of precluding the Other, but also of validating the academic culture to itself” (Bawarshi and Pelkowski 43).  

A key facet of our everyday unmakings is our disruption of standard language ideology, “the belief that there is one set of dominant language rules that stem from a single dominant discourse (like standard English) that all writers and speakers of English must conform to in order to communicate effectively” (Young 111). Tasked with controlling “this heterogeneity” (Grimm, “Rearticulating” 524), we silence both the language practices of our students and the knowledges that come along with those language practices when our pedagogies project a frontier of academic achievement beyond the “wasteland of achievement” (Pimentel and Wilson 126) students bring into the writing center. This work of the writing center does not simply happen in the abstract. It is work we embody as “[t]he ‘rules’ of scholarly discourse — the legitimizing discourse of the discipline of rhetoric and composition — require us to write ourselves into this frontier story” (Powell 3). It is here that our unmaking begins in moments of arrival when our enforcement of standard language ideology is what is expected. 

In the spirit of comadrismo, a concept introduced by Ana Milena Ribero and Sonia C. Arellano as a tactic both for mentoring Latinas in Rhetoric and Composition and for disrupting institutional cultures that exclude Women of Color. As we engage in this work, we heed warnings from José Cortez and Romeo García about the limitations of decolonial work in our context. As a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) located within hours of the U.S.-Mexico border, our decolonial work can easily fall into the trap of reproducing epistemologies grounded in the violent colonial legacies we discuss above. To help us reframe our thinking as administrators, we work to focus on and use rhetorics of women of color.  Sonya, Katherine, and Lizbett all talk together, form friendships, grow in relationship, and know that we can count on, lean on, and ask for advice or help when needed. We model comadrismo for our tutors through dialogue that we have in their presence, which models for them how to navigate highly emotional and important topics.  We acknowledge that we have tutors with multiple and varied positionalities, which is why we say “in the spirit of comadrismo” because the types of relationship and interaction that comadrismo addresses and are the types of relationships we intentionally seek to foster within the center for our tutors, administrators, and staff for our tutors. 

In the spirit of cultural rhetorics performance as story (Powell et al.; Cedillo, et al.), we have used narrative to try and capture these conversations and the knowledge we made together about our arrivals, our becomings, and our unmakings. What follows is a narrative of a dialogue among Katherine Bridgman, the Writing Center Director; Sonya Barrerra Eddy, the Assistant Director of the Writing Center at the time this article was first drafted; and Sarah Burchett, Juan Escobedo, Marissa Galvin, and Randee Schmitt, who were writing tutors at the Jaguar Writing Center at the time of this writing. In order to facilitate the sharing of these stories, Katherine and Sonya first discussed the topics and the potential for submission for this article in a weekly meeting with the tutors. We had been looking for ways to write about our writing center that did not center the experience of white administrators, but rather centered the voices of BIPOC faculty and tutors and was not administrators writing about tutors, but was actually tutors constructing the knowledge for themselves with their voices at the center. 

After our first meeting, many of the tutors expressed interest in deepening the conversation and participating in the writing of an article. Sonya then constructed a few writing prompts, and at the next meeting we took time to journal about the writing prompts and discuss our answers. This conversation was wide ranging and most of the tutors not only wrote extensively but shared many stories. After this initial sharing, we asked the tutors to refine their contributions and to place them in a shared document. Katherine, Sonya, and Lizbett then constructed the introduction and the theoretical sections of the piece and gave the tutors each a word count, so that they could revise their section to place in the piece. We wanted the piece to mimic our conversation as closely as possible, but we didn’t want the administrators choosing what the tutors were including in the conversation. We then began the process of collecting the narratives and weaving them together into the dialogue you see below.  We decided to keep the dialogue format to foreground rhetorics of women of color. Sharing these stories about how we navigate our arrival to writing center studies and the Jaguar Writing Center helped us in understanding connections among our experiences, while also developing ideas for what we envision for the becomings and unmakings that happen through our current and future work together. The goal of sharing our stories is to listen, reflect, and build community in ways that are locally and contextually situated. 

While we may not yet have arrived at a way forward, the discussion below about our arrivals to the center seeks to disrupt the essentializing topos of Latinx identity that we may so often see manifest within the discourse of HSI’s and to resist discourse that relies on “metaphors for impurity, mixture and border become new concepts of the very purity they were employed to disavow” (Cortez and García 569).  Engaging with each other and working with our students, we are confronted with the challenge of avoiding a “conception of a resistant subjectivity as an exception to coloniality when coloniality is the condition of possibility” (576). While there is a growing body of scholarship that theorizes the complexity of this, we are seeking to avoid a rhetoric of propriety and instead examine the work we do as we trek across campus and embody the spaces of the writing center. Our dialogue below reveals how the relationships we build with each other and with the students who come into the writing center are at the heart of the unmakings we seek to enact. These relationships are themselves disruptive of our complicity in the settler-colonist project of the university, and it is through these relationships that we chip away at the standard language ideology enforced outside of the center. 

Let us begin. How did we arrive here? 

Sonya: Arriving at the writing center at this university, on this parcel of land was arriving at a place I had long romanticized as my ancestral homeland. My cousins all wanted to leave the South Side of San Antonio. I always wanted to be a part of a community I felt excluded from, so when I arrived at Texas A&M-San Antonio, I arrived at a place that no longer existed only in my mind.  I am a sixth generation Tejana who was raised in Arizona, because my parents relocated there for jobs. I visited my grandfather’s store on Roosevelt, a few minutes from our current campus, a few times per year. My understanding of all of Texas was limited to what I knew of the south side and southwest side of San Antonio. My father’s family is from the Valley, and I grew up hearing stories of him playing with friends in dugout houses that used to belong to indigenous people. I heard of him and his friends finding arrowheads and tying them to sticks to play war. I also heard stories that frightened me of Texas Rangers and some of the atrocities my family witnessed. This land we stand on has a history, a history that is passed down in bits and pieces from my family who has been here since before it was the Republic of Texas or the United States. The stories are faded, and complex, and often bloody, and contain hierarchies of color, language, and cultures. This complex history of violence and colonialism in the settlement of Texas, the one that doesn’t often appear in the history books, is not only my legacy, but the legacy of many of the students we serve and it also the legacy of the land on which we stand. 

Katie: Because our university is built on the homelands of the Payaya, Coahuilteca, Tonkawa, and Lipan Apache, we grapple both collectively and individually with the history of settler-colonialism that has enacted violence on both the land and the communities in which our university is situated. This violence, though, is not only in the past tense. This violence is never separate from the writing center that we work in together and is in many ways continued through my presence here.  My presence as a white tenured writing center director who moved to San Antonio for this position extends the violence of settler-colonialism. I had finished graduate school with just a couple of years of experience in writing centers and applied to many of the jobs that were posted that year. The position I currently hold was one of those jobs, and so I moved to San Antonio having only visited the city for my interview and for a conference that was held here shortly after I accepted the position. My arrival continued a neocolonial violence that takes shape in a number of ways across our university including the linguistic violence that is often enacted through a writing center and that I was in many ways hired to enact as a white settler-colonist. My arrival is marked by the becomings of a center that has the potential to grow alongside the university and the unmakings that must also challenge the colonial legacies that enable our very presence and growth.   

Sonya: I feel like we arrived in opposite ways. This is my first job out of graduate school and I had been on the job market during my last year of graduate school and I worked full-time and completed my dissertation. I applied to something like thirty-seven jobs that year, and I was fully prepared to go anywhere there was a job. But, I also wanted to stay in San Antonio to be near my family, because I returned to San Antonio with my parents when they retired for a reason. I wanted to raise my children in this contested space, with all its complexity, as Tejanas, so they could know their family and our deep ties to the land. I didn’t dare voice my hope to remain here to anyone, and I was overwhelmed with excitement at the opportunity to work at A&M - SA and return to the historic spaces my family occupies. Mixed in with the excitement was the apprehension of entering a space to work with a white Director and a transplant to San Antonio. I am not sure if I was worried about the history of settler-colonialism, or about our university and writing center participating in a history that threatened to continue to displace my family.

Katie: I think many of our tutors and students may share your experience of arriving, of coming to a place that claims to embrace them, yet threatens to break their ties to land and community. For example, in our enforcement of Standard Language Ideology, the university writ large often enforces a narrow becoming of the very students it claims to embrace, a becoming that enacts violence on the linguistic and cultural backgrounds of these students. In the work of our writing center, we seek to invite an unmaking of the institution rather than an unmaking of the language practices of our staff and the students who come to the center.  

Sonya: Yes, and I think that part of that unmaking of the institution begins with the space of our arrival. I think that we work together as a Director and Assistant Director, as friends and colleagues, with the tutors and front desk staff to create a vision of a different type of space in our center. I often wish I had known about spaces like our center sooner, because it was in a writing center that I learned to be a scholar and an academic, a researcher, and an administrator. I learned to research things I find important, to write with vulnerability and bravery, and towards a future I want to see in the world. However, I also learned that not everyone sees the center the same way. I found many colleagues in the university who see the center as a place of correction, as a place of assimilation, and a place to fill in the deficits of those students who look like and sound like me. So, we are often at odds with our vision for the center and the expectations of the broader institution. 

Randee: This is how I saw writing centers before I started. I assumed writing centers were places where students went to get help with their writing, or where tutors would take a piece and respond to any grammatical errors or other concerns. I really didn’t have any idea what a center would even look like. Desks? Would it be dimly lit? Quiet?  

Sarah: Me, too.  Before working in the Writing Center, as a student, I always imagined the writing center as a place for students who did not excel in their writing courses. I strived to be the best writer I could be and, being an English major, I felt an added pressure from myself to be successful in every piece of writing that I created. When professors would suggest that the class go to the writing center I always worked harder to prove to them that I didn’t need that assistance. My first time visiting the center was after my interview when I was taken into the center by a fellow tutor to show me around the space. It looked much more casual than I had expected, with large tables and open spaces for students and tutors to gather. I had always imagined small desks, paperwork spread around, and tutors in business casual attire. Those first footsteps that I took inside the center changed my entire perspective of what the writing center really was. 

Katie: Many of our tutors are like you and arrive in the center because they are confident in their writing skills. Many are also negotiating the nuances of unmaking and becoming that accompany this arrival. After having invested years of work in unmaking their own language practices and the cultural values that are circulated through those practices, we work with tutors to see these practices as powerful facets of becoming for both themselves and the students they work with. It is not the writer that we are working to unmake and remake in the writing center, it is the institution that surrounds us. 

Juan: I agree. I arrived at the writing center by accident. I’m not a writer in the sense that I studied it or have an English degree. I mostly used writing as a tool to describe to a general audience my artwork, but writing has always come somewhat natural to me because I associate it very much to storytelling. I see any paper, including any type of formal research paper, as a story being told. I have always been good at describing events in an organized way. At a young age my mother would have me write formal complaint letters to her bosses which often got her some kind of attention. Although I didn’t have a formal education in writing or English, I had the confidence to apply to the position at A&M because, at the very minimum, I felt I had the ability to identify structural issues within writing.  

Marissa: Same here. I have always felt that my writing was strong, so I didn’t necessarily see the Writing Center as a place where I would go to get corrections on my writing. It wasn’t until I went to the Writing Center when a faculty member required the visit that I came to see how helpful tutors were, even for strong writers. When I entered, the center was welcoming and there were tables and the space felt open and inviting. There were two other people in the room when I arrived. The session was good, I received some feedback on some concerns I had with my draft and it was a collaborative experience. I didn’t have any apprehensions about visiting the center, and after visiting, my initial feeling was confirmed by how good the visit went. When I applied for the Writing Center tutor position, I came into it with the belief that I could help people and support them with their writing. I wanted to replicate the experience that I had when I visited. 

Katie: Yes. And as so many of us arrive to the writing center having been successful within classrooms shaped by Standard Language Ideology, we must retool our understanding of language to begin unmaking the colonial and racist language practices that get glossed over in the broader becoming of the university.  

Sonya: Yes. Until I was a graduate student I didn’t know the writing center existed. As a highschool dropout I missed much of the foundational education in English. As an avid reader and writer I often was able to pass any test that was put in front of me. When I decided I wanted to go to college I found out there was a test required for entrance, something I had never heard of before, the SAT. I took the test and was admitted with a reasonable score even though I could only do rudimentary math. I had a good ear for words and I understood the underlying rhythm and nuance of language and words. Although never successful in school, I was a C and D student and at different times I was given ESL (I am a native English speaker) and reading interventions, however I was quickly exited from both programs. As an undergraduate, when I changed schools (it took me 7 years and three universities to earn my BA) I scored in the top ten percent when I was required to take the written essay exam. I earned a degree in creative writing and considered myself a good writer.  Over a decade later when I entered graduate school after working as a copy writer then a Public Relations Director, I was faced for the first time with academic writing. I found myself floundering. The academic genre was so new to me and required so much precision, I began to doubt my ability. I read the suggested grammar books and did the suggested exercises, but my writing skill never seemed to improve no matter how many worksheets I did. In despair, I asked a mentor who suggested I go to the writing center. This was near the end of my graduate career. It was there in the last year of my MA degree that I learned how to write academic papers, and I also learned the art of revision. Prior to this my revision process was to throw the story away and begin again, until I could finally tell the story right. I had no vision of writing centers. Until that moment I had zero exposure to writing centers. At the moment, when I was directed to the writing center, I felt a bit embarrassed because I knew that whatever it was I didn’t know meant I was really no good at writing. I continued to use the writing center as a place to understand the academic genre through my first few years of my PhD program. I found the model at my university restricting my work, so I switched to working with an “Academic Coach” in a different department instead.  

Katie: Our embodied experiences stand in such contrast, and unmaking the privileges that come with successfully aligning our language practices with Standard Language Ideology looks so different for each of us. A question you and I are constantly grappling with is how do we introduce new tutors into the center and prepare them to challenge the privileges they’ve enjoyed as a result of their successes with Standard Language Ideology and to participate in the broader unmaking of the university that unfolds through our daily arrivals to the Writing Center. 

Sarah: This is especially complex because, as tutors and writing center staff, we all have lived experiences that we bring with us into the workplace. Whether we visited the writing center before working there or not, we are all unique and bring with us a different perspective on how we should develop our best practices. No two tutors approach their positions in the same way, which works to the benefit of the students because they are always receiving assistance from a tutor who is doing their best, rather than a tutor who is trying to fit a mold created by a detached entity. This also allows students to work with different tutors and determine who they work with the best. If a writing center is designed to be uniform, with no room for individuality or change, then it will become stagnant and create an environment that is not conducive to growth or necessary adaptability. Just as tutors and writing center staff are different, each student that visits the center is their own unique individual, as well. Therefore, the writing center must acknowledge who their students are and what ways will best serve them.

Marissa: I agree. I view my role as a tutor as someone who supports students throughout their writing experience. I appreciated the collaborative approach in my own session as a tutor, so I wanted to do the same for the students that I work with as well. I try to offer anecdotes about my own struggles as a writer so that the students know that they are not alone in their insecurities about writing. I think it’s important to be transparent about those experiences. 

Juan: I think that the approaches and theories we discuss at the writing center are more transparent for the student than what they are receiving elsewhere. The student does not leave the writing center feeling that writing is a grand mystery that only an elite few can understand. I also think it begins to hold the institution and everyone that upholds academic writing as THE standard accountable– that academic english is only another code and that any other language code can be used to decipher academic english. 

Marissa: I’ve always believed and tried to live by the notion that change begins with the individual. Structural and Institutional change begins with me. I realize that I have to “buy in” to the work that we do as a center in order to effect change. We have read and continue to read and study antiracist work and practices that help us to not only understand the impact of the work that we do but allows us to examine and see the students that we help in all of the ways that they “arrive” at the center.

Juan: I do feel that the writing center is currently in subversive mode– meaning we are informing students one at a time, and sometimes they exit the writing center aware of these new approaches but having to grapple with instructors and fellow students that are unaware they are reinforcing racist practices. Worst yet, the boundary guarding instructors/ students that are aware of anti-racist practices but reinforce because these new approaches tap at their white fragility.  

Marissa: I feel that we as a center are doing this work to create structural and institutional change. If structural and institutional entities see the benefits of this work, then that will hopefully lead to more changes that benefit students. That work begins with us and I feel that as we consistently and fervently enact these practices that the tides will shift. It won’t happen overnight, but I am hopeful that it will happen. How can we bridge the gap between doing what’s right and operating within an institution with troubling and archaic notions of what it means to be educated, to be a good writer? I still believe that we as a center can be the catalyst for change. I’m not naïve about the challenges that we face, particularly against administrations and “the old ways of academia,” but because we interact so closely with students, we have the unique opportunity to directly impact their experience. Because of this, we can see how theory works in practice and this information should be valued for how it can encourage change at the higher levels of institution and instruction, so that students’ writing and experiences are honored at every level.  

Conclusion

Marissa highlights the ways in which the collective work we engage as we arrive in the center involves both collaborative and individual work to interrogate and challenge our positionalities in the center and in the university. As she builds relationships through her work in the writing center, she brings to the fore that it is through these relationships that we enact institutional change. As we move forward from these discussions and the arrivals they story, our writing center finds itself in an effort to embrace “a knowledge that actively unworks itself,” unmakes itself (Cortez and García 585). At our writing center, the unmaking of preconceived notions and unchallenged and internalized ideas happens over time through the relationships we build with each other and with our students. It is when we are in relationship with others that we disrupt the settler-colonist project of the university and move away from the too-often disciplining role of the writing center. It can be through the building of these relationships that we stop trying to conquer the world through education, and we begin engaging in and owning our growth. As time passes and our relationships grow, we learn to understand each other and depend on one another. This leads to an unmaking that displaces the sedimented knowledge about language and writing centers that we arrive with and that constrain our work. Nancy Grimm describes this constraint of our work in the center writing, “Because the work of the writing center is strongly regulated by how we read and write the cultural beliefs about literacy embedded in normalized practices such as institutional placement, syllabus construction, assignment making, conferencing, grading, and writing center policies, a reexamination of the role of the writing center must include a critical engagement with these cultural beliefs” (“Regulatory” 8). These beliefs “teach us to locate the problem of literacy in individuals (e.g. a lack of preparedness, carelessness, "poor" family background, first language "interference") and the solution in institutional practices (e.g. tougher assignments, more muscular models of assessment, increased emphasis on standards, back-to-the-basics instruction - even in more vigorous and visible writing centers),” tenets that are often reflected through the becoming of our university as it strives to expand access to higher education without stopping to question what that education might look like (“Regulatory” 8). As we arrive with these beliefs, we work collectively to navigate arrivals that at once contribute to the becoming that surrounds us and participate in an unmaking that seeks to disrupt the colonial violence embedded in the university’s becoming. This involves work that is both collective and personal in nature, as Marissa describes.

The knowledge informing this praxis is “a knowledge that is not knowledge but a clearing, an opening: a possibility to think through the base conditions of knowledge production and whether or not the work we do in the academy can amount to anything other than the expropriation of difference” (Cortez and García 585). We enter this opening together in a number of ways, including reading groups that hopefully destabilize sedimented knowledge that often underpins writing center work. For example, we have done reading groups unmaking our knowledge about the collaborative relationships at the core of a writing center session, unmaking our knowledge about bodies that write and the abilities they must possess, and unmaking knowledge that masks Standard Language Ideology and the ostensible neutrality of “academic English.” We do this work and sit with the discomfort of destabilized knowledge in a context that strives to facilitate a mutual trust. When we first arrive, we share our stories, we get to know one another, and we engage each other as whole people. This engagement comes in many forms, through reading a variety of texts together (not just scholarship), sharing food and stories at potlucks, watching movies together, and engaging in social and interpersonal activities that are designed to facilitate a community that celebrates its own heterogeneity. By sharing our spaces, stories, and lives, in the spirit of comadrismo1 we build trust and support systems that help us sit with discomfort and do our broader work of unmaking. 

When we think about how our relationships grow, then we understand that our arrival at the center is not an end goal. Instead, our arrival to the center initiates a process of unmaking that challenges us to do the becoming we want while avoiding the types of replication of standards that we are simultaneously complicit in as part of a writing center.  Our arrival then also highlights the absence of those who will never arrive and those who do not wish to do the type of work that we engage in. Our arrival helps us think about those who have been erased, those who have been barred from entry, as well as those who refuse to participate. As our stories demonstrate, arrival begins the unmaking of our sedimented beliefs and unacknowledged biases about writing and the writing center. As we unmake, we grow to become mindful listeners who are open to engaging in the collaborative work of helping writers find their vision. We also grapple with the very real notion that we should not deprive students of the skills they will need inside and outside of academia to succeed in places where they will be expected to be able to participate in standard language practices when they need to. We recognize that if we deprive students of these skills due to our own sedimented knowledge, we are replicating colonial practices that have very real social and economic implications, especially for already marginalized students. We arrive at this unmaking and becoming after first grappling with our arrival to this space and the land on which it is situated. We listen to the stories of those who came before us and we share and tell our stories so that we can know not only that we have arrived, but where we arrived from. This arrival prepares us to unmake both the sedimented knowledges of our field and the university that continues the colonization of this land and the communities that reside here. This arrival opens spaces of unmaking and new becomings for us and our university, allowing us to move forward with intentionality and not be swept up in the tides of blindly repetitive history.

Notes 

1. The Six Flags of Texas, have become part of the visual identity of the state, and serves as a reminder that that Texas was once a colony of Spain (1519-1685 and 1690-1821), France (1685-1690), Part of Mexico (1831-1836), An Independent Nation, Republic of Texas (1936-1845), a member of the United States (1845-Present), and also a member of the Confederate South as part of the Confederate States of America (1861-1865).   

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