The Humanities and the Rhetorical: Being a Professional Human in a Border Writing Studies Program

19 Jan 2023
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By Juan Moisés García-Rentería

The Humanities and My Rhetorical Situation
Here is a story that might sound familiar to many of you: As a student pursuing a career in the arts and humanities, I began a journey that did not start with me pushing myself to achieve the goal of becoming a professional writer. Rather, my educational choice had responded to my desire to challenge myself intellectually and, ultimately, to achieve a type of success on a very personal level.

Preserving Texts: An Experience in Archiving

19 Jan 2023
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By Erick Balandran

Libraries are fascinating facilities for the vast wealth of literature they hold, useful for every university student regardless of major. There is always something for someone to read, be it fiction or non-fiction, public records or carefully preserved memorabilia of the past. I’ve always been someone who took these institutions for granted and never really considered all the work that goes into preserving and deciding what works should be kept.

Architectures of Disappearance: In Conversation with Contemporary Poets

19 Jan 2023
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By Honora Spicer

This past Fall, I was joined by Mellon Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP Student Research Fellows Rebekah Patnode and Tatiana Rodriguez in a series of conversations with contemporary poets and writers that formed part of a Commentary series in the Jacket2  journal of poetics.

Dead Flesh: House Bill 3979’s Murder of Our Stories

19 Jan 2023
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By Jazmine Janay Cuevas

"I found myself crying. I could hear my father’s voice telling me the story. And I guess I was sad. But I was also a little bit happy. He left me stories to tell. My dad had them. My mom had them. Stories were living inside us. I think we were born to tell our stories. After we died, our stories would survive. Maybe it was our stories that fed the universe the energy it needed to keep on giving life.

Maybe all we were meant to do on this earth was to keep telling stories. Our stories-and the stories of the people we loved."—Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World

Uncovering Historical Silences toward a Cageless Future

19 Jan 2023
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By Adam Heywood

As I traveled down I-10 East, making my way from El Paso, Texas, en route to Tarpon Springs, Florida, I came across several “welcoming” markers along the way. At a Mississippi welcome center, my eleven-year-old Mexican-American daughter and I took a quick picture next to the “welcome to Mississippi” sign.