Giving Voice and Listening to the Asylee: A Review of Mónica Reyes’s Rhetoric and Storytelling within the U.S. Asylum Process: Shelter Rhetorics

Jun 4, 2025

Published in Book Reviews | Issue 8

Tomas Maldonado, University of Texas at El Paso

Reyes, Mónica. Rhetoric and Storytelling within the U.S. Asylum Process: Shelter Rhetorics. Routledge Focus, 2025.

Mónica Reyes’s Rhetoric and Storytelling within the U.S. Asylum Process: Shelter Rhetorics provokes those of us in the United States to reevaluate our privilege and consider the asylum process from the point of view of an asylee. Reyes argues that La Posada Providencia (LPP)—an emergency center for displaced people in her hometown of San Benito, Texas, approximately a three-hour drive from Laredo, Texas—“operates as an influential ‘Third Space’ for asylum hopefuls” (2). Drawing on several methodologies derived from cultural rhetorics, rhetorical ecologies, and Chicana feminisms, Reyes explores what she terms “shelter rhetorics:” the distinct shared rhetorical practices that LPP residents use in their daily lives to create a sense of safety and enact agency within these precarious spaces.

Relying on what she identifies as “shelter rhetorics”—idiosyncratic, everyday rhetorical practices that protect people’s vulnerabilities while also giving them agency in unstable situations—as presented in audio-recorded interviews, resident drawings, and photos, Reyes conducts a thorough case study of what asylees endure through the asylum process. She argues that LPP constitutes a “Third Space” for the residents and is useful in determining the ways they resist hegemonic narratives focused on asylum-seeking experiences. Reyes defines “Third Space” as being an in-between site that “may provide space for marginalized people to cultivate alternative perspectives and shared rhetorical practices which speak back to hegemonic and fixed representations of their experiences” (3).

The study is shaped by three main research questions: “(1) How does LPP operate as a theoretical network within the rhetorical ecology of the U.S. asylum system? (2) How does the shelter, as a networked site, afford or constrain what the variety of people seeking asylum tell about their lived experiences? (3) How do the stories produced at the shelter perpetuate or critique hegemonic narratives of asylum circulating within the rhetorical ecology of the U.S. asylum system?” (3).

Reyes argues against the criminalization and victimhood that the U.S. asylum process perpetuates by recognizing the asylee’s use of shelter rhetorics to share their stories via their own agency. Chapter 1, “A Short Tour of the Project,” begins with an introduction to Blanca, an illiterate, elderly LPP resident from an undisclosed country who is seeking asylum after she and her son were threatened by a local gang in cahoots with her country’s law enforcement. Blanca, like many residents at LPP (referred to as “clients” throughout the text), must develop a narrative, otherwise known as a credible fear-based account, in order to begin her asylum process and persuade the government that she is unable to return to her home country. Reyes outlines how Blanca demonstrates agency through several rhetorical moves such as collaborating with someone else to help share her story, choosing to exercise silence about the traumatizing aspects of her experience in order to protect herself, and pivoting to stories about topics and events that would focus on her displacement. It is through this use of displacement rhetorics that Blanca shows “how the variety of stories displaced people tell about themselves are influenced by their rhetorical ecology—a varied and shifting context of narratives, events, people, materials, and policies—that is the US asylum system” (2).

The rest of the introduction does the work of describing the facility in detail along with resident demographics, explaining the theoretical underpinnings of the text, and providing a chapter breakdown. There are beautiful black and white photos taken by the residents themselves, documenting the spaces and items on the compound grounds. All the chapters are divided into subsections that are signposted for ease of reference.

Chapter 2, “La Mesa Redonda: A Located-Listening Approach to Knowledge-Building,” offers a fascinating look at “La Mesa Redonda” or the Round Table, a type of centered MacGuffin—a rhetorical object that moves discussion forward—used by residents to share their experiences and stories. It is simply a white, round picnic table, possibly made of aluminum, with three matching benches surrounding it. The chapter begins with the author positioning herself as a contributor of knowledge. Reyes acknowledges her academic and financial privilege, her connection to San Benito as a Mexican American, and the origins of volunteering for LPP while developing relationships with the residents and staff. She regards herself as a cultural rhetorics scholar who does research in communities that she is already a part of to allow for more insightful observation and meaning making. One methodological touchstone that resonated well with me was Reyes’s idea of “mirroring”—respecting a cultural community as authority in its own life. She links mirroring to storytelling as a rhetorical tool especially when residents commune at La Mesa Redonda to exchange information and discuss their issues. Mirroring places the researcher in a position of observation while the researched are the agents and authorities of their own experience. As Reyes outlines, “Mirroring is…an act of accurately esteeming the cultural community as experts in their own lives. It is a rhetoric of respect” (20).

For Reyes, La Mesa Redonda is more than just a place to sit. It is a living metaphor, engaging the human with the non-human, that illustrates several theoretical lenses of her approach to “located-listening”—a cultural rhetorics research method designed to enhance knowledge-building. The author grounds this approach in four axioms: “materiality,” “equitable,” “permeability,” and “diversity.” She defines “materiality” as rhetoric entangled with the material starting with physical bodies and reaching geographic locations and the circumstances surrounding them. The concept of “equitable” refers to a tangible item—such as the round table—functioning as a rhetorical network that illustrates how everyone in a certain space contributes to the meaning-making process. The term “permeability” describes how each person can easily enter and exit a conversation due to the table’s curved and split bench design. “Diversity” is characterized by the variety of people and stories that are shared at the table every day.

Chapter 3, “En la Frontera: Resisting Spatial Conventions,” explores the notion of space and how LPP residents interpret spaces during the asylum and refugee processes. This chapter contains seven subsections. In one of the most fascinating of the seven, Reyes explains how space and place are connected to criminalization. Reyes writes that space and place can be viewed as positive—such as public and private spaces we visit like museums or a friend’s home. However, as Reyes explains, when it comes to displaced people, the conceptualization of space is usually always negative and usually connotes criminality. To show space and place within labels of criminalization in action, the author unveils the stories of some of her participants. One of the most poignant is the story of Santos, from the Caribbean, who was contained for four days in a processing facility with twenty to thirty asylees and refugees crammed into a small, cold room of 2 meters by 2 meters. He was then transferred to a detention facility for twelve days, experiencing belittlement and verbal abuse from officers who he says looked like him. He eventually made his way to LPP, but reveals of the whole ordeal, “To follow the process is to be in prison” (43). The irony of fleeing to a country of refuge—a supposed safe space—only to discover the refugee is criminalized and contained is both harrowing and difficult to fathom.

Continuing with resident stories, Chapter 4, “Public Narratives of Asylum and Silence as an Echo of Displacement,” listens to the accounts of eight residents—David, Issa, Ayana, Alex, Benjamin, Yazmin, Mary, and Timotheo—as they prepare their personal experiences to present in asylum court. This chapter is divided into five sections that deal with the residents’ credible stories of fear, their echoes of displacement, their selective silences, their building of community and trust, and their claims of time and agency in their narratives. Like in Chapter 3, we hear the residents’ voices first-hand as Reyes transcribed them from the preliminary and post interview audio recordings. It is obvious that these are only snippets from the data, and I wanted to see more of it, but the quotes are riveting, raw, and capture the essence of how the residents choose to tell their stories.

In Chapter 5, “Cooking, Crocheting, y Cantando: Composing Agency through Routine,” Reyes turns attention to the residents’ daily household duties on the compound. The chapter shares the stories of LPP residents as they fit into five cites of analysis: residents’ hegemonic discourses concerning their asylum experience; exhibiting agency through normal activities of living; crocheting to earn money; doing housework on the compound and the sense of family that it brings to some of the residents; engaging in singing in the LPP classroom; and engaging in “rasquache rhetorics”—a concept taken from “rasquachismo,” defined as involving “living in the moment and looking for ways to recycle, upcycle, make do, and make new meaning through whatever available bits and pieces” (100).

This chapter wonderfully incorporates nine black-and-white photos complementing the residents’ narratives on their daily activities at LPP. I particularly appreciated the accounts of them learning to crochet as a form of craftivism that fosters “social ties, which crystalize ‘into more durable activist networks advocating for and even creating change’” (Gruwell qtd. in Reyes 86). Reyes quotes LLP resident Timotheo commenting on the sense of partnership between the residents and LPP and the feeling of autonomy that their crocheting created, “[I wish there was] something that would distract them emotionally while contributing to [the shelter], like when we made all those [crocheted hats] for [a shelter fundraiser]. At the same time, they were being distracted…and the money that was made was used to help those people when they left – they were given that money when they left – it was like savings they got to take with them” (86). Timotheo’s quote connotes the residents’ ability to perform rasquache rhetorics in their craftivism to gain autonomy and confidence. This supports Reyes’s idea that the effects of rasquachismo reframe displaced people as having control over their own lives independent of advocacy groups, non-profit agencies, or good Samaritans.

In the final chapter, Chapter 6, “The Long Path Out through Advocacy-Building,” Reyes reconvenes and finishes where she began in Chapter 1. The five subsections in this chapter seem to follow the conventions of the conclusion contained in a research article, exploring the author’s considerations and challenges; her recommendations for re-evaluating the collected data so as to interpret them in such a manner that they do not devalue the participants’ lived experiences; the overall implications of the research as well as the implications of silence and routine in shelter rhetorics; and the building of bridges among displaced people and the non-displaced.

Reyes answers the three research questions we reviewed in Chapter 1 in a straight-forward manner that does not try to make the work appear as exhaustive research. Take, for example, research question three, “how do the stories produced at the shelter perpetuate or critique hegemonic narratives of asylum circulating within the rhetorical ecology of the U.S. asylum system?” Reyes states that because LPP is situated between two different rhetorical ecologies that follow different conventions, the stories created at the shelter are “messy” and cannot be easily categorized as purely subversive or hegemonic; as a result, they contain remnants of both resistance and oppression (118). The reader is left understanding the possibility of more than one conclusion with the existence of dichotomies that leave more questions than answers.

As Reyes concludes her text, she states her hopes that her project and advocacy help build a bridge between the immigrant community and the university. A pathway where people come together and connect through the use of rhetoric since, in her estimation, rhetoric is “paramount in helping people seeking asylum bridge their way to safety” (120). Our field is in need of such work to contribute to and better serve these communities. Reyes’s final passage is a call-to-action for any reader interested in or already involved in rhetorics of migration and asylum: to show displaced people respect and dignity with the intention of building the kinds of networks needed to help them live safer lives.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge Dr. Lauren Rosenberg at UTEP for her feedback and encouragement to write this book review.

About the Author

Tomas Maldonado is currently pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric & Writing studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. He obtained a Bachelor’s in English & American Literature at the same university then went on to earn an MA in TESL and an MFA in Creative Writing at MNSU Mankato in Minnesota. He has taught rhetoric and composition as well as technical writing for over five years at South Central in North Mankato while adjuncting in the Intensive English Language program at MNSU Mankato.