Negotiating Impossibilities: An Introduction to Issue 8 of constellations

by Alexandra Hidalgo, University of Pittsburgh

I was raised on Punky Brewster, the 1980s show starring Soleil Moon Frye as the vivacious pig-tailed eight-year-old who refuses to wear matching shoes. After Punky’s mom abandons her and their golden retriever Brandon at a supermarket, Punky and Brandon end up living with Henry (George Gaynes), a misanthrope with a heart of gold. The show, which revolves around Punky and Henry becoming a family despite their mismatched sunshine/stormy-cloud dispositions, took my school by storm.

We only got the first two seasons in Venezuela, where I grew up, and whoever was in charge of the channel that dubbed and screened the show must not have held it with the reverence my friends and I did. For a year, they played and replayed the 44 episodes they’d purchased on a Monday-through-Friday schedule. They didn’t always play them in order, though. For the multi-part episodes, like when Punky is forced to leave Henry and move in with an uptight rich couple, the channel’s lackadaisical approach to sequencing felt cruel. We knew we’d eventually get to those episodes, though. If you only have 44 episodes and you play 5 a week, you’ll return to each of them soon enough—and they did, as did I when I became a mother.

Sharing the shows you love with your children can be a perilous practice. What if they’re outdated? What if your kids don’t like them? What if they flat-out hate them? Punky Brewster holds up admirably well four decades after debuting. The show’s heart, like Punky’s, is optimistic and compassionate, but it doesn’t shy away from the traumas that tarnish our lives. Homelessness, racial profiling, bullying, children kidnapped by one of their parents. Punky Brewster tackled them with grace and a touch that was light enough that adults would still let their children watch. But tackle them they did. William and Santiago, my boys, were enthralled by the unstoppable girl with an empathetic heart who owned up to her mistakes and always ended up making the compassionate, if harder, choice.

I cherished revisiting my childhood with William and Santiago. It was the first time I heard Punky and Henry speak English instead of Spanish, but it didn’t bother me. This was still my Punky, no matter the language. As we watched the show in its original English, the boys and I commented about it in Spanish. Mine native, theirs a literal mother tongue. As in, the only person they spoke Spanish with regularly was their mother. Eventually my Ohio-born husband Nathaniel Bowler brought his own tentative Spanish into the mix. Living in the US and unable to visit Venezuela due to Byzantine geopolitical reasons, Nate and I have been the boys’ sole consistent source of Spanish and of their heritage culture. Yet, when I wanted to show them what it was like to be me at their age, Punky was the show I turned to because she shaped me and so many Venezuelans who grew up during the reign of her 44 (mostly in sequence) episodes.

People’s engagement with TV is limited to the time we can dedicate to watching (at least in Hidalgo-Bowlers household, where we give what we watch our collective undivided attention). Music, though, can accompany us as we perform the myriad tasks of living, and I shared my music with the boys. The same music I’m still playing night after night as I dance in our living room for a half hour. The same music I danced to every Friday night at the Swindlefish Saloon while in college at Ohio University in the late 1990s. A couple hundred students (most of them white) would crowd the sizable dancefloor and the stage by the bar.

We, the dancers at the Swindlefish, felt wild and exuberant as the DJ played Shakira, Ricky Martin, Wilfrido Vargas, Juan Luis Guerra, Celia Cruz, Héctor Lavoe. My girlfriends (a group of Latina and Spanish students) and I were partial to the stage, dancing on it for hours. Sometimes with boys, mostly without them. We were young women entranced by rhythm and each other’s company. The bars closed at 2am, and the DJ would signal the end of the night by playing Rubén Blades and Willie Colón’s 1978 salsa classic, “Plástico.” The song is a call for Latin Americans to see ourselves as a community, for going beyond the superficial and following our hearts. As “Plástico” concludes, Rubén calls out each country:

Panamá, ¡presente!
Puerto Rico, ¡presente!
México, ¡presente!
Venezuela, ¡presente!
Perú, ¡presente!
República Dominicana, ¡presente!
Cuba, ¡presente!
Costa Rica, ¡presente!
Colombia, ¡presente!
Honduras, ¡presente!
Ecuador, ¡presente!
Bolivia, ¡presente!
Argentina, ¡presente!
Nicaragua sin Somoza, ¡presente!
El barrio, ¡presente!
La esquina, ¡presente!

When our own country was called, we’d raise our hand and scream, but we also raised our hand for the other countries. And for the barrio. And for the corner. The vast majority of the people dancing were not from the listed countries. They were American, and they didn’t speak Spanish, but they still danced to the song’s intoxicating beat. “Plástico” is a song about being proud of our Latinx culture. It’s also a song that invites all human beings, regardless of their place of birth, to dig deeper, to look after each other, to work hard for a better future. As the night drew to its climactic close, the air was thick with sweat and hormones, thick with the sense of our shared humanity that hours of dancing together (and, sure, some alcohol) can elicit.

I’m not a sports fan, much less a football one, so I did not watch the Super Bowl, but Nate, the boys, and I gathered in our living room the following evening to check out Bad Bunny’s halftime show. As we got ready to watch, Santiago, our sixth grader, told us that plenty of kids at school had mentioned hating the performance. As we made sense of his classmates’ reaction, Nate read us an Onion satire about conservatives losing their ability to speak English as Bad Bunny (né Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) took the stage. The article was hilarious, but the performance was riveting and, yes, besides Lady Gaga’s spellbinding salsa version of her Bruno Mars duet “Die with a Smile,” it was in Spanish.

The show was a radiant celebration of Latin American lives. We fall in love, we get married (at the Superbowl!), our children and our grandmothers dance, our grandfathers play dominoes, we grow and cook much of the food people eat in the US. We also struggle. Puerto Rico, Bad Bunny’s motherland, has a power grid that’s been decimated by storms. Yet both sides of the American political spectrum have failed to support Puerto Rico in addressing this ever-worsening problem, which is why Bad Bunny said, “Maldita sea, otro apagón,” as he and his backup dancers climbed the power lines. If power outages happen regularly, you end up trying to fix them yourself. Bad Bunny could have made the point in a more strident manner. Instead, he delivered a lyrical choreography for us to ponder Puerto Rico’s apagones.

Ricky Martin was more straightforward in his protest when he sang, “Que no quiero que hagan contigo lo que le pasó a Hawaii.” This Puerto Rican icon, who’s been in my life since he joined the boy band Menudo in 1984, was voicing the need for Puerto Rico to keep its language, cultural identity, and national sense of self. Puerto Rico’s status as a US territory and the possibility of becoming a state like Hawaii did, has divided Puerto Ricans for decades. These are big, messy, questions for a country to grapple with, and they have no easy answers. They need to be debated, though, so why not in a football stadium as millions watch?

The most stirring moment for me was when Bad Bunny said he’d made it this far because he’d always believed in himself. He then looked straight at the camera and said, “Tú también deberías creer en ti. Vales más de lo que piensas. Créeme.” He locked eyes with us as he uttered the statement, his face urgent as he told us to believe in ourselves, to remember we’re worth more than we think. The message is straight out of Punky Brewster: Keep at it, don’t let the hardships break your spirit. Too Pollyanna-ish? Probably. But I needed the reminder (who doesn’t?), and it touched me even more because I was carried away by the buoyancy of the melodies and the mesmerizing Latinx dancers before me.

The hysterical hullabaloo around Bad Bunny’s performance began long before he walked onto the field. Turning Point USA, the conservative nonprofit co-founded by Charlie Kirk, hosted an alternative “All-American Half Time Show,” headlined by Kid Rock. The problem is that there is no All-American without Latin Americans. We’ve been shaping American culture for as long as the US has been shaping ours. Venezuelans watched Punky Brewster, yes, but Ohioans danced to Celia Cruz with the same devoted fervor. Bad Bunny and his band performed El Gran Combo’s “Un verano en Nueva York,” the 1975 salsa hit about summering in New York and having a blast while you’re at it. He ended his performance surrounded by dancers carrying flags. Then just like Rubén and Willie used to, he called to us:  

God Bless, America. Sea Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Perú, Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Panamá, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, México, Cuba, República Dominana, Jamaica, Haití, Las Antillas, United States, Canadá, and my motherland, mi patria, Puerto Rico. Seguimos aquí. 

I screamed with joy and raised my hand as he called out Venezuela, and the boys excitedly pointed out when the Venezuelan flag came into view.

 

You could argue that our cultures have gotten more divided since my Swindlefish days, and you would be right. But Bad Bunny didn’t only call out the Spanish-speaking countries like they do in “Plástico.” He called out every country in the Americas, climbing up the map all the way from Chile to Canada. He reminded us that we’re a joined mass of land inhabited by an interconnected group of people. And yes, the audience had to stick around until the end of the performance to witness that moment. The audience needed to pay attention to the flags and the countries he named to get the inclusive nature of his message. But if people didn’t, that’s on them. Not on him.

You could say I’m romanticizing Bad Bunny’s show and my college days, and maybe I am. I did grow up on Punky Brewster. It takes all kinds, though. Some are more optimistic like Punky and me, some are more pessimistic like Henry and perhaps you, and that’s just a small portion of the spectrum. But we need a wide spectrum to negotiate the kinds of impossibilities we’re faced with today—like we always have been. Complicated dynamics between groups that are linked yet also different have existed for millennia, if not much longer. Being an individual is hard, and being part of a society is harder still. It’s devastating and cruel, and it’s always uphill.

The outstanding pieces in this issue of constellations do the messy and uncomfortable work of facing devastating, cruel, and uphill situations. They untangle them. They deliver urgent calls to action and practical how-tos. These pieces are linked by a call for valuing personal storytelling as a legitimate approach to knowledge-making. They make the case that by telling stories of people standing up to erasure by the countries where they reside, and stories of people trying to transform academia into a more humane and fertile space. Like Bad Bunny and Punky, they don’t shy away from the difficult, but they invite us to come together and strive for the future we want for ourselves and for those around us.

You know who else is working for a better future? The constellations team. We’ve gotten an unprecedentedly high number of submissions in the last year. A wonderful and exciting turn for our journal, but one that has required our staff to extend our already daunting (time wise) commitment to the journal. My most tireless companions in the logistical labyrinth we navigated for this issue have been our former editorial assistant Natalie Cohen and her successor, Gissell Del Castillo. Natalie was our first undergrad to take on the position, and she did so with unflappable grace and patience. Since joining our team, Gissell has been instrumental in updating our internal procedures to make them clearer and more efficient. She and I co-authored our “constellations Statement on AI Usage,” which you can find on our submissions page.

Our editors are some of the most cutting-edge, innovative, and kindest scholars working today. They’re not afraid of difficult conversations, and they help constellations find nuanced solutions to the conundrums we face on a regular basis. I’m infinitely grateful to our current and former managing editors who made this issue possible: Lauren Brentnell, José Luis Cano Jr., Stephen K. Dadugblor, Catheryn Jennings, Sharadha K Kalyanam, Andrés C. López, Jaquetta Shade-Johnson, Megan Simmermeyer, Xiqiao Wang, and Kimberly Wieser-Weryackwe. Thank you also to our brilliant and tireless review editor, Ana Milena Ribero, who edited the five fantastic reviews featured on this issue, which should fill your reading list for the coming months. We’re also grateful to our mentor, Felicita Arzu-Carmichael, and to our issue reviewers for helping us publish generative and carefully crafted pieces. Most of all, thank you for reading and citing our work and for assigning it in your classes. Please remember to stay in touch with us by subscribing to our constellations Substack, which will keep you up to date on new pieces we publish and on opportunities to be involved with constellations.

And now, without further ado, please enjoy the spectacular issue we’ve put together for you.

Articles

Alexander Slotkin opens “Constellating Jewish Rhetorics: A Call for New Directions from an Iraqi Jew” by telling the reader he’d been asked not to write this article by colleagues who believe Jews should present a united front. He has, however, decided it’s time to tell his story as an American-born descendant of Iraqi Jews. In this exquisitely argued and researched article, Slotkin blends his family history with an analysis of Jewish Rhetorics scholarship to call for diversifying our understanding of Judaism to include the perspectives of Mizrahi (Middle Eastern and North African) and Sephardi (Iberian Peninsula) Jews. Slotkin weaves family photographs, his grandmother’s jinn ghost tales, and the story of the Mizrahi Jewish “Kuwaity Brothers” music group to demonstrate the devastating efficacy of cultural erasure, making a case for the connection between the decimation of Mizrahi Jews’ presence and legacy in Iraq and Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine.

In “Gatekeeping Reviewer 2,” Amy Wan uses the confessional format to make an impassioned call for continuing to transform our peer-review system to be one where we acknowledge and respect the humanity of the authors whose work we’re judging. Wan draws from feedback she received when the first article she sent out from her dissertation was rejected. While Reviewer 1 offered useful feedback, Reviewer 2 proudly announced that they didn’t read past the first paragraph, due to what they deemed to be its low quality. Wan portrays the aftermath of that rejection through affective and theoretical lenses. She shows how the pressures of being an Asian American in a university structure that privileges white men made her doubt herself but not enough that she didn’t rewrite the piece. Drawing from recent guidelines for inclusive reviewing and editing and from what she learned once she published the revision in College English, she delivers a nuanced examination of our review system. Wan concludes by pointing us to a more humane and generative version of the change that’s already under way, urging us to make sure it continues for years to come.

In “Negotiating for Space: Pushing Boundaries and Settling in New Spaces,” Mariam Mohammed uses her experience coming from Ghana to study in the U.S. to provide a guide to individuals and institutions on how to support African international students. She vividly conveys the shock of being a Black woman surrounded primarily by white people for the first time and of the toll taken by feeling like an outsider when she’d just left her support system behind. The piece examines the actions, big and small, from fellow graduate students, faculty, and administrators that helped Mohammed see herself as belonging. Showcasing the power of storytelling, “Negotiating for Space” delivers a moving call and a how-to guide for welcoming students who’ve come from abroad and who enrich our lives as much as we enrich theirs.

In “Facilitating Stories of Immigration in Rural North Central Florida,” Laura Gonzales, Anwesha Chattopadhyay, Judy Colindres, Chandler Mordecai, Dinalo Chakma, Payal Nagpal, Felipe González-Silva, and Kaylee Lamb provide a nuanced roadmap for organizing community events. The article is a collaboration between a faculty member (Gonzales) and her graduate students at the University of Florida, most of whom have deep ties to immigration—as international students and first-and-multiple generation immigrants. They reflect on the “Stories of Migration” gathering they hosted at a Gainesville history museum to provide immigrants with a space to share their stories and to together envision strategies for individuals and collective entities to better support them. The article provides layered meditations on immigration while delivering actionable advice on how to host similar events. The authors make a moving argument for how diverse teams can organize richer community events if their backgrounds are allowed to shape the events’ planning and execution.

Conversations

Moderated by Alex Jennings and Ada Hubrig, our “Recovering What’s ‘Swept Under the Rug’: Embodied Academic Experiences as Cultural Rhetorics” conversation features Jo Hsu, Alexandria Lockett, Sophia Angela Maier, and Bernice Olivas. In this frank and resonant exchange, our participants explore the myriad ways in which institutions fail to look after the physical, emotional, and family needs of their faculty. Through storytelling and cultural rhetorics theory, the conversation touches on disability, neurodivergence, grief, race, motherhood, sexuality, gender, and class, as well as other matters faculty navigate while juggling the pressures of succeeding in academia, not to mention the increasingly embattled and intolerant world we live in. It’s an impassioned call for change, and a reminder of how personal narratives can deliver messages in visceral and unforgettable ways.

I moderated the “Deep Feelings and Intentional Communities: Honoring Patricia Sullivan’s Legacy” conversation, in which upon Pat’s retirement, Jenny Bay, Huiling Ding, Tarez Graban, Emily Legg, and Laurie A. Pinkert, celebrate her career and impact on our lives. Teachers and colleagues can have life-changing effects on us, and in Pat’s case, her influence has lingered for decades in the dozens of students (me included) she chaired. From her gridding methodology and generative feedback, to her steadfast belief that rhetoric and her students could change the word, to the meaningful gifts she regularly gave us, this conversation captures the intellectual, emotional, and relational labor Pat put into our lives, providing readers with an account of what a committed scholar, teacher, and administrator can accomplish for herself and for those with whom she shared her long career.

Our “Restoration and Connection: Where Rhetoric Meets Art” Conversation, moderated by Catheryn Jennings and Megan Simmermeyer and featuring Ben Lauren, Luhui Whitebear, and myself, examines the challenges and joys of being academics who make art. Our participants are practitioners in music, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, filmmaking, and photography, and they speak to the multifaceted ways in which academia feeds their art, and how their art feeds their research, pedagogy, and community engagement. The conversation delivers practical advice for publishing about the creative process, as well as peer-reviewed scholarship primarily comprised of artistic work. It also discusses bringing artistic pursuits into the classroom and into activist community projects, as well as building sizable audiences through platforms like YouTube and Substack. “Restoration and Connection” complements those stories with a generative exchange about how to get creativity flowing and sustain it over time.

Book Reviews

In “Seeking Refuge through Decolonial Counterstories: A Review of Cruz Medina’s Sanctuary: Exclusion, Violence, and Indigenous Migrants in the East Bay,” Kyle Boggs shows how vital Medina’s blend of counterstory and accessible writing is to our scholarly and public understanding of immigration. Boggs details how Medina, whose great grandmother was Guatemalan, draws from his experience volunteering to teach English to Indigenous migrants at a church that helps its convocation adapt to life in the US. While sharing their stories, the book highlights the migrants’ dignity and self-edification efforts. As Boggs points out, Medina makes larger scholarly claims about the need for personal narrative in our scholarship if we’re going to humanize populations that are being dehumanized by our political and mainstream media systems.

Prakash Paudel’s “A Call for Algorithmic Justice: A Review of Meredith Broussard’s More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech” explores how Broussard’s comprehensive study exposes the fissures in tech and AI’s claims to objectivity. The book wields examples from healthcare, finance, law enforcement, justice, and education to warn us about the damage technochauvinism inflicts on the marginalized populations it mislabels, as well as on society as a whole. As Paudel shows, Broussard suggests actionable solutions to the issues she highlights, including ways for readers to counter tech companies’ exclusionary practices, despite their claims to be unbiased.

In “Transformative Care as Pedagogy: A Review of Mimi Khúc’s Dear Elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss,” Sidra Naveed Arshad examines Khúc’s call for faculty, universities, and students to acknowledge and empathize with the vulnerability and unwellness we must all live with. Drawing from Khúc’s experiences as a disabled Asian American academic, the book draws on personal storytelling and student testimonies to highlight the psychological and emotional toll that being a model minority takes on Asian Americans. As Arshad argues, Khúc’s letters throughout the book—to her young daughter Elia, to colleagues, to the readers themselves—enact her call for us to be open about our wounds and fears as we try to build pedagogies, institutions, and personal lives that sustain us and those around us.

Tommie Leigh McPhetridge’s “Walking Toward Meaning: A Review of Melissa Kagen’s Wandering Games” argues that Kagen situates wandering and video games within larger historical and theoretical spaces, inviting scholars and game makers to follow suit. McPhetridge synthesizes the book’s engagement with labor, nature, gender, disability, colonization, and race, showing that Kagen delivers a capacious study of what video games can mean for those who play them and for those who make and study them.

In “Giving Voice and Listening to the Asylee: A Review of Mónica Reyes’s Rhetoric and Storytelling within the U.S. Asylum Process: Shelter Rhetorics,” Tomas Maldonado argues that Reyes brings to life the powerful connection between rhetoric, advocacy, and immigration. Reyes uses her experiences as a Mexican American who volunteers at a center that helps asylum seekers in order to showcase the value of shelter rhetorics. Maldonado highlights Reyes’ portrayal of asylum seekers’ use of ingenuity and creativity to support themselves and each other while navigating the arduous immigration process as vital to the book’s call to action for us to respect the dignity of displaced populations and treat them accordingly.

One More Thank You: I’m grateful to Gina Washington, my dearest friend and mother of my beloved goddaughter, Matilda Sage Washington, for taking and developing (in the dark room, no less) the stunning black-and-white photos featured in this post. You can learn more about Gina’s work on her Instagram account.

Bio

Alexandra Hidalgo is a Venezuelan writer, filmmaker, theorist, memoirist, and editor whose documentaries have been official selections for film festivals in 15 countries and been screened at universities around the United States. She is the recipient of From the Heart Productions’ inaugural “Carole Joyce Award for Excellence in Documentary Storytelling.” Her videos and writing have been featured in The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, NPR, The Criterion Collection, and Women and Hollywood. She writes about relationships and the creative life in her Love in Many Genres Substack and analyzes big-hearted books, movies, and TV content in her All the Love! YouTube channel. She has a PhD in English from Purdue University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University and is associate professor and Crow Chair of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Her video book Cámara Retórica: A Feminist Filmmaking Methodology for Rhetoric and Composition received the Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award. Her scholarship has been published in Kairos, Composition Studies, Enculturation, and Peitho, among others. Her video essay, “Motherhood on the Screen,” received the Kairos Best Webtext Award. She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing space.

Production Credits

Copy Editors: Gissell Del Castillo and Nathaniel Bowler

Posted by: Gissell Del Castillo

Social Media Manager: Sasha Jason

Editor-in-Chief: Alexandra Hidalgo