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A Reflection of America: Reconceptualizating Westside Discourse
Oral Histories of Westside Latino Residents
Brenda Robles, McNair Scholar
Mary Ann Villarreal, Ph.D.
University of Utah
The documentation of Latino resident experiences who grew up or live in Salt Lake
City’s “Westside” has received a smattering of attention through oral histories and photo
exhibits. The dominant rhetoric text devaluates the Westside through the process of
“Other-ing” (Villenas & Deyhle, 1999; Martinez, J. M., 2000; Garcia, J., 1998), creating
a repeating public rhetoric that casts the Westside in terms of racial urbanization and
deficit based notions. As an ever-expanding community, there is a necessity to create
space for voices historically devalued as a legitimate community. Labeled as “missing,”
the Westside population has rarely remained quiet or passive. My research both collects
and examines oral histories, as they give insight into the lives of Latino Westside
residents over two generations. This paper specifically explores questions of
empowerment, self-determination, and community collectivism based on these accounts.
Their stories reveal the ways in which resistance manifests itself individually and within
the larger community, and at times produces contradictory struggles between each of the
two. Prevailing notions of the survival, education/educación values, and border and space
dynamics portrayed about the Westside are called into question as the life stories of five
residents unfold. Though the process of oral story telling does not fit an academic
strategy of resistance, through further examination these oral histories provide alternative
histories to the dominant narrative of Utah and the Intermountain West. My interviewees
detail complex histories contrastingly different from their homogeneous construction.
These stories reveal a booming and inclusive community; where a multiplicity of
identities, cultures, and classes collide to generate a diverse living space. They further
expand our understanding of how persistence towards change in the prevailing structures
and discourse is performed across generations, time, and movement.
The diversity of the Westside is what gives it so much character and
energy. It is not just full of ethnic diversity, the rich and the poor. It is
all different groups…. You have the educated, the uneducated.
Convicts and perfect citizens. Immigrants and citizens. I think the
Westside is a reflection of America. (Judge Andrew Valdez)
I think my underlying message is, especially in what I do is no longer
do I let people define me and who I am… That we must tell our own
stories, that we must document our own histories. That it’s wrong that
our histories are invisible. But mostly, the most important thing is
that never again is somebody going to define me or my community. I
really insist that we are the ones that define ourselves and not buy into
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the stereotypes. The myth that we have to be humble and have our
heads bowed in order to be good Mexicans or good Latinos; or the
fact that we speak up means that we are defiant or a rebel. I am who I
am; I don’t care if you feel uncomfortable around me. I am going to
be who I am and I am not embarrassed or ashamed anymore. (Artist,
Ruby Chacón)
Ever since its formation, the Westside has always been communicated in the larger Utah
rhetoric as the marked place inhabiting the Other. Disputably located on the Northwest
border of the metropolitan downtown area of Salt Lake City, the Westside historically
once served as a region of settlement in the post-WWII era for immigrants and various
Communities of Color as a demand for laborers for industrial sights like the Bingham
Kennecott Coppermine and the Union Pacific Railroad intensifiedi. Presently, it
continues to function not only as a residence for new waves of immigrants from any and
all spheres: representing a multiplicity of cultures, customs, and identities; but it booms
in developing homes, schools, and businesses. The Westside is a locale where
generations of families, particularly Latino families, have lived having never left, or have
left only to return out of conscious decision. It is a region for first time homebuyers in
search of a diverse community in which to reside. As the living conditions and reasons
for living on the Westside are as plenty and diverse as the residents who occupy it, the
Westside is simultaneously constructed as static, Community of Color: physically and
rhetorically living on the margins of a dominant white-Mormon center.
As a historically known republican-conservative state, dominant Utah rhetoric
advocates at the very core of its values, the American ideology. These oppressive ideals
promote and maintain the supremacy of Whiteness and the prevalence of, “National
stability, equity, fairness, and meritorious individual achievement” (Villenas & Deyhe,
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2000, p. 414) within Utah as a standard told through celebrated stories of pioneers
suggesting rugged individual meritocracy. Just as any facilitation of Whiteness serves to
exclusively privilege its members, individualism and heterogeneity is the stage where it is
performed; a vehicle by which one is allowed to maneuver their day to day lives as an
individual, separate from a constructed and constrictive racial or ethnic identity. As a
microcosm of the larger United States, dominant Utah’s power is maintained in the
rhetoric of individual majority identity, pushing out any means or possibility of
heterogeneity for the marked Other.
Representations of the Westside in all realms of dominant public rhetoric forge it
in extenuations of generalization, stereotype, and deficit; rendering the Westside and any
mark of the Westside incapacitated not only of the authority and power to demonstrate
itself as an affirmative space not unlike any other community, but in disregarding
Westside residents and the legitimacy of their day-to-day experiences as a valid section
of historical and contemporary Utah text. The specifically occurs within the rhetoric
idealizing other Salt Lake regions, locations like the Eastside which embody picturesque
suburban, upper-middle class, White-American values. Confinements such as these
encompass the intersections of oppression, included inherent racism utilized by
discursive devices of impure or disorderly rhetoric of the dominant to describe the
Westside as a ghetto or a barrio, criminally infested by those who do not belong in
positions of power. The same uncanny signifiers have been employed in the social
construction of Communities of Color across the U.S. to justify slavery, segregation, and
more recently, white flight. The most insidious form of rhetorical crime is the ability on
part of the dominant to construct the Other, especially as this act itself warrants the
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systematic homogeneity utilized to restrain and essentialize (Ono & Sloop, 1995)
communities like the Westside. The absence of the Westside history, experience, and
voice, take place as the dominants collectively assembles one or few negative identities,
then distributing them to mask a community that is always in constant flux and transition
with the dynamic lives who compose it.
Nakayama and Krizek (1995) invoke the metaphor of space to describe the ways
in which Whiteness operates as a strategic rhetoric. Their work particularly focuses on
the decentering of whiteness,
We believe that the time has come to deterritorialize the territory of
‘white,’ to expose, examine and disrupt… We begin that process by
surveying (exposing and examining) the territory of ‘white’ so that it, like
other positions, may be placed under critical analysis. In order to
accomplish this end, we investigate the strategies that mark the space of
whiteness… Our goal is to develop some initial insights into how whites
have constructed their own social locations of whiteness (p. 292).
As Nakayama and Krizek mark the invisible spaces of whiteness by relocating its center,
I intend to disrupt whiteness through metaphorically reframing the margins by placing
Salt Lake City’s Westside in the center, disputing the operation of collectivism working
on behalf of the dominant rhetoric as a silencer to the complex community-identity
dynamics of the Westside. While presenting five contrasting life experiences of Latina/o
Westside residents, I am able to further deactivate the process of collectivism by
examining emerging themes found in oral history data. I begin with talking about the
many ways in which survival permeates the experience of the Westside, expounding the
common notions that survival is limited to physical conditions. I then transition to a
discussion on education value, dismissing the notion that those from the Westside lack
educational value; in fact, oral histories provide that many revere teachings educación
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that build strong moral and ethic fiber. Finally, I conclude with the discussion on
promoting the necessity of ambiguity in conceptualizations of space and delineations of
the Westside; all while my search of answers to questions like: where is the Westside,
what is a Westsider, guide this theme. By employing a framework of contested culture
(Martin & Nakayama, 2000; Moon, 2000), I argue that dominant Utah’s most effective
form of power is silencing the voices of the Westside, a manifestation of strategic
rhetoric maintaining white belief and supremacy.
THE WESTSIDE AS A CONTESTED ZONE
Here my research integrates Martin and Nakayama’s (2000) development of culture as a
contested zone as a contextual background for removing perceptions of the Westside as a
stagnant, homogeneous location, while infusing understanding of it as a contested zone; a
home to a multiplicity of cultures and identities in constant transition. Moon (2000)
explores this way of reconceptualizing culture,
Thinking about culture as a contested zone helps us understand the
struggles of cultural groups and the complexities of cultural life. It also
aids us in coming to understand and consider various cultural realities and
perspectives of the diverse groups that reside within any cultural space…
If we define culture as a contested zone in which different groups struggle
to define issues in their own interests, we must also recognize that not all
groups have equal access to public forums to voice their concerns,
perspectives, and the everyday reality of their lives (p. 16).
Not only does this notion of cultureii visibly allow us to debunk the concentrated
collectivism of the Westside community giving us the opportunity to, “Hear and perhaps
appreciate the varieties of cultural experiences and views that make up what we
understand as ‘America,’ and give us a way of thinking about cultural politics that can
point us in the direction of social change” (Moon, p. 16) but disseminates the center,
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reconstructing a space for multiple competing realities. The struggle for what Moon
deems reality is particularly bound in its composition of language and communication.
Integral in this discussion of communication is the need for the control of it; indicating
power, specifically in the ways communication constructs the reality of Others, or hope
in someday accessing it on part of the oppressed. For example, Moon investigates this
concept additionally through exploring communication as a constitutive of cultural and
social reality by applying Carey’s (1989) notion of symbolic and processual
communication. To say that communication is symbolic implies that the words we speak
and the gestures we use, have no inherent meaning (Martin & Nakayama, 2000); our
language has no imbedded meaning, it is always attached to some symbolic signification.
Specific terms used earlier to construct the Westside, concepts like ghetto insinuate a
multitude of negative signifiers that aren’t innate in the actual term. It is in the
processual, that time and circumstance wherein those authorizing communication have
attached other meaning revolving around dirty or depreciated rhetoric. It is imperative to
remember that while communication is constantly being negotiated between individuals
and groups, one constant remains the same: the control of it lingers in the center, the
space of the powerful. Throughout this essay I will transition from theme to theme while
explaining the notion of contested zones to reveal the ways in which the Westside is
perceived to operate, and the ways in which it resistance manifests in the process of
transformation (Delgado Bernal & Solorzano, 2001, Villenas & Deyhle, 1999).
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METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES: ORAL HISTORY &
COLONIZED/COLONIZER DILEMMA
As a basic, yet powerful form of data, oral historyiii captures individual voices of each
Westside resident involved; voices with rich pasts and relevant presents are given a space
in which a reflectivity can occur. Oral history is documentation of stories wherein we are
allowed to comprehend the complexities of narrative and reflection. This process is both
distinctive from traditional data collection and empowering for the narrator on many
levels. Specifically operating in oral histories for the narrator assists in the construction of
self and social identity, in addition to resisting the dominant cultural practices that would
otherwise rhetorically silence personal histories as they conflict with those of the
dominant. Finally, discursive reprieve occurs as the individual is allowed to name their
own experience, enacting a sense of freedom rarely subscribed to oppressed
communities.
I collected oral histories from five distinct Latinosiv living on the Westside.
Originally, I wanted to examine if Latino families growing up in the Westside to identify
if various forms of resistance were negotiated within the families and if resistance
traverses generations. This initial inquiry guided me to popular Westside figure Judge
Andrew Valdez, and his son Daniel Valdez. I furthered the scope of my research in
approaching Councilman Lee Martinez, artist Ruby Chacón, and Sergeant Isaac Atencio
II. Each history documented, indicated that either the interviewee’s were raised on the
Westside, or chose to live on the Westside as adults with their families. Traversing the
boundaries and borders of the Westside on a daily basis, most the individuals interviewed
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are known in the community as well as outside of it as progressive leaders and public
figures of the Westside.
The interview procedure included one audio-recorded interview, which usually
lasted anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour. Follow-up interviews and phone calls were
used if any additional clarification was needed. The interviews took place within their
homes, offices, and studios; extremely intimate spaces where I was welcomed warmly
without much information aside from emails and calls about the background of my
research. Questions I asked to initiate the interview ranged from: “Can you describe the
Westside neighborhood you grew up in,” to “What kinds of advice did you get about
education from your family?” The larger ideas guiding my research surrounded issues of
community, voice, the installation and varying dimensions of resistance, and finally how
identity is prescribed by oppressive rhetoric of the dominant.
These concepts led to the questioning of my own positionality as a researcher
representing the institution, as well as a self-identified Chicana from generations of the
Westside. Obvious is the paradox best explained by Villenas (1996), whom like many
researchers of color write scholarship on or collect data on behalf of the institutions that
serve to exclude by multiple means the very communities they are from,
While qualitative researchers in the field of education theorize about their
own privilege in relation to their research participants, the “native”
ethnographer must deal with her own marginalizing experiences and
identities in relation to dominant society. This “native” ethnographer is
potentially both the colonizer, in her university cloak, and the colonized,
as a member of the very community that is made “other” in her research
(p. 712).
In every sense of the notion, I am the “native” ethnographer attempting to study the
experiences of my own community in an institution of power that marginalizes with its
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own strategic rhetoric. More than relevant is the dilemma in working with the five oral
history interviews from which I will expose to the world of academia, specifically as I
examine their experiences in academic coded text and discourse that excludes them.
Nakayama and Krizek (1995) suggest reflexivity as a medium, not explicitly in
the remedy of a solution to the insider/outsider dilemma, but rather as praxis wherein
multiple dialogues are facilitated. They specify reflexivity through three aspects used to
intervene the space of whiteness.. Included in the first approach, “reflexivity encourages
consideration of that which has been silenced or invisibly in academic discussions,” (p.
303). Thus always keeping a consciousness on behalf of marginalized communities,
particularly, as I embark upon my own journey throughout this research where I initiate
conversations about the Westside within academic arenas. Second describes, “reflexivity
as it encourages consideration of the presentation of research and the articulation of the
researcher’s position vis-à-vis social and academic structures,” (p. 304) this is especially
relevant as I begin to deconstruct my own positionality in the ways I reflect or embody
power on behalf of the institution. Finally, “following from the first and second points,
reflexivity encourages an examination of the institutions and politics that produce
knowledge,” (p. 304), it is here that I must continually question how I have been
conditioned to understand the world via institutions of education and how that has served
as a form of oppression in the exclusion of other pedagogies. Thus, it is my goal to
examine the varying pedagogies from the Westside as they relate to the emerging theme
of education provided only by living in the spaces of the Westside and in doing so
challenge the rhetorical and discursive power of societal systems and institutions, such as
academia.
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In the framework of vernacular discourse I utilize to also examine the Westside,
Ono and Sloop (1995) recommend a similar methodology where an emphasis is placed
on the communities being researched,
Rhetoricians cannot take the tools they have now and blithely apply to the
study of cultures. Rather, new methods, approaches, orientations, and even
attitudes, toward cultures need to be created. This means that the critique
of vernacular discourse is not merely an addendum or an example of
critical rhetoric. It means that critical rhetoric must be reconceived in light
of vernacular discourse that challenges approaches founded within
Western notions of domination, freedom, and power (p. 40).
Ono and Sloop reframe the ways in which vernacular discourse should be perceived, it is
not only a form of resistance against dominant rhetoric, but rather culturally affirming
process. They later suggest a focus on culturally specific approaches wherein the critic,
or in this case, the researcher is forced to, “Note the ways in which texts are often
constructed apart from solely hegemonic or counter-hegemonic considerations” (p. 40).
Below demonstrates three constant themes of survival, education/educación, and the
conceptualization of space and borders. Throughout the descriptions of each theme, my
goal is to facilitate or rather demonstrate an inherent counter against the essentailism of
the Westside experience, identity, and space on part of strategic rhetoric of dominant
Utah.
SURVIVAL
I am who I am; I don’t care if you feel uncomfortable around me. I
am going to be who I am, and I am not embarrassed or ashamed
anymore… (Ruby Chacón)
By first discussing the rhetorical construction of the Westside from the authoritative
perspective of dominant outsiders, the theme of survival prevalent in most, if not all oral
histories marks the construction of the Westside from internal forces. Many of the oral
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history interviewee’s earliest recollections of the Westside surrounded against backdrops
or circumstances of day-to-day survival.
When industrial and agricultural sights like Bingham Coppermine and the Union
Pacific Railroad expanded, labor opportunities drove Latino families from New Mexico
and Southern Colorado regions to Utah, and later to the Westside where workers were
sanctioned to live. Similar to many Latino families settling in Rose Park, Jackson, Fair
Park, or Glendale, all neighborhoods that are said to compose the Westside, Andrew
Valdez’s family experienced the stresses of xenophobia early on. Valdez’s recalls the
subjugation of his mother not only as a domestic worker, but also as an immigrant
domestic worker despite her family’s long established U.S. lineage.
“My Dad lasted about 4 or 5 years and then abandoned my Mom and
moved on to California, left her here with her kids… And my Mom was
working three jobs. My Mom, even though she was from New Mexico and
had been a citizen all her life and could count generations of citizenship
just like the Atencio’sv from 1848: when New Mexico, Utah, California,
Texas and Oregon all became part of the United States. Even though we
had been U.S. citizens for eight generations, my Mom was still treated like
an immigrant, she worked low-paying jobs, she was living in the city
where Spanish was not spoken, she was part of the minority religion, she
wasn’t treated with much respect. She worked difficult jobs—three jobs,
sometimes in bars, you know, sometimes as a domestic, and so she had a
very, very hard life. She was on survival mode, not child-rearing mode.”
Survival is a universal circumstance among many inhabiting the Westside as they have
historically and contemporarily worked to establish themselves in industrial, agricultural,
and domestic workforces; mainly jobs taken up in the persistence towards survival.
Valdez’s history also speaks to the ways in which newly arrived Spanish-speaking,
Latino Catholic communities from South West regions were marginalized by
discrimination based on language and religion. Promotion of ideal English-only
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decisions and Mormon-based beliefs are particularly prevalent to the current oppression
for those on the Westside.
Not all oral history interviewees grew-up in the Westside. Lee Martinez recalls
how his family settled in a neighborhood on the Northern outskirts of Salt Lake City.
Similar to circumstances governing the Westside, the neighborhood in which Martinez
was raised comprised of many Communities of Color,
“Post-WWII migration, where people came from—most of our
community came from Northern New Mexico or Southern Colorado. And
my parents came to Utah for jobs, for employment. They came once or
twice and went back to New Mexico and then settled here for good in the
early 1950s… Actually I wasn’t here (in the Westside), the first time I was
in Davis County. There was a neighborhood in Davis County, which is
now the Pre-point Center… It was kind of like barracks, block buildings.
For those who would remember way back when it was called Anchorage,
like Anchorage, Alaska. Anchorage was—it seemed like a nice place to
me, but in retrospect it was a pretty run-down place and it was kind of like
a ghetto. That is where all the poor people lived and they were mostly
Mexicanos, a few Blacks, very few Native Americans and a few White
people. And just a little place, a run-down place.”
Both accounts from Valdez and Martinez reverberates many of the experiences of
Communities of Color charted by socioeconomic boundaries across the United States.
Valdez and Martinez illustrate conditions of survival as a result of their placement in the
margins by ideal standards of Salt Lake City communities. Consequently, the
circumstances of Valdez and Martinez are seen justified in the reverence of American
ideology, when oppressed communities cannot “pick themselves up by the bootstraps,” to
achieve the level of meritocracy advertised by those successors of it. Martinez (2000)
expands on the contradictions of the American Dream on oppressed communities as they
struggle to survive not only physical circumstances, but also negative identity
constructions,
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The mere existence of the dream legitimates that there will always be
those who have not achieved it; it authorizes the notion that those who
have not made it up the socioeconomic scale deserve to be at the bottom…
In this way, the American Dream authorizes the existence of incapacitated
communities where life is defined by fighting daily battles for basic
survival. In such an environment, the simple but profound achievement of
one’s sense of personal human dignity becomes a crucial measure of
success, albeit a success unrecognized within the narrow terms of the
American Dream (pp. 71-72).
Martinez illustrates the double binds confining oppressed communities as they are upheld
to the unachievable standard of the American Dream specifically when it, “Removes
social accountability to even the most horrifically poor, destitute, and socially isolated
communities within society,” (p. 71). She also leads ground toward ways in which
oppressed communities begin to reject the constraints of American ideology, by refusing
the idealized practice of assimilation. She points out the inabilities on part of the
racialized Other to completely assimilate into a culture never meant to serve them, “The
fact that such [assimilation] success results in the erasure of the racialized Other’s
cultural difference is barely noticed by the dominant culture, and never actually called
into question as a violence perpetuated against people and their histories” (p. 72).
Counter against assimilation works itself in multiple ways, in forms of resistance
that surpass any typical overt form of protest, rather incorporating other ways of
resilience. In speaking about the Westside and the context of survival, because one must
survive the conditions in which they live, overt resistance becomes more and more of a
privilege. In response, resistance manifests itself consciously and subconsciously
(Delgado Bernal & Solorzano, 2000) in a multiplicity of ways. Transformational forms
of resistance are performed as resilience against dominant culture, ranging from the
participation in the Dignity March of 2006, to the practices of cultural rituals and
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traditions. Resistance within conditions of day-to-day survival has become a key tactic
against dominant Utah rhetoric, specifically as resilience is declared within the realm of
education.
EDUCATION/EDUCACIÒNvi OF THE WESTSIDE
It is a myth to think that living on the Westside destines one to failure
in life. One thing about living on the Westside is that it does prepare
you for life. It has always prepared me well through the different
experiences I have had throughout my life. (Andrew Valdez)
I always remember my parents telling me, ‘You have to be a
respectable person, because we are from a respectable community.’
(Isaac Atencio II)
Rarely is Salt Lake City’s Westside perceived in dominant consciousness, as a
community strongly valuing the education of its youth. In fact many if not all dominant,
public rhetoric centering on the Westside focuses on the lack of educational value, the
“at-risk” students dropping out of ghettoized schools like West High, and the inadequacy
of parental involvement particularly from Latino, Spanish-speaking parents. Deficitbased notions permeate rhetoric of the Westside, particularly in the blame of the
community for deemed educational inadequacies. Not only does the employment of
deficit-based thinking hold Communities of Color accountable for not achieving
standardized ideals of meritocracy, but deficit-based notions disregard the institutional
barriers blatantly overt in historical pasts, and hidden in the normalized obstacles of the
current educational system. As another form of subordination encouraging assimilation
beliefs, Yosso (2006) outlines the inner-workings of deficit-based notions,
The cultural deficit model finds dysfunction in Chicana/o cultural values
and insists such vales cause low educational and occupational attainment.
Cultural deficit models assert that Chicana/o families also exhibit
problematic internal social structures. They claim these social structures—
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large, disorganized, female-headed families; Spanish or nonstandard
English spoken in the home; and patriarchal or matriarchal family
hierarchies—cause and perpetuate a culture of poverty… Deficit models
blame Chicana/o students and communities or lacking certain attributes
and therefore causing low academic outcomes (pp. 22-23).
The rhetorical utilization of deficit thinking plays out in constructing the community as
socially and educationally inept, as well as in the removal of responsibility on part of
education leaders, policy makers, and administrators when their insufficiently prepared
programs working with Latinos, and other students of color fail to succeed. López (2003)
attributes this to the unqualified administrator falling short of assisting a rapidly diverse
demographic,
Today’s administrators must not only be able to successfully navigate
these cultural divisions, but must also have a thorough understanding of
political systems, intergovernmental relations, micropolitics, community
participation, interests groups, and theories of power and conflict to
effectively do their job (p. 72).
The call to those in positions of power within the education system to reform the current
politics of education, in addition to expel the deficit notions constructing Communities of
Color is deafening.
In response to present educational practice neglecting the basic needs of Latino
students, resistance in the form of alternative educational praxis occurs within the family.
Villenas and Deyhle (1999) asserts that this cultural strength serves to empower the
Latino student as a, “Base by which new ways of schooling can be conceived,” (p. 413).
They explain how, “The ‘norm’ of Whiteness always positioned the cultures of Mexicans
and Latinos/as as deficit while also ignoring the political-economic context” (p. 422). The
‘norm’ of Whiteness specifically implies those privileged students benefiting from the
rhetorical positioning of Latino students, particularly when their cultural practices are
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acknowledged as the standard, “correct” manner in which competitive, individualistic
education are idealized to the highest degree. Villenas (2001) contends that oral stories,
adages, or consejos passed on from one generation to the next against a backdrop of
intersections of oppression saturating education systems, serve to validate the experiences
of Latinos as an empowering form of resistance. For Communities of Color deprived of
the power to change social stratification of their conditions, the centering of familial
education is core, specifically in the context of the Westside where Atencio II was first
educated in the home.
Atencio vividly describes his childhood on the Westside in terms of the values
imparted to him by his parents. Those beliefs and values, not reflected in the dominant
Utah text, encompassed life lessons in the form of actions and stories,
Something my parents would always do is whenever we’d leave the
grocery store and there was a homeless person, they would give that
person money and my mom would always say, ‘Did you see that?’ and we
would say, ‘Yeah.’ And she would say, ‘That man that asked for money
isn’t going to use that money to eat, he is going to buy liquor with it.’ And
we would ask, ‘Then why would you give it to him?’ And she would say,
‘Because just like Jesus thirsted for water on the cross, he thirsts for what
he needs to survive. And if it is liquor that is what he needs and if I could
give him a dollar for a bottle of wine, then so be it. Those are the stories I
grew up with and what educated me. And those are the stories I try to pass
on to my kids.”
In a society promoting individualist values, beliefs in community welfare infuse countless
stories and acts of community on the Westside. The families of those interviewed
resonate with what Villenas calls the transmission of educación, an incorporation of not
only dominant U.S. educational pedagogies, but also ethics and values that follow a child.
The construction of educación imparted by Latino parents follows the lines of a
vernacular discourse. A discourse where dominant education failed, an intricate form of
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educación emerged, centered in values and morals, transmitted by narratives of lived
experience. The formation of educación helps as a tool for the navigation of survival in
outside constructions of the Westside.
The promotion of values and manners in the form of educación weighs equally
with the encouragement of traditional Westernized views of education. Andrew Valdez
remembers,
My mom always demanded that we go to school, we learn, and we work.
That was the worst crime you could commit in my family, is to not go to
school.
As Valdez survived the educational obstacles posed against him, he went on to become a
successful lawyer and eventually a respected public figure as a Judge of Utah’s 3rd
District Juvenile Court, overseeing child welfare cases. After his appointment to the
bench he moved his family back to the Westside to make good on a pact made with his
late best friend, former Senator, Pete Suazo. His son, Daniel Valdez remembers the
impact of the move,
The year my dad became a judge, we moved back to the Westside. And
my dad wanted us to move to the Westside because he said, ‘It is more of
the world. It’s an idea of what the world is.’ Next door in our
neighborhood we have a family of Tongans, in the other direction, a
family of Latinos. Across the street you have people from Somalia. It is
more of the world. By going to West [High School] and growing up on the
Westside made me ready, I was used to seeing people from all over the
world and all walks of life.
Inherent in the explanation Valdez provides his son is the idea that by living on the
Westside, as opposed to living in the dominant segregated spaces, one might be imparted
a discursive space of multiple perspectives, an education that empowers an individual by
exposure, engagement, and tolerance of multiple cultures and ways of life.
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Present in oral history interviews is a collection of varying perspectives on
education that counter essentialized rhetorical constructions of the Westside. The
interviewee’s indicate a deep value for traditional education systems that have functioned
to isolate them in the generalized construction of their abilities emulated in the form of
deficit-thinking models. They also reveal the ways in which they tactically become the
recipients, and later the transmitters of a separately constructed educación that promotes
the legitimacy of their lived experiences and culture firmly excluded from dominant Utah
ideology.
AMBIGUITY IN THE CONCEPTUALIZATION OF SPACE AND BORDERS OF
THE WESTSIDE
I now consider myself a ‘Westsider,’ but not in the same sense as those
who grew up in and went to school here and have lived here most of
their lives. I chose this as an adult. I wanted to live here not because I
had to be here, or because this is where are the Mexicans were living.
But thinking that there was more of a feeling of comradely or
congeniality here. I didn’t want to live around people who just don’t
understand. There are many cultures here, and party and church
affiliation with the Westside being more democratic and non-Mormon
(Lee Martinez)
National rhetoric generalizes locations like the Westside as undesirable for living.
Similar to blatantly unfair generalizations, is the Americanized notion that the Westside
is a place one “grows” out of, a distant memory to those who have successfully navigated
the obstacles of meritocracy. The rhetoric placed on the Westside, and other
Communities of Color thrive on assumptions that those who graduate from the
constraints of the Westside abandon it to assimilate with ease to ideal suburban-American
life. Rarely is the Westside conceptualized as a space where one moves to or lives in out
of conscious decision. Daniel Valdez vocalizes his resistance to notions that assume the
Westside signifies inherent constraint, as well as inherent failure.
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A lot of people believe that those who live on the Westside and have lived
there for generations are trapped, in a sense--and can’t move on up to the
Eastside. But as my Dad pointed out he chose for us to live here and it is
not that we are trapped or anything... The Westside will always be home to
me. Salt Lake’s Westside will always be home.
What noticeably resonates in Valdez’s reflection are sentiments that remove perceptions
of ghettoized rhetoric, by proudly reclaiming the Westside as home. Inherent in oral
histories collected, is defiant loyalty to the Westside. The discourse of claiming the
Westside and no other space establishes a visible sense of empowerment, for those living
on the Westside.
This is evident for first time residents like Ruby Chacòn, whose father out of fear
of the Westside reputation raised her in the Eastside. She painfully details childhood
memories of alienation, as her family was one of the only Latino, non-mormon families
in the Eastside neighborhood. Chacòn contemplates the feelings of comfort experienced
as she begins life on the Westside,
I have really grown attached to the Westside. People are so much more
friendly and community-oriented. And when I heard the roosters and the
train and the ranchero music, I thought, ‘Oh my God, I am home.’
Chacòn talks of hearing the sounds of the Union Pacific train tracks, one of the many
identifiable markers of the Westside; commonly referred to in many oral history
interviews as serving both a positive indicator of the Westside space, as well a
determining signifier of division. If not around language of deficit or stereotypes, most
discussions of the Westside revolve around conflicting debates about the locations of its
physical borders. Included in this dispute of geographical division is the I-15 freeway
whose initial construction and later reconstruction for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter
Olympic ceremonies make the interstate a center of mass commute in Utah, its body
20
spans North to South, separating the Westside with overpasses and large concrete
barriers. Another location discussed is 3rd West, the most visibly recognized split between
metropolitan downtown and the space of the ghettoized Other. Historically and
contemporarily, 3rd West is the site for Salt Lake City’s homeless population, whose
shelters reside behind and along the street. Due to attempts by city officials to clean up
or gentrify the Westside, structures like the Gateway Mall, located across the street from
two blocks of shelters, has become a premiere attraction for high-end retail stores, fine
dinning, theatre-goers, and expanding living and office space. Evident here is the attempt
to further push the Westside more to the margins, and also serve as another site of
juxtaposition between the privileged and the oppressed. Gloria Anzaldúa (1987)
elucidates the conflicting territory of border sites,
Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to
distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along
a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by
the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of
transition (p. 25).
Throughout her historically significant and foundational book, Borderlands (1987),
Anzaldúa utilizes the physical boundaries of the U.S.-Mexican border to metaphorically
present the zones of conflict and transgression amongst cultures. Embedded in her
discourse of borderlands, is a long discussion about the consciousness of the oppressed,
specifically as the consciousness creates a need for ambiguity, separate worlds. One
example of this is the physical borderlands, where residents of the Westside traverse
especially in their attempts to define Westside space. During his explanation of the
geographical location of the Westside, Lee Martinez mentions,
Trying define the borders of the Westside is as ambiguous as trying to
define the U.S.-Mexico border.
21
Not only manifested physically, the borders of the Westside present themselves in a
multiplicity of intersections, marking the space as one that thrives in ambiguity. In oral
history interviews, all of the residents identify themselves as ‘Westsiders.’ This form of
identification may sometimes surpasses, or is matched an ethnic identifier, the
assumption is that one from the Westside is both marked as a racialized Other as well as a
displaced Other, particularly as the two intersect. Daniel Valdez explains,
When I moved to the Westside, I wasn’t just a Mexican. I was a
Westsider.
Valdez like many from the community claims the Westside in ways that permeate his
identification. A strong sense of belonging, knowing, and consciousness arises in
personal recognition of the Westside. When probed further, Valdez as well as all of the
interviewees responded with distinct explanations, stories, and ideas of what it meant to
be a “Westsider.” Valdez explains,
It means different things for different people. The Westside is a place. It’s
a state of mind. It’s home. You know you are in the Westside, and you
know when you’re not.
In terms of space and borders, the vernacular discourse of the Westside community
disposes the contradiction of polarization; in fact it affirms ideas of constant
transformation, continually challenging homogenous constructions through individual
and communal efforts. Ono and Sloop (1995) contend to the notion that it is unfair to
just, “Recuperate, locate, and catalogue vernacular discourse” (p. 21). Rather, the
necessity to critically understand ambiguities and continual transformations of
communities like the Westside is crucial to any social change. By removing the burden of
homogeneity and all of the ailments that follow, we begin to remove our own discourses.
22
No longer should Communities of Color or Communities of the Other be defined by the
imbalances of power relation or deviations of rhetorical ideologies of the norm. The
Westside serves as a universal symbolization of Otherized communities demanding for
discursive space, calling for the ability to represent interwoven identities, reclaiming and
decolonizing the territorial rhetoric that attempts to occupy them. As Ono and Sloop go
on to feature the ambiguities of vernacular discourse, they highlight how definitively
apart it is from any rhetorical analysis, “Idealized versions of vernacular discourse
necessarily fails to address the multiplicitous layers within which vernacular discourse
operates,” (p. 25). Immediately, the ambiguity of vernacular discourse reflects the
numerous identities of those residents who define themselves as Westsiders.
DISCUSSION: THE WESTSIDE AS A VERNACULAR COMMUNITY
Throughout this discussion, I have noted the ways in which discourse of the Westside is
made silent, in the following section I attempt to critically invoke what are now
generations of devastating effects this silence in dominant rhetoric to therefore highlight
the defense tactics confronting constructions of the Westside. Not only does absence of
history, experience, or voice result in a number of conflicting responses and
consequences, but a dysfunction in the identity development of an individual occurs
within a community whose selfhood is formed by the community’s place within the
larger social setting (Rosenthal, 1997 in Wong(Lau) 2002, pg. 95). As seen on the
Westside, individual identity development of residents are assembled in such a manner
by outside hegemonic construction, that dominant rhetoric becomes normalized, inherent,
imbedded within the fabric of Utah culture. Configurations of the Westside are
transmitted in forms of the cultural messages, discussed by Martinez, J. M. (2000) as
23
communication conveyed by mediums which contribute to a social and cultural
environment that uphold norms, values, and traditions of larger society (p. 69).
Wong(Lau) (2000) details the mediums, especially as they are distributed via forms of
public communication, which include discourse in everyday conversations, mediated
discourse, news media, popular culture, and other types of public outlets, (p. 96).
Particularly prevalent in the means of conveyance of cultural messages, news media is
the foremost authoritative power over constructions of the Westside. As local news media
conflate stories, dramatize events, and polarize places, they inflate the same impure or
disorderly rhetoric of the Westside as a space completely separate from a socially pure,
safe, and orderly Utah. Below, the passage from Daniel Valdez represents the news
media’s ability to play up a story based on territorial borders of the Westside,
Growing up on the Westside is an eye-opener. It’s not exactly sheltered.
Of course there are the negative things that happen, but they happen in
every neighborhood. They may seem like it is a little more frequent [in the
Westside] because the media will blow something up out of proportion,
like a shooting down the street. But there is violence anywhere you go…
Not only can it be conveyed that Valdez is aware of the negative media depictions of the
Westside especially as they are disproportioned, but also in the resistance enacted as he
acknowledges violence as a perpetual factor in not just Westside neighborhoods, but in
all neighborhoods.
As the territorialization of communities of color within the margins materializes,
Grossberg (1993) in Nakayama and Krizek (1995) details how it functions, “A
territorializing social machine (which) attempts to map the sorts of places people can
occupy and how they can occupy them. It maps how much room people have to move,
and where and how they can move,” (p. 305). Nakayama and Krizek further this notion
24
by explaining, “The power relations inherent in these spatial relations are embedded in
our identities vis-à-vis whites or qua whites” (p. 305). As a result of the construction of
white power-laden spaces, counter-text affirming evolves, legitimizing, and validating the
marginalized experience.
Ono and Sloop (1995) demonstrate the counter-text by detailing ways in which
the vernacular discourse of the oppressed substantiates itself in relation to the rhetoric of
the powerful. They also outline the necessity in critiquing the vernacular discourse to
impede power, and its systems by examining speech and culture from historically
oppressed communities. Therefore, by framing the Westside community not only as a
contested zone, but also how it operates as vernacular discourse allows us to again
decenter the source of power specifically in deconstructing multiple forms of oppression
as well as in the inability to include a detrimental portion of the Westside experience into
the larger story of Utah as it results in the writing and blanketingvii of identities, history,
and individuality.
Ono and Sloop expound the characterizations of vernacular discourse, by
exercising syncretism and pastiche as they detail how a reformed discourse is created.
Cultural syncretism, the process of “borrowing fragments” of mainstream culture on part
of the marginalized culture is highlighted as, “an embodied practice that is everchanging,
active, and constantly motivated by a concern for local conditions and social problems”
(p. 23). It is here that Ono and Sloop underscore the constructions of marginalized
identities while they confront dominant images, which indicates an imbedded idea of
resistance and protest. They stress Boyd’s (1991a & 1991b) theory as it is specific to the
historical development of marginalized images, while also demanding that, “Vernacular
25
discourse does not exist only as counter-hegemonic, but also as affirmative, articulating a
sense of community that does not function solely as oppositional to dominant
ideologies,” (p. 22). Cultural syncretism, as a critical function of vernacular discourse,
serves to empower the Westside; not just as a construction of a marginalized community
in relation to the authoritative forces of dominant Utah, but also as a discursive arena
wherein establishment of it as an authentic community occurs. Consequently, pastiche
implies the process by which cultural syncretism operates, “Pastiche is an embodied
practice that is everchanging, active, and constantly motivated by a concern for local
conditions and social problems” (p. 23). Ono and Sloop claim that although vernacular
discourse borrows from fragments of larger culture, it specifically avoids “mimicking,”
larger culture. However, in the historical context of the Westside, I argue against the
application of the term “borrowing” as well as its traditionally known connotations. To
specifically imply “borrowing” associates the act of loaning, taking temporarily or
acquiring on the accord of parties and the returning of that “borrowed” entity. For the
purpose of furthering of the theoretical base of pastiche, I question its meaning especially
in regards to oppressed communities and their agency to borrow from dominant culture.
Rather, I argue that whatever borrows from larger dominant culture to produce the
vernacular discourse of the Westside, is done so for the purpose of survival or to extend
challenge against marginalization. Said differently, the Westside and other, racial,
cultural, gendered, and ethnic communities negotiate fragments of dominant culture
because of the conditions in which the dominant culture has placed them. I argue rather
than promoting the function of pastiche under which cultural syncretism functions and
vernacular discourse generates as a mechanism of borrowing, we examine the deeper
26
constructs of the marginalized specifically as they make attempts to negotiate conditions
among their transitions among the privileged.
NOTES
Due the lacking or insufficient recorded information on history of the immigration status
or past living conditions of Latinos in Utah, I relied on oral history accounts to lay
groundwork on early conditions of what constituted the Westside.
ii
Here I use culture and community irreversibly among one another to illustrate how the
Westside acts as both.
iii
I followed the Donald Ritchie book on oral history to guide my interviews.
iv
Oral history interviewee’s did not disclose or self identify to a particular ethnic group,
thus I am using the umbrella term Latino/a.
v
Judge Valdez is referring to the family of Isaac Atencio, interviewed later.
vi
When I discuss the concept of educaciòn, I specifically refer to Sofia Villenas’
definition outlined in her article cited below.
vii
Moon (2000) writes about “blanket stereotypes,” used to interact with multiple cultures
as a tool of homogeneous constructions.
i
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