Letters from the Fair City: A Rhetorical Conception of Literacy

Abstract

This article suggests that literacy development in immigrant, refugee, and other historically marginalized communities can be understood as a response to struggles in contexts of civic life. To illustrate this rhetorical conception of literacy:' the article examines a collection of anti-immigrant letters published in a Midwestern newspaper between 1985 and 1995 and the responses to these by a group of Southeast Asian Hmong refugee writers. The essay explores the relationships of content, form, language, and audience in the two sets of letters to show how the anti-immigrant rhetoric became the basis for new forms of public writing in the Hmong community.