Year: 2024
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This dissertation uncovers the complex natural and social histories of two Texas border counties, El Paso and Hidalgo, to explain how these counties became highly susceptible to the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. This work argues that humans engaging with natural resources throughout history created a rhetoric of exploitation and social hierarchy along the Texas/Mexico border. Rhetoric from Spanish and Anglo colonists coupled with environmental phenomena across time displaced Latinx/e bodies living in these counties into precarious communities called colonias, and the presence of these colonias made each county highly susceptible to disease outbreak. I draw on scholarship from subdisciplines in rhetorical studies (the rhetoric of health and medicine, rhetorical new materialism, and environmental rhetoric), cultural architecture, history, and decolonial studies to construct a new methodology that historicizes rhetorical ecologies: a confluence of ecologies. By applying this method to the COVID-19 outbreak in Hidalgo and El Paso Counties, I illustrate the role histories of human and non-human engagements play in making communities precarious to diseases.
Author: Ordeman, William
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7046914206
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: