Victor Villanueva
Working and Writing for Change
Series Editors: Steve Parks and Jessica Pauszek
Information and Pricing
978-1-64317-473-0 (paperback, $16.95); 978-1-64317-474-7 (PDF, $9.95). © 2024 by New City Community Press. 106 pages, with photographs and bibliographies.
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Victor Villanueva tells stories of The Forever Colony through snippets of memoir, creative nonfiction, and fictional magical realism. Each chapter opens with a personal memory and a particular rhetorical trope that reinforces the ongoing colonialism symbolized by Puerto Rico. Memoir and trope are followed by tales told by the spirit Bushika or other narrators, tales with which to imagine Columbus and the Taíno, Ponce deLeón, and others sometimes forgotten in histories of Puerto Rico, like the legendary cacica/leader Yuíza, the pirate Miguel Enríquez, the revolutionaries of the 19th century, the journeys north from settler colony to the economic colony in the northern migrations to the U.S. during the mid-20th century. The stories would have us consider colonialism, racism, and political economy from the perspective of one descended from the world’s oldest continuous colony.
What People Are Saying
“Villanueva finds a new way to share with readers the signature quality of his writing: its weave of lyricism and analysis, of narrative and argument, of rhetoric and philosophy.”
—Raúl Sanchez, University of Florida
About the Author
Victor Villanueva is Regents Professor and Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts at Washington State University. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of eight books and nearly fifty articles or chapters in books. Among his books are the award-winning Bootstraps, From an American Academic of Color, Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114 BCE to 2013 CE, and Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, one of the most-adopted books for the training of English teachers of writing in the U.S. and abroad. He received his PhD in English with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Writing from the University of Washington in 1986. Since then, he has worked at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Northern Arizona University, and Auburn University, as well as Washington State University. He came to Washington State University in 1995, where he has served as Director of Composition, English Department Chair, Associate Dean, and Director of American Studies. He is the current Director of the Writing Program and is the editor of the Studies in Writing and Rhetoric book series. He served as the head of the national organization for Rhetoric and Writing Studies, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, from 1997 to 2000. Over the years, he has received a number of honors, including the Richard A. Meade Award for Distinguished Research in English Education (1994), the David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research and Scholarship in English (1995), Rhetorician of the Year (1999), the Advancement of People of Color Leadership Award (2008), and the disciplines’ (rhetoric and composition studies) Exemplar Award (2009). All of his efforts center on the connections between language and relations of power, especially racism.
