ABSTRACT This multivocal piece grapples with possibilities and necessities for transcolonial kinships forged by and with communities that share struggles rooted in the unrelenting cruelties and violence of colonization and empire. Informed by years of coalitional work with several grassroots collaborators in the Jobos Bay area of Borikén (Puerto Rico), this piece joins calls to be in relation with communities and movements, assuming interest, consent, and shared commitments, to co-create life-affirming, co-liberatory praxes, rather than aligning with narrow rhetorical studies research agendas, or the aims of academic institutions. As so many communities choke on the intermixed toxicities of racial capitalism, environmental racism, and global militarism and racial empire, while simultaneously demanding and demonstrating a more just world, this essay reflects on intersectional transcolonial kinships beyond Latinidad(es). In doing so, this piece communicates the necessary relational and rhetorical work of strengthening allegiances to and coalitions with on-the-ground and in-the-water movements within and across various spaces and temporalities.

ABSTRACT The normative ontologies and epistemologies of communication and rhetorical studies have increasingly come under scrutiny as scholars from minoritized backgrounds have forced the hand of the discipline to consider how structural inequities of various kinds are communicatively constituted. This essay identifies one important way of making rhetorical studies accountable to resolving structural inequities, by making a case for the discipline to take caste seriously. While some South Asian communication scholars, primarily from oppressed castes, are already doing this work, my claim is that the discipline as a whole should take up this task because of the theoretical as well as political implications of caste as an institution. My argument is that an engagement with caste is not only consonant with what I imagine as the core task of communication studies, which is to demystify how different structural inequities are communicatively constituted, but it is also politically urgent, if the developments in the USA and in other parts of the world are any indication. In other words, I argue that the stakes of studying caste are nothing less than planetary.

ABSTRACT Although the history of the quinceañera celebration hinges on the notion of introducing young women to society and demonstrating they are ready to transition into a new stage of life, the figure of the quinceañera has the potential to be used in more agentic ways to mobilize communities and exert Latine visibility. In this article, I extend previous scholarship on quinceañeras in popular culture to argue that quinceañeras have evolved in such a way that they can also serve as sites of agency, resistance, and reclamation of power. Quinceañeras can help Latine communities mobilize and assert their presence amidst large scale efforts to marginalize and silence us. I introduce the concept of quinceañeridad to refer to the flexibility of a cultural ritual that can be deployed across gender, age, class, race, nationality, and location. I further present a continuum for studying mediated quinceañeridad, where I focus on the quinceañera’s presence within the public sphere. As we imagine new possibilities for Latinidad, this analysis traces how a traditional ritual is rearticulated as a hybrid space of possibility.

ABSTRACT This article begins with two examples of moral contradictions in the South Asian diaspora’s anti-racist activism. First, it analyzes how diasporic communities condemn western racism while perpetuating caste oppression against Dalits and Indigenous groups, dismissing systemic barriers as outdated. Second, it connects anti-Asian microaggressions (like “curry smell” shaming) to casteist food hierarchies that marginalize Dalit and Indigenous culinary traditions. The article challenges dominant-caste complicity—enveloped in privileged oblivion, masked as symbolic gesture of progressiveness—in maintaining these systems. I argue that genuine solidarity requires dismantling caste in private spheres—homes, temples, patrilineages—while abandoning epistemic control over Dalit narratives. Centering Nepali Dalit poet Aahuti's revolutionary work, the article demands concrete accountability: material rematriations/reparations and epistemic restructuring that disrupt Brahminical hegemony. Crucially, it calls for the dominant-caste diaspora to abandon saviorism and instead embrace the role of a relentless anti-caste irritant—not a hero, but a necessary disruption. Being an anti-caste irritant is a rhetorical praxis that rejects comfort, convenience, and quiet complicity. It is about how one’s presence itself becomes an embodiment of anti-casteism and anti-oppression. Only then can we begin to imagine a solidarity that is not performative or symbolic, but truly transformative.

ABSTRACT In this forum essay, I argue that fostering a more engaged dialogue between U.S. and Latin American scholars requires a dialogic stance that resists both Eurocentrism and the romanticized view of Latin American rhetoric as purely Indigenous and uncontaminated. While recognizing that hegemonic power and discipline structures will continue to shape the field of rhetoric, we can nevertheless work toward a more expansive and pluralistic field. By embracing a heteroglossic perspective in which each region contributes to distinct and often hybridized approaches grounded in its own histories, languages, and intellectual traditions, we can create a polyvocal space where diverse regional perspectives are not merely acknowledged, but genuinely legitimized as essential to the study and practice of rhetoric.

ABSTRACT This brief essay considers how US xenophobia and racism function through autopoetic rhetoric. It examines the self-regenerating story that designates Asian American migrants as always-foreign, forever-threats, and never enough. While the analysis centers the experiences of second-generation Asian Americans, it has broader applications for examining how controlling narratives infiltrate law and policy, and it argues for the centrality of rhetorical studies in disrupting harmful mythologies.

ABSTRACT This essay troubles the romanticized US American “nation of immigrants” narrative through its relationship to Black diasporic histories of migration. The Immigration Act of 1924 codified white ethnocentrism in US American citizenship rights, and thus represented a potential challenge to Black American citizenship claims. Here we reflect on Black American rhetorical practices as a mode of worldmaking; of laying claim to putatively white space and US American citizenship. Through this lens, Black migration and consequent transformation of space functions as a transgressive practice for a people who are perpetually positioned outside of nationality, a way of reclaiming ownership over the spoils of unwilling labor. These Black rhetorical practices echo through the diaspora, as those who built but do not own push back against the ontological negation of ethnonationalist citizenship and immigration policies dictated by white and western imperial powers, in favor of speaking themselves into belonging.