Writing and Rhetoric Along the U.S.-Mexico Border

Recently, our field has seen a strong surge in the interest in writing across borders, multilingual and ESL writing, and globalization and rhetoric (see, for example, the 2010 Penn State Conference on Border Rhetorics; 2014 Border Rhetorics, Rhetoric Society of America). This surge parallels, in many ways, the growing enrollment of international student populations and second-language writers in U.S. writing programs, which is widely documented (Roberge, Siegal, & Harlau, 2009; Matsuda, 2009). Given this development, it would seem appropriate or even natural that writing programs would be developing curriculum to meet the needs of these multilingual students. In fact, that development is happening with many U.S. writing programs integrating ESL and second-language pedagogies (see, for example, Ferris & Hedgcock, 2014; de Oliveira & Silva, 2013; Kirklighter, Cárdenas, & Murphy, 2007)