ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author wants to trace the development of the rhetorical practice in his own life as he moved from a highly segregated housing project in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas to a multiculturally rich university in Chicago where opportunities to engage in transcultural repositioning exploded. Based on his work investigating “the extremely complex transmutations of culture” taking place in Cuba, F. Ortiz proposed the concept of transculturation as a more fitting term. Transculturation, Ortiz surmised, necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as a deculturation. Although the notion of transculturation focuses on the processes the disenfranchised inevitably experience each time they are confronted with a new set of social, cultural, or linguistic circumstances, by itself it does not capture the rhetorical work they must do to establish new hybrid identities as they move from one social site to another.
