Hammerback and Jensen focus on Mexican- American rhetoric, publish book on César Chavez

John Hammerback was frustrated. Early in his career he wanted to bring speakers relevant to his students into his classes on contemporary rhetoric. Since he lived in California, this desire meant including Mexican-American speakers. But, scholarship on Mexican-American speakers just wasn’t available, either in English or in Spanish.

So, Hammerback decided to write some of his own. He saw a local newspaper story about Reies Lopez Tijerina, who was described as a spellbinding orator, and applied for a grant to study Tijerina’s rhetoric. Traveling to Albuquerque on the grant money to find information on Tijerina, Hammerback stopped in at the University of New Mexico. There he met Richard Jensen, then a young faculty member in rhetoric. Jensen, it turned out, shared Hammerback’s frustrations, and a research partnership was born.

The process from the initial frustration to publication turned out to be a long one. Both Hammerback and Jensen studied Spanish and spent time in Mexico becoming more proficient in both the language and the culture, as well as gathering texts for study. Early convention papers emerged from this work by 1976, but it wasn’t until 1980 that the first published studies began to appear. Publications appeared steadily after that time—nine articles, thirteen book chapters, and two books in all on the topics of Mexican-American rhetoric and Chicano protest speaking. Both Hammerback and Jensen continued to publish in other areas, but this work kept drawing them back. Even career advancement and job changes have not interfered—Hammerback became an administrator at Cal State, Hayward, and eventually moved to North Carolina State University, where he currently heads a large and complex communication department. Jensen spent many years at the University of New Mexico before eventually moving as a senior scholar to the Greenspun School of Communication at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Hammerback and Jensen’s latest work is titled, The Rhetorical Career of César Chavez, and it has been published by Texas A&M Press. In this work, the authors analyzed Chavez as a rhetor but also evaluated his rhetoric as part of a labor-organizing genre. They found that Chavez was surprisingly soft-spoken for a labor organizer. He succeeded, they argued, primarily because he was so capable of adapting to the expectations and values of his audiences. Chavez built a public character for his speeches that was shaped by his life experiences, and this character became apparent through analysis of close to 200 pieces of discourse that have been examined for the volume. In fact, Hammerback and Jensen plan to produce another volume of samples of this discourse, along with scholarly annotations.

One of the points of pride for this work is that it has been well received by Mexican-American scholars. When they started, there were no active Mexican-American scholars doing research in rhetoric; now there are several doing excellent work that builds on what these two scholars pioneered. Clearly Hammerback and Jensen are proud of their contributions and plan to keep the scholarship coming.