Eduardo Galeano's "Memory of Fire: Genesis" raises a number of questions concerning the "politics of location," a term that may be defined as the intersections, tensions, and complications that people of color bring to space and what space means in terms of hierarchies and power, racial and gender stratifications. Text can also be a fluid, contested space--one which can articulate something about people's "position in the hierarchy of power." A composition instructor, interested in unmasking certain hierarchies of power not only as these hierarchies operate in the classroom but also as they manifest themselves in an institution like the University of Michigan, is also committed to teaching writing skills. In a pre-Freshman Composition course concentrating on issues of ethnicity and race, students (most of them Latino and African American), however, began to raise questions about the apparent contradiction between a course that, on the one hand, encourages students to engage in oppositional behaviors but then, on the other hand, teaches traditional, oppositional modes of writing. While the negotiation of this tension was difficult, it was successful, however hard it may be in retrospect to figure out why and how it was so. The course used portfolios for assessing student writing. Excerpts from several papers written by one student illustrate the complex, advanced way he worked through problems of ethnicity, language, culture and values. (TB)