This project argues that nostalgia operates rhetorically as an argument of ethos and that its function within public arguments provides the field of rhetoric an opportunity to reimagine how ethos is produced within political discourse. To analyze the relationship between nostalgia, argumentation, ethos, and home, this project analyzes my own home—Texas. I focus on three Texan Democrats—Beto O’Rourke, Ann Richards, and Julián Castro—and detail what each figure reveals about nostalgia’s relationship to ethos. In my chapter on Beto O’Rourke, I argue that O’Rourke becomes authentic for Texans by embracing a nostalgic vision of the “real Texan” in his Senate campaign. The analysis examines how authenticity is a concept deeply rooted in nostalgia and can function as ethos when such a nostalgic authenticity proves a rhetor to be an occupant of a specific place—the home—that highlights a group’s values. My case study of Governor Ann Richards pairs feminist analysis and archival methods to argue that her ethos in Texas was produced via a nostalgic (re)construction of her body as a Texan “good ol’ boy” based on her speaking style and infamous Southern wit. In perhaps my most methodologically complex chapter, I employ spatial criticism and ethnographic research to examine Julián Castro’s work in San Antonio, reading San Antonio’s downtown as a text that produces its ethos through a nostalgic retelling of its Latinx history and traditions—a retelling that creates spaces for stories that expand its borders and look to an ideal future by reimagining an ideal past.

If nostalgia as ethos transforms the field’s understanding of political discourse, it should also transform our methodological approaches to such discourse. Thus, following each case study I offer an interchapter that further explicates the research methods used in the previous chapter. In doing so, I comment on how nostalgia gives back to and transforms methods of analysis for public discourse. By blending and creating rhetorical theory, analysis, and methods throughout my dissertation, I construct what I call a critical nostalgia. Critical nostalgia suggests that understanding nostalgia as ethos can work to highlight dominant and colonial ideologies that undergird visions of home in many political arguments. Critical nostalgia demonstrates how using nostalgia as a critical rhetorical tool can participate in unsettling privileges and (re)building homes that stand in defiance of colonial discourse. Moving beyond Texas politics to implications for the field of rhetoric, I argue that utilizing a critical nostalgia affords us—as scholars and citizens—the opportunity to better respond to, craft, and embody arguments that honor the home we aspire to have.