The author questions the continued usefulness of inside/outside as a liberatory metaphor, particularly for Latino/a students, who experience that classroom quite differently from the privileged way that the author, their Anglo teacher, does. The author argues that the assumptions of the inside/outside metaphor accentuate the challenges that these students face when confronted by the demands for assimilation posed by academic writing. Inside/outside becomes a means of identifying what lies on either side of a boundary, while simultaneously bypassing how the boundary functions to categorize and, according to Lazaro Lima, even compartmentalizes by selecting who may pass through. The border rhetorics that Latino/a students bring into the classroom can help them and other students resist being appropriated by academic discourse. For example, the "corrido" involves a mimicry of conventions that enables students to envision a fluid identity rather than exchange one identity for another. (Contains 3 notes.)