0553618_660de_stavans_i_spanglish.pdf

SpangliSh

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Recent Titles in The Ilan Stavans Library of Latino Civilization

Lat�na Wr�tersIlan Stavans, editor

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SpangliShEdited by Ilan Stavans

The Ilan Stavans Library of Latino Civilization

GrEEnwood PrESSwestport, Connecticut • London

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Spangl�sh / ed�ted by Ilan Stavans. p. cm. ― (The Ilan Stavans library of Latino civilization, ISSN 1938–615X) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–313–34804–4 (alk. paper) 1. Spanish language―Foreign elements―English. 2. English language― Influence on Spanish. 3. Languages in contact―America. I. Stavans, Ilan. PC4582.E6S63 2008 460'.4221―dc22 2008014855

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright © 2008 by Ilan Stavans

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008014855 ISBN: 978 – 0 –313 –34804 – 4 ISSN: 1938 – 615X

First published in 2008

Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The editor and publisher will be glad to receive information leading to a more complete acknowledgments in subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime extend their apologies for any omissions.

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Contents

Series Foreword by Ilan Stavans v��Preface ix

I ConSIDeRaTIonS 1

Our Linguistic and Social Context 3Rosaura Sánchez

The Grammar of Spanglish 42Ana Celia Zentella

The Gravitas of Spanglish 64Ilan Stavans

Boricua (Between) Borders: On the Possibility of Translating Bilingual Narratives 72Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel

¡¿Qué, qué?!—Transculturación and Tato Laviera’s Spanglish Poetics 88Stephanie Álvarez Martínez

II The MeDIa 111

Legal Language, On the Fly 113Peter Monaghan

Is “Spanglish” a Language? 116Roberto González Echevarría

Waving the Star-Spanglish Banner 118Ariel Dorfman

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III TeSTIMonIoS 121

Linguistic Terrorism 123Gloria Anzaldúa

Anniversary Crónica 125Susana Chávez-Silverman

Nomah 130Ilan Stavans

Selected Bibliography 135Index 137

About the Editor and Contributors 143

v� Contents

Series Foreword

The book series The Ilan Stavans Library of Latino Civilization, the first in its kind, is devoted to exploring all the facets of Hispanic civilization in the United States, with its ramifications in the Americas, the Caribbean Basin, and the Iberian Peninsula. The objective is to showcase its richness and complexity from a myriad perspective. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Latino minority is the largest in the nation. It is also the fifth largest concentration of Hispanics in the globe.Out of every seven Americans, one traces his or her roots to the Spanish-

speaking world. Mexicans make about 65 percent of the minority. Other major national groups are Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Ecuadorians, Gua-temalans, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, and Colombians. They are either immi-grants, descendants of immigrants, or dwellers in a territory (Puerto Rico, the Southwest) having a conflicted relationship with the mainland United States. As such, they are the perfect example of encuentro: an encounter with different social and political modes, an encounter with a new language, an encounter with a different way of dreaming.The series is a response to the limited resources available and the abun-

dance of stereotypes, which are a sign of lazy thinking. The twentieth-century Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, author of The Revolt of the Masses, once said: “By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.” The purpose of the series is not to clarify but to complicate our understanding of Latinos. Do so many individuals from dif-ferent national, geographic, economic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds co-alesce as an integrated whole? Is there an unum �n the pluribus?Baruch Spinoza believed that everything in the universe wants to be pre-

served in its present form: a tree wants to be a tree, and a dog a dog. Latinos in the United States want to be Latinos in the United States―no easy task, and therefore an intriguing one to explore. Each volume of the series contains an assortment of approximately a dozen articles, essays, and interviews never gathered together before. The authors are scholars, writers, journalists, and specialists in their respective fields. The selection is followed by a bibliography

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of important resources. The compilation is designed to generate debate and foster research: to complicate our knowledge. Every attempt is made to bal-ance the ideological viewpoint of the authors. The target audience is students, specialists, and the lay reader. Thematically, the volumes will range from poli-tics to sports, from music to cuisine. Historical periods and benchmarks such as the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, the Zoot Suit Riots, the Bra-cero Program, and the Cuban Revolution, as well as controversial topics such as immigration, bilingual education, and Spanglish, will be tackled.Democracy is only able to thrive when it engages in an open, honest trans-

action of information. By offering diverse, insightful collections of provoca-tive, informed, insightful material about Hispanic life in the United States and inviting people to engage in critical thinking, The Ilan Stavans Library of La-tino Civilization seeks to offer critical tools that open new vistas to appreciate the fastest growing, increasingly heterogeneous minority in the nation―to be part of the encuentro.

Ilan Stavans

v�� Series Foreword

Preface

The topic of Spanglish generates enormous controversy. Its army of critics uses an array of arguments against it: that it bastardizes standard English and/or Spanish; it delays the process of assimilation of Hispanics into the melting pot; it is proof of the way the American empire dismantles other competing cultures; it confuses children in the age of language acquisition; and it segre-gates an ethnic minority already ghettoized by economic factors. In response, the supporters of Spanglish (among whom I count myself) celebrate this hy-brid form of communication for its dynamism, creativity, and political savvy. Regardless of what opinion one has about it, the polemic itself showcases the impact Latinos are having not only in the United States, where almost one out of every five Americans is of Hispanic descent, but in the Spanish-speaking world as well, from Madrid to Bogotá and Ciudad Juárez. According to news-paper reports, echoes of Spanglish have been heard even in the Patagonia.Passionate about this linguistic phenomenon, I myself have been at the cen-

ter of the controversy, having released a lexicon with some 6,000 entries along with a translation of the first chapter of Cervantes’ Don Quixote of La Mancha into Spanglish and a dramatic monologue called Nomah staged in Boston. Yes, I support lexicographic activism. It’s my belief that philologists should not take a passive role in their pursuit of scientific knowledge. Spanglish ought to have a place in the classroom. Given its widespread power, it must also be em-braced as a tool in politics. It surely already serves a crucial role in advertising and the media. Hallmark Cards has a line in Spanglish. Taco Bell, Mountain Dew, and MTV have it in commercials. Even the U.S. Army, in magazine ads, employs it when seeking to reach a Latino audience.Will it become a full-fledge language in the future, one with its own recog-

nizable grammar? It’s too early to say. Languages develop over long periods of time. However, the impact of the Internet and of telecommunications in gen-eral has changed the rules of the game. The speed with which fresh Spanglish terms are disseminated these days is astounding. Just google the word and you get approximately 3,000,000 hits. The future is indeed unknowledgeable but the fact that Spanglish exerts such influence already is, in and of itself, solid evidence of its versatility. This volume collects a handful of exploratory

ix

sociolinguistic essays, by Rosaura Sánchez and Ana Celia Zentella, among others, on the history and linguistic development of Spanglish and the chal-lenges it poses on a number of areas, among them education. (Given its pro-portions, I’ve deliberately left out of this book the debate surrounding the Quixote translation.) A bouquet of opinion pieces, pro and against, including those by Roberto González Echevarría and Ariel Dorfman, is displayed, fol-lowed by representative artistic samples from Gloria Anzaldúa, Susana Chávez- Silverman, and myself (the example of Nomah). I’ve also included a chronology about the politics of the language in the United States.Spanglish, I’m convinced, is a frame of mind.

x Preface

part i

ConSIdEratIonS

1

Both material and social conditions determine whether the languages of na-tional and lingual minorities throughout the world thrive, struggle to survive, or cease to exist. Where society is stratified, the social and economic level that the lingual minority occupies will determine the status of the minority lan-guage, the extent of its social functions, and the type of social and linguistic interaction between majority and minority language groups. Changes in ma-terial and social conditions necessarily produce changes in language and in the status of languages, ensuring their maintenance or loss.In the Southwest of the United States, the social and linguistic situation of

the population of Mexican origin (Chicanos) is intrinsically connected to em-ployment, immigration, and education, factors that have undergone change since 1848, when the Southwest was wrested from Mexico. These have greatly influenced where Chicanos live, how much contact they have with Spanish and English speakers, and thus the degree of preservation of Spanish lan-guage varieties and linguistic assimilation.Chicanos in the Southwest are a national and lingual minority largely of

working-class status in contact with a majority English-speaking population that also constitutes the dominant class. Invariably socioeconomic status plays a significant role in determining linguistic and cultural assimilation because material factors combine to produce particular patterns of social relations and attitudes toward a given language. Given the particular population configura-tions in the Southwest, this process of acculturation and linguistic assimilation is ongoing and incomplete. Thus, at present, the Chicano community includes three different groups; Spanish monolinguals, English monolinguals, and bi-lingual persons. The bilingual group is the most widespread and the most complex because individuals exhibit various levels of language proficiency in the two languages and various patterns of language choice according to func-tion and domain, as we shall see later. Before exploring the particular Spanish

Our Linguistic and Social Context

rosaura Sánchez

“Our Linguistic and Social Context” is reprinted with permission from the publisher of Chicano Discourse by Rosaura Sanchez © 1994 Arte Publico Press-University of Houston.

3

4 Spanglish

varieties of this population, I will analyze briefly the various factors that cre-ate and maintain the present language situation.According to various statistics, more than 15 million persons in the United

States are of Mexican origin and about 80 percent of these reside in urban areas. In the last forty years this population has been characterized by geo-graphic and occupational mobility, which has taken it out of largely agri-cultural work into the factory and into service industries. This occupational mobility, however, has not been accompanied by great strides in social mobil-ity, and Chicanos continue to be a low-income population. According to the Bureau of the Census, about 25 percent of all families of Mexican origin have an income below the poverty level. This economic situation is the result of labor segmentation within a capitalist system that has produced a dual labor market: a primary sector with workers who are highly paid and enjoy a cer-tain stability, and a secondary sector characterized by low wages and unstable employment. Workers within the secondary labor market are primarily mem-bers of minority groups and women. This dichotomy in the labor market is the most important factor in determining the type of social and linguistic contact between communities because it is the labor process that determines relations of production (i.e., those arising between the owner of the means of produc-tion and the workers) and thereby, social relations between groups, classes, and individuals. Thus low-income jobs lead to the concentration of the mi-nority population in ghettos and barrios, where housing is cheap and where one can rely on friends and relatives for assistance during moments of crisis. Those who can earn more money achieve a certain social mobility, moving out of the barrio into higher income bracket English-dominant communities. The concentration of the Spanish-speaking population in certain residential areas is thus a result of poverty and racial discrimination and is largely responsible for the maintenance of Spanish.The same urbanization and industrialization that have led to segregation

and labor segmentation have also produced geographical mobility. Thousands of Chicanos have migrated from towns and rural areas characterized by strong interethnic and family ties to large, sprawling suburbs interspersed with free-ways, industry, junkyards, warehouses, and dumps where these bonds are dissolved and where there is often little contact between neighbors. Thus we have a concentrated minority that is segregated from the majority community and within which are conditions that alienate community and family mem-bers from each other. This situation both unites and separates the Chicano community. Occupational mobility has also created diversity in the patterns of social relations by bringing highly segregated agricultural workers into a sec-ondary labor market, which usually includes workers from various minority groups. Thus workers in small industries, restaurants, hospitals, maintenance, and other support services are likely to be primarily Chicano and black but may include Asian groups as well. The presence of other minority groups, as well as low-income whites, in these employment categories introduces the Spanish-speaking worker into an English-dominant domain, although some interworker relations may call for Spanish.

Our Linguistic and Social Context 5

Another highly significant factor that influences the linguistic context is the continual flow of workers from Mexico into the United States, which is both documented and undocumented. These workers constitute not only a reserve labor pool but a reserve language pool as well, allowing a constant infusion of Mexican varieties of Spanish into the Southwest. Because both incoming Mexican workers and second-, third-, or fourth-generation Chicanos often re-side in the same low-income areas, contact between the two groups has been continuous. Those who have been able to leave the barrio for higher-income areas have little or no contact with these recently arrived Mexicans, nor with other Chicanos, and consequently little contact with the Spanish language. The obvious exception here, of course, are the high-income Mexicans who migrate to the United States, reside in particular high-income areas, like Coro-nado or La Jolla in San Diego County, and relate socially to other Mexicans of the same income bracket.The economic factor is thus highly significant as an impediment to the lin-

guistic assimilation of many Chicanos. In general one could say that first- and second-generation Chicanos are likely to make much greater use of Spanish and be Spanish-dominant or Spanish monolingual, whereas the later genera-tions, third, fourth, and subsequent ones, are either English monolingual or English-dominant bilinguals. Yet, the generational factor is not as significant as the segregational factor for people who have stayed in the barrio in con-tact solely with Spanish-speaking persons. Some persons in Chicano barrios do not speak English at all and some are quite limited in English, although they have lived in this country for many years. It is, of course, possible to be a manual or unskilled laborer without being literate or having any proficiency in English. The presence of these Spanish monolinguals not only reflects the degree of segregation in the Southwest but evidences numerous functions that Spanish continues to have in areas where English is not indispensable.Education has also contributed to a changing language situation, because

instruction in English has facilitated the overlapping of language functions and seriously undermined the use of Spanish as the home language. As edu-cational attainment has increased, formal and informal contact with English has also increased as new roles and situations have opened up for the popula-tion. Bilingual education in the public schools, especially of Spanish-language students, could still have a strong impact on the maintenance of Spanish, but unfortunately these bilingual programs have been primarily transitional ones, in which the objective is the rapid acquisition of English in order to place the minority-language students in classes where English is the sole means of instruction.Occupation, salary, education, and years of residence are all interconnected

factors affecting the language choices of Chicanos. Their status in society as pri-marily low-income working-class persons explains the low status of Spanish in the United States, despite the presence of some middle-class Chicanos in pro-fessional, technical, and primary industry categories. Lack of socioeconomic success can lead to disparagement of oneself, one’s group, and one’s language. It is not surprising, then, that education and the acquisition of English are seen

6 Spanglish

to be the principal vehicles for social mobility and assimilation. For this rea-son, many parents consciously decide to stop speaking Spanish in the home so that their failure in school will not be repeated by their children. Where change of language in the home is not a conscious decision, the children them-selves learn to associate Spanish with conditions of poverty and to resist its use. Language choice is thus both conscious and subconscious, as is evident in many Chicano homes where parents address their children in Spanish and they respond in English.All of these conditions have produced various types of bilingualism. Using

the classification outlined by Glyn Lewis (1972), we can distinguish four types of bilingualism in the Southwest: stable, dynamic, transitional, and vestigial. Stable bilingualism is found at the Mexican border, where Spanish maintains all its functions on the Mexican side, as English does on the U.S. side despite the presence of certain domains, like the commercial areas, where both lan-guages may be used.In dynamic bilingualism, one of the languages threatens to displace the

other as differentiation of social roles and overlapping of language functions occur. This bilingualism, which arises in times of great mobility and instability, when everything is in the process of change, is widespread in Chicano com-munities and is renewed by each incoming generation of immigrants. Tran-sitional bilingualism, on the other hand, is a more advanced stage, in which one language completely appropriates some of the functions of the other, dis-placing it little by little until finally only the dominant language remains and only vestiges are left of the other, as evidenced in some expressions or terms reminiscent of another time and culture.The linguistic context is thus heterogeneous and contradictory, because

while Spanish is being displaced in many homes it continues to be maintained as the informal language of home, friendship, and intimacy in many commu-nities. The presence today of an increasingly larger Spanish-speaking com-munity has allowed Spanish to be the second language of several domains in the Southwest. Although it is never the principal language, it sometimes func-tions as an alternative or secondary code, as evidenced by Spanish versions of billboards, traffic signals, announcements on TV and radio, government and health brochures, rulings, warnings, and school textbooks as well as by bilin-gual telephone operator services, bilingual salesclerks, and bilingual transla-tors in government and the courts. Ironically, while gaining a certain visibility at the public level, Spanish has suffered losses of important functions in vari-ous spheres. For many Chicanos today, English is the language of the home, the choice for all domains and functions, spoken even in intimacy.Attitudes of Chicanos toward the Spanish language reflect the full gamut

of possibilities, from rejection of the language and the subordinate status that it represents, to defense of it as a symbol of cultural resistance. Maintenance of Spanish is thus considered a bond uniting working-class Spanish speakers in U.S. communities to workers in Latin America. For some middle-class Chi-canos and Latinos the maintenance of Spanish means greater opportunities in employment and within the existing political system. Whether it serves as a symbol of resistance or acquiescence to the system, the Spanish language


will continue to survive as a living language in the Southwest as long as the material conditions of stratification persist.

SPanISh of The SouThweST

The Spanish spoken in the Southwest includes a number of varieties re-flecting the national origin, as well as its rural or urban nature, the social class, and the education of immigrants from Mexico and Central and South Amer-ica. This study will deal only with the Spanish varieties of the population of Mexican origin.Because Mexican immigration, since 1848 but especially since the early part

of the twentieth century, originates in various parts of Mexico (despite certain patterns of immigration from certain Mexican regions to particular south-western states), it is difficult to propose a classification in terms of regional di-alects, although studies of dialect have been attempted under the assumption that some variants are peculiar to one state when in fact they are widespread throughout the Southwest. I propose here a study of several sociolinguistic varieties that can be further subdivided by degree of standardization and by rural or urban origin. The linguistic phenomena that characterize these popu-lar Southwest varieties are not exclusive to the Spanish of Chicanos; they can be found in popular varieties throughout the Spanish-speaking world, espe-cially in the popular Spanish of Mexico, the source of our own varieties. Only the extent of the borrowing phenomenon can be said to be a distinctive feature of Chicano Spanish. Linguistic borrowing is, of course, widespread whenever two languages are in contact and especially where one is subordinate to the in-fluence of the other. As a consequence of the political and economic influence of English-speaking countries, the English language is a source of loans for many languages including Latin American and peninsular Spanish. Quanti-tatively, however the degree of absorption of these loans is greater in Chicano Spanish because of the daily and close contact with the English language.In a descriptive study, like this one, the function of particular variants

within particular contexts is not specified. An analysis of the variables that trigger particular shifts, be they speech acts, turn taking, the presence of par-ticular addressees, or the transmission of particular messages, is also absent. Neither is the aim of this study to propose rules of variability postulating that particular social and linguistic factors trigger certain phonological, mor-phological, syntactic, and lexical rules. I offer here an inventory of linguistic features that characterize the Spanish of Chicanos, not only in Texas and Cali-fornia but also in the rest of the Southwest. Not all of these features appear in the Spanish varieties of all speakers, but a continuum will be presented that includes numerous variants typical of both rural and urban Spanish varieties in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. A Chicano Spanish speaker can fall at one or more points along this continuum. Despite urbanization, rural varieties are a major consideration in this study, for most Chicanos have rural roots, whether in the United States or Mexico.Spanish varieties of the Southwest include both standard and popular

codes. Within standard varieties, we can distinguish between formal and

8 Spanglish

informal styles, marked by differences in phonetic and lexical rules. Consider the following examples of both styles:

formal Style: Informal Style:

¿Fuiste al cine? ‘Tonces ‘stábamos hablando inglés.Ojalá que vayamos. ‘Stá bueno.Lo empujaron. ‘Horita no me acuerdo. Lue’o te digo.Ahora no me acuerdo.

These standard varieties are the codes used in formal domains, particularly in radio broadcasting, whether in Mexican border stations transmitting to the Southwest or in Spanish-language stations of the Southwest. These standard varieties are generally part of the repertoire of urban Mexican immigrants who have had some schooling in Spanish. Thus education and literacy in Spanish are significant factors determining literacy in Spanish and the acquisition of standard varieties of Spanish. Proficiency in Spanish, however, is primarily oral in the Southwest, especially among second and subsequent generations, because bilingual education is a new component of public schooling and lim-ited generally to non-English-speaking students. Most Chicanos have received no instruction in Spanish.The rural roots of the Chicano population and the presence of numerous

newly arrived immigrants from rural areas in Mexico have served to give the oral Spanish of Chicanos a definitely rural flavor. Differences between rural and urban varieties can also be expressed in terms of rule differences affecting the phonology, morphology, and syntax. Some rules are characteristic of both urban and rural varieties. Particular combinations of these rules can be said to charac-terize the language of different speakers in the community. As we shall see in the following examples, sex, age, and style are important factors distinguishing between the vato loco (the cool dude), the comadres (the barrio housewives), the jovencita (the young teenage girl) and the Chicano university student.A vato loco:1

Guacha, ¿por qué no me alivianas con un aventón y me dejas en el chante? Y mientras que vas por el Chente, yo tiro clavao, me rastío la greña y me entacucho. Te trais al Chente a mi cantón y le digo a la jefa que nos aliviane con un calmante porque a mí ya me trai la jas-pia, y quiero refinar. Le dices al Chente que ‘stoy invitao a un borlo y pa’ que se desagüite el vato le digo a mi güisa que le consiga una jainita para irnos a borlotear todos. ¿Cómo la ves?

Some comadres:

Fíjate que anoche llegó Juan echándole trancazos a la Filomena. Hizo una rejolina que ¡Válgame Dios! Y pa cabarla de amolar pos no se le antojó a Pedro irse a meter al borlote quesque pa pararle el alta al Juan. A ése ni quién lo paciqüe pero Pedro es mu cabezudo.

¿Y a poco se le rajuelió todo?


Ande, si ni chanza tuvo, porque lo-lo vino la chota y cargó con toos.Diay la Filomena se dejó venir.

¿A poco quería que se lo juera a sacar?Pos sí. Y como le dije yo, comadre: “No me vengas con lloriqueos. Amár-rate las naguas como las meras mujeres y déjalo que se pudra nel bote.” No sé pa qué le habló a la ley. Ya no más por no andar dejando.

A jovencita:

Hey, Mary, ¿por qué no vienes pa mi casa? Tengo un magazine nuevo that I got this morning nel drugstore. Tiene todas las new songs, muy suaves, de los . . . cómo se llaman . . . You know . . . los que cantan ésa que tocaron . . . ahi nel jukebox when we were at the store. No, hombre, not that one, the other one, la que le gustó much a Joe. I like it too porque tiene muy suave rhythm y las words también, muy suaves . . . yeah . . . what? really???? . . . te llamó? OOOOhhhhh, Mary. Ese está de aquellotas.

A Chicano university student:

Gento orita ya stá despertando y stá dijiendo pos que la única modo de ganarle al gabacho en el juego, este . . . es metërnos haciendo cosas de nohotros como de la política y economía, metiéndonos, gente mexi-cana, que tiene el corazón mexicano, que quiere yudar la gente mex-icana . . . Como orita van a tener gente correr en las elecciones de 72 en el estado de Texas. Toavía no han agarrao la persona. Yo creo que es una movida mal porque no tenemos la feria y las conexiones y todo eso. Tenemos que empezar en los pueblos chiquitos. Yo ha hablado con gente que sabe más que yo que cree lo mismo.

These are all examples of the Spanish spoken in the Southwest. Although all reflect popular varieties, it is evident that standard forms predominate in the oral production. Thus it is the presence of certain morphological and lexi-cal markers that characterize popular varieties and that distinguish them from standard varieties. These popular varieties could be classified in terms of place of origin (rural or urban) and in terms of particular subcodes as follows:

urban:

General:¿Fuistes al cine?Cuando vuélvamos, le digo.¡Qué bueno que haiga venido!No sabe espelear.Me llamó pa tras.Pagaron los biles.

Caló:Le talonié pal chante.Aliviáname un frajo.

10 Spanglish

Code-shifting:Allí esta más barato because the one que me trajo Maggie costaba nomás

one-ninety-eight.Y está muy loco el tripe ese porque mine is a cábula, you know, and l�ber-ación también es cábula and is really a beautiful trip and . . .

Rural:

General:Y tamién me gustaba en la noche porque nos juntábanos, un grupo nos juntábanos y nos sentábanos debajo de ese árbol.

¿Qué hicites ayer? ¿Adónde fuites?Vivemos por la Hill. ¿On tá? Pos tá allí por la ochenta y siete.Lo vide ayer y me dijo que asina nomás era pero como nomás no trabaja, pos por eso se lo truje a usted pa que me lo arregle.

Each one of these examples contains different types of variants that I shall examine later. As previously indicated, the discourse of any one individual may include standard as well as popular forms. These shifts between varieties function like shifts between styles in many cases and may be grouped within particular repertoires. The findings indicate that although a particular speaker may shift between está or tá, according to the intimacy or informality of the situation with a given addressee or for a particular speech act or function, rarely do we find a speaker who shifts between dicemos and decimos according to these same contextual features. Except for cases where there is a conscious effort to make certain shifts as the result of instruction in the Spanish lan-guage, a speaker who uses dicemos rather than decimos will generally use the same form throughout his shifts from informal to formal styles. Lexical shifts are also common for all speakers, especially shifts from loanwords to com-mon Spanish terms, as in shifts from puchar to empujar, where various factors trigger the change, but again one rarely finds cases, except for those of the conscious learner of new language varieties, where a speaker shifts from asina to así, that is, from a rural form to an urban form.In the Spanish version of this article, I attempted to defend Chicano Span-

ish in view of attacks from various quarters about the inferior quality of its language varieties. Yet despite this defense, the article did not completely es-cape the tendency to follow certain syntactic notions of norm. Obviously the Bernsteinean notions (1968) of elaborated and restricted codes should have been completely rejected in that article. Popular varieties of language, as dem-onstrated by Labov (1972), are linguistically complex codes with great syn-tactic variety, broad vocabularies, and the capacity to serve as the means for transmitting abstract ideas as well as concrete information. Popular codes in the Southwest have numerous functions where they are used as the prin-cipal means of communication, such as the home, the neighborhood, centers of recreation, and the church. Because language is a social convention there are instances in which the social context does not require extensive verbal expansion of certain ideas. Once suggested, they are clear to the addressee.


Thus it is often not necessary to verbalize certain explanations that are part of general knowledge. Often not more than two or three words are necessary for the meaning to be clear to a friend or family member. The same codes are shared, not only linguistic codes but social ones as well. The mode of explicit or implicit expression depends, of course, on the message to be transmitted and its specific context. All languages also have ready-made expressions of high frequency that can communicate as much as more complex structures, which may be considered unnecessary in informal contexts. In English, for example, there are numerous expressions containing the verb get. It �s thus nothing strange that informal Spanish has a number of similar expressions containing the verb agarrar. These expressions, common in many Spanish-speaking nations and thus not unique to Southwest Spanish, are quite fre-quent in Chicano communities. Consider the following examples collected from taped interviews and personal observations:

1. Tienes que agarrar una tarjeta para registrarte. (conseguir) 2. Yo voy a agarrar tres cursos. (seguir) 3. Agarra al niño. (Tómalo en los brazos) 4. Agarra al niño. (Detenlo) 5. Voy a agarrar el libro. (tomar) 6. Voy a agarrar trabajo. (conseguir, obtener) 7. Ya lo agarraron. (arrestaron) 8. Es muy agarrado. (adj. derived from agarrar―tacaño) 9. Ahí no agarran chicanos. (emplean) 10. Me agarró bien fuerte. (abrazó) 11. No puedo agarrar la estación. (sintonizar la emisora) 12. Agarró la paseada. (se tiró al vicio) 13. Ya agarró juicio. (ya entró en razón) 14. Ya le voy agarrando. (entendiendo) 15. Quieres agarrar los derechos de un americano. (disfrutar) 16. Al rato lo agarra el Army. (recluta) 17. ¿No me quieres agarrar una orden? (comprar) 18. ¿No me quieres agarrar este taquito? (recibir, aceptar) 19. Voy a agarrar el bos. (tomar el bus) 20. Me agarró bien fuerte la calentura. (dio)

As these examples indicate, informal expressions are useful for many lan-guage functions within contexts in which Spanish is used. Unfortunately, some language functions require particular experiences that have been ei-ther totally inaccessible to persons of Mexican origin or accessible only in English. Without formal instruction in Spanish, it is then not surprising that Chicanos have not developed certain academic and technical language vari-eties in Spanish. The instructors in bilingual education programs often are native Spanish speakers who have not had the opportunity to develop the lexical repertoire necessary for teaching biology, math, history, or govern-ment nor the metalanguage necessary to explain certain cognitive concepts. Obviously these additional language skills can be easily acquired by native

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speakers if teachers are appropriately trained. Unfortunately the problem is even greater, for besides being deprived of the opportunity to develop these formal language skills in Spanish in the public schools, Chicanos are often also deprived of the opportunity to acquire them in English, as indicated by numerous studies of achievement levels in minority schools throughout the Southwest.Most of the Spanish-language variants that will be described were derived

from the language samples provided through taped interviews of seventeen Chicano students at the University of Texas at Austin. These students were originally from San Antonio, Laredo, Brownsville, Austin, Mason, Odessa, Lyford, Seguin, and San Angelo, Texas. Since then I have had ample contact with students in California, whose speech is also discussed here. Texas Chi-canos are much more Spanish dominant, however, than those in California because of their greater concentration in the Texas valley and stronger pat-terns of segregation in housing and education throughout the state. The study, then, is based primarily on the taped interviews, on personal observations of Chicano university students in Texas, on written compositions by Chicano students in my classes, and on my own personal experience as speaker of Chicano Spanish.

PhoneTIC VaRIanTS

The phonetic variants that I shall describe are common in the popular Span-ish varieties of Chicanos but may be found throughout the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. Some changes, such as apheresis, laxing, and loss of voiced fricatives, are part of the informal style of all Spanish speakers, whether their main language codes are standard or popular.

Vowel Changes

The popular Spanish varieties of the Southwest are characterized by vow-els so lax, or nontense, that unaccented vowels are often lost. This vowel loss is especially common in initial position if the vowel is unstressed. In poly-syllabic words, unstressed noninitial syllables before stressed syllables may be lost. Diphthongization of contiguous hiatus vowels also occurs unless the two syllables are maintained through the introduction of an intervocalic glide. Homologous vowels are generally reduced to one syllable.

Aphaeresis. The loss of an unaccented vowel in initial position often occurs in rapid and informal speech.Loss of initial low vowel (a):

yudar, cordar, rodillar, silenciar, paciguar, cabar, reglar, hogar, prender, horcar, hora, horita

Sometimes, however, the vowelless form becomes the accepted form. Con-sequently it is common to hear, even in careful speech, Se hogó en el río or los hogados in certain varieties of Chicano Spanish.


Other examples:

haber > ber estar > tar hacer > cer había > bía estoy > toy, stoy enfermedad > fermedad hubiera > biera estuviera > tuviera

Synaeresis. Two syllables are often contracted into one, in this case through diphthongization.

ea > ia pelear > peliar (desiar, mariar, voltiar, rial, tiatro, golpiar)aí > ai caído > caido (traido, ahi, maiz, raiz)ae > ai traer > trai (caer > cai, or, sometimes, a contraction: trer, quer) trae > trai (cae > cai)oe > ue cohete > cueteoa > ua toalla > tuallaeo > io preocupa > priocupa (or sometimes, reduction: procupa) peor > pior

Substitution of simple vowel for diphthongs in stressed position.

ie > e ciencia > cencia (setembre, pacencia, alenta, quero, sente, penso)

ue > o pues > pos luego > lo’o > lo (mueblería > moblería)ua > a graduar > gradarau > a aunque > anqueie > i diez y ocho > diciocho, dicinueve, etc.ei > e treinta y cinco > trentaincinco (venticinco, etc.)

Change of high vowels to mid-vowels.

i > e injusticia > enjusticia (estoria, polecía, decesiva, enmagino, dericion, defícil, ofecina, dejieron)

u > o rumbo > rombo (complir, tovimos, joventud, imposieron, recoperó, sepoltura, secondaria, caloroso)

Vowels appearing before a nasal may become low mid-vowels:

invitando > anvitando entonces > antonces enveces > anveces

Change of unstressed mid-vowels to high vowels. In the speech of some New Mexicans and their descendants, final mid-front vowels become high as well.

e > i entender > intender (disilucionó, manijar, siguridad, disconfiado, dishonesto, impidir, dicir, siguida)

leche > lech�o > u morir > murir

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Apocope. One or more sounds may be lost at the end of a word.

para > pa clase > clas

Prothesis. A sound is often added to the beginning of a word, in this case a low mid-vowel.

tocar > atocar yendo > ayendo gastar > agastar

Contraction of homologous vowels.

ee > e leer > ler creer > crer

Syncope. A sound is often lost in the interior of a word, in this case, un-stressed syllables before stressed syllables.

desaparecido > desaparecido desapareció > despareció necesita > necita desapego > despego zanahoria > zanoria alrededor > alredor

Epenthesis. A sound is inserted or developed; in this case, a glide is inserted in intervocalic position.

creo > creyo veo > veyo cree > creye tío > tiyo mío > miyo leer > leyer creer > creyer oído > oyido maestra > mayestra quería ir > quería yir of > oyi destruir > destruyir

For other cases of epenthesis, see the section on consonants.Laxing of unstressed vowels:

schwa [ə] pero > pərə le > lə me > mə

Metathesis. Two vowels are transposed.

iu > ui ciudad > swid⁄ ad⁄ > swid⁄ á

Consonant Changes

In general, consonants in popular Chicano Spanish also tend to be non-tense, with laxing of fricatives, especially voiced fricatives, the aspiration of sibilants and sometimes of the voiceless labiodental fricative f, and the s�mpl�-fication of consonant clusters. These consonantal changes are also common in the informal popular varieties of the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. Some are part�cularly prevalent �n rural Span�sh.

Aspiration of the sibilant -s- in any position. This occurs especially in rural Spanish varieties in north central Mexico and Texas.


nosotros > nohotros puertas > puertah decir > dihir este > ehte Sí, señor > hí, heñor

Aspiration of the voiceless labiodental fricative f.

fuimos > juimos fue > jue fuerte > juerte

Aspiration of what is now only an orthographic h in urban Spanish. This aspira-tion was common in sixteenth-century Spanish.

Se fue de hilo > Se fue de jilo. Se huyó > Se juyó.Se hallo . . . > Se jalló . . .

Loss of voiced fricatives in intervocalic and final positions.

1. Intervocalic [b/ ], [d/ ], [g/ ] todavía > toavía, tuavía todos > toos estado > estáu lado > lau luego > lue’o > lo’o > lo agua > awa abuelo > awelo iba > í:a

2. Intervocalic -y- ella > ea ellos > eos botella > botea billetera > bietera orilla > oría cabello > cabeo, etc.

3. In final position vecindad > vecindá usted > usté muy > mu

Interchangeable “grave” voiced fricatives [b/] and [g/].

aguja ~ abuja boato ~ guato abuelo ~ agüelo

Simplification of consonant clusters.

ct > t doctor > dotornd > d andábamos > ad/ á:mosmb > m tamb�én > tam�énrr > r barrio > bario correr > corer arrancar > arancar c�erra > c�era arr�ba > ar�ba agarrar > gararrl > l tenerla > tenela pensarlo > pensalorn > n, l pararnos > paranos, paralos

Metathesis.

pared > pader problema > porblema, pobremaimpresiones > impersiones lengua > luengamagullado > mallugado estómago > estóngamo, estógamo

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Epenthetic consonants.

lamer > lamber estornudar > destornudar querrá > quedrápodemos > podermos mucho > munchonadie > nadien, naiden aire > aigre adrede > aldredehuelo > güelo

Lateralization.

d > l de > le advierto > alvierto desde > deslen > l nos > los nosotros > losotros nomás > lomás

Use of “archaic” terms, common in rural Spanish. For example:

semos, asina, ansina, truje, vide, naiden, haiga, endenantes

Stress changes.

mendigo > méndigo (change in stress paralleled by change in meaning)seamos > séanos, séamos (affects all first person plural, present subjunc-tive verbs)

Alveo-palatal fricative instead of the affricate. It is common in West Texas, southern New Mexico, Tijuana, and the southern part of California to hear sh instead of ch in words like muchacho (mushasho) and cuchara (cushara). This fricative variant has also been documented in Cuba, Paraguay, and other parts of Latin America.

noche > noshe choque > shoque leche > leshe

English interference. There are cases of English interference in the speech of some Chicanos, although generally only in that of nonnative speakers of Spanish. The use of retroflex r is one example in the speech of English-dominant Chicanos.Rule differences between varieties may involve the sound system as

well as the morphosyntactic component or the lexicon. Some of the dif-ferences involve rule simplification, as we shall see in relation to the verb system.

VeRb TenSeS of InDICaTIVe MooD

Southwest Spanish has maintained the same orientation of tense that we find in standard Spanish, as described by Bull (1965). Verb tenses reflect the focus (simultaneous, anterior, or subsequent) from a particular time axis, whether explicitly or implicitly stated. This verbal tense system continues to


function in Southwest Spanish, but the morphology and the tenses associated with particular time orientations have varied. To see the differences we must look at the systemic uses of verb tenses in standard Spanish in terms of two time axes: present and past.The future tense is seldom used in a systemic way. Generally, to indicate

a subsequent action, speakers use the present tense or the periphrastic form with the verb ir plus infinitive.

Saldré mañana = Voy a salir mañana Salgo mañana

The future case is retained for nonsystemic cases, as in cases of prob-ability:

Será tu papá (or, Ha de ser tu papá) ‘It’s probably your father’No sé que quedrá (querrá) ‘I don’t know what he wants (might want)’

The future perfect tense is almost never used. To indicate a distant future point before another moment, the simple future tense plus an adverb are used:

Para diciembre habrá llegado = Va a llegar pa diciembre

Two tenses are oriented toward the present (present and present perfect), and five tenses are oriented toward the past.

Present Tense

The orientation is the same in the Spanish of Chicanos, but there is a ten-dency to add duration to the tense when the action is in progress, as in the following example:

Sí, sí te oigo = Sí, sí te estoy oyendo ‘I’m listening’

Present Perfect Tense

As in other Spanish varieties, the use of the preterit verb plus adverb is more common here than the present prefect tense: Se ha ido or Ya se fue. Other changes here are morphological in nature and affect the auxiliary verb (he > ha, etc.) or the past participle (roto > rompido, etc.).The following are examples of verb tenses oriented toward the past:

Simultaneous to the past

Perfect aspect Preterit tense comíImperfect aspect Imperfect tense comía

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Anterior to the past Past perfect tense había comidoSubsequent to the past Conditional tense comeríaSubsequent to the past Conditional perfect habría comidobut anterior to a tense subsequent point

Preterit and Imperfect Tenses

These two tenses, as in the standard Spanish verb system, indicate actions simultaneous to the past axis. The only changes here are morphological, as we shall see later. There is also a tendency to add duration to the imperfect tense:

Comía cuando entró = Estaba comiendo cuando entró.

Past Perfect Tense

This tense has the same function as in the standard variety. The only changes, again, are morphological. In some cases the auxiliary is changed from haber to ir, as �n iba comido for había comido. Is it really from the verb ir or is it a case of metathesis: había > bía > iba? Perhaps it is a case of confusion between two forms that suffer laxing of fricatives: había > bía > ía; iba > ía. Or perhaps it is a case of an -er verb conjugated as an -ar verb: habiba (as in teniba, sentiba) > iba.

Conditional Tense

This tense is also rare except in nonsystemic cases indicating probability in the past: ¿Quién sería?In place of the conditional we have the imperfect indicative tense and the

imperfect subjunctive tense. The question ¿Qué haría Ud. si tuviera mil dólares? is often answered with either Yo iba a México or Yo fuera a México. Thus the function of the conditional tense is maintained, but the form having this func-tion is different.

Conditional Perfect Tense

As in the conditional tense, a substitution is often made, here by use of the past perfect indicative or past perfect subjunctive tenses. For example, the question ¿Qué habría hecho Ud. si hubiera recibido mil dólares? is often answered with (1) Yo fuera comprado un carro, (2) Yo (hu)biera comprado un carro, or (3) Yo (ha)bía comprado un carro.Thus, tenses oriented toward the past are often simplified to the preterit,

imperfect, and past perfect tenses. The imperfect tenses also function to in-dicate a point subsequent to the past. The orientations, therefore, seem to be reduced to two, those indicating an action before some given point and those indicating actions both simultaneous and subsequent to a particular moment. (See Table 1.)


Verb Tenses of the Subjunctive Mood

The subjunctive mood includes four tenses in modern Spanish (present, present perfect, imperfect, and past perfect) that appear in subordinate clauses (noun, adjective, and adverbial). In noun clauses, the subjunctive appears after verbs of influence, verbs of doubt or negation, and verbs expressing an emotional view (Es ridículo que salga). In the popular Southwest varieties, uses of the subjunc-tive follow these general rules except after verbs of doubt, where sometimes it does not appear. On occasion, the use is extended to other verbs: No sé si venga. I shall now consider some examples where the subjunctive does not appear.Indicative tense after expressions of doubt or negation:

No creo que tiene muchas ganas.No creo que es necesario.No creo que hay sólo una manera de hablar el español.No hay nada que puede hacer.No hay nada que yo puedo hacer bien.No hay seguridad que hallas trabajo.

In some cases there is never a vacillation between the indicative and the sub-junctive, as in expressions like ójala (ojalá) and ójali (ojalá y):

Ójala y venga.Ójala que ténganos tiempo.El espera que nos pórtenos bien.El sueño de mi hermana es que algún día júntenos un poco de dinero.

In clauses introduced by verbs of influence there is no uniformity of use:

A nosotros los católicos nos dice que estéyamos preparados.El podrá decir que ténganos un buen tiempo.Le gusta que lo van a buscar.Hizo que abandonaban el pueblo.Querían que la mujer les hacía la cena.Quiere que vamos a San Antonio.Perdón que no lo ha entregado.A mi mamá le gustaba que volvíamos temprano.Pedro no quiso que su hijo se casaba porque pierdía.Mandó que paraban de ir.

Table 1 Indicative Verb Tenses

Anterior Simultaneous Subsequent

Axis in the presentAxis in the past

Present perfectPast perfect

PresentImperfect and preterit

PresentImperfect

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Es mejor que fumamos.Quería que me paraba.

Overall, the tendency seems to be to retain the subjunctive after expressions of hope and in some cases after verbs of influence functioning as indirect com-mands: Quiere que váyamos; Dijo que ciérremos la puerta.In adjective clauses, the subjunctive is used to modify a nonspecific or inde-

terminate noun to express contingency or expectation: Se necesita una mujer que tenga vientiocho años (any woman that might be twenty-eight years old) versus Vi una mujer que tiene vientiocho años (a particular woman who is twenty-eight years old). Unfortunately this construction was not used at all in the taped interviews nor did it appear on compositions. The only example appeared in combination with an adverbial clause where the subjunctive was not used: Pero con una ocu-pación como maestra no la puede hacer menos que se casa con alguien que es rico.In adverbial clauses, the subjunctive is used where the action is subsequent

to a given axis: El vendrá a las cinco. Entonces iremos > Iremos cuando venga. Or Me dijo que vendría a las cinco. Yo comí a las tres > Comí antes de que viniera él. In the varieties in the Southwest the indicative is sometimes (but not always) substituted for the subjunctive in cases of subsequent action, as indicated by the following examples.

1. Lo mandó pa que juera decirle a Demetrio.2. . . . antes que me fui.3. El gobierno gasta miles de dólares cada año para que no plantan var-ias cosas.

4. Chicano Studies serán necesario hasta cuando la escuela pública enseña, no adoctrina.

5. Cuando la sistema se cambia más, los chicanos no van a tener que depender en los gringos.

6. Antes de que comenzaba a pagar . . .7. Dice que la vida es una cosa que nos pasa antes que llegamos al fin descanso, la muerte.

8. Cuando acabamos ¿vamos a tener un examen?

The subjunctive also appears in subordinate clauses introduced by si where an unreal and improbable condition precedes a conditional probability:

Si tuviera dinero, iría. ‘If I had the money, I would go.’Si hubiera tenido dinero, había, ido. If I had had the money, I would have gone.’

Southwest popular varieties offer several possible combinations. The auxil-�ary hubiera is often replaced by fuera. Both the subordinate and independent clauses may take the subjunctive form. In some cases different combinations of indicative and subjunctive forms are used. The following examples are clas-sified according to patterns of use:

Si ___________________, ______________________ subjuntivo subjuntivo


1. Si biera tenido un auto, yo te biera visitado.2. Si tuviera mil dólares, yo fuera a Europa.3. Te dijiera si supiera.4. Si ellos llegaran a nuestros escalones, fuera fácil para comenzar una revolución.

5. Si yo fuera sido el papá, yo fuera visto que mi hijo . . .6. Si yo fuera el papá, yo le fuera dicho al hijo que lo que vía pasado, vía pasado.

7. Si fuéranos tenido bastante más tiempo, se me hace a mí que pudiéra-nos hablar con esos jóvenes para dicirles que no tuvieran miedo de platicar la verdá.

Si ___________________, ______________________ subjuntivo indicativo

1. Te decía si supiera.2. Si no fuera por la idea, ahorita no tuvíamos Chicano Studies.3. Si le biera pasado algo a mi mamá, la familia no puedía, mi papá no puedía mantener la familia.

Si ___________________, ______________________ indicativo subjuntivo

1. Te dijiera si sabía.2. Le ofreciera trabajo si podía.3. Le diciera que es muy difícil. Si no le puedía enseñar el mal de sus deseos, entonces le ayudara comenzar algún negocio.

Si ___________________, ______________________ indicativo indicativo

1. Te decía si sabía.2. Si yo era el papá, yo le decía de la vida.3. Si yo tenía dinero, iba a las vistas esta tarde.

There are other, unusual uses of the subjunctive. In some cases haber que plus infinitive is used as an equivalent of tendría que; in other words the im-personal construction with haber admits a subject:

Un buen católico hubiera que rechazar las cosas del mundo.

This same construction also appears as an equivalent of debería haber plus past participle:

Y los gringos van a tener que ‘cer lo que hubieran hacido años pasado.

The same phrase appears with fuera replacing the auxiliary hubiera:

En vez de hacer el edificio fueran ayudado la gente pobre en Austin.

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Sometimes in the substitution of hubiera by fuera, the verb haber �s reta�ned �n infinitive form:

Puedo vivir la vida como si no juera ber pasado. (como si no hubiera pasado)

MoRPhoLogy of The VeRb

Verbs in Spanish are divided into three conjugation groups, according to thematic vowel: -ar, -er, and -ir. The first conjugation group, verbs ending in -ar, is the largest not only because most Spanish verbs belong to it but because it contains all modern loanwords (subsuming the -ear group). In the popular varieties of the Southwest, the three conjugation groups have, for all practical purposes, been reduced to two groups, forms ending in -ir having been taken into the -er group. The same phenomenon was observed by Espinosa (1930) in New Mexico. Consider the following examples:

Standard Varieties Popular Varieties

salgo salgosales salessale salesalimos salemossalen salencomo comocomes comescome comecomemos comemoscomen comen

The only case where the thematic -i- vowel is retained, in the first person plu-ral form, is eliminated in the popular varieties. Numerous instances exist of similar verb regularizations, as in the following examples:

Standard Popular

venimos vinemossentimos sintemosvestimos vistemosmentimos mintemossequimos siguemospedimos pidemosdormimos durmemosmorimos muremos

Mid-stem vowels become high vowels (e > i; o > u) as the thematic vowel is lowered (i > e). In some cases these vocalic changes correspond to a regulariza-tion of the stem, as is evident below:


pid-o vist-op�d-es v�st-esp�d-e v�st-epid-emos (< pedimos) vist-emos (< vestimos)p�d-en v�st-en

Stem vowels that are diphthongized when stressed maintain the diphthong even when the syllable is unstressed; subsequently new forms with diphthong-ized stems are created or derived:

piens-o puedo/puedemos vienen/vieneronpiens-as cuento/cuentando juego/juegópiens-a pierdo/pierdía despierto/ piens-amos (< pensamos) acuesto/acuestó despiertandopiens-an quiero/quieriendo duermen/duermieron

Other stem changes that may occur include verbal forms derived from preterit or other tenses:

tuve/tuvía quiso/quisiendo pido/pidía/pidiste/pidíafui/juíanos vino/vinía

The simplification of the verb morphology seems to be a strong tendency. Nu-merous irregular verbs have become regularized in these Southwest popu-lar varieties, as is common in the popular varieties of other Spanish-speaking areas of the world:

seguí/seguió decir/deciste decir-dicir/diciera/dicíacomponer/componí poner/poní sentí/sentióproducir/producieron entretener/entretení caber/cabieron/caboeres/ero costar/costa ando/andétú has/yo ha/nosotros forzar/forzan hamos

The same regularization is evident in the formation of past participles. Not only are there regular variants of irregular participles but there are also parti-ciples derived from new stems:

abrir/abrido (abierto) escribir/escribido (escrito)decir/decido/dicido/dijido (dicho) hacer/hacido (hecho)morir/morido (muerto) poner/ponido (puesto)resolver/resolvido (resuelto) puedo/puedido (podido)volver/volvido (vuelto) romper/rompido (roto)supe/supido (sabido) niego/niegado (negado)tuvo/tuvido (tenido)

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In some cases regular verbs are conjugated like irregular verbs:

entregar/entriego

Or verbs in -er are conjugated like -ar verbs:

traer/traiba (traía) tener/teneba (tenía)caer/caiba (caía) sentir/sentiba (sentía)

The impersonal haber construction is also inflected for number:

Habia muchos accidentes > Habían muchos accidentes

Number inflections are also regularized for second person verb forms. In the Spanish verbal system, the second person morpheme is -s and �t appears in all conjugated forms except in the preterit, where the morpheme is -ste. In Southwest Spanish final s is maintained throughout all conjugated second person forms, as occurs in other popular Spanish varieties. Thus the forms hablaste, viviste, and comiste are hablastes, vivistes, and comistes in Southwest Spanish. In some of the rural Southwest varieties of Texas and New Mexico, the preterit morpheme is -tes rather than -ste. Thus we have forms like these:

fuiste > fuites viste > vitestomaste > tomates viniste > vinites

Forms like fuistes, vistes, tomastes, and vinistes are common in urban varieties.There are other number inflection changes in rural varieties. The first per-

son plural morpheme, for example, which is -mos is changed to -nos whenever stress falls on the antepenultimate syllable. Proparoxytones (esdrújulas) occur in first person plural forms in the following tenses:

conditional tense: comeríamos > comeríanosimperfect tense: comíamos > comíanosimperfect subjunctive tense: comiéramos > comiéranos

As I noted previously, regularization of verb stems is common in these popu-lar varieties of Spanish, affecting not only stem vowels but stress as well. This regularization is especially evident in present subjunctive forms. Once stress is retained in the stem, new proparoxytones arise, as in the following examples:

pueda p�ensepuedas pensespueda p�ensepuédamos (< podamos) piénsemos (< pensemos)puedan p�ensen

This retention of stress on the stem vowel affects regular verbs as well, even when there is no diphthongization of stem vowels involved:


coma vivacomas vivascoma vivacómamos (< comamos) vívamos (< vivamos)coman vivan

Once these verb forms take the stress on the antepenultimate syllable, all un-dergo changes from -mos to -nos in rural Southwest varieties:

puédamos > puédanos piénsemos > piénsenoscómamos > cómanos vívamos > vívanos

Other changes in the verb system are easily explained as phonetic changes or the retention of archaic forms. The only other interesting phenomenon noted is frequent use of the reflexive forms to indicate the inchoative as-pect of verbs and the willingness with which one undertakes an action (Bull 1965):

Me fui a comer el taco. Me salí de la clase.Me fui. Me vine temprano.Me tomé el vino. Me leí todo el libro.

PRonounS

Personal Pronouns

The personal pronoun system has also undergone simplification, especially in the speech of young people and in the state of California, where the formal usted �s rarely used. Strangers and adults are �mmed�ately addressed as tú. In Texas, on the other hand, the usted-tú distinction is maintained throughout the general Mexican-origin population, although young people seem to prefer one second person singular pronoun form. The feminine plural form is also rare, leaving the following pronoun system:

yo nosotrostú ustedesella, el ellas, ellos

An interesting phenomenon is the use of the plural proclitic accusative form when the direct object is singular and the indirect object is plural. Evidently there is a transposition of the plural marker from the dative to the accusative, as demonstrated in the following example:

Les di el libro a ellos. > Se los di (a ellos).Les di la mesa a ellas. > Se las di (a ellas).

An analogous transposition occurs with the enclitic nos, which becomes no when it is followed by another clitic pronoun. Bear in mind that a somewhat

26 Spanglish

similar sibilant loss occurs in standard varieties when imperative forms lose the final s if followed by an enclitic nos: (Vamos + nos = Vámonos; peinemos + nos = peinémonos). The loss of final s after nos is thus an extension of the vowel loss rule plus transposition:

Nos dio el dinero. > No los dio.Véndanoslo. > Véndanolos.Véndanoslos. > Véndanolos.

A similar transposition of consonants is prevalent in imperative verbs, where verb final n is transposed to the end of the first enclitic pronoun:

Dénmelo. > Démenlo.Vénganse. > Véngansen.Bájense. > Bájensen.

Other pronoun variants are the result of phonetic changes. The unstressed me, for example, is often assimilated to a mid-back vowel in its immediate context:

Me lo dio. > Mo lo dio.No me gusta. > No mo gusta.Se me olvida. > Se m’olvida.

In some cases me is converted into mi, if there is an adjacent high vowel:

Me dijo que no. > Mi dijo que no.Me encontré . . . > M’incontré . . .

Other phonetic changes include the lateralization of nasals, affecting both per-sonal and clitic pronouns. Often both nos and los appear in the same discourse:

1. Quiere que los sálgamos.2. Nos dice que los páremos.3. Pasamos día tras día sin jamás pensar en lo que los pasará.4. Los encontramos con unos jóvenes.

Interrogative and Relative Pronouns

In the popular Spanish of the Southwest, the interrogative qué is often sub-stituted for cuál, especially in informational questions calling for what in En-glish. Thus instead of ¿Cuál es tu dirección? or ¿Cuál es tu número de teléfono? we often hear ¿Qué es tu dirección? or ¿Qué es tu número de telefón?Inflection for number often disappears in the case of quién/quiénes:

¿Quiénes son? > ¿Quién son?


Perhaps this simplification is a result of English influence, where there is only one interrogative form: who. As previously indicated, however, simplification is a strong tendency in these popular varieties and could easily explain this loss of number inflection. Nevertheless, the use of que for lo que sounds some-what like a literal oral translation from the English:

Esto es todo que puedo decir de mi comunidad.

There are other pronominal variants in Chicano communities, which I shall merely note, like the use of acuál for cuál:

Ahí estaba el Piporro no sabiendo acuál quería.

Frequent in rural Spanish varieties, in the Southwest, and throughout the Americas are compound combinations of indefinite pronouns: algotro (algún otro), algotra, algotros, algotras, un otro (only in the Southwest following the English another) and cada quien (cada uno).

nounS, aDjeCTIVeS, anD aDVeRbS

Gender and number agreement rules are also simplified in these popular Spanish varieties. The norm for standard varieties, for example, calls for the art�cle el before feminine nouns in the singular that have an initial stressed low vowel: a. In the popular varieties, elision produces l’ before all singular (masculine or feminine) nouns with a word initial vowel, whether the vowel is stressed or not. Thus we have examples like the following:

el agua > l’agua la amiga > l’amiga la hermana > l’hermanael oro > l’oro el aguacate > l’aguacate el humo > l’humo

Simplification also occurs in the case of gender inflection. In standard Spanish, where gender is inherent in all nouns, there is no correspondence between ending and gender, that is, all nouns that end in a are not auto-matically feminine nouns. Words like día, problema, sistema, and other words derived from Greek and ending in a are masculine in gender. In the popu-lar varieties, on the other hand, all words that end in a (except for words of high frequency, like día) may be converted to the feminine gender. Although gender simplification does not occur in all popular varieties, these are some typical examples:

la sistema la síntoma la diploma la mediodía

Another modification of number inflection is characteristic of some rural popular varieties, especially those used in West Texas and New Mexico. The stress rule in standard Spanish calls for an -s plural morpheme after stressed -á and -é, as �n sofás or cafés. Nouns ending in a consonant, with some exceptions

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discussed later, take an -es plural morpheme, as in papeles or poderes. In these popular varieties, however, both rules are applied to words ending in stressed á and é so that the plural morpheme after words ending in stressed vowels is -ses, as in the following examples:

pie/pieses papa/papases café/cafeses mamá/mamases

In nouns ending in unstressed vowel plus s, with stress on the penultimate sylla-ble, the plural morpheme is zero, as in words like el lunes, los lunes. S�nce Span�sh in the Americas is characterized by seseo (that is, by the absence of a θ phoneme), words like lápiz are pronounced with a final sibilant s sound as in lunes. It is not surprising then that in West Texas one often hears el lápiz and los lápiz.Another feature of popular Spanish, especially among the younger bilin-

gual generations, is the lack of number and gender agreement between nouns and adjectives. It could well be a case of English interference, particularly in written texts where Chicano students are prone to translate from their English literary variety when writing compositions in Spanish. Thus, some cases of lack of agreement arise in written discourse that might not ordinarily appear in oral speech. Let us look at some examples:

los escuelasmuchos cosasUna mujer hecho para pelear.Una cadena que está conectado.El televisor es vieja.Las personas que son gordas son muy alegre.Yo creo que el tercer persona es hombre.No son igual.Estas dos maneras son universal con nuestra gente.

Sometimes in the same discourse a speaker will select more than one gender for the same word:

las ideales, el ideal el pared, la paredel función, la función el parte, la parteLas ideales, el Ideal el pared, la pared

Agreement between numerals and nouns is also simplified. In popular va-r�et�es numbers end�ng �n ún tend to take a singular noun: Tiene veintiún año, rather than veintiún años, as in the standard variety. The apocopated form of ciento is also common: ciento cincuenta > cien cincuenta. With numerals over one hundred there is no agreement with the nouns that follow unless the cientos, cientas immediately precede the nouns:

400 mujeres―cuatrocientas mujeres343 mujeres―trecientos cuarenta y tres mujeres


In addition to inflectional suffixes, derivative suffixes abound in the oral speech of this area. The diminutive -ito, -ita affix is used in great abundance not only to indicate small sizes and quantities or short duration but to demon-strate affection or sympathy as well, as is common in other Spanish-speaking areas. For example:

más tardecita, al ratito, un momentito, lo’o lueguito, orita, orititita, muchita (muchachita), muchito (muchachito), el negrito, la tiendita, toitito (toditito), toita (todita), frijolitos o frifolitos, carrito.

Augmentative suffixes are also frequent in Chicano speech with various functions as in other Spanish-speaking areas. More interesting, to augment a qualitative feature to indicate repeated or prolonged duration or even to reit-erate an intention, the adjectives, adverbs, or verbs are repeated or the prefixes re- and rete-, common in other areas, are used:

Está azul azul.Está fuerte fuerte.Está retebonito.Vino luego luego. Vino lo’o luego.Ponlo recio recio. (más fuerte)Iba recio recio. (bien rápido)Ese hombre no más trabaji trabaji y tú de hoquis. (trabaja y trabaja)

Anda canti canti. (cantando)Lo vi corri corri. (corriendo)Estaba chifli chifli. (silbando)El niño está brinqui brinqui. (brincando)

engLISh InTeRfeRenCe2

As a result of the daily contact between English and Spanish speakers and the dominant role of English in every aspect of society, loanwords are nu-merous in the Spanish of the Southwest. Although the influence of English is primarily evident in the lexicon, it sometimes occurs in pronunciation and syntax. English has also affected intonation patterns, as is particularly evident in the Spanish of bilingual Chicano students who have had all their academic instruction in English.We will first look at some examples of morphosyntactic influence. Changes

within any language are generally explained in terms of rules already operat-ing within that language. It is, of course, possible to find, for example, uses of possessive adjectives before parts of the body and articles of clothing even where there is no contact with English. Yet bilinguals often translate thoughts from one language to oral production in another, especially when the use of the two is continuous and contiguous within the space of a conversation. These

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bilinguals are often surprised to find that all Spanish speakers do not automati-cally use the possessive all the time, as in English:

Tengo las manos sucias. > Mis manos están sucias. ‘My hands are dirty.’Se pusieron el sombrero. > Se pusieron sus sombreros. ‘They put on their hats.’

Translation also seems to be the explanation for the addition of the particle a before infinitives. Spanish normally uses the a after certain verbs of motion (ir a, salir a, entrar a, venir a, etc.) to produce expressions like Va a venir a comer. Other verbs, however, like querer, dejar, deber, and poder, for example, are not followed by a, as is evident in sentences like Quiere comer, Puedo ir, or Debe cantar. In the following examples, verbs and to be-plus-adjective expressions normally not accompanied by a appear with this preposition as is common in English, where infinitives are introduced with to:

1. Querían a comenzar.2. Déjeme atocar la colcha.3. Lo quieren a quechar.4. Quedé de a ir para Mexico.5. Ofreció a prestárnolas.6. Porque es difícil a presentar todos los lados.7. Es importante a yir.8. ¿Pero es asesinato a quitarlas del cuerpo?9. Es difícil a leer.

A further extension of this phenomenon is the appearance of an epenthetic a before a number of verbs. Thus one student wrote: No puedo hagastar a tiempo a cambiar el mundo. And others were recorded as saying: Tuvimos a registrando; Tuvimos a buscando; Andamos a vendiendo unos posters.Where there are certain correspondences between the English and the Span-

ish verb systems, the English patterns are frequently followed. In the speech of young Chicanos, the progressive tenses are often the preferred form, where a simple present would do as well. Standard Spanish, of course, also has the progressive tense. The difference here is the absence of the present tense in speech to refer to an action in progress. Thus a question like ¿Por qué fumas? would typically be translated as ‘Why do you smoke?’ rather than as ‘Why are you smoking?’ In fact the second translation would sound odd to some Chicano Spanish speakers. Other cases pointing to English interference are the use of -ing verbals as nouns. Like many English speakers learning Spanish, Chicano students who are native speakers of Spanish often use these verbals as gerunds rather than simply as participles, as is common in Spanish. English gerunds have to be translated as infinitives in Spanish:

After leaving the office, he went to the drugstore. (Despues de salir de la oficina, se fue a la botica.)

In the following examples we will find several cases of Spanish gerundios func-tioning like gerunds rather than like participles:


1. Para mis hermanitos viviendo en el proyecto era bueno.2. El hijo quería poner al papá en una posición de sintiéndose culpable de los problemas del hijo.

3. Autorizando abortos es algo que exige mucho pensamiento.4. Usándolas es una manera de afirmar su mexicanidad.5. El ideal de la hombría consiste en nunca permitiendo que el mundo exterior penetre en su intimidad.

6. El dinero que gana lo gasta en tomando.

English interference is more commonly seen in written texts than heard in oral speech. Here the interference arises from lack of practice in Spanish com-position as a result of English dominance. This type of interference is evident in the absence of an article before generic and mass nouns in Spanish, where an article is always required. Thus sentences like Man is mortal or Rice is good must be translated as El hombre es mortal and El arroz es bueno �n Span�sh. Ch�-cano students, however, will often omit the article, as in English:

1. Capitalismo es un sistema económico2. Religión es algo muy personal3. Gente ya orita está despertando4. Todos creen que cambios son necesarios.5. Estadísticas revelan que . . .

Constant translation from one language to another, especially when deal-ing in Spanish with material that has been learned and rehearsed in English, often leads to the translation of prepositions, such as the preposition to before infinitives as we have already seen. Informal English also allows particular prepositions that follow certain verbs to appear in sentence final position with transposed object complements. Literal translations thus appear strange in Spanish, as in the following examples:

1. La muerte es un tema que todos piensan en a veces.2. Quieren quedar vivos porque su vida es la única vida que están segu-ros de.

3. . . . significa en realidad lo que nosotros tenemos fe en.

Prepositions are especially difficult to translate, but problems also arise when no preposition is required in Spanish, as in the following example:

No estamos pidiendo por mas caridad. (pidiendo más caridad) ‘We’re not ask-ing for more charity.’

The one distinguishing characteristic of Chicano Spanish is the presence of numerous loanwords from the English language. The phenomenon of borrowing is, of course, common throughout the world in areas where lan-guages are in contact. In fact the Spanish language itself has incorporated numerous loans from Arabic, Greek, French, Italian, Germanic languages,

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and American Indian languages throughout its history, loans that are today generally accepted by all Spanish speakers. The Spanish varieties of Latin America and Spain also have incorporated English loanwords but not to the extent that Chicano Spanish has. Thus the distinguishing phenomenon in the Southwest is quantitative and refers to the degree of borrowing rather than to the phenomenon itself. Borrowing is actually quite logical given the dominance of English, and given the exclusion of Spanish from most formal functions, especially in academic and technological fields. Thus, information provided and stored in English is frequently converted into Spanish through morphological and phonological adaptations. In most cases borrowing leads to the incorporation of new meanings into Spanish varieties in the Southwest. Often, equivalent terms exist in Spanish but with different connotations, so that particular meanings can be captured only through these loanwords. Often the whole borrowing process becomes a linguistic game that Chicanos delight in playing. Sometimes the equivalent term in Spanish is not part of the Chicano repertoire and borrowing is the only alternative. Various reasons exist, therefore, for the presence of these loanwords in Chicano Spanish; all provide the Spanish varieties with new meanings, but not all are the result of lexical gaps.Spanish varieties include a number of verbs borrowed from English. These

verbs are generally integrated into the -ar conjugation group, with -ear (pro-nounced -iar) combinations having a higher frequency, as in the following examples:

shine > cha�near lock > laquear dust > dostearmop > mapear quit > cu�tear watch > huacharspell > espelear catch > quechar match > mechearmiss > m�stear type > ta�pear

Nouns borrowed from English are provided with number and gender, like all nouns in the Spanish language. A certain uniformity prevails throughout the Southwest in terms of the gender assigned to particular loans, but in some cases there are differences. Thus the term for plug may vary between plogue (masculine) and ploga (feminine). What is magasín (m.) for some is magasina (f.) for others. Yet for terms of high frequency, gender assignments are generally the same in Texas as in California. In some cases gender differences corre-spond to differences in meaning. For example, in some areas the term for truck �s troque, whereas in others, it is troca. Often, troque �s the larger veh�cle and troca is equivalent to troquita. Sometimes the gender of a loanword corresponds to the gender given its equivalent in Spanish, as in puche (from push) for em-puje: un puche, un empuje. Where it is a matter of false cognates, as, for example, carpeta for alfombra ‘carpet,’ terms already part of the Spanish language with another meaning (carpeta ‘portfolio’ or ‘folder’) retain their original gender. The form is often simply supplied with an additional meaning if the standard meaning is familiar. Yarda and mecha, which normally mean measurement and the wick of a candle or lamp, respectively, in Chicano varieties refer addition-ally to English yard, the green space in front of a house, and match.


Sometimes the equivalent in Spanish is not familiar to the Chicano, or it is seen as not having the same meaning, given the different context of use. The equivalent for mapiador (from mop), for example, is the uncommon trapeador. In fact one student indicated that the action mapear ‘to mop’ involved the use of a mop, whereas trapear meant cleaning the floor with trapos ‘rags’. Thus the introduction of new tools led to the incorporation of new loanwords to reflect new meanings.Because these popular varieties have a simplified gender and number sys-

tem, words ending in a are automatically feminine. In some cases the final low vowel is derived from final er in English, where the schwa is related to the central vowel in Spanish, -a. Thus we have examples like the following:

la dipa ‘dipper’ la juila ‘wheeler’ la mira ‘meter’ la rula ‘ruler’

The gender of some words is determined by its correlation with sex, as in the following examples:

el bosero ‘busdriver’ la norsa ‘nurse’ la huayfa ‘wife’el broda ‘brother’ el troquero ‘truckdriver’el hueldeador ‘welder’

New loanwords ending in final e or in a consonant are generally masculine:

el fil el yin ‘gin’ el cloche el bil el bos un daimeel fone el estare un nicle el suiche el faite el saine

Phonetically, English sounds are adapted to the Spanish phonological sys-tem. English sounds are thus replaced with the segment that more closely resembles it in terms of manner of articulation or point of articulation. Thus, words with English sh are generally adapted as ch-: sheriff > cherife, shampoo > champú. In some areas of the Southwest, however, the fricative variant sh ex-ists, as we indicated previously, allowing the following pronunciations: sherife, mushasho, shampú. Words ending in a consonant other than d, l, r, n, or s are �n-corporated with an added final vowel, generally e, as �n puche, sete, cloche, but sometimes a: brecas. Words ending in er, although generally incorporated with a final a (meter = mira), may at times reveal a final e: mofle ‘muffler’, indicating possible acquisition through the printed word. Words starting with initial s plus consonant take an epenthetic initial e as �n espelear ‘spell’, esquipear ‘skip’, and estare ‘starter’. English words with aspiration, h, have a velar fricative in Spanish: jaiscul ‘high school’.

Extensions of Meaning

The incorporation of loanwords has meant the broadening of the semantic fields by allowing the expression in Spanish of meanings acquired through the English language. Chicano Spanish has made false cognates, where the meaning in English is not equivalent to the meaning in standard Spanish varieties, into

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true cognates, with equivalent meanings. Sometimes the standard meaning is not familiar to the speaker; at other times the speaker adapts to the new meaning system and simply incorporates an additional meaning for that word. Thus, the word colegio, which is a public school in most Latin American countries, becomes synonymous with college, to indicate the first four years of university work in an institution without graduate studies. The concept of high school is represented by jaiscul, the translated escuela alta, or secundaria. This incorporation of false cog-nates as true cognates is widespread. Below are just a few examples:

Chicano Spanish Standard Spanish english

librería biblioteca librarycarpeta alfombra carpetconferencia reunión conferencelectura conferencia lecturesuceso éxito successrealizar darse cuenta realizepar�entes padres parents

When lexical items in English resemble Spanish items with a few minor differences, the loan is incorporated as a true cognate, leading to phonetic and morphological differences between the loan and the original Spanish equiva-lent, as in the examples below:

competición ‘competition’ for competenciapopulación ‘population’ for poblacióntelefón ‘telephone’ for teléfonoperpetual ‘perpetual’ for perpetuomaterialístico ‘materialistic’ for materialistaasistante ‘assistant’ for asistenteexploitación ‘exploitation’ for explotaciónpractical ‘practical’ for prácticodistincto ‘distinct’ for distintofarmacista ‘pharmacist’ for farmacéuticosadístico ‘sadistic’ for sádicoincapable ‘incapable’ for incapazcorrectar ‘correct’ for corregirdirectar ‘direct’ for dirigir

Compound Phrases

English phrases may be borrowed directly and translated literally to pro-duce previously inexistent combinations, like objetores concientes (Weinreich 1968, p. 50) for conscientious objectors in Florida Spanish. Loan translations are also common in the Spanish of the Southwest, producing combinations that often make no sense to someone coming from another Spanish-speaking coun-try, unless the necessary English code is part of his or her repertoire. These compound phrases include expressions like the following:


Loan: Compound Standard Spanish english Phrase Phrase equivalent

to call back llamar pa’tras volver a llamarto put back poner pa’tras devolver, volver a ponerto have a good time tener un buen tiempo divertirseHow do you like it? ¿Cómo te gusta? ¿Qué te parece?to run for office correr para un puesto ser candidato o una oficinato figure the figurar los problemas resolver los problems out problemasYour town is run Su pueblo está corrido está dirigido, by anglos. por anglos. gobernadohe grew more confused creció más confusido se puso más

confuso

Sometimes the English phrase serves as a model for the loan, especially if the literal translation calls for some modification in Spanish, as in these examples:

to get a college education > agarrar colegioto get a kick out of > agarrar patada

Hybrid compounds. In some cases part of the original English phrase is trans-lated, and part of the phrase is a loan:

flour > harina de florbedroom set > sete de recamaral�ght meter > mira de la luzl�ght b�ll > el bil de electricidad, el bil de la luztraffic sign > saine de tráfico

Often the incorporation of loanwords leads to the displacement of an existing Spanish term or to the less frequent use of particular terms. For example, the incorporation of huachar ‘watch,’ together with the existing mirar ‘look,’ have led to the loss of ver in the repertoire of some young Chicano Spanish speakers. In some cases, where various terms have similar denotations but different con-notations, the incorporation of loans allows for a richer repertoire. Series like the following are common in Chicano Spanish: el chó, el mono, las vistas, la película, el cine: brecas, manea, frenos. The Spanish equivalent may not be familiar to some speakers, leading necessarily to the incorporation of loanwords, as in the case of espelear ‘spell,’ when the word deletrear is not part of instruction in school.

Code-switching

The discourse of bilingual Chicanos is often composed of shifts from one language to another, initiated not only with turn taking in conversations, but within the same utterances. Chicano speakers are aware of these shifts and often

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answer that they mix both languages when asked if they speak English or Spanish at home: “Pos hablamos revuelto. Inglés y español.” These shifts, trig-gered by shifts in speech act, theme, or language function, are often consid-ered to be the mode of expression that best captures the bilingual, bicultural situation of the Mexican-origin population residing as a minority within an English-dominant society. Code-shifting is thus common in Chicano short sto-ries, novels, poetry, and essays published in Chicano journals and magazines. In Magazín, published for a short while in San Antonio, the following sentence ap-peared in a story: “Se encerró in the recamara and cried over her mala suerte.”Where shifts occur, each language segment retains the pronunciation and

grammatical form of the proper language. Thus sentences like Me puchó are not examples of code-shifting, because the loanword puchar is a part of Chi-cano Spanish and follows all the necessary morphological and phonological Spanish rules. A sentence like Me dio un push, with push pronounced as in En-glish, is a case of code-shifting, because the shift is from one phonological and lexical system to another.Elsewhere I have discussed shifts as means of conveying different levels

of meaning. Here, however, I will briefly examine some linguistic constraints that operate in code-shifting. There is not yet a large set of rules to describe nor a code-shifting grammar to propose, but I will attempt to demonstrate that shifts do not occur at random.The grammatical systems of both languages are totally different in terms of

underlying structures, rules, ordering of rules, and rule transformations. Some rules, however, are somewhat similar at the categorical level. Both languages, for example, form the progressive tenses with an auxiliary verb plus present progressive morpheme. In some cases, as in the formation of questions, the transformational rules differ significantly, with English requiring reordering of categories and the addition of the verb do. Shifts seem to occur where there are similarities in structures but not in cases where the surface structures are entirely different. Thus we find examples like these:

Lo hizo slowly. Vino early.

but never like these:

*How lo hizo? *When vino?

The explanation could be that English requires the particle do:

1. How did he do it?2. When did he come?

Thus shifts like the following are not possible in Chicano discourse:

1. *Con quién Peter go? for ¿Con quién va Pedro?2. *Cuándo is Mary coming? for ¿Cuándo viene María?


The usual surface form for questions in the Southwest requires placing the verb before the subject: ¿Cuándo viene María? ¿Con quién viene Pedro? Because some varieties of Spanish, like Caribbean Spanish, allow for the preposition of the subject before the verb (¿Cuándo mi esposo lee? ¿Cuándo yo comeré? ¿Con quién ella baila?), it may be that shifts are being determined by surface struc-ture rules operating in this area.3Where surface forms are similar there are no problems, and shifts may

occur even in the middle of phrases. As I have mentioned, English has ver-bal complements―gerunds―which function like nouns, whereas in Spanish only infinitive verbals function like nouns. In code-shifting, Spanish particip-ial constructions function like English gerunds and English gerunds function like objects of Spanish prepositions:

1. I’m talking about conociéndonos.2. está hablando de integration, de understanding other people’s cultures.3. Estoy por lowering the standard.

Thus it would appear that where surface forms are similar but structural rules are significantly different, the speaker will follow the English rule.The only examples considered here are those that appeared in the taped

interviews. In the analysis that follows, however, I have followed my intuition as well. We will look now at specific uses within noun and verb phrases, as well as at shifts occurring at the clause or sentence level.

Shifts within noun phrases. The noun phrase in both English and Spanish con-sists of the following: (determiner) noun (adjective clause). In these possible combinations, I have found that a noun in English may be preceded by an article in Spanish:

1. el wedding2. el building3. los officials4. metieron un suit.5. Tenemos un newspaper.

Spanish nouns, however, are not preceded by English articles. Thus we did not find sentences like *The muchacho está aquí nor *A mujer vino. Only in cases where the press has popularized a term and made it a Spanish loan to English do we find any instance of English article plus Spanish noun:

Most of the barrio va por Gonzalo Barrientos.

English nouns may be modified by adjectives in Spanish:

1. Tiene todo el building agujeráo.2. en cualquier facet of school life

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An English noun modified by an English adjective can be preceded by an article in Spanish:

Hay un friendly atmosphere.

If no article is necessary, the entire noun phrase may appear in English after a Spanish verb:

1. Te dan greater yields.2. Puede dar better results.3. Si hay run-offs.

Within the Spanish noun phrase, Spanish nouns may be followed by an adjec-tive clause in English:

Una cosa that turns me off . . .

The same occurs within an English noun phrase, where the English noun may be modified by an adjective clause in Spanish.

1. That’s another bitch que tengo yo con los chicanos, que ponen música amer�cana.

2. La most beautiful thing que nos ha pasado.

Predicate adjectives and predicate nouns. A sentence begun in Spanish, with a Spanish verb, may have an English predicate, as in these examples:

1. Me quedé surprised.2. Te digo que está prejudiced.3. Apá es el dominant.4. La vida no nomás es un party.5. Esa es una cosa que ya estamos brainwashed los mexicanos.6. Es self-employed.7. Parece que soy sensitive.

Spanish predicates, however, did not occur after English verbs.

*He is carpintero.*She is sensible. (i.e., She is sensitive.)

Adjectives in English within a Spanish structure may be modified by Spanish adverbs:

1. No quieren ser muy “radical.” (radical―in English)2. Es muy friendly.

English adverbs, however, do not appear with Spanish adjectives: Thus we do not hear *Es very amistoso. Nor do English adjectives appear within a Spanish


noun phrase, that is, between a Spanish determiner and a Spanish noun: *un friendly hombre.

Verb phrases. Both English and Spanish have underlying sentences of this type: S → noun phrase + auxiliary + verb + (noun phrases). In examples gath-ered from the recorded interviews, we found that sentences initiated in Span-ish, with Spanish auxiliaries, could be followed by English participles:

1. No está hurting a la t�erra2. Te están brain-washing3. Cuando van aging . . .4. Estaban striking Kelly (AFB), but not: *He is trabajando

Shifts occur within the auxiliary phrase itself. In Spanish, the auxiliary phrase could be represented morphologically as follows:

Aux → tense (aspect) (haber + -do) (estar + ndo)

The English auxiliary rule has been variously represented, but here I will follow this morphological model, quite similar to the Spanish rule:

Aux → tense (have + -en) (be + -ing)

The code-shifting grammar is thus creating the following combination:

Aux → tense (haber + -do) (estar + -ing)

with the verb that follows in English.Subject-verb relations. A Spanish verb may be preceded by a noun phrase

that contains a Spanish article plus English noun:

Dice el announcer . . .

Spanish, of course, allows reordering of subject and verb.Verbal phrases. As in the case of progressive verb phrases, periphrastic

phrases used to indicate future or subsequent actions and formed with the verb ir plus infinitive may consist of the conjugated verb ir in Spanish fol-lowed by an English infinitive:

Si va take una muchacha el dominant role . . .

The opposite combination (verb go plus Spanish infinitive) does not occur:

*If you’re going to tomar . . .

Noun phrases after prepositions. Spanish prepositions may be followed by English nouns:

1. Yo estoy hablando de interaction, de power.2. Siempre ando con hate.

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On the other hand, Spanish nouns rarely appear after English prepositions, unless, again, it is the case of a culturally marked term, like barrio or gente:

I’m talking about interaction with la gente

If the verb combines with a preposition in the English expression (as in look for, watch over, look up, etc.), then verb loanwords will retain the preposition in English:

What would it be like si un perrao estuviera afuera watchando over quien sale para perseguirlos

Verb complements. Verb complements (direct objects) may appear in English after a Spanish verb:

1. Si no tienen integrated parties …2. Tiene todo el publicity.3. Agarra el moisture.4. Te dan greater yields.5. Se caba cuando va al cemetery, halla el grave de su madre …

Vestigial Spanish. One of the more frequent types of code-shifting is the intro-duction of colloquial Spanish expressions in English discourse. Lewis (1972) has commented that in cases of vestigial bilingualism, after the dominant language has taken over all of the functions of the subordinate language, what remains of the nondominant language is evident in a few vestiges, a few expressions or words from a former period. It is to be hoped that Chicano Spanish will never be reduced to the insertion of phrases like Órale! or Jijo! in English discourse.This inventory of some linguistic constraints operating in code-shifting is

obviously incomplete. It will now have to be integrated into a semantic and ideological analysis that will indicate the function these shifts have in Chicano discourse.

ConCLuSIon

Code-switching and loss of Spanish among younger generations who prefer communicating strictly in English are indicative of strong pressures to assimilate the dominant language. Yet the presence of major contradic-tions within U.S. society, which contribute to segregation in residence, ed-ucation, and employment, guarantee the continued concentration of these populations in certain sectors and thus continued interaction of Chicanos with each other, allowing thereby the maintenance of the Spanish language. Chicano barrios are still bilingual and in some instances Spanish monolin-gual. With the continuing immigration of Mexicans, popular Spanish vari-eties of the Southwest are constantly enriched and invigorated, especially where a great deal of social and linguistic interaction exists between new and older residents.


I have tried to describe some of the major characteristics of rural and urban Spanish varieties, from a linguistic and pedagogical perspective, for it is im-portant that Spanish classes for native speakers concentrate on making stu-dents aware of the existence of different language varieties and on allowing them to increase their language functions in Spanish to where they can discuss academic, political, and technical topics in Spanish and shift from one Spanish variety to another, according to the linguistic and social context.I do not pretend to suggest that the characteristics of the Spanish varieties

presented here are unique to Chicanos or the Southwest. The popular varie-ties of Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, and other Spanish-speaking areas share many of the features of Chicano Spanish. In general terms, all pop-ular var�et�es share certa�n tendenc�es and certa�n rules. But desp�te s�m�lar�-ties each specific context is distinct, and the mode of expression is necessarily different. In that sense, the language of Chicanos is a product of the Chicano community. It is the verbalization of communal experience.

noTeS

1. Dialogue of Benito Villanueva as recorded by Olga Villanueva, San Diego. 2. This section follows Weinreich’s (1968) analysis of loanwords. 3. With thanks to Rosa Kestelman, East Los Angeles College, for the information on Car�bbean Span�sh.

RefeRenCeS

Bernstein, Basil. 1968. Some sociological determinants of reception: An inquiry into sub- cultural differences. In Readings in the sociology of language, ed. J. Fishman, pp. 223–39. Paris: Mouton.

Bull, William. 1965. Spanish for teachers. New York: Ronald Press.Espinosa, Aurelio. 1930. Estudios sobre el español de Nuevo Méjico. Vol. 2. Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires.

Labov, William. 1972. Language in the inner city: Studies in the black English vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lewis, Glyn. 1972. Multilingualism in the Soviet Union. The Hague: Mouton.Weinreich, Uriel. 1968. Languages in contact. Paris: Mouton.

The linguistic and cultural insecurity expressed by a second generation NYPR in Sandra María Estéves’ poem, “Not Neither” (1984: 26), is all too common:

Be�ng Puertorriqueña americana1 (“PR American”)Born in the Bronx, not really jibara (“PR peasant”)Not really hablando bien (“speaking well”)But yet, not Gringa either (“US American”)Pero ni portorra,2 (“But neither PR”)Pero si portorra too. . . . (“but yes PR”)

The narrator’s fear that she is “Not really hablando bien” reflects her internal-ization of the charge that her generation’s type of bilingualism is unaccept-able, the mark of one who is neither Puerto Rican nor US American. In this chapter we refute the charges of linguistic incompetence by analyzing the “out of the mouth” factors that demonstrate the children’s knowledge of Spanish and English grammars. Some of what we refer to as “out of the mouth” may seem to be part of the “on the spot” observables since they are hearable and recordable and can be analyzed with precision; some are highly abstract and in some sense, “in the head.” They differ from the other two categories in that they rest on the structure of language and are more amenable to treatment by the analytic tools of the linguist. The selection of English or Spanish and the syntactic boundary of the switch point are “out of the mouth” factors because they define a code switch’s form, although speakers clearly called upon knowledge that was “in the head” of how to say what they switched. Here, the focus is on the grammatical constraints observed by the children, and on the constituents they linked with English or Spanish. What looked

The Grammar of Spanglish

ana Celia Zentella

Reprinted from Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York, by Ana Celia Zentella (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 1997). © 1997 by Ana Celia Zentella. Used by permission of Blackwell Publishing, Inc.

42

The Grammar of Spanglish 43

so effortless actually required the complex coordination of social and lin-guistic rules, most of which are shared with Spanish-English bilinguals in many communities in the US. Of particular importance is the evidence of a developmental pattern. The acquisition of the hows and whys of “Spanglish” as a conversational strategy reflected children’s age, dominant language, and social status, and those same variables determined their mastery of the gram-mar of “Spanglish.”

honoRIng The SynTaCTIC hIeRaRChy

The notion that Spanish-English code switching is a haphazard jumble of two languages has been rebutted by many analyses, principally Pfaff 1975; Timm 1975; McClure 1977; Poplack 1980, 1981a, 1981b; Zentella 1981a, 1982; Lipski 1985; Alvarez 1991; Torres 1992; Toribio and Rubin 1993. Spanish-English bilinguals―young and old and from diverse Latino backgrounds―demonstrate a shared knowledge of rules about appropriate boundary sites for Spanish-English linkages that distinguishes their code switching from the transfer-laden speech of second-language learners. The latter impose wholesale English lexicon and morpho-syntax on Spanish, and often switch at points avoided by bilinguals, e.g., *Yo have been able enseñar María leer (“I have been able to teach María to read”). Spanish-English bilinguals do not favor switches between the pronoun and auxiliary, or between aux and infinitive, or omit personal a or indirect objects, as required in the Spanish sentence, (Yo) he podido enseñarle a leer a María. They switch primarily at the boundaries of a restricted variety of syntactic categories. As Table 2 reveals, the young children in this study honored the principal switch points that characterize adult Spanish-English switching in the Houston Mexican-American community (Lipski 1985) and the NYPR community (Poplack 1980). Sankoff and Poplack (1981) proposed that NYPR bilinguals favored switching at some constituent boundaries more than others, in a pattern that formed a syntactic hierarchy of proportional switch-ing rates. Lipski compared their hierarchy with his analysis of 2,319 Mexican-American switches and found that the “degree of correspondence is quite high, despite the different classificatory schemes which have been utilized” (Lipski 1985: 25). The third column in Table 2 shows that the children of this study switched at similar points: three categories―sentence, noun, object NP―are among the first five in each list.3 Clauses (independent, subordinate) with and without conjunctions appear within the top ten categories of all three sets of data. Only tags and pre-positional phrases differ strikingly, per-haps due to differences in data collection methods.4 Also, a small minority of speakers may be skewing the group results re tags, as was the case for object N/NPs in our data (below). Accurate comparison of the three hierarchies is thwarted by overlapping and/or distinct categorizations, but they agree on the most frequently and most infrequently switched categories; the latter include auxiliaries, determiners, prepositions, adjectives.The literature on code switching rarely mentions that many switches do not

correspond neatly to one syntactic category. In el bloque’s data, switches could begin within or at the boundaries of one sentence and extend into another

44 Spanglish

sentence for one or more constituents, as is evident in Blanca’s warning about the Skylab rocket’s return to earth:

Hey Lolita, but the Skylab, the Skylab no se cayó pa(-ra) que se acabe el mundo. It falls in pieces. Si se cae completo, yeah. The Skylab es una cosa que (e-)stá rodeando el moon taking pictures of it. Tiene tubos en el medio. Tiene tubos en el medio. It’s like a rocket. It’s like a rocket. ¿Oíste Lolita? Tiene tubo (-s), pero como tubos en el medio, así, crossed over. The thir-teenth it’s going to fall, pero si se cae completo―that falls by pieces―pero no se acaba el mundo. Ahora una cosa sí, everybody has to be in the house, porque si le cae encima de alguien se lo lleva ejmanda(d)o, ’cause those things are heavy!(Hey Lolita, but the Skylab, the Skylab (“didn’t fall for the world to

end”). It falls in pieces. (“If it falls whole”), yeah. The Skylab (“is some-thing that’s going around”) the moon taking pictures of it. (“It has tubes in the middle” [repeated]). It’s like a rocket [repeated]. (“You heard, Lo-lita? It has tubes, but like tubes in the middle, like this”), crossed over. The thirteenth it’s going to fall, (“but if it falls whole”)―that falls by pieces―(“but the world won’t end”). (“Now one thing’s for certain”), everybody has to be in the house, (“because if it falls on top of somebody it’ll blow them away”), because those things are heavy!)

This excerpt exemplifies the daunting task of assigning a grammatical cate-gory to every switch. The bulk of the children’s switches consisted of complete sentences or syntactic categories that fell within the confines of a single sen-tence (1,353/1,685 = 80 percent). Switches that crossed syntactic boundaries or broke into a constituent, e.g., “The Skylab es una cosa que (e)-stá rodeando el moon taking pictures of it” were coded in accordance with the grammatical

Table 2Comparing Syntactic hierarchies (five Leading Categories)*

Poplack 1980adult NYPRs(n = 1,835)

Lipski 1985adult Houston MAs(n = 2,319)

Zentella 1994NYPR Children (n = 1,685)

Category (%) Category (%) Category (%)

Tag

22.5

(before & after)^Preposition

16.13 Sentence 23

Sentence 20.3 Sentence(before & after)

15.67 Noun 14

Noun 9.5 ^and/or/but 11.19 Ind. Clause 12Object NP 7.6 Tag 9.76 Object NP 6Interjection 6.3 Noun 8.27 Conjunct. &

Ind. Clause 6

* Adapted from Lipski 1985.


form of the largest constituent at the switch’s initial boundary (Spanish VP and English N in this example). The following list of 19 categories resulted; it expands to 28 when sub-categories are included, primarily those that distin-guish nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs from their corresponding phrases:

1. Full sentence (n = 385, 22.8 percent)5Pa, ¿me va(-s) (a) comprar un jugo? It cos’ 25 cents. (“Pa, are you gonna buy me juice?”)

2. Noun/Noun Phrase (N/NP) (n = 360, 21.4 percent)

(a) Object Noun (n = 214, 13 percent) She went to the entierro. (“burial”)

(b) Object Noun Phrase (n = 102, 6 percent) Tú estás metiendo your big mouth. (“You’re butting in”)

(c) Subject Noun Pharse (n = 26, 1.5 percent) Tiene dos strings, una chiringa. (“It has two”) [strings = Object Noun], (“a kite”) [SNP]

(d) Subject Noun (n = 18, 1.06 percent) My pollina (“bangs”) is longer than hers.

3. Independent clauses (n = 304, 18 percent)

(a) without preceding coordinate conjunction (n = 208, 12.3 percent) You know how to swim but no te tapa. (“it won’t be over your head”)

(b) with coordinate conjunction (n = 96, 5.7 percent) My father took him to the ASPCA y lo mataron. (“and they killed him”)

4. Subordinate clauses (n = 112, 6.6 percent)

(a) with conjunction (n = 72, 4.3 percent) He saw que e/h/ta bola e/h mía. (“that this ball is mine”)

(b) without subordinate conjunction (n = 40, 2.4 percent) Because yo lo dije. (“I said it”)

5. Adverb/adverbial phrases (n = 96, 5.7 percent)

(a) Adverb (n = 58, 3.4 percent) I’ma put it al revéz. (“backwards”)

(b) Adverbial phrase (n = 38, 2.2 percent) Rá/h/came allí, allí mismo, a little bit down. (“Scratch me there, right there”)

6. Verb/verb phrase (V/VP) (n = 60, 3.6 percent)

(a) Verb phrase (n = 32, 1.9 percent) Her sister me e/h/petó una hebilla.

(“stuck a buckle in me”)

46 Spanglish

(b) Verb (n = 28, 1.7 percent) “Puede ser mãnana” means que no trae este día, trae mãnana. (“It can be tomorrow”) (“that he doesn’t bring [it] this day, he brings tomorrow” [sic])

7. Prepositional phrase (n = 54, 3.2 percent) I’m going with her a la esquina. (“to the corner”)

8. Filler or hesitation (n = 48, 2.8 percent) Where’s the deso? (“whatsit”).

9. Adjective/adjectival phrase (n = 46, 2.7 percent)

(a) Adjective (n = 33, 1.9 percent) Yo me voy a quedar skinny. (“I’m going to stay”)

(b) Adjectival phrase (n = 13, 0.8 percent) I saw honey bees, un montón, making honey. (“a whole bunch”)

10. Imperative (n = 33, 1.9 percent) It’s full already, mira. (“look”)

11. Tag (n = 30, 1.8 percent) E/h/to e/h/una peseta. (“This is a quarter”), right?

12. Conjunctions (coordinate, subordinate) (n = 47, 2.8 percent)

(a) Coordinate conjunction (n = 30, 1.8 percent) He came last night pero (“but”) the thing was he stood up Millie’s house.

(b) Subordinate conjunction (n = 17, 1 percent) You never seen one que in the night time this car comes? (“that”)

13. Relative clause (n = 24, 1.4 percent) Alguien se murió en ese cuarto that she sleeps �n. (“Somebody died in that room”)

14. Exclamation (n = 22, 1.3 percent) Y era un nene (“And it was a baby boy”), embarrassing!

15. Miscellaneous, e.g., Interrogatives, (n = 22, 1.3 percent) ¿Cuál? Which one?

16. Personal pronoun (n = 13, 0.8 percent) Oye (“Listen”), you.

17. Predicate adjectives (n = 11, 0.6 percent) Ni son sweet ni na(da). (“They aren’t even”) (“or anything”).

18. Determiner (n = 10, 0.6 percent) The little martians, los l�ttle al�ens así, they were her family. (“the”) (“like this”)

19. Preposition (n = 8, 0.5 percent) She was con (“with”) López’s mother.


SPanISh anD engLISh ConSTITuenTS

Switches occurred in both languages in every category and sub-category of constituents. A few constituents that were switched into English and Spanish at a similar rate accounted for the bulk of the data. Six categories differed by 10 percent or less in respect to the language of the switch: full sentences, ob-ject N/NPs, subordinate clauses, adverb/adverbial phrase, subject N/NPs, and exclamations. They added up to 58 percent (975/1,685) of the switches, contrib-uting heavily to the parity of both languages in the entire corpus. The leading role of sentences and clauses in English (52 percent) and Spanish (48 percent) is evidence of the children’s ability to produce major constituents in both lan-guages. In a later section, we discuss whether bilinguals who tend to switch large constituents are more or less accomplished than those who switch smaller constituents.Most of the syntactic categories favored either English or Spanish by more

than 10 percent, particularly small units. Three of the five constituents that were switched in English more than Spanish were single words―tags, adjec-tives, predicate adjectives―63 to 70 percent of which were in English. Single words also predominated in five of the nine that favored Spanish: determiners (90 percent), fillers/hesitations (83 percent), prepositions (75 percent), conjunc-tions (64 percent), and pronouns (62 percent). These data reinforce the promi-nence of code switching as a marker of bicultural identity. The majority of the constituents that favored English or Spanish decidedly were short code shifts inserted into a longer stretch of discourse in the other language. Constituting almost half (48 percent) of all switches, the frequent embedding of small con-stituents had the effect of continually reasserting and recreating children’s dual New York-Puerto Rican identity. Because they had a foot in both worlds, they never spoke in one for very long without acknowledging and incorporating the other, especially in informal speech.

gRaMMaR anD InfoRMaL SPeeCh

In the tradition of Labov (1966, 1972a, b), the children’s “styles” were ranked in formality in accordance with the types of talk that demanded more or less attention to speech. Making purchases, talking about language, doing/teaching school lessons, talking to the tape recorder, and interviewing others like a newscaster were their careful speech styles. Casual conversation, narratives, talk during games, telling a joke, and egocentric speech represented more re-laxed speech. The bulk of the switches occurred during casual conversation and narratives; from 73 percent to 100 percent of each girl’s switches appeared in these two genres.Following Labov (1972a, b), a narrative is an account of a personal experi-

ence in the past that includes at least two sequential clauses. It may include an introductory abstract, an orientation, actions in the story, evaluations, a reso-lution, and a concluding coda. Labov’s description of the narrative as the type of speech which is monitored the least implies that bilinguals will generate more code switches in narratives than in any other genre. In el bloque’s data,

48 Spanglish

there were more than five times as many casual talk switches (1,336) as switches in narratives (242), but when the difference in the number of hours of recording was taken into account, the prediction based on Labov’s analysis was borne out. Switching in narratives was more frequent: 27 switches oc-curred in every estimated hour of narratives (242/9 hrs) versus 17 per hour in casual talk (1,336/80). The number of syntactic categories switched in narra-tives (27/28) very nearly duplicated the rate in nine times more hours of casual conversation (100 percent = 28/28).6 Still, narratives did constrain the type of grammatical constituents switched by certain speakers.In casual talk, sentential switching predominated (24 percent), as it did in

other studies of Spanish-English switching (Pfaff 1975; Marlos and Zentella 1978; McClure 1977; Poplack 1980; Zentella 1981c). In narratives, however, only 9 percent were sentences. There was a significant preference for switch-ing clauses: almost one-third (32 percent) of the switches in narratives were independent clauses, compared with 15 percent of casual talk switches. When the five leading constituents in each genre were totalled, three types (object N/NPs, subordinate clauses, and adverbs/adverbial phrases) occurred in very similar proportions (0–3 percent difference). Thus, narratives and conversa-tions were similar in respect to the variety and type of constituents switched, except that narratives included more than three times as many clause switches as full sentences. The reason became clear when individual practices were d�st�ngu�shed.Elli and Lolita switched complete sentences in casual conversation at more

than twice their rate in narratives; only 6 percent of Lolita’s and 4 percent of Elli’s switches in narratives were full sentences. It was their preference for independent clauses in narratives―together they produced 69 percent (53/77) of them―that was reflected in the narrative vs casual talk contrast. A similar pattern appeared in the switching of US-born PR teens in Brentwood, Long Island; they produced significantly more clause switches in narratives than community members who were born in Puerto Rico (Torres 1992). Lolita and Elli were the most English dominant in their group, as were the Brentwood teens, and the correspondences in their behavior hint at a contrast between the code switching of English-dominant and Spanish-dominant members of the second generation that is corroborated below.

SynTaCTIC ConSTRaInTS

When English and Spanish switches were combined, five grammatical categories predominated. Full sentences, N/NPs, and independent clauses with/without conjunctions accounted for 62 percent, while the remaining categories each contributed 5 percent or less. The consistent switching by Spanish-English bilinguals of full sentences and clauses more than determin-ers and prepositions suggests that the size of the constituent determines its likelihood of being switched, with larger constituents favored over smaller ones. But the presence of lone nouns among the most preferred switch points in three studies (Table 2) is evidence against this conclusion. In el bloque, ad-verbs and adjectives also were switched alone more often than with their


phrasal complements (58/96 and 33/46 respectively).7 The pattern of these small constituents points to an explanation of the preferred switching sites that depends on a factor other than size, one that resides in the similarities between English and Spanish grammatical structures and syntax. Those sim-ilarities facilitate proficient bilinguals’ repeated separation and linking of their languages, allowing them to project a bilingual identity.The recognition that Chicano and Puerto Rican bilinguals switch between

segments of rule-governed Spanish and rule-governed English by mapping similar parts of the two grammars onto each other led to Poplack’s formu-lation of the equivalence constraint: “the order of the sentence constituents immediately adjacent to and on both sides of the switch point must be gram-matical with respect to both languages involved simultaneously” (Sankoff and Poplack 1981: 4). Given this requirement, there is a greater propensity for switches between languages that have similar grammars, at points in their syntax that are most alike. This is true regardless of the size of the constituent, although samller constituents that are more loosely bound to neighboring con-stituents are more likely to be inserted alone than those which are more tightly coupled. Constituents dominated by the same node under phrase structure grammar―for example, prepositions form part of the prepositional phrase―are less likely to be switched alone. A related notion of bondedness accounts for the “free morpheme” constraint, which stipulates that “a switch may not occur between a bound morpheme and a lexical form unless the latter has been morphologically and phonologically integrated into the language of the bound morpheme” (ibid). This allows for forms such as jangueando (“hanging out”) but disallows *viving [from vivir (“to live”) and “living”].The universality of the equivalence constraint has been challenged by stud-

ies of switching between languages with dissimilar structures, such as Arabic and English (Bentahila and Davies 1983), and Hebrew and Spanish (Berk-Seligson 1986); these and other challenges are discussed by Romaine (1989).8 Part of the explanation for the frequency and the equivalence of Spanish-English code switching lies in the resemblance of the surface structures of these two S-V-O Indo-European languages. English does not inflect nouns, verbs, and adjectives as Spanish does, but both languages often place them in analogous syntactic slots, making it possible to switch from one language to the other “without introducing complicated grammatical concordance” (Lipski 1985: 19). The Spanish-English bilingual is like a conductor of two trains on parallel tracks whose cars are linked at similar places; she switches one car of the train on the Spanish track for a car on the English track or vice versa at the appropri-ate coupling points.Myers-Scotton (1993a, b, c) has proposed another approach to the analy-

sis of code switching based on her work among multilinguals in Africa. In her “matrix language” model, the bi/multi/lingual is basically on one track, and inserts elements of the other language(s) into the matrix language; the grammar of the matrix language governs the sentence. Still other models disallow the need for a unique and linear code switching grammar to ex-plain the constraints; they analyze the process within the Chomskian gen-erative grammar framework that purports to explain the deep structure of

50 Spanglish

all languages (Woolford 1983). Recent efforts to subsume a variety of con-straint models within a Universal Grammar that generates permissible code switches between any two languages include the specification of a Functional Head Constraint (Belazi, Rubin, Toribio 1994; Toribio and Rubin 1993). Its proponents argue that the linguistic competence of fluent bilinguals includes the abstract features (phonological, semantic, syntactic) that mark each item in their lexicons, as set forth in Chomsky (1992). Switching is accomplished via an abstract “feature matching process,” i.e., “features of functional words must match the corresponding features of their complements . . . sensitive to the language feature, among others” (Toribio and Rubin 1993: 12).The exact nature of the mechanism at work in bilingual code switching,

even when limited to Spanish-English bilinguals, is still unknown. Concern-ing the debate as to whether bilinguals control one or two grammars, Lipski (1985: 85) points out the trend towards a multiple approach:

A key feature in the contemporary analysis of language switching is the abandonment of doctrinaire insistence on extremist models, which postulate either totally separate grammars or a single homogeneous un-derlying grammar. Researchers are coming to accept that all bilingual speakers, regardless of their ethnic background, the manner in which they learned their languages or the community in which they live, ex-hibit characteristics of both separate grammars and of a single unified underlying system, and that it is fruitless to force a choice between what are in reality two aspects of a single phenomenon.

Despite discrepancies, all of the models that seek to account for the regulari-ties in code switching refute the notion that it precipitates the deterioration of one or both of a bilingual’s languages, or that code switchers are semi-lingual or alingual.

equIVaLenCe, TRanSfeRS, STanDaRDS

Not surprisingly, el bloque’s data corroborate the Sankoff-Poplack hierar-chy and constraints, which were based on the switching of NYPR adults a few blocks from el bloque. Of the children’s switched utterances, 94.7 percent (1,596/1,685) complied with the equivalance constraint, that is, the grammati-cal rules (standard or non-standard) of each language were honored by the constituents on both sides of the switch boundary (see Table 3). Less than 9 percent of all the switches (147/1,685) obeyed a non-standard dialect’s rules of grammar, e.g., “Man, you cheap!” (zero copula). Also included in the “non-standard” category were a few developmental errors, e.g., “poniste” for “pu-siste” (“you put,” second fam. pret.), or unique forms, e.g., “What you did that?!” instead of “Why did you do that?” or “What did you do that for?” No true violations of the bound morpheme constraint occurred, except for “me-dioday” instead of mediodía (“mid-day,” “noon”), which separated the mor-phemes of a compound noun.The few switches (3.6 percent) which defied the equivalence constraint usu-

ally ran afoul of the languages’ contradictory noun-adjective placement rules.


Table 3Percent of equivalent/Standard/non-Standard Code Switches

Age*

Blanca10

Elli13

Lolita10

Paca7

Isabel9 Total N

% + Equivalent,+ Standard, –TransferNon-standardvs Span�shvs Englishvs Bound morepheme

Transfer

95.6%

2.410.500.5

95

1.41.40.701.4

88

4.932.201.9

87

8.90301

74.5

19.81.41.60.22.3

(1,449)

(147)(30)(30)(1)(28)

(n) = (205) (145) (630) (281) (424) (1,685)

* December 1980.

Spanish normally requires determiner-noun-adjective (una camisa roja) (“a shirt red”) and English demands determiner-adjective-noun (“a red shirt”). Conse-quently, a break between adjective and noun violates the equivalence constraint, e.g., *una camisa red, *a red camisa, *a sh�rt roja, *una roja shirt. Most (61 percent) of the switches that contradicted Spanish word order were nouns, e.g., “the tall maestra” (“teacher”), and 43 percent of the switches which contradicted English word order were adjectives, e.g., “las cosas scary” (“the scary things”).Finally, transfers imposed one language’s way of saying or meaning onto

the other language, for example, “She started telling, ‘Mira, pipi’ ” (“Look, pee”) mimics the Spanish use of the same verb (decía) for “saying” and “tell-ing.” Another example, “Put me this one,” follows the verb-indirect object-direct object order of Ponme este instead of “Put this one on me.” Similar transfers appeared in only 1.7 percent of the code switches. In sum, there was impres-sive compliance with the constraints that characterize adult Latinos’ bilingual behavior. Dexterous juxtaposition of English and Spanish segments was ap-parent in all of the girls’ speech, despite notable individual differences.

LInkIng Language, ConSTITuenTS, gRaMMaTICaLITy, anD DeVeLoPMenTaL PaTTeRnS

The form of the code switches favored by individual children suggested a developmental pattern. Even when the examples were too few to satisfy math-ematical criteria for statistical significance, they pointed to language-dominant and age-related tendencies that deserve further investigation. A quantitative comparison of three factors was especially revealing:

1 The Language Linked to Particular Constituents

Generally, the selection of Spanish or English reflected a speaker’s language dominance, often linked to age. The accuracy of the children’s self evaluations

52 Spanglish

of bilingual proficiency was confirmed by the language they chose for the syntactic constituents they switched most often.Lolita and Elli, the two girls who evaluated their English as better than

their Spanish, switched into English more than their friends did for various grammatical categories. Two constituents―full sentences and subordinate clauses―would have favored Spanish in the group totals if Lolita and Elli had been excluded. English was the language of 63 percent of their full sentence switches and 70 percent of their subordinate clause switches. They also pre-ferred English for some small constituents which rarely were switched by the others and which appear at the bottom of the Sankoff and Poplack (1981) syn-tactic hierarchy of adult switch points, for example, determiners and preposi-tions. But Elli and Lolita did not always prefer English; for object N/NPs they chose Spanish.Every child switched at least one constituent with a disregard for her ob-

served and self-reported proficiency. Just as English-dominant Elli and Lolita preferred Spanish for object N/NPs, Spanish-dominant Isabel preferred En-glish for both object and subject N/NPs, and Paca joined her in producing most of her subject switches in English. Sometimes a child was the source of the most Spanish versions of one type of constituent and of the most English ver-sions of another. Isabel, for example, produced the greatest number of Span-ish switches in the Miscellaneous and Adverb/Adverbial phrase categories, yet she stood alone in her preference for English conjunctions and imperatives. Blanca performed like the younger Spanish dominant children in opting for more Spanish switches overall, but her object N/NP switches manifested the highest proportion of English choices for that category (62 percent).Generally, the children preferred to use their strongest language for the

longest grammatical units. Paca and Isabel used Spanish for 52 percent of their full sentence and subordinate clause switches. As the youngest girls, they were striving eagerly to speak more English so they switched into English for constituents which are easily inserted, for example, subject N/NPs, conjunc-tions and imperatives. Their early attempts to participate in intrasentential code switching like older bilinguals began with incorporating conventional vocabulary and structures that identified them as knowledgeable of English without taxing their knowledge of code switching constraints. Similarly, Elli and Lolita also chose easily insertable constituents in their weaker language (Spanish object N/NPs). Challenges to the syntactic hierarchy in the form of determiners or prepositions were in English, their strongest language.

2 Frequent and Infrequent Switches

All the girls switched at similar grammatical boundaries and with similar frequency. Exceptions to the pattern distinguished levels of code switching abilities which in turn served as indicators of overall bilingual competence and distinctive switching styles.The widest fluctuations among the group occurred with respect to object

N/NPs. One fourth (158/630) of Lolita’s switches were of this type, a propor-tion that was 7–15 percent higher than that of her friends. Some of Lolita’s


N/NPs were for Spanish objects that she did not know in English because they came up infrequently outside of the home or the block, e.g., “seno” (“breast”), “coco pela(d)o” (“baldy bean”), “tornillo” (“screw”). More were common nouns that she did know in English, e.g., “camiseta” (“teeshirt”), “peseta” (“quarter”), “sala” (“living room”), but they too were closely linked with home and her Spanish-speaking parents. Sometimes she inserted the English versions in a Spanish sentence. The prevalence of switches for lone nouns identified with family life, along with switches used as stand-ins or crutches for N/NPs she did not know, gave Lolita’s speech a more childish and sheltered quality than that of the older girls.Elli took second lead in the production of object N/NPs. They tended to be

in Spanish like Lolita’s, but they were less child-like, e.g., “demonio” (“devil”), “moreno” (“black man”), “psiquiatra” (“psychiatrist”), and they appeared in nar-ratives more than in casual conversation. The largest proportion of Elli’s switches were not objects but independent clauses (28 percent), which surpassed the oth-ers by 9–13 percent, and she was the only speaker to switch more than twice as many independent clauses (28 percent) as full sentences (12 percent). Elli switched fewer full sentences than the others, and Isabel switched them the most (33 percent). Almost one half (49 percent) of Isabel’s switches consisted of the two largest syntactic units (full sentence 33 percent + independent clause 16 percent). In contrast, although Elli took the lead in switching clauses, she also led in smaller and less likely forms such as determiners, prepositions, pro-nouns, and relative conjunctions. She was the only speaker who switched de-terminers in both languages. The conflicting patterns of Elli and Isabel implied a relationship between each girl’s bilingual proficiency and the syntactic shape of her code switches. That relationship can be interpreted from contradictory perspect�ves.Switching like Elli’s, at boundaries low on the syntactic hierarchy of major

studies of Spanish-English switching, can be interpreted as reflecting ignorance of the grammatical constraints. Since it is the kind of switching reminiscent of second-language learners, this view would designate Elli as less proficient than Isabel, who switched at the boundaries of large constituents that did not chal-lenge the syntactic constraints. But Isabel’s high incidence of unique forms and her 20 percent lower rate of standard, equivalent, and transfer-free switches (see Table 3) pointed to another analysis, one that distinguished her from older, accomplished bilinguals. The NYPR adults who preferred intra-sentential switching manipulated the rules of both grammars simultaneously more skill-fully than the switchers who broke the confines of the sentence less frequently (Poplack 1980). Consequently, the fact that almost one half of Isabel’s switches consisted of independent clauses and full sentences was more a sign of inability and/or unwillingness to tackle the complexity of switching at the boundaries of smaller constituents than a sign of a more skilled bilingualism. Elli’s switching was of the “high risk, high gain” type, that is, she defied some of the syntactic constraints because she broke into sentence boundaries more freely, in an effec-tive and adult-like speaking style.Another perspective on the same issue is provided by analyzing the least

frequently switched categories. Of the 28 syntactic boundaries tabulated in

54 Spanglish

this study, five contributed less than 1 percent each to the total number of switch points (see Table 4). The contrast between Paca and the others in Table 4 confirms my earlier point about “high risk-high gain” switching, although the numbers are too low to be significant. Paca stands out because her switches at all five points (combined) amounted to less than 1 percent (0.7), a rate that was two to eight times less than that of her friends, even those who switched less. She did not switch at four of the five uncommon boundaries, whereas Isabel, Blanca, and Elli switched at four and Lolita switched at all five. It is un-likely that Paca’s inhibition was attributable to greater awareness of syntactic hierarchies on her part than on Elli’s, who produced the highest proportion of infrequent switches (5.6 percent). More plausibly, older children produced more infrequent switch types as they tackled more complex juxtapositions of syntactic categories, that is, they took more chances and got into more trouble as a result. The less experienced bilinguals had not yet achieved such intricate intersections of the two grammars, and they opted for the largest and most frequently switched units.Switching at sentence or clause boundaries was the logical result of the

way children were initiated into code switching. When they alternated Spanish and English for interlocutors who spoke different languages, usu-ally they completed a sentence or clause directed at one speaker before they addressed the other. The transition to intra-turn switching set the stage for intra-sentential switching. As they acquired the skills necessary to employ code switching for almost two dozen conversational strategies within their turn at speaking, they acquired sensitivity to more than two dozen syntactic boundaries within the confines of the sentence. The older girls took advan-tage of a broader assortment of intra-sentential switches to achieve varied and effective discourse, particularly in narratives.Narratives deserve special mention because they exposed another age-

related contrast: 2 percent of Paca’s switches, 8 percent of Isabel’s, 12 percent of Lolita’s, 16 percent of Blanca’s, and 63 percent of Elli’s switches appeared in narratives. Contrary to the expectation that narratives―because of their

Table 4Infrequent Syntactic boundary Switch Points

Paca(%)

Isabel(%)

Blanca(%)

Lolita(%)

Elli(%) Total N

Adjective phrasePronounPredicate adjectiveDeterminerPrepositionTotal switches (number)Percent of total

0000.70

2810.7

0.20.500.50.5

4241.7

0.51100.5

2053

1110.60.5

6304.1

1.41.401.41.4

1455.6

13 = 0.8%13 = 0.8%11 = 0.7%10 = 0.6%8 = 0.5%

1,685


informality―would be the leading source of switches, Elli was the only one who produced the majority of her code switches in narratives, at a rate four to 30 times more than the others. She enjoyed enthralling the younger chil-dren with spooky tales in which switches heightened the dramatic effect, for example:

. . . Uuuu! an’ en mi casa, when I was― (“in my house”.) cuando yo estaba durmiendo, (“when I was sleeping”) to me I saw unos ojo(-s) pega(d)o/h/ en la pared haciendo así. (“some eyes stuck on the wall going like this”) Uuuu my God when I saw that, lo/h/ pelo(-s) se me pararon así. (“my hairs stood up on me like this.”)

The inverse relationship between age and the frequency of switches in narratives in my data is in keeping with research on adult narratives from another bloque where “the occurrence of code switching is the norm in the majority of narratives” (Alvarez 1989: 376). Apparently, coming of age in El Barrio includes producing more narratives and switching frequently in them, a progression that was obvious in Paca’s development (see The Evolution of Paca’s Code Switching below).

3 Standards, Constraints, and Transfers

As the first row of Table 3 indicates, switches that adhered to the equivalence constraint (+ Equivalent), were in standard grammar (+ Standard), and absent Transfers (₋Transfer) ranged between 75 percent and 96 percent. The oldest girls, Blanca and Elli, produced the smallest percent of non-standard, non-equiva-lent switches (5 percent). The English dominance of Elli, Blanca, and Lolita was reflected in their syntactic violations, that is, they defied Spanish word order more than English, although never for more than 3 percent of their switches. Spanish-dominant Paca and Isabel had more problems with English word order than with Spanish; none of Paca’s switches violated Spanish grammar. The three youngest girls were responsible for 93 percent (220/236) of the non-equivalent switches. Differences in adherence to the constraints put an individual stamp on speaker styles.Lolita produced 43 percent (12/28) of the switches that manifested inter-

ference, or negative transfer. In her English switches, the transfer of Spanish prepositions was obvious, for example, prepositions imitated the Spanish en (“in,” “on”) to mean “at,” “in,” “on,” “by,” as in the following examples:

•“She was crying on the funeral.” •“I like that muñequita (‘little doll’) on black.” •“In the 22nd or the 23rd.” [re: dates] •“You’ll find out in the end of school.”

56 Spanglish

English influence on Lolita’s Spanish was apparent when she incorporated the English possessive ’s in “El beibi de papi’s amigo es así” (“My father’s friend’s baby is like that.”) This was a natural extension of her use of Spanish family titles in otherwise English sentences, as in “my papi’s (‘father’s’) book,” “my titi’s (‘aunt’s’) house,” and it did away with the repeated de prepositions that Spanish requires: el beibi del amigo de papi. On other occasions Lolita made obvi-ous efforts to avoid Spanish interference, for example, she stopped to re-word “It puts―it gets mushy” to avoid transferring the Spanish way of saying “it gets/becomes” (se pone literally “it puts itself” = “it becomes”) into English. De-spite the presence of transfers and non-standard forms in Lolita’s speech, and even though she broke with the equivalence constraint more than the others, Lolita enjoyed a reputation as a fluent bilingual on the block and in school.Isabel was failing in school, with reading and writing scores below grade

level in English and Spanish; no one voiced admiration for her bilingualism. Several aspects of her code switching shed light on her difficulties. Transfer (2.3 percent) and, especially, non-standard forms (19.8 percent) were more characteristic of Isabel’s speech than that of her friends. Her switches were 10 percent more non-standard than those of Paca, who was two years her junior. Most of those could be traced to developmental differences or to non-standard dialect rules. Isabel’s non-standard Spanish included regular conjugations of irregular verbs often found in young children’s speech, e.g., “ponieron” for pu-sieron (“they put,” third pl. pret.), and “cabió” for cupo, (third sing. pret. “fit”). In English, several features of PRE and AAVE recurred, such as, lack of subject and verb agreement (“she have,” “we was”), zero copula (“This the pintura” “paint”), lack of “do” in interrogatives (“Which one you chose?”), hypercor-rected comparatives (“more better,” “worster”), and “it gots” instead of “it has.” All the children employed similar constructions. What distinguished Isabel’s speech was their quantity, and some unique forms, for example:

• “Mi catarro yo tenía” instead of El catarro que yo tenía. (“The cold that I had.”)

• “¿Cuán/cuál hora tú vas”? instead of ¿A qué hora (tú) te vas? (“What time are you going?”)•“You should don’t say that.” • “Yo dició we was gonna talk from Paca,” instead of

Yo dije we were gonna talk about Paca. (“I said we were going to talk about Paca.”)

Sentences like these promote fears of “double semilingualism” (Skutnabb-Kangas 1984). In the last example, “dició” does not conform to the tense or per-son marking of the irregular dije (a typical developmental error), subject-verb agreement is violated in “we was” (a variable rule in AAVE and other working class dialects), and “from” is a translation of de, which can mean “from,” “of,” “about” (negative transfer). Despite the impression of large scale confusion, quantification proved that Isabel’s code switches were in standard English and Spanish and without negative transfers in the majority of cases (75 percent).


When switches that followed other dialect rules were distinguished from developmentally linked and unique forms in the non-standard category, over 90 percent of Isabel’s switches were grammatically well formed.A quantified analysis of Isabel’s speech proved that she did not depart as

radically from community norms as some glaring examples suggest. Still, her unique constructions, including the only switch within a word (“medioday” for mediodía “noon”), suggest that the presence of unique non-standard forms along with violations of the equivalence and bound morpheme constraints may prove to be a finer diagnostic of bilingual proficiency than analysis of constraints alone. Contrary to some critics’ claims, Isabel’s unconventional forms could not be blamed on simultaneous exposure to two languages in view of other crucial factors, some hereditary and some social. Isabel was an exception on the block, and only a detailed study by doctors, social workers, and speech pathologists―informed by linguistic knowledge―could have de-termined why her bilingual language acquisition differed from that of the 36 other children in her community.

The eVoLuTIon of PaCa’S CoDe SwITChIng

At six, Paca was just beginning to code switch but she conformed to the rules more than Isabel. She progressed from infrequent switches, mainly for quotes and easily insertable constituents, to more diverse and intricate switches. Dur-ing the first seven months Paca switched only twice in narratives, preferring to recount her short stories in Spanish. Reporting on the teacher’s discipline in her first grade class in Catholic school, she began to introduce English by quoting the teacher’s words:

ACZ: ¿Y la maestra? (“And the teacher?”)P: Pue/h/la maestra cuando le da a uno se empieza a riir [reír]

(“Well, the teacher when she hits someone she starts to laugh.”)ACZ: ¿Por qué le da? (“Why does she hit somebody?”)P: No, porque hacen algo malo, velá [verdad], y ella le da porque hacen algo

malo. (“No, because they do something wrong, right, and she hits them

because they do something wrong.”) Dipue [después] hace, “You should not do that!,” [laughs.] (“Then she does”) [shouting]ACZ: ¿Y te lo hizo a ti también? (“And she did it to you too?”)P: Nunca. Ella dice que yo soy “good girl.” ¿Tú no sabe(-s) lo que e/h/

“good girl?” Ella dice que yo soy “good girl” y tú sabe(-s) lo que e/h/ “good girl.”

(“Never. She says that I am ‘good girl’. You don’t know what ‘good girl’ is? She says that I am ‘good girl’ and you know what ‘good girl’ is.”)

ACZ: ¿Qué (e-)/h/ “good girl?” (“What’s ‘good girl’?”)P: Que yo me porto bien. (“That I behave well.”)

58 Spanglish

Paca’s ability to translate her teacher’s words was called upon often at home, and it made her aware of her own bilingualism and the linguistic limitations of others. She stopped to make sure that I understood her teacher’s positive evaluation of her behavior and unhesitatingly translated it for me when re-quested. In the following narrative she switches for a school-related loanword (“gym”) and then for a complete sentence that is a metalinguistic evaluation of her teacher’s Spanish. It displays her own bilingual ability, and makes effec-tive use of switching for a narrative coda:

Mi maestra―este―ella dice así: Ella dice en inglés que e/h/ pa(-ra) (e-)l lune/h/que vamos pa(-ra e-)l gym, y yo y yo le digo “E/h/lune/h/” a mami en e/h/pañol. Ella dice así: “Erloone erloone.” She don’t know how to speak good Span-ish. (“My teacher―um―she says like this: She says in English that it’s for Monday that we’re going to the gym and I and I say ‘It’s Monday’ to mommy in Spanish. She says [it] like this: ‘Erloone erloone’ ” [attempting Anglo pronunciation]).

Two months later Paca exploited code switching in more varied ways. When she described Vicky’s newborn she switched for (a) full sentences, (b) inde-pendent clauses, (c) subordinate clauses with and (d) without conjunctions, (e) an object NP, and (f) an adverbial phrase.

P’s mother: Vicky te puede cuidar. (“Vicky can take care of you.” [referring to upcoming school holiday]

P: Vicky me cuida. (a) She’s my babysitter. (“Vicky will take care of me”.)

A: You like Vicky?P: Yeah. She’s got a cute baby an’ (d) cuando ella va (a) (ha-)cer algo

dice, “Paca aguanta el beibi,” y yo aguanto (e) the baby. (c) Si tú no aguanta(-s) cabeza él te XXX cabeza, (c) because he’s like that. . . . “when she’s going to do something she says, ‘Paca hold the baby,’ and I hold”) the baby. (“If you don’t hold head he [unintelligible] head”) because he’s like that.

ACZ: Because what?P: The baby of Vicky (f) (es-)tá monguia (d) o.

(“is wobbly”)ACZ: i(Es-)Tá monguia(d) o! [laughing] ¿Tú lo cuida/h/?

(“He’s wobbly! Do you take care of him?”)P: Yo, yo, yo aguanto. Todo el día (b) when I see the baby I tell Vicky,

(b) “Lo puedo aguantar?” y ella dice “Sí,” (c) and I carry him. Then, (c) cuando se duerme, (b) I give it to Vicky. (“I, I, I hold. All day”) when I see the baby I tell Vicky, (“ ‘Can I hold him?’ and she says ‘Yes’,”) and I carry him. Then, (“when he falls asleep”), I give it to Vicky.

In the presence of her monolingual mother, the researcher, and a bilingual peer, Paca mixed Spanish and English more than usual, perhaps as a neutral-ization strategy to accommodate us all instead of choosing one language over the other (Myers-Scotton 1976).


As Paca’s contact with English-speaking and bilingual worlds intensified, she advanced from merely inserting quotations to imitating the code switch-ing of older fluent bilinguals, and her English improved at the expense of her Spanish. Except for “the baby of Vicky,” a word-for-word transfer into English of the Spanish possessive phrase el beibi de Vicky, the English portions were freer of errors than the Spanish. She left out some reflexive and object pronouns in Spanish, e.g., “[le] aguanto [la] cabeza,” “yo [lo] aguanto,” and she confused todos los días (“every day”) with “todo el día” (“all day long”). The de-velopment of Paca’s code switching included the three stages represented by three generations of PR immigrants in Long Island (Torres 1992): those who emigrated as adults (I), those brought to the US as pre-schoolers (II), and US born teens (III). She demonstrated a progressive loss of Spanish as she went from inserting obligatory switches, for example, for English quotations, like group I, to more purposeful and optional switches like the members of group II, and culminated in a mix of optional and obligatory switches, for example, for Spanish lexical gaps, like group III. Between her sixth and eighth birth-days, Paca advanced through three code switching phases―each of which was characteristic of a group with a greater degree of exposure to US society than the previous one. The pattern seemed to imply that she was on her way to becoming English dominant with a simplified Spanish.

ConCLuSIon

In their passage from children of immigrant puertorriqueños ra�sed as part of el bloque to NYPRs with a more encompassing pan-African and pan-Latino identity, members of the second generation broke traditional linguistic co- occurrence rules that predict that each interaction will be limited to either Spanish or English, or to standard or non-standard dialects. From a prescrip-tive grammarian’s point of view, or one which imposes fixed boundaries on linguistic codes, their speech might be judged as “mongrelization,” exciting fears of a complementary cultural mongrelization of the nation (Urciuoli 1985). From Urciuoli’s perspective of “bilingualism as practice” instead of bilingual-ism as fixed codes, NYPR code switching may be seen as part of an “alterna-tive form of resistance, not a deliberate ignorance of multicultural realities but a different and potentially more democratic way of apprehending them” (Flores and Yúdice 1990: 74).The code switching of el bloque’s children proved they were not semi- or

a-lingual hodge-podgers, but adept bilingual jugglers. They followed rules for what and where to switch that were shared by several Latino commu-nities, corroborating the syntactic hierarchy and constraints outlined by Sankoff and Poplack (1981). An older vs younger contrast that was linked to each group’s dominant language (younger = Spanish, older = English) surfaced in favorite switch boundaries, adherence to constraints, and lan-guage of the switch. English-dominant bilinguals favored short Spanish in-sertions that distinguished them from monolingual English speakers, and younger Spanish-dominant children―eager to demonstrate their increasing

60 Spanglish

command of English―made use of easy-to-insert English constituents. Both groups displayed their bilingual NYPR identity by continually touching base with Spanish and English.The girls switched mainly within sentence boundaries, like proficient adults,

but at a rate commensurate with their bilingual skills. Isabel, the child whom the schools labeled “language impaired,” produced the highest rate of full sentence switches (33 percent). The two oldest English-dominant bilinguals, Elli and Lolita, took the most risks by alternating grammars within sentence boundaries for 86 percent of their switches, and they ran afoul of the syntactic hierarchy postulated for Spanish-English code switching more than the oth-ers. The five most infrequently switched syntactic units constituted 5.6 per-cent of the oldest child’s switches, but less than one percent of the youngest (and least bilingual) child’s switches. Evidently, as bilingual children grow in age and proficiency, they relax and/or challenge the constraints. The only child who considered herself a “balanced bilingual” occupied an intermediate posi-tion: Blanca produced more full-sentence switches than her English-dominant friends, but less than the younger Spanish-dominant children. She also pro-duced less of the infrequent switch types than the English-dominant girls, but more than the younger children.Just as monolinguals need not “watch their ps and qs” when they feel at

ease, bilinguals may disregard the injunctions against switching nonequiva-lent segments of English and Spanish. Also, younger speakers may not have acquired some constraints yet. The speech of the two eldest girls was freest of transfers and non-standard forms, while the three youngest were responsible for nearly all word order violations (54/60). In no case did non-equivalence account for more than 6 percent of anyone’s switches.These patterns link language ability with the type and number of gram-

matical constituents that are switched in ways that are of interest to those who seek measures of bilingual proficiency, but reliance on isolated code switches or deviations from standard rules results in a distorted picture of a bilingual’s competence. Isabel’s speech contained unusual forms and syntactic violations, but her significant bilingual abilities, as evidenced in the bulk of her switches, should not be ignored. A quantified analysis of an extensive corpus pinpoints areas of verbal prowess as well as gaps which can benefit from intervention. Ultimately, each girl’s code switching made a personal bilingual-bicultural statement which was best understood when quantified data were interpreted in the light of ethnographic observations about the language history, bilingual behavior, and social status of each child.Over the 18 months of the initial part of this study, the elementary school-

ers acquired a more adult-like pattern of code switching in their narratives. Alvarez found that the bilingual PR adults studied by Poplack (1980, 1981a) switched from English to Spanish at the beginning of narratives “to call atten-tion to one’s membership in a bilingual speech community which recognizes the value of Spanish among in-group members” (Alvarez 1989: 385). Simi-larly, the children of el bloque switched into Spanish to acknowledge the home language’s value, while the consistent use of English as the base language re-flected the symbolic domination of the dominant society. Sadly, their bilingual


skills were disparaged within and beyond their community, and their “Span-glish” often became a source of embarrassment instead of pride.The narrator of “Not Neither,” cited at the beginning of this chapter, ends

by affirming her common heritage with the nationalist heroine Lolita Lebrón (Estéves 1984: 26):

. . .

We defy translation Ni tengo nombre (“I don’t even have a name”)Nameless, we are a whole culture once removedLolita alive for 25 years [in a US prison]Ni soy, pero soy Puertorriqueña como ella (“I’m not even, but I am

Puerto Rican like her”)Giving blood to the independent starDaily transfusions into the river of La Sangre Viva. (“The Living Blood”)

The “Spanglish” of el bloque’s children was the principal artery of their daily bilingual transfusions. Its grammar―particularly the constraints it honors and violates―alerts us to their participation in the process of transculturación (“transculturation”) (Ortiz 1947), i.e., a dominated group transforms the domi-nant culture in the process of transforming its own traditional language and culture. Individual code switching patterns exposed each girl’s vantage point in the NY-PR cross-cultural intersection, and communicated unique aspects of the process of growing up bilingual. No straight line could be drawn from the type of bilingual each girl was as a child to her linguistic profile as a young adult. Decisive factors had less to do with their acquisition of grammar, their code switching differences, or their parents’ desire or efforts to raise them bilingually, than with policies, institutions, and circumstances beyond their control.The lines from “Not Neither” in Tropical Rain: A Bilingual Downpour, by

Sandra María Esteves (Bronx, NY: African Caribbean Poetry Theater, 1984) are reprinted with permission.

noTeS

1. The author has since changed the opening of “Not Neither” to read: “Being Puertorriqueña-Dominicana, Boricua-Quisqueyana, Taino-Africana.” 2. “Portorra” is a common abbreviation of puertorriqueña. 3. Lipski’s list of categories does not include NPs, but some were tabulated in the “after preposition” category, which constituted one fourth (4.02 percent) of the “before and after preoposition” category (16.13 percent). 4. Lipski recorded radio call-ins. Poplack’s adults were interviewed by a researcher from the community, and el bloque’s children carried a tape recorder.

62 Spanglish

5. The number of switches in each category is followed by the percentage the cate-gory represents of all the code switches. 6. The absence of subject noun switches in narratives is not significant because they accounted for only 1.3 percent of the switches in casual conversation, and more record-ings of narratives would have elicited some. 7. Lipski (1985) and Poplack (1980) did not separate adverbs and adjectives from their phrasal complements. 8. Sankoff and Poplack (1981) argue that true code switching is limited when the syntax of the languages conflicts, but Myers-Scotton (1993b) disputes that view.

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―――. 1981a: Quantitative analysis of a functional and formal constraint on code switching (Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños Working Paper No. 2).

―――. 1981b: Syntactic structure and social function of code-switching. In R. P. Durán (ed.), 169 – 84.

Romaine, S. 1989: Bilingualism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Sankoff, D. and Poplack, S. 1981: A formal grammar for code-switching. Papers in Lin-

guistics, 14, 3 – 46.Skutnabb-Kangas, T. 1984: Bilingualism or not: The education of minorities. Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters.

Timm, L. A. 1975: Spanish-English code-switching: El porqué y how-not-to. Romance Philology, 28, 473 – 82.

Toribio, A. J. and Rubin, E. J. 1993: Code-switching in generative grammar. In Spanish in Contact, J. Jensen and A. Roca (eds), Amsterdam: Benjamin.

Torres, L. 1992: Code-mixing as a narrative strategy in a bilingual community. World Englishes, 11(2/3), 183 –93.

Urciuoli, B. 1985: Bilingualism as code and bilingualism as practice. Anthropological Lin-guistics (Winter), 363–86.

Woolford, E. 1983: Bilingual code switching and syntactic theory. Linguistic Inquiry, 14, 520–36.

Zentella, A. C. 1981a: Hablamos los dos. We speak both: Growing up bilingual in el Barrio. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

―――. 1981b: Language variety among Puerto Ricans. In C. F. Ferguson and S. B. Heath (eds), Language in the USA, London: Cambridge University Press, 218–38.

―――. 1981c: “ ’Tá bien, you could answer me en cualquier idioms”: Puerto Rican code switching in bilingual classrooms. In R. P. Durán (ed.), 109–32.

―――. 1982: Code switching and interactions among Puerto Rican children. In J. Amastae and L. Elías-Olivares (eds), 386 – 412.

slang, n. The grunt of the human hog (Pignoramus Intolerabilis) with an audible memory.

―Ambrose Bierce

Once asked by a reporter for his opinion on el espanglés―one term used to refer to Spanglish south of the border―the Nobel Prize-winner Octavio Paz is said to have responded: “Ni es bueno ni es malo, sino abominable.” Indeed, it is commonly assumed that Spanglish is a bastard jargon: part Spanish and part English, with neither gravitas nor a clear identity. It is spoken (or broken) by many of the approximately 35 million people of Hispanic descent in the United States, who, no longer fluent in the language of Cervantes, have not yet mastered that of Shakespeare.The trouble with this view is that it is frighteningly nearsighted. Only dead

languages are static, never changing. After the various forms of Chinese, En-glish is the second most widely spoken language around the world today, with 350 million speakers; Spanish is the third, with 250 million. In the Amer-icas, where English and Spanish cohabit promiscuously, Spanglish spreads effortlessly. “Tiempo is money,” intones an advertisement running on a San Antonio radio station. Musicians and literati use Spanglish without apology in songs, novels, poems, and nonfiction―often merely sprinkling in a few words, but also using a full-blown dialect. Even on the campaign trail, George W. Bush’s nephew, George P. Bush, can be heard at political rallies switching between Spanish, English, and, yes, Spanglish.Not surprisingly, Spanglish has become a hot topic. For some time, I’ve

been working on a lexicon of the language, and this semester I’m offering a course based on my research, “The Sounds of Spanglish.” In historical and geographic scope, it is, I believe, the first of its kind and has drawn about

The Gravitas of Spanglish

ilan Stavans

“The Gravitas of Spanglish” by Ilan Stavans was first published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 13, 2000. Used by courtesy of The Chronicle of Higher Education and Ilan Stavans.

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The Gravitas of Spanglish 65

60 students (unusual for a small liberal-arts institution like Amherst College). The buzz the course and the dictionary have created on National Public Radio and in newspapers around the globe has brought home to me just how much interest the subject of Spanglish arouses these days. But it also generates anxiety―and even xenophobia. In the United States, it announces to some people an overall hispanización of society; abroad, it raises the specter of U.S. cultural imperialism and the creation of a “McLengua.”But a language cannot be legislated. It is the most democratic form of ex-

pression of the human spirit. Every attack serves as a stimulus, for nothing is more inviting than that which is forbidden. To seize upon the potential of Spanglish, it is crucial to understand the development of both Spanish and English.Antonio de Nebrija, the first to compile a Spanish grammar, noted in the

15th century: “Siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio.” An imperial tool, indeed, with a clear-cut task: to spread the sphere of influence of the Catholic crown. But, as the ethnolinguist Angel Rosenblatt argued as far back as 1962, Spanish was never simply transplanted; instead, it adapted to the new reality. For more than 500 years, Spanish has twisted and turned in spontane-ous fashion, from the Argentine Pampas to the rough roads of Tijuana. Today, it is as elastic and polyphonic as ever. A person in Madrid can communicate with someone in Caracas, but numerous nuances―from meaning to accent and emphasis―distinguish the two.The verbal dimension of the Conquest is, I am convinced, a little-known

aspect of the encounter between Europe and the pre-Columbian world that ought to be analyzed in detail. For the Conquest involved not only political, military, and social colonization; it was an act of linguistic subjugation, im-posed on millions of Indian peoples who spoke such languages as Mayan, Huichol, and Tarascan in Mexico, and Arucanian, Guaraní and Quechua in South America. The Spanish language spoken today on the continent that ranges from Ciudad Juárez to Tierra del Fuego is an acquired artifact. Of course, the fact that Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Jorge Luis Borges wrote their poems and stories in Cervantes’s tongue doesn’t mean that they wrote in translation. Their Spanish was as much theirs as it was the property of Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, Miguel de Unamuno, or Federico García Lorca. But their language, as such, arrived in the Americas in far different fashion than Spanish came to the Iberian Peninsula. It is no coincidence that 1492, the annus mirabilis in Iberian history, when Spanish began to be standardized and the Jews were expelled, was also the year that Columbus, and the language of Iberia, sailed the ocean blue.It is in this period that Spanish became a language of power, a global lan-

guage with an army, a language through which Catholic Spain concentrated its strength and announced itself as a well-delineated nation to other coun-tries, spreading its world-view in northern Africa, Turkey, the Philippines, the Caribbean, and the Americas. But what was being imposed? The answer might surprise those critics of Spanglish who worry about linguistic impurity.It was also in 1492 that Nebrija, a respected scholar at the University of Sal-

amanca, published his Gramática la lengua castellana, the first grammar of the

66 Spanglish

Spanish language, and his Diccionario latino/español. Shortly after, around 1495, he came out with the Vocabulario español/latino. The climate was ripe in Spain not only for the consolidation of Castile and Aragon into a single Catholic empire, but also for a unifying tongue that would help centralize political and social power. The so-called Reconquista of Muslim-held territory in Spain, which had started in the 11th century, was finally complete. But to become one, a nation needs a set of symbols, a shared history, a centralized power structure―and a single, commonly understood language. Castilian Spanish became that language.By devoting himself to standardizing and cataloging the spelling, syntax,

and grammar of Castilian Spanish, Nebrija legitimated a language whose speakers had only recently become self-conscious about its use. Over a pe-riod of several centuries, the vulgar Latin spoken in the peripheries of the Roman Empire, which was different from the classical Latin of authors like Ovid and Seneca, had evolved on the Iberian Peninsula into various dialects. Those, in turn, had been gradually absorbed by one, Castilian. The language of the New World was also penetrating Iberian Spanish. For example, the 1492 Diccionario contained the Latin term “barca” for a small rowboat; the 1495 Vocabulario listed the Indian term “canoa,” from the Nahuatl, followed by the Latin definition.The consolidation of Spanish began a period of intense intellectual and ar-

tistic fertility. The 150 years that followed Nebrija’s work was the so-called Golden Age of Spanish arts and literature, of poets, playwrights, and novel-ists like Fray Luis de Leon, Santa Teresa de Jesús, Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, Calderón de la Barca, Luis de Góngora, and, especially, Miguel de Cervantes.The first full-length dictionary of the Spanish language appeared in 1611

(almost exactly in between the release of the two parts of Don Quijote de la Mancha, which appeared in 1605 and 1615). The Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española was put together by a lexicographer of the name Sebastián de Co-varrubias Orozco. Like Nebrija, Covarrubias was attached to the University of Salamanca, but as a student. Of his academic qualifications, we know only that he was a priest, a clerk, and a religious instructor. The dictionary was his sole work, but it is unclear how he came to produce it.For years, it was referred to in various sources as Etimologías, because of

the emphasis it placed on the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew origins of Spanish words. Covarrubias was also versed, although less competently, in French and Italian; but he knew nothing of Arabic, which had strongly influenced Spanish from the 10th to the 15th centuries. As most intellectual matters were at that time, the dictionary was also prepared under the shadow of the Inqui-sition, and the title page lists Covarrubias as a “consultor del santo oficio de la inquisición.”Covarrubias argued, in a note following the frontispiece in his book, that

he wanted Spain to catch up to the other nations of Europe. By royal decree, Italy and France had previously established official academies for the study of their own languages. (The Accademia della Crusca published its six vol-umes of a dictionary in 1612; the dictionary of the Académie Française, whose


mandate was “to purify” the French tongue, took shape from 1639 to 1694.) But Nebrija’s and Covarrubias’s dictionaries were printed privately, and they sold poorly.It wasn’t until 1713 that Juan Manuel Fernández Pacheco, Marquis of Vil-

lena, founded the Real Academia Española de la Lengua Castellana, which was given official approval by Philip V a year later. From its inception, the academia was intent on both institutionalizing the dialect of Castilian on the peninsula (as its very name makes clear) and safeguarding the purity of the language for posterity. It took 14 years―from 1726 to 1740―to produce the six volumes of the famously disappointing Diccionario de autoridades that were supposed to do that. The work’s limitations say much about Spanish character and history―and the Span�sh language.The original members of the academia were neither lexicographers nor

academics. They were devotees. Their motto, much ridiculed in modern days, was established as “Limpia, fija y da esplendor”―“clean, standardize, and grant splendor.” The word “limpia” cannot but invoke the concept of “lim-pieza de sangre,” purity of blood, which the Spanish Inquisition used to dis-tinguish between Old Christians and New Christians. The former made the nation proud; the latter (those Jews who, before and after the official expul-sion of Jews from Spain, ostensibly converted to Christianity, but practiced Judaism at home) had to be rooted out. The animosity against Jews, Muslims, and women, as well as the desire not to include rude terms and sexual innu-endoes, was represented in the dictionary’s pages. Definitions were substanti-ated with a quota of textual excerpts from established intellectual figures of the Golden Age. Above all, the dictionary strove to be a replica of its French and Italian models.Only in the past century, however, has Spain begun to reflect on its linguis-

tic heritage―if only halfheartedly. That is happening at a time when Spain is once again fraught with cultural anxiety. The advent of democracy in 1974, and the economic boom and social stability ushered in by the Socialist re-gime of Felipe González, have produced an era of fractured identity, as vari-ous groups, from Catalunya to the Basque country, promote their ancestral tongues as a ticket of autonomy. Increasingly, Catalan and Galician, which have much in common with Occitan and Portuguese, respectively, are recog-nized as separate languages in Spain. The fact that Castilian Spanish is still the official language has produced civil and legislative tension.Yet the soul-searching about the Spanish language has not extended to con-

sideration of its role as an instrument of colonial control. That is because Spain is mired in a symbolic battle with the United States. Still smarting from the 1898 loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to U.S. influence, the Span-ish take pride in the fact that their language is now the second-most-important tongue in the land of their former enemy. Noting Spain’s importance in the American past, King Juan Carlos proudly announced during the Quincenten-nial of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas that “España está al centro del pasado de los Estados Unidos.” That same year, Puerto Rico, in a nationwide referendum, established Spanish as the island’s official language―for which Spain awarded the Puerto Rican people the prestigious Príncipe de

68 Spanglish

Asturias prize for extraordinary achievement. And only a few months ago, the prize went to branches of the academia in the Americas, in recognition of their efforts to preserve the language of Nebrija.Small wonder that, in such an atmosphere, the melding of Spanish with

English in Spanglish seems threatening.Of course, English makes up the other part of Spanglish. The fact that

Shakespeare’s language has no official body like the Real Academia Española to protect it is reason to rejoice. Dictionaries have been produced by individ-uals unaffiliated with political causes, like Robert Cawdrey, Noah Webster, and, of course, Samuel Johnson―the insuperable Dr. Johnson―who remains a magisterial model.In many ways, Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, which first ap-

peared in 1755, followed the same pattern as the Spanish dictionary, using quotations from canonical figures to put a word’s usage in the proper context. In his introduction, Dr. Johnson noted that language was in constant mutation. Still, he said, his mission was to honor his country so “that we may no longer yield the palm of philology without a contest to the nations of the continent” and to give “longevity to that which its own nature forbids to be immortal.”But Johnson’s task was not to promote the world-view of a state or em-

pire. He was the quintessential individual. He argued against establishing an academy of the English language, lest “the spirit of English liberty” be hin-dered or destroyed. He believed the worst malady to afflict a language was spread by translators too prone to use foreign words, especially French, rather than colloquial alternatives. At the same time, he was open to foreign influ-ences, tracing words to Greek, Roman, and other etymologies, and allowing for neologisms.Even the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, by far the most reputed

lexicon in the English language, epitomizes individualism and openness. It was not an official group, but a university (and within it, Richard Chevenix Trench, then Dean of Westminster), that called in 1857 for a new dictionary to cure “the deficiencies of the language.” Work by hundreds of people around the world began in 1878, and the actual publication of “125 constituent fas-cicules” took place from 1884 to 1928. While the endeavor was dedicated to Queen Victoria, and early copies were presented to King George V and to the president of the United States, it was, by all accounts, a nonofficial effort by Oxford University and the Clarendon Press. And it took as its objective cat-egorizing words from English-language regions far and wide.The birth of Spanglish per se is not too difficult to place in this history.

From 1492 through the mid-19th century, the encounter of the Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic cultures produced a bare minimum of verbal miscegenation. The chronicles of conquest and conversion of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, Fathers Eusebio Kino and Junípero Serra, and many others, for example, were primarily targeted at the Iberian Peninsula. They were composed in Castilian Spanish and colored by few regionalisms.The linguistic picture changed dramatically in the 19th century in the re-

gion that is now the Southwestern United States. Between 1803, when Thomas


Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana Purchase, and 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed over almost one-third of Mexico’s land to the United States, Anglo arrivals created a dialogue between English and Span-ish, beginning a tentative merging of the two tongues.With the 1848 treaty, the Mexican people in the Southwest became, over-

night, Americans. Curiously, however, no mention was made anywhere in the document of the inhabitants’ madre lengua, although newspaper reports noted that Spanish was to be respected. Soon, however, English became the domi-nant tongue of business and diplomacy, although usage of Spanish in schools and homes did not altogether vanish. Then, with the Spanish-American War, and U.S. control over formerly Spanish colonies, the United States replaced the Spanish empire as a global power. The Spanish language was out, at least politically; English was in. Again, however, Spanish usage didn’t altogether cease; it was kept alive in areas like Miami and New York, which were becom-ing magnets for immigrants.Nevertheless, it was clear that the communication code was changing.

From 1901 until the end of the millennium, dictionaries of Anglicisms were published with more and more frequency all across the Hispanic world―a symptom of verbal cross-fertilization. Words like lasso, rodeo, amigo, mañana, and tortilla made it into English; mister and money into Spanish. Added to the mix, numerous Nahuatl words like molcajete (mortar), aguacate (avocado), and huipil (a traditional embroidered dress) are accepted by the Real Academia España as “Americanismos.”Out of this potpourri comes Spanglish―a vital social code, whose sheer

bravura is revolutionizing both Spanish and, to a lesser extent, English.There isn’t one Spanglish, but many. Issues of nationality, age, and class

make a difference. The multiplicity is clear in the United States, where the lingo spoken by Cuban-Americans is different from so-called Dominicanish (Nuyorican) Spanglish. Localisms abound. There are not only geographical differences (Istlos, for instance, is Spanglish for East Los Angeles, Loisiada is New York’s Lower East Side), but also ethnic ones (chale is a Chicano expres-sion of disagreement, chompa is Nuyorican for jumper, Y.U.C.A. stands for Young Urban Cuban American in Florida).“Ganga Spanglish,” as I’ve heard the jargon spoken by urban youngsters,

introduces other nuances, incorporating slang from other ethnic groups. Look at a sample of lyrics from the popular group Cypress Hill’s album Temple of Boom. Ebonics, Chicano Spanglish, and L.A. Spanglish are intertwined:

Don’t turn your back on a vato like me Cause I’m one broke motherfucka in need Desperate! What’s going on in the mente Taking from the rich and not from my gente Look at that gabacho sipping borracho from the cerveza He’s sipping, no me vale, madre Gabacho pray to your padre This is for the time you would give me the jale 4 and 3 and 2 and 1

70 Spanglish

This ol motherfucker, got him a gun Bla-on! I took one to the kneecap Things happened so fast now I dropped my strap Now I’m about to meet my maker I thought I had it all, figured it out for the paper No longer will I be runnin Last thing I heard was the fuckin GAT hummin

In Spanglish, numerous terms come from sports: los doubles (tennis), el corner and el ofsait (soccer), el tuchdaun (football), el nokaut (boxing). And then, of course, there’s Cyber-Spanglish, the cybernetic code used frequently by Internet users. Terms like chatear (to chat), forwardear (to forward), and el maus (computer mouse) are indispensable north and south of the Rio Grande, as well as in Spain and in the Caribbean.Here at Amherst, a few students and I did an experiment not long ago:

We invited four Spanglish speakers of different backgrounds (Brownsville, Tex., Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami) to meet for the first time; the only guideline was that they should not be formal, but communicate in a comfort-able way. The result was astounding: As soon as the participants familiarized themselves with one another, the conversation flowed easily, although the speakers often felt compelled to define some terms; within 15 minutes, a sense of linguistic community was perfectly tangible.Ebonics, or black English, provides an interesting comparative case study.

Expressions like “I own know what dem white folk talkin bout” and “Hey, dog, whass hapnin?” are common among African-American youth, especially in ghettos across the country. This form of communication follows its own grammar and syntax. It is, for the most part, a spoken language nurtured by oral tradition, even though the poets and novelists of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920’s and their successors have transcribed it. And there is little doubt that Ebonics is an intraethnic slang used by members of a minority group to establish identity. It dates back to the age of slavery, and, embraced particu-larly by poor people in urban centers, is marked by class.Spanglish, too, is often an intraethnic vehicle of communication, used in

the United States by Hispanics to establish empathy among themselves. But the differences with Ebonics are sharp. For one thing, Ebonics is not a product of mestizaje, the cross-fertilization of two perfectly discernible codes; Span-glish is. Spanglish is also not defined by class, as people in all social strata, from migrant workers to politicians, academics, and TV anchors regularly use it, both in the United States and south of the Rio Grande.Of course, the interchange between Ebonics and Spanglish has been strong,

especially in rap music, where Latino pop stars often imitate their African-American counterparts. In literary works like Piri Thomas’s 1967 memoir of a black Puerto Rican in Spanish Harlem, Down These Mean Streets, the hybr�d street register also comes through.But, in many ways, Yiddish (the word means “Jewish”) is closer to Span-

glish than Ebonics is. Like Spanglish, Yiddish was never a unified tongue, but a series of regional varieties (Litvak, Galitzianer, and so on). Moreover, while


both Yiddish and Spanglish started as intraethnic minority languages, both quickly became transnational verbal codes.Benjamin Harshav, in The Meaning of Yiddish, has chronicled the odyssey of

Yiddish from rejection to full embrace. The dialect was used by East European Jews from the 13th century until the 20th. Its linguistic sources were plenti-ful: Hebrew, German, Russian, Polish, and other Slavic languages. It was first known as a gibberish for women and children, looked down upon as unwor-thy of Talmudic dialogue by rabbis and the intelligentsia.Nevertheless, by the 19th century, a vast majority of poor, uneducated

Jews―male and female alike―in the so-called Pale of Settlement that in-cluded Poland, Lithuania, and Galicia were no longer fluent in Hebrew and spoke only Yiddish. Time had turned Yiddish from a jargon into a dialect and, finally, into a mature language. So, around 1865, Sh. Y. Abramovitch, the grandfather of Yiddish literature, made the decision to write his novels and pedagogical treatises in the language. He was followed, with growing self-confidence, by figures like Sholom Aleichem. Plays, stories, novels, poems, commentary, and translations were produced in Yiddish. In 1978, Isaac Bashe-vis Singer, a native of Poland and a New Yorker by choice, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his Yiddish works.Although Yiddish has been eclipsed, its impact is still felt. Today, we are

clearly witnessing a revolution in culture when the London Economist captions a fuss over mortgage rates “Home Loan Hooha,” or when The Wall Street Journal headlines a feature on student movements “Revolution, Shmevolution.”It seems to me that, although Latino and Latin American intelligentsia look

down on Spanglish, attitudes toward that language will change in a similar fashion. The reason is simple: Spanglish won’t go away. Instead, as time goes by, it will solidify its status. Indeed, it is already in the process of standard-izing its syntax. The question is no longer, What is Spanglish? It is, Where is it going? Will it grow into a full-blown language? Is it likely to become a threat to Spanish, or even to replace it altogether? (English, our lingua franca, is ob-viously not at stake.) None of that is impossible, although the transformation is likely to take hundreds of years.We are, clearly, at once witnesses and participants to radical change. Imag-

ine if, by a miracle, Miguel de Cervantes was given a copy of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. How many Americanisms in it might be utterly impenetrable to him? Even if Spanglish never seizes its chances fully, the future of Spanish―and of English―will be affected by it.The day may even come when a masterpiece of Hispanic identity, in order

to be fully appreciated by millions of people, not only in the United States, but around the world, shall be composed in the vernacular: Spanglish. Then it will be translated into English for the uninitiated reader.

In what language do we remember? Is it the language we use when we speak with friends and family in our everyday lives? Or does our choice of a language of memory involve a transposition, a translation in the literal sense of moving across: trasladar, “de un lado a otro”?

—Juan Flores, “Broken English Memories”1

TexTos ileGibles (unReaDabLe TexTS)

Puerto Rican literature and culture earned its place within Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean Studies after a long, and sometimes heated, debate. This debate centered around the ambiguous nature of Puerto Rican claims to nationhood, based on a cultural discourse that has produced a strong defini-tion of a national identity without having some of the basic and traditional elements of a sovereign status.2 Given its close contact with the United States, Puerto Rican cultural practices were not, simply put, considered to be strictly “Latin American” or “Hispanic” by scholars of these disciplines.While Puerto Rican Studies in the United States became for some critics

synonymous with studies of migration, boricua diasporic culture and writ-ing has had a very fragile relationship with Puerto Rican literature produced in the island. Examples of the frailty of these relationships are the contested reception of U.S. born writers such as Nicholasa Mohr and Esmeralda San-tiago in Puerto Rico, the parodies of island-based writers Ana Lydia Vega and Magali García Ramis featuring Nuyorican characters, and the debate around Rosario Ferré’s novels and essays in English.3

Boricua (Between) Borders: On the Possibility of Translating

Bilingual Narratives

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel

“Boricua (Between) Borders” by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel was published in None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era, edited by Frances Negrón-Muntaner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

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Boricua (Between) Borders 73

The study of Puerto Ricans as part of Latino Studies, a relatively young field when compared with Latin American and Caribbean Studies, poses yet another interesting problem―namely, how the Puerto Rican experience in the United States could be studied along Latino populations that cannot be considered internal migrations within a colonial network as Puerto Ricans are.4 This state of affairs has led critics such as José Quiroga to propose “Latino American” as a new category of study, a more productive intersection between North and South in the Americas that will break the tradition of “the North always providing the theory for the South’s cultural practice.”5One way to examine Puerto Rican literature’s liminal location is by re-

ferring to Tato Laviera’s book, AmeRícan.6 Rooted in the diaspora, this book of poems questions a central motif in Latin American racial discourse― “miscegenation”―by creating a Caribbean subjectivity in transit, produced in New York City, which established a broad array of relationships with other immigrant groups living in “El Barrio.” The text begins with a section entitled “Ethnic Tributes,” and it includes graphic and discursive representations of a wide variety of ethnic groups―such as Boricuas, Arabs, Blacks, Chinese, Cu-bans, English, Greeks, Irish, Italians, Jamaicans, Japanese, Jewish, Russians, and Spanish―challenging traditional links between nationality and territory by proposing a complex set of interactions among different ethnic groups liv-�ng �n the Un�ted States.The second section, entitled “Values,” includes key cultural and linguistic

Puerto Rican categories such as coffee, sports and race; the use of the phrase “ay bendito;” and the definition of a “jíbaro,” seen by many as the quintessen-tial symbols of Puerto Ricanness. The text invokes these categories to transform them in yet another element of a Latino and Rícan discourse that is, however, produced from another location, beyond the culture and language of the is-land, and without the nostalgic desire of coming back to recover an originary Puerto Rican identity.The final section of the book, entitled “Politics,” is an attempt to unify a

Puerto Rican past in the island with a present that needs to incorporate the diaspora as a dynamic element of contemporary Puerto Ricanness. The book ends by proposing a hybrid and transnational identity synthesized in two words that are used as titles of two poems: “Commonwealth” and “AmeRícan.” The first title refers to the political status of the island, and uses this ambigu-ous and debated concept to propose an identity that lives in between various limits: “i’m still in the commonwealth / stage of my life, observing / the many integrated experiences / we took everything / and became everybody else.”7The second term, “AmeRícan,” uses linguistic hybridization by fusing and

confusing the word used to refer to U.S. natives, “American,” with the word used to call Puerto Ricans living in the United States, “Rícan.” This reading de-pends heavily on Laviera’s performance, because he employs an intermediate pronunciation―typographically signaled by his interesting use of capitaliza-tion and a grammatical accent―that mixes Spanish and English, producing a neologism that sounds very similar to the phrase “I’m a Rican,” and also looks like a reconfiguration of the phrase “a Rícan me” following Spanish gram-mar: “a me Rícan” (un yo Rícan). This interlingual noun allows him to cre-ate a new national or ethnic name (in Spanish, gentilicio) that simultaneously

74 Spanglish

acknowledges his belonging to both Puerto Rican and American societies. As a result, “AmeRícans” are proposed as a new identity produced and defined in a context of continuous transit and transition: “AmeRícan, across forth and across back / back across and forth back / forth across and back and forth / our trips are walking bridges!”8I would also like to comment the poem―“Ay bendito”―included in the

second section of this book as an example of a text that even resists the bilin-gualism and translatability of most of the pieces included in the rest of the compilation. This is a text that explores the limits of signification of any lan-guage, as the narrative proposed in the poem is constructed by a series of fragmented expressions well known in the Puerto Rican colloquial dialect:, but that are literally impossible to translate into standard English:

oh, oh, ¡ay virgen! fíjese, oiga, fíjese. ay bendito. pero, ¿qué se puede hacer? nada, ¿verdad? ave maría. ah, si, ah, sí, es así. pues, oiga, s� es la verdad. pero, ¿qué se puede hacer? nada, ¿verdad? fíjese, oiga, fíjese. mire, mire. oh, sí, ¡hombre! oiga, así somos tan buenos, ¿verdad? bendito. ¡ay madre! ¡ay, Dios mío! ¡ay, Dios santo! ¡me da una pena! ay, si la vida es así, oiga. pero ¿qué se puede hacer? nada, ¿verdad? fíjese, oiga, fíjese. oiga, fíjese.9

“Ay bendito” is composed of “interjecciones” or verbal expressions that are used in moments of intense or sudden emotion. Interjections are basic gram-matical elements that convey a verbal message that is almost irrational or instinctive; they could be metaphorically conceived as emotional onomato-poeias. Translating this text, then, will go beyond finding the literal mean-ing of each word to identify and convey very specific cultural contents for each term. For example, the title of the poem is a short phrase―“Ay bendito”―that


would require a contextual explanation of how these two words incorporate a religious background into a social meaning that is very specific for Puerto Rican speakers.Therefore, it is surprising that Laviera is able to construct a narrative or

a poetic text that expresses a “feeling” or message closely linked to an acute sense of a subaltern―yet unique―identity among Puerto Ricans. The lyrical voice of this text expresses Puerto Rican resignation to the constant difficul-ties faced in everyday life. The use of interjections, however, links language to a very idiosyncratic use of verbal communication, while at the same time points out the ethnic appropriation of Spanish by a Puerto Rican community. In the context of the collection of poems―AmeRícan―this poem is included in the section entitled “Values,” which plays with the representation, translation, and re-signification of the core of Puerto Ricanness from the island to produce an identity that is portable, and functions as a dynamic element in contempo-rary cultural manifestations among “Nuyorícans,” Diaspo-Ricans, or Puerto Ricans living in the United States.10Taking into consideration how early on Laviera explores the limits of a

transnational and globalized identity, I would like to use this text as a point of departure to think about the “problematic” place of a Diaspo-Rícan litera-ture and to analyze the difficulties of reading some of these texts based on notions of disciplinary and linguistic purity, particularly academic contexts organized around a single language as a defining paradigm of ethnic and na-tional identities.11 I would like to think about the problems posed by a set of texts that question the foundational place assigned to language in literary studies and in other disciplines such as Ethnic, Latino/a, and American Stud-ies, translation departments, and in the cultural components within Migration Studies programs.In many cases, there is an implicit criticism of a hesitating or unstable

language as a main characteristic of Latino/a literature that is used as a pre-text not to study the intrinsic multilingual nature of many of these cultural productions. The untranslatability of some of these texts is also problemati-cal, since it suggests that there are limits to the globalized exchanges within a multicultural society, and that there are significant areas within contem-porary American cultures in the United States that cannot be easily ren-dered in English. Furthermore, many of these Latino cultural productions make us realize that linguistic hesitation or untranslatability cannot be un-derstood as incompetence or lack of control over communicative skills, but quite to the contrary, as a discursive strategy that forces us as readers to re-consider our basic notions about the relationship of language and cultural �dent�ty.12 What is at stake in this disciplinary debate is also the urgency of reconfiguring the field of cultural and literary studies, to make multicultur-alism mean a new way of reading, interpreting, and understanding cultural difference.I would also like to propose that Laviera’s text is an excellent example of an

“unreadable” literature. “Unreadability” is a common notion used to refer to Latino/a writing in a wide range of situations.13 As a professor of Latin Ameri-can literature, I have quite often experienced how the inclusion of Latino/a

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texts in courses is questioned based on disciplinary arguments―“can we con-sider Latino/a writings as a part of Latin American literature?”―or linguistic and pedagogical concerns―“in which language are you going to read/teach the text? are you using the ‘original’ version or a translation?” or “what are you going to do with all the spelling mistakes and/or the grammatical errors included in some of these texts?”These concerns frequently raise an even more difficult question, and that is

the lack of recognition of Puerto Rican and Latino/a writing and culture as a legitimate topic to be studied within U.S. college curricula.14 One of the main problems posed by these texts is their intrinsic bilingualism and bicultural-ism, because in many cases this contact or convergence of languages implies a process of continuous and reciprocal translation that goes against the basic definition of a Hispanic or American national literature. Thus, I would like to propose a critical analysis of the trope of translation, and the relationship between original and translated versions of some of these works.

TexTos inTraduCibles (unTranslaTable TexTS)

The fascination of translation, as Roman Jakobson suggested, is that it poses the central question of “equivalence in difference.”15 Sherry Simon has further noted that “[t]ranslation is not only an operation of linguistic transfer, but also a process which generates new textual forms, which creates new forms of knowledge, which introduces new cultural paradigms.”16 The question I explore here is, then, what happens when a bicultural/bilingual text becomes untranslatable?Puerto Rican and Latino writing are excellent cases to revisit traditional

definitions of translation and the relationship between an original language and a secondary language in Latino/American discourses. The text itself, for instance, can be seen as a bilingual narrative, and as such there is an exer-cise of constant translation that is fundamental to understanding its multiple levels of meaning. It could be said, then, that many Latino texts propose a place of linguistic articulation that could be located “beyond translation,” as the consistent interdependency of languages make some of these texts nearly untranslatable. If a text depends on the bilingualism of its audience, what hap-pens when the rendition in one language literally eliminates the interlinguistic structure of a text? It seems, then, that what Bruce-Novoa describes as “inter-lingual writing” in Latino texts requires a new conceptualization of diglosia, bilingualism, and translation:

These are pieces written in a blend of Spanish and English. They are not bilingual in that, in the best examples, they do not attempt to maintain two language codes separate, but exploit and create the potential junc-tures of interconnection. This results in a different code, one in which neither monolingual codes can stand alone and relate the same meaning. Translation becomes impossible, and purists from either language deny its viability. Monolinguals, from either side of the border, often react as if they were being personally insulted.17


In some of these texts the interaction of Spanish and English can be superficial―such as in the cases in which the author uses vocabulary from both languages―or it can be basis of the internal semantic and grammati-cal structure―such as Sandra Cisneros’s use of the diminutive in English to express affection in the same way it is done in Spanish, or the “calques” (lit-eral translations of Spanish idioms and colloquial phrases) in the works of Víctor Hernández Cruz studied by Frances R. Aparicio. An example of these “calques” are the literal translation of Spanish names, like when Hernández Cruz refers to his hometown Aguas Buenas as “Good Water,” or when a pop-ular saying is literally translated into English: “What doesn’t kill you gets you fat”18 (lo que no mata engorda). Juan Flores and George Yúdice also study the formation of a “border vernacular” that is attained by “the crossing of entire language repertoires,”19 as for example when Louis Reyes Rivera uses “sonrisa” and “sunrise” to create a new interlingual vocabulary in his poem “Problems in Translation.”Another relevant case is Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican/

Cuando era puertorriqueña, a text written and published, almost simultaneously, in Spanish and English. According to linguist Gloria D. Prosper-Sánchez, who studied both versions of the novel to compare the texts in lexical, phonologi-cal, and morphosyntactic terms, Santiago has native competence in academic English and colloquial Spanish. As a result, in the English version, the narra-tion is rendered in formal English, while the dialogues are translations from colloquial Spanish. In the Spanish version, the narration is a translation from the English text, and the dialogues represent: Santiago’s native command of colloquial Spanish.20 Therefore, in this case, both texts are an original version and a translation of a primary autobiographical narrative. Texts like Santiago’s could also be a paradigmatic example of those “other ways of knowing” that take place between languages and that critic Walter Mignolo has described as “b�languag�ng.”21The use of internal―and imperfect―translations in “El cuento de la

mujer del mar” (The Story of the Woman of the Sea) by Manuel Ramos Otero represents yet a different type of phenomena. This text narrates the final crisis of a love relationship between two immigrant men who create a story of a woman of the sea who is constantly traveling between different cities. Angelo, an Italian American, and his Puerto Rican lover invent two parallel characters―Vicenza Vitale and Palmira Parés―and each narrator adds a chapter to the life of this imaginary woman using their family histories and their personal experiences and cultural referents. The story of the woman of the sea―narrated in Spanish, English, and Italian by this couple living in New York City―becomes a pretext to postpone the ending of their dying love relationship.Due to the different cultural backgrounds of the main characters, internal

translation becomes a predominant gesture to this narrative, and fiction be-comes the lingua franca that keeps both narrative voices sharing a communi-cative space within the text. The narrator uses two strategies of translation in this story, which I would like to analyze here. The first one is to present imagination as a space of encounter and coincidence for the narrator and his

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lover in a terrain where they can continue communicating even though their relationship is in a moment of crisis. As the Puerto Rican narrator declares,

Contra la noche y el fuego de la yerba, contra la noche y la ventana abi-erta de nuestro cuarto en el Hotel Christopher, siempre uno llegando al otro como un amante que llega de repente de una tierra remota, y entre vino y amor comenzaba a contar misteriosamente de una mujer y del mar. . . . Amándonos en la zona de un inglés callejero.22[Against the night and fire of the grass, against the night and open

window of our room in Christopher Hotel, always one arriving on the other as a lover who suddenly appears from a remote land, between wine and love I/he* began to mysteriously tell the story of a woman and the sea. . . . Loving each other within the realm of our English from the streets.] (*The Spanish version is ambiguous here in terms of the subject of this phrase.)

Storytelling keeps Angelo and the narrator together throughout the story. It becomes the dialogic space that calls on them to come together, even though their love is gradually fading.Fantasy and imagination are like a space for a truce, as in the classical story

of One Thousand and One Nights, the (pre)text that postpones their final sepa-ration, produced either by death or the end of love, or by their disintegration as a couple of two migrant men who become exiled “en el amor como en las c�udades”23 (in love as in cities). Fiction is their only connection, and that is why the narrator insists on saying that “entre nosotros se alarga como un pu-ente invisible la Mujer del Mar”24 (between us the Woman of the Sea extends herself as an invisible bridge).The second strategy is the constant translation and transfer of the story of

the woman of the sea between narrative voices. This process of transposition sometimes results in the fusion of Palmira Parés and Vicenza Vitale in one single character that leads the life of both narrators:

Uno es tanta gente a la misma vez. Yo sólo puedo contar el cuento de la Mujer del Mar (la historia nunca antes contada de la poeta manatieña Palmira Parés) y Angelo sólo pudo contar “the story of the woman of the sea” (tanto escuchó la historia de Vicenza Vitale . . .: la viajera había iniciado el viaje en un puerto de Napoli, detrás de un pasaje del Vesubio, venía de los parrales de Giocavaran llena de polvo, inmóvil en la popa de un velero―“immobile . . . on the orange aft of a vaporous vessel,” contaba el amado inmóvil, atardeciendo―había atracado en Casablanca y en las Islas Azores había zarpado camino del mar a las Antillas; con otros campesinos del agua salada, en el agosto caluroso de 1913 llegó a San Juan). El orden de sus vidas iba diluyéndose en las palabras memo-riosas de los cuentos.25[One can be so many people at the same time. I can only tell you the

story of the Woman of the Sea (the story never told before of the poet from Manatí, Palmira Parés) and Angelo could only narrate “the story of the woman of the sea” (he heard Vicenza Vitale’s story so many times [. . .]: the traveler began her journey in a port in Naples, behind a passage


of the Vesuvius, she came from the vineyards of Giocavaran, covered with dust, immobile on the aft of a sailboat―“immobile . . . on the orange aft of a vaporous vessel,” the immobile lover narrated, as the sun was going down―the vessel docked in Casa Blanca and the Islas Azores, it had departed in route to the Antilles’s sea; with other sea water peasants she arrived to San Juan, on the hot August of 1913. The order of their lives was diluting in the memorious words of the stories.]

Ramos Otero includes different languages in his narrative without marking or separating them. In these quotes from Ramos Otero’s short story I am adding emphasis to distinguish the original languages of the text (English is in bold, Italian will be identified in italics, and Spanish as the predominant language is represented in regular typeface). In the story, the narrator translates, rather freely, Angelo’s phrases in English. It is noticeable that there is not a desire to achieve an “exact” transfer of ideas; instead, an approximate exchange of narratives is proposed.This “imperfect translation” happens again in other parts of the story:

“ ‘my father was born in Providence, in an old house inhabited by witches, purified by fire, and the aged memories of a remote Italy, full of dust . . .’ (una casona habitada por brujas purificadas en la hoguera y los recuerdos añosos de una Italia . . . de la que sólo quedaba la imborrable virilidad de las mujeres y el mudo secreto de los hombres)” [“ ‘my father was born in Providence, in an old house inhabited by witches, purified by fire, and the aged memories of a remote Italy, full of dust . . .’ (an old house inhabited by witches purified by fire, and the aged memories of a remote Italy . . . from which the only remains were the indelible virility of women and the mute secret of men)].26

The process of translation is not exact, but not because it is imprecise, rather because the narrator chooses different selections of both narratives that coin-cide only partially. The Spanish version translates some of what Angelo has just said in English, but it includes more of what has already been quoted from his story of Vicenza Vitale. In this text the translation from one language to another is consciously inaccurate, as if to suggest that meanings can be partially exchangeable, or as if the narrative voice carelessly chose portions of each of the two versions, producing a single story composed of the interlock-ing pieces of the narrations in different languages.In this sense, both versions of this story are simultaneously original texts

and translations of the final story of the woman of the sea. This gesture of free and imprecise transferences reminds us of the way in which Walter Benjamin describes the task of the translator:

Even when all the surface content has been extracted and transmitted, the primary concern of the genuine translator remains elusive. Unlike the words of the original, it is not translatable, because the relation-ship between content and language is quite different in the original and the translation. While content and language form a certain unity in the

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original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its contents like a royal with ample folds.27

On other occasions each lover uses his own cultural referents to reconstruct the story produced by the other narrator, to translate the story from the narra-tor’s discourse to the listener’s imaginary:

“Él me hablaba todavía de aquella Vicenza Vitale . . . y yo sólo veía puer-tos grises y mares solitarios, él hablaba de esas arrugas profundas (‘sol-cari profondo . . .’) como si fueran surcos de una Italia remota quel exilio había convertido en callejones, y yo sólo veía un cementerio de islas, las tumbas verdes de Atlántida” [He would speak to me about that Vicenza Vitale . . . and I only saw gray ports and lonely seas, he spoke about those deep wrinkles (‘deep furrows . . .’) as if these were furrows of a remote Italy that exile had transformed in alleys, and I only saw a cemetery of islands, the green tombs of Atlantis].28

In this case, the reader witnesses a translation that parallels an interpreta-tive process that makes possible or impossible the communication between these two storytellers and lovers. By incorporating each narrator’s refer-ents, the rendition of the story from one language to another also implies the transference and exchange of cultural imaginaries, so, as Joseph Pivato suggests about the process of translation, “[t]he same events are recalled in a different language and each time are changed.”29Thus, fiction becomes an alternative “native tongue” that allows a commu-

nication that is not based on the commonality of referents that characterizes those who speak the same tongue and/or dialect, but that instead is based in a process of constant interpretation and acknowledgment of diverging cultural referents. Imagination provides a space in which translation becomes a “site for dialogue,”30 instead of pretending to be a transparent mode of transmis-sion of ideas between speakers. This new “mother tongue” is not a regional or specific code, but a broad and mutating discourse, as polysemic and bound-less as that sea crossed by Palmira/Vicenza to complete their endless travels. Fiction forges a fragile community of emotions and imaginaries that transcend conventional or unique interpretations, so in this creative realm it is possible to promote a deeper and more intimate communication than the one that usu-ally takes place between the speakers of the same national language. In this case, sharing imaginaries seems to be a stronger bond than the one supplied by a common language.

de boriCua a laTino: ReConfIguRIng LaTIno/aMeRICan STuDIeS

I would like to conclude by returning to one of the first concerns posed in this chapter by raising the following question: In which kinds of academic contexts do these Rícan and Latino texts become “readable”? If, as Mignolo


points out, “changing linguistic cartographies implies a reordering of episte-mology,”31 what kind of productive relationship can Latino/a literature establish with Departments or Programs of English, Spanish, Comparative Literature, Translation, Linguistics, American, Ethnic, Latin American, and Migration Studies?One of the most interesting features of this corpus of texts is its resistance

to be read, as a consequence of the difficulty posed by the multilingual na-ture of many of their referents. As Julio Ramos points out, Latino intellectu-als and critics redefine the traditional limits of Latin American Studies as a discipline by destabilizing notions such as linguistic purity, or the fixed and univocal relationship with a place of origin or a native tongue.32 Thus, Rican and Latino/a writing problematizes one of the key coordinates in the defini-tion of a national and ethnic identity by proposing a variable and mutable relationship between the subject and his/her native tongue.33 By destabilizing the connection between a mother tongue and a national or cultural identity, these texts question the epistemological paradigms of many of the language and literature departments, as well as some of the limits separating disciplines or programs, such as English, American Studies and Latin American Studies, among others.34By the same token, due to the interstitial nature of its production, Latino/a

literature questions the geopolitical limits and the imaginary cartographies of what is currently defined as Latin American Literature. Thus, it is no sur-pr�se that The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature ends with two sec-tions devoted to Latino Literature: “Chicano Literature” and “Latin American (Hispanic Caribbean) Literature Written in the United States.”35 Ana Pizarro also includes Chicano literatures in her anthology América Latina: Palavra, Lit-eratura e Cultura. Volume 3: Vanguarda e Modernidade.36 Even though Rícan and Chicano literatures and cultures are still the two foundational traditions in the configuration of contemporary Latino Studies, it has become increasingly evident that there is a U.S. pan-Latino culture and discourse that makes pos-sible a common set of questions that I would like to explore in the final section of this chapter. For example, it can be said that the limits of Latin Americans Studies have been actively reconceived as a result of the dialogues currently established between Latin American and Latino/a literatures and cultures. Furthermore, Latino bilingualism has also functioned as a provocative coun-terpoint to rethink Latin American cultural traditions by studying linguistic contacts as a crucial element in many canonical texts, such as Comentarios re-ales, Los ríos profundos or Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony, not to mention the debates on bilingual education in México, Paraguay, and Perú. At the same time, Latino Studies has reconfigured some of the most recent definitions of Caribbean and Puerto Rican Studies by making possible new questions on the significance of location, displacement, and multiculturalism that redefine the limits of cultural practices and traditions.On the other hand, as a result of the internal bilingualism and the constant

work with internal and external translations, Latino texts also explore some of the problems posed by translations as a discipline. For example, many of these works incorporate more than one language, or are published in both

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monolingual versions of English and Spanish. In some cases the same authors do the translations of their work (Esmeralda Santiago and Rosario Ferré, for example).37 In these cases the difference between the original and the trans-lation becomes problematic, because in some of the monolingual versions there are sections that are translated from another language while others function as a narrative with native competence. The existence of multiple works that are all original versions, or the emergence of texts that are partly original versions and partly translations, could pose an interesting set of questions in translation and comparative literature departments or programs, since many of them legitimate their field of study by stressing their usage and analysis of the “original” versions of many literary texts. What happens when we have more than one original version of the same narrative, and when each version proposes a different set of meanings depending on the language in which they are rendered or even remembered?Moreover, Latino/a literature poses a question that can be crucial in the

revitalization of the relationship existing between literature and linguistic de-partments. By questioning the privilege given to linguistic purity and the use of a standard language, Latino/a literature brings forward a whole new set of studies on the usage of popular language,38 as well as on the incorporation of orality and colloquial variants of both Spanish and English, so linguistic read-ings become crucial to study and interpret many of these ethnic narratives. Linguistic competence, code-switching, and linguistic registers all become pro-ductive areas of study to unravel the complexity of these texts.Latino/a literature also reassesses the relationship between sociological

studies of migrant populations and the study of their cultural productions. More than refurbishing the traditional readings of literature from a sociologi-cal perspective, these writings make evident the need to reconceptualize the way we define the limits between fields of study. Interdisciplinarity or multi-disciplinarity is not only crucial when addressing ethnic cultures,39 but �n th�s case it seems that one thing Latino/a literature points out is the importance of disciplinary “contact zones”―to remember here Mary Louise Pratt’s illumi-nating concept―as a condition of possibility for new questions.40 For exam-ple, Saldívar uses Chicano Studies to consider “the effects of shifting critical paradigms in American Studies away from linear narratives of immigration, assimilation, and nationhood.”41 Sommer also proposes that a “bilingual aes-thetic” can broaden the areas of research of a variety of intellectual fields.42Finally, Frank Bonilla explores the productive “interdependence” between

Latino/a and Latin American Studies by rethinking the usefulness of inter-disciplinary approaches.43 I would like to suggest that the comments I am in-cluding in this last section are all a result of the questions that arise when we explore new readings that are made possible by the disciplinary contacts promoted by Latino/a writing, due to its marginalized position within the American and Latin American curricula. I am not questioning the need for Latino/a studies as a separate field of study, because it is clear there are both institutional and academic needs for these kinds of programs.44 More than op-posing the goals and objectives of each one of these disciplines to define a spe-cific object of study45 or trying to find a home department or program to study


Latino/a culture in all its complexity, I am proposing that one way to take ad-vantage of the “floating” nature of this cultural production is by exploring the new questions that these texts propose, especially those related to the variable and dynamic relationship existing between language and subjectivity.The incorporation of Latino/a literatures into a broad range of courses and

programs can become an opportunity to promote interdisciplinary dialogues as a crucial element in the reconfiguration of academic institutions and dis-ciplines from within. Perhaps, by looking at the disciplinary, linguistic, and cultural contacts, and sometimes the oppositions that these writings make pos-sible, we could begin to explore the multiple translatability that Latino/a litera-ture promotes and calls for within American and Latin American universities. Beyond the academic world, Latino cultural productions―along with other ethnic and minority discourses present in many U.S. creolization and melting pots―push the limits of the working notion of a multicultural and globalized identity. In this context, unreadability and untranslatability become, more than a source of isolation or anxiety, an invitation to share real and fictional imagi-naries as a point of departure to explore “equivalence in difference.”46

noTeS

I would like to thank Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui for providing insightful comments and suggestions on a previous version of this article. 1. Juan Flores, “Broken English Memories: Languages in the Trans-colony,” in From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press, 2000), 56. 2. Ramón Grosfoguel, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, and Chloé S. Georas, “Introduc-tion: Beyond Nationalist and Colonianist Discourses: The Jaiba Politics of the Puerto Rican Ethno-Nation,” in Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism, ed. Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Ramón Grosfoguel (Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press, 1997), 10–19; Jorge Duany, The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move. Identities on the Island and in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 15–18. 3. For more information, please see the debate between Nicholasa Mohr and Ana Lydia Vega about her short story “Pollito chicken” (in Vírgenes y mártires (cuentos), [Río Pie-dras: Editorial Antillana, 1983], 73–79) included in Mohr’s essay entitled “Puerto Rican Writers in the United States, Puerto Rican Writers in Puerto Rico: A Separation Beyond Language” (The Americas Review 15, no. 2 [Summer 1987]: 87–92); and the discussions on bilingualism and Puerto Rican literature in the case of Esmeralda Santiago (Gloria D. Prosper-Sánchez, “Washing Away the Stain of the Plantain: Esmeralda Santiago y la con-stitución del relato autobiográfico bilingüe,” in Actas del “Congreso en torno a la cuestión del género y la expresión femenina actual.” [Aguadilla: Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1998], 131–138) and Rosario Ferré (“On Destiny, Language, and Translation, or, Ophelia Adrift in the C. & O. Canal,” in Voice-Overs. Translation and Latin American Literature, ed. Daniel Balderston and Marcy E. Schwartz [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002], 32–41). Magali Gar-cía Ramis also published a controversial text on the motives for Puerto Rican migration, entitled “Los cerebros que se van, los corazones que se quedan” (in La ciudad que me habita [Río Piedras: Editorial Huracán, 1993], 9–19). This same uneasy dialogue between

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Puerto Rican literature and culture produced in the island and the U.S. was the central topic in the Second Annual Conference of the Puerto Rican Studies Association held in San Juan Puerto Rico in September of 1996. 4. Ramón Grosfoguel, “The Divorce of Nationalist Discourses from the Puerto Rican People: A Sociohistorical Perspective,” in Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism, 66–70. 5. José Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 8. Frances Aparicio has also noted Diana Tay-lor’s coinage of the term “Latin(o) America” in her book Negotiating Performance (1994) to integrate Latin American and U.S. Latino cultural spaces and practices (Frances R. Aparicio, “Latino Cultural Studies,” in Critical Latin American and Latino Studies, ed. Juan Poblete [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003], 3–31). 6. Tato Laviera, AmeRícan (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1981). 7. Ibid., 80. 8. Ibid., 94. 9. Ibid., 45. 10. Jorge Duany has noted that, “scholars cannot even agree on a common termi-nology to refer to Puerto Ricans in the United States. The papers for the 1996 Puerto Rican Studies Association Conference in San Juan suggested the following alterna-tives: Neo-Rican, Nuyorican, Niuyorrican, nuyorriqueño, mainland Puerto Rican, U.S.-born Puerto Rican, Boricua, Diaspo-Rican, and even Tato Laviera’s curious neologism AmeRícan―but never that hyphenated mixture, Puerto Rican-American” (The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002], 28). 11. See Walter Mignolo, “Bilanguaging Love: Thinking in Between Languages,” in Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality Subaltern Knowledge and Border Thinking (Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 222; Doris Sommer, “EI contrapunteo la-tino entre el inglés y el español: notas para una nueva educación sentimental,” Revista Iberoamericana 66, no. 193 (October–December 2000): 866; Julio Ramos, “Genealogías de la moral latinoamericanista,” in Nuevas perspectivas desde/sobre América Latina: el desafío de los estudios culturales, ed. Mabel Moraña (Pittsburgh, PA: Instituto International de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2002), 224. 12. This is one of the main arguments to devalue bilingual speakers who use code-switching during spontaneous speech. This view of alternation of linguistic codes as a deviation that “indicated a speaker’s inability to separate the two languages at her or his disposal” is now recognized as a “functional linguistic behavior which demon-strates the speaker’s ability to manipulate the grammar and lexicon of two languages at the same time” (Holly Cashman, “Language Choice in U.S. Latina First Person Nar-rative: The Effects of Language Standardization and Subordination,” Discourse 21, no. 3 [Fall 1999]: 132–50). This same view is presented by Lipski in his essay entitled “Spanish-English Language Switching and Literature: Theories and Models,” The Bilingual Re-view/La revista bilingüe 9, no. 3 (September–December 1982): 191–212, and in Ana Celia Zentella’s foundational book, Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997). 13. I use “unreadable” here as the “unintelligible,” in the sense proposed by Butler �n Gender Trouble: “To what extent do regulatory practices of gender formation and divi-sion constitute identity, the internal coherence of the subject, indeed, the self-identical


status of the person? To what extent is ‘identity’ a normative ideal rather than a descrip-tive feature of experience? And how do the regulatory practices that govern gender also govern culturally intelligible notions of identity? In other words, the ‘coherence’ and ‘continuity’ of ‘the person’ are not logical or analytic features of personhood, but, rather socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility” (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York: Routledge, 1990], 16–17). I propose extending Butler’s reflection on gender to the ways in which ethnic identity is constructed within American and Latin American interpretations of Latino cultures. 14. See Frances R. Aparicio, “Reading the ‘Latino’ in Latino Studies: Toward Re-Imagining Our Academic Location,” Discourse 21, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 5, 15; Nina Scott, “The Politics of Language: Latina Writers in United States Literature and Curricula,” Melus 19, no.1 (Spring 1994): 57; Margaret Villanueva, “Ambivalent Sisterhood: Latina Feminism and Women’s Studies,” Discourse 21, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 49; Marcus Embry, “The Shadow of Latinidad in U.S. Literature,” Discourse 21, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 78; Frances R. Aparicio and Susana Chávez-Silverman, “Introduction,” in Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad, ed. Frances Aparicio and Susana Chávez-Silverman (Ha-nover, NH: Dartmouth College, 1997), 14; Pedro Cabán, “The New Synthesis of Latin American and Latino Studies,” in Borderless Borders. U.S. Latinos, Latin Americans, and the Paradox of Interdependence, ed. Frank Bonilla et al. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 203; Suzanne Oboler, “Anecdotes of Citizen’s Dishonor in the Age of Cul-tural Racism: Toward a (Trans)national Approach to Latino Studies,” Discourse 21, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 25. 15. Roman Jakobson, quoted in Sherry Simon, “Rites of Passage: Translation and its Intents,” The Massachusetts Review 31, no. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1990): 97. 16. Ibid., 96–97. 17. Juan Bruce-Novoa, “Spanish-Language Loyalty and Literature,” in Retrospace: Collected Essay on Chicano Literature Theory and History (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990), 49. This topic has sparked the interest of cultural critics and linguists. Frances Aparicio calls this interaction of English and Spanish common in Latino text a “tropicalization” of North American poetic discourse (“On Sub-Versive Signifiers: Tropicalizing Language in the United States,” in Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad, 204–5), while Juan Flores and George Yúdice refer to this process of intercultural transferabil-ity as “Transcreation” (“Living Borders/Buscando América: Languages and Latino Self-Formation,” in Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity [Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993], 219–20). John Lipski, on the other hand, has approached this same topic as a linguistic issue and has proposed the existence of a “bilingual grammar” (William Luis, “Latin American (Hispanic Caribbean) Literature Written in the United States,” in The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, Volume 2: The Twentieth Century, ed. Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker [Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 208). I use Bruce-Novoa’s definition because it refers directly to the problem of translation that I am analyzing in this section of the chapter. 18. Frances R. Aparicio, “On Sub-Versive Signifiers: Tropicalizing Language in the United States,” in Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad, 203–6. 19. Flores and Yúdice, “Living Borders/Buscando América: Languages and Latino Self-Formation,” 221. 20. For more information, see Gloria D. Prosper-Sánchez, “Washing Away the Stain of the Plantain: Esmeralda Santiago y la constitución del relato autobiográfico bilingüe,”

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�n Actas del “Congreso en torno a la cuestión del género y la expressión femenina actual.” [Agua-dilla: Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1998], 131–138. 21. Walter Mignolo, “Bilanguaging Love,” 264. 22. Manuel Ramos Otero, “El cuento de la mujer del mar,” in Cuentos de buena tinta (San Juan: Instituto de Cultura, 1992), 219–20. 23. Ibid., 221. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 213–14; All emphases are mine. 26. Ibid., 226–27. 27. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 75. 28. Manuel Ramos Otero, “El cuento de la mujer del mar,” 226. 29. Joseph Pivato, “Constantly Translating: The Challenge for Italian-Canadian Writ-ers,” Canandian Review of Comparative Literature 14, no.1 (June 1987): 69. This link between a vital experience and the language in which it is recalled or narrated is also explored by Edward Said in his autobiography entitled Out of place: A Memoir [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999], 4) and by Esmeralda Santiago in her introduction to Cuando era puertor-riqueña (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), a self-translation of her autobiographical narra-t�ve When I was Puerto Rican ([New York: Vintage Books, 1994], xv–xvii). In both cases the contention is that for the exiled or migrant narrator some experiences occur in a particu-lar language, and that problematizes the process of producing a monolingual account of their lives. I explore this topic in more detail in my article entitled “Bitextualidad y bilingüismo: reflexiones sobre el lenguaje en la escritura latina contemporánea,” Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 12, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 19–34. Ramos Otero’s writing, however, proposes the formation of one single narrative between two different narrative voices and explores how the process of intermingling of languages and imagi-naries can produce a space of commonality that promotes a communication that tran-scends the limits of the native or national tongues (“El cuento de la mujer del mar”). 30. E. D. Blodgett, “Translation as Dialogue: The Example of Canada,” in Cultural Dialogue and Misreading, ed. Mabel Lee and Meng Hua (Broadway, Australia: Wild Peony, 1997), 149. 31. Mignolo, “Bilanguaging Love,” 247. 32. Julio Ramos, “Genealogías de la moral latinoamericanista.” Paper presented at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Princeton University, April 1998. 33. Martínez-San Miguel, “Bitextualidad y bilingüismo,” 29. 34. In “Capitalism and Geopolitics of Knowledge,” Walter Mignolo extends this question to include the location from which knowledge is produced by proposing a comprehensive comparative history of the ideological and epistemic foundations of Latin American and Latino Studies in the United States to point out the problematic re-lationship with studies on Latin American culture conducted in Latin America. One of his most interesting proposals is the connections he establishes between Latino scholars and intellectuals in Latin America, because they both live immersed in the political and cultural practices they study (in Critical Latin American and Latino Studies, ed. Juan Poblete [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003], 43). 35. See Luis Leal and Manuel Martín-Rodríguez, “Chicano Literature,” in The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, Volume 2: The Twentieth Century, 557–86;


William Luis, “Latin American (Hispanic Caribbean) Literature Written in the United States,” 526–56. 36. See Ana Pizarro ed., América Latina: Palavra, Literatura e Cultura, Volume 3: Van-guarda e Modernidade (São Paulo: Editora da Unicamp, 1995). 37. Rosario Ferré reflects on the difficulties she has faced when translating her own works in her essay “On Destiny, Language, and Translation, or, Ophelia Adrift in the C. & O. Canal,” in Voice-Overs. 38. See Frances R. Aparicio, “La vida es un Spanglish disparatero: Bilingualism in Nuyorican Poetry,” in European Perspectives on Hispanic Literature of the United States, ed. Genvieve Fabre (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1988), 147; Cashman, “Language Choice in U.S. Latina First Person Narrative, 135; William Luis, “Latin American (Hispanic Caribbean) Literature Written in the United States,” 540. 39. Frank Bonilla, “Rethinking Latino/Latin American Interdependence: New Know-ing, New Practice,” in Borderless Borders: U.S. Latinos, Latin Americans, and the Paradox of Interdependence, 222, 227. 40. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (Lon-don: Routledge, 1992). 41. José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berke-ley: University of California Press, 1997), 1. 42. Sommer, “El contrapunteo Latino entre el inglés y el español,” 866. 43. Bonilla, “Rethinking Latino/Latin American Interdependence,” 221–28. 44. See Juan Poblete, ed., Critical Latin American and Latino Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 45. Cabán, “The New Synthesis,” 206–12. 46. Jakobson, quoted in Simon, “Rites on Passage,” 97.

la lengua es la ametralladora de la libertad―Tato Laviera1

Tato Laviera makes his role as poet clear in the first poem of his first collection of poetry. In “para ti, mundo bravo” of la carreta made a U-turn (1979), he states “I am nothing but a historian / who took your actions / and jotted them on paper” (13). For Laviera, el pueblo y su gente are the subjects of his poetry and from where the most authentic culture emerges. He feels that it is his duty, as a Nuyorican poet, to document that culture. As is the case for many poets, the word is at the center of his creation, his creativity. However, in the case of La-viera, a Puerto Rican born in Santurce and raised in New York City, language takes on an important and political role. Frances Aparicio has identified four major poetic moments in the metalinguistic discourse of Latino poetry: “bi-lingualism as conflict; the dismantling of institutionalized forms of discourse; the redefining of literacy; and Latino language(s) as a source of empower-ment” (“Language” 58). What makes Laviera’s poetry so unique, powerful, and exceptional is that all four major poetic moments are present.In an interview, Laviera tells how he became a poet:

So in May of 1960 I was Jesús Laviera Sánchez, and in September, three months afterward, when I started classes here [in New York], I was Abraham Laviera. That affected me a lot. That’s when I decided to be a writer, to go back to my name. When I became a writer, I said “I don’t want to go back to either Jesús or Abraham”; I used my nickname, Tato. (“Interview” 83)

Laviera’s choice not to use either Jesús or Abraham, but Tato, reflects his atti-tude toward his choice of language. Laviera does not choose between Spanish or English. His personal reality and the reality of his people, the Nuyoricans,

¡¿Qué, qué?!—Transculturación and Tato Laviera’s Spanglish Poetics

Stephanie Álvarez Martínez

“Transculturation and Tato Laviera’s Spanglish Poetics,” by Stephanie Álvarez Martínez, was pub-l�shed �n Centro. Courtesy of The Center for Puerto Rican Studies and Stephanie Álvarez Martínez.

88

Qué, qué?! 89

is not one of either/or. He opts instead for a mixture of the two, and displays a vast range of vernaculars in between the two dichotomous languages. Laviera observes:

Bilingualism is not only between English and Spanish; it’s a universal situation. It may refer to urban English in Spanish form . . . it’s a Span-ish with an English tonality, with an English spirituality, it’s a Spanish urbanized. . . . It’s an accent in English, it’s an accent in Spanish, it is Spanish with an English accent and with urban Black tonalities. (“Interview” 81)

In his collections, one can identify at least seven different linguistic registries, which he combines in endless varieties. These include:

1. Puerto Rican Spanish Vernacular2. Urban/African-American English Vernacular3. Formal/Standard Spanish4. Formal/Standard English5. Afro-Spanish Vocabulary and Grammatical Constructions6. Nuyorican Spanglish7. Other Latino Spanglish Vernaculars

Just as the choice to use his nickname, instead of Jesús or Abraham, was a conscious act of freeing himself from linguistic constraints, so is his decision to employ all the languages at his disposal and to mix them as he sees fit. With this act, Laviera assumes the role of historian in order to recover the often lost and forgotten voices of his community. His community speaks Spanglish, and he, as a voice of the community, will write in Spanglish. There are no translations, no glossaries at the end of the book, no italics or quotation marks to indicate a foreign word. No words are foreign for Laviera, and he makes no apologies for his Spanglish. He acknowledges and overcomes the anguish that Gloria Anzaldúa describes in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. She writes, “Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Span-ish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accom-modate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate” (81). Laviera’s Spanglish constructions legitimize the language, and therefore, the people who use it. For these reasons, Véro-nique Rauline refers to the poet as “a linguistic activist, [because] Tato Laviera does not only voice the linguistic confrontation, but the power of words as a source of our imprisonment but also of our liberation” (162). Anzaldúa her-self reflects on the importance of this act of legitimization and recalls, “when I saw poetry written in Tex-Mex for the first time, a feeling of pure joy flashed through me. I felt like we really existed as a people” (82). This existence is exactly what this poet/historian wishes to capture. As Juan Flores aptly notes, “Laviera is not claiming to have ushered in a ‘new language’. . . . Rather, his intention is to illustrate and assess the intricate language contact experienced by Puerto Ricans in New York and to combat the kind of facile and defeatist

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conclusions that stem so often from a static, purist understanding of linguistic change” (Divided 176). As the Nuyorican poet Miguel Algarín observes, in true transculturating fashion, the Nuyorican poet is “the philosopher of the sugar cane that grows between the cracks of the concrete sidewalks” (9).Spanglish permeates throughout all of Laviera’s work, which includes a

number of unpublished plays, and four collections of poetry, all published by the Latino publishing house Arte Público Press: la carreta made a U-turn (1979),2 ENCLAVE (1981), AmeRícan (1985), and Mainstream Ethics (ética cor-riente) (1988). La carreta made a U-turn takes René Marqués’ 1953 production of La carreta as its point of departure.3 Marqués play, La carreta, descr�bes the typical displacement of the Puerto Rican jíbaro4 due to the politics of “Op-eration Bootstrap.”5 In the play, Doña Gabriela and her family move from the countryside of Puerto Rico to the streets of San Juan to the hostile Anglo metropolis, New York City. For Marqués the only possible redemption for Doña Gabriela, and those like her, is a return to Puerto Rico. Flores observes that in Marqués’ play “the ‘oxcart,’ guiding symbol of the play and an abid-ing reminiscence of abandoned national roots, must be restored to its natural place in a world uncontaminated by inhuman modernity and incompatible foreign values” (Divided 169).Laviera’s oxcart, however, opts not for Puerto Rico, but instead makes a

u-turn and stays in New York, just as so many Puerto Ricans did and still do. Laviera himself refers to this collection as the fourth act of the Marqués play (“Interview” 81). The first section of la carreta made a U-turn, titled “Metropo-lis Dreams,” directly references the last act of Marqués’ play, “La metrópoli.” Laviera’s metropolis, not unlike Marqués’, portrays a harsh New York reality, filled with scenes of hunger, cold, poverty, drugs, abandoned buildings, sub-ways, and homelessness. One may read the second section of U-turn, “Lois-aida Streets: Latinas Sing,” as what became of the displaced Doña Gabrielas in New York.6 These Latinas portray hope, sadness, love, freedom, rhythm, and, above all, survival. The third and last section of this collection, titled “El Arrabal: Nuevo Rumbón,” suggests a new path for the Nuyorican that returns to the cultural richness of Puerto Rican popular culture. This popular culture, the product of transculturation, according to Laviera is African at its root, and reflected best in the bomba, plena, and décima. Unlike Marqués, La-viera sees the possibility of such a return to Puerto Rican culture not in the physical return to the island, but instead the poet calls for a new transcultura-tion between the popular culture of the Island and that of New York. Laviera’s “nuevo rumbón,” or new transculturation, allows Nuyoricans to challenge the acculturating forces of Anglo society.Just as in la carreta made a U-turn, ENCLAVE begins in English and ends in

Spanish while filling the pages in between with Spanglish, moving between languages and mixing them with great ease. The very title of this second col-lection indicates Laviera’s linguistic aptitude. It can be seen as a possible refer-ence to the enclave of Puerto Ricans in New York, and one can also interpret enclave as en clave, in a code or to the beat of the clave.7 All of these definitions, however, apply and thereby demonstrate Laviera’s capacity to use language in order to portray a unique worldview. Again divided into three sections,

Qué, qué?! 91

“Feelings of One,” “Oro in Gold,” and “Prendas,” Laviera presents “a gallery of cultural heroes whose every essence is adaptation and survival within the enclave that allows for freedom of identity and expression” (Kanellos “Intro-duction” 3). Here the transculturation of Puerto Rican culture in New York called for in his first collection has taken effect and has given the enclave its unique place and flavor in the metropolis.In Laviera’s third collection, AmeRícan, Laviera proposes and defines a new,

more humane America. Just as Laviera proposes in the two previous collec-tions, the African and Indigenous are the humanizing factors and principal creators of a transcultural Puerto Rican culture. In AmeRícan, Lav�era suggests the need for a new humane America, one in which the “Puerto Rican, Hispanic, ethnic or minority [acts] as the important catalyst in American culture as a whole, the presence that humanizes America, helps her to grow and flourish” (Kanellos “Introduction” 3). While still presenting and documenting a vast array of cultural values to his fellow Nuyoricans, he hopes to reach “beyond the New York enclave. He seeks to stake a claim for Puerto Rican recognition before the whole U.S. society, especially as Puerto Ricans are by now clustered in many cities other than New York” (Flores Divided 194). He challenges the United States to integrate these humanizing Puerto Rican values.Laviera’s last collection, Mainstream Ethics (ética corriente), takes on a simi-

lar tone. In this collection, while still faithful to his role as “chronologician,” and “wordsmith” (“poet” Mainstream 25), he boldly states that Latinos are the mainstream; migration, bilingualism, Spanish, English, injustice, foreign invasion, religion, freedom, and poverty, among others, make Latinos main-stream. As Nicolás Kanellos accurately observes, “It would be futile to search for . . . waspish ideals in this book . . . we all can and do contribute to the com-mon ethic” (“Introduction” 3). Furthermore, “it is not our role to follow the dictates of a shadowy norm, and illusive mainstream, but to remain faithful to our collective and individual personalities. Our ethic is and shall always be current” (4).In all four collections, however, the very language and linguistic variety of

his poems mirror all of Laviera’s themes. Moving from English to Spanish, to urban English, to Spanglish, to Puerto Rican “que corta” vernacular, he creates a linguistic cosmovisión that reflects all of his values and hopes for the future. A cosmovisión of linguistic transculturation that reflects the transculturation of the people, where languages are not static, but ever evolving, mixing, collid-ing, and, of course, creating. Laviera’s poems demonstrate the “proceso dolo-roso” of transculturation that Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz coined to describe Cuban culture. This process takes on three phases, as Ortiz defines it; acculturation―the partial acquisition of another culture; deculturation―the partial loss or displacement of a previous culture; and neoculturation―the creation of new cultural phenomena (Contrapunteo 96).8 Take for instance La-viera’s poem “my graduation speech:”

i think in spanish i write in english . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

92 Spanglish

tengo las venas aculturadas escribo en spanglish abraham in español abraham �n engl�sh tato in spanish “taro” in english tonto in both languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

ahί supe que estoy jodίo ahί supe que estamos jodίos english or spanish spanish or english spanengl�sh now, dig this: hablo lo inglés matao hablo lo español matao no sé leer ninguno bien so it is, spanglish to matao what i digo iay virgen, yo no sé hablar! (la carreta 17)

At first glance, it seems that the poetic voice is caught in a world of confu-sion, a world in which Spanish and English clash, leaving the poet and the community without any language. The placement of this poem within the collection is important. Located in the first section of la carreta made a U-turn, “Metropolis Dreams,” it is preceded and followed by depictions of a cruel New York. A New York of drugs, death, cold, and abandoned buildings―el arrabal. However, this poem apparently points to another brutal reality: loss of language and the failure of the education system. The reference to his name, Abraham, reflects that defining moment in Laviera’s life upon his arrival in the United States when a teacher changed his name: The very moment that made Laviera a poet out of his need to reclaim his name.However, just as Laviera comes to realize that neither his Spanish given

name―Jesús―nor his adopted English name―Abraham―will suffice, the same is true of his language choice. Neither English nor Spanish will do. Nevertheless, a solution exists: the acceptance of Spanglish as his language. The very title, “my graduation speech,” is indicative of this. His graduation may be read as the realization and acceptance of Spanglish as his language. “Matao” or not, Spanglish is his language and he will not make any excuses about it. The placement of the poem within the collection points to this con-clusion. Not only is it the first statement on language, but while the four pre-vious poems are mostly in English, with the exception of a sprinkling of a few Spanish words, “my graduation speech” is followed by a roller coaster ride of movements without warning between a range of English(es) and Spanish(es), which leads ultimately to the creation of a true Spanglish text. Placed in the center of the first section of his first collection, depictions of a

Qué, qué?! 93

brutal and ugly New York precede and follow the poem. The placement, then, would also seem to reveal the survival skills and creativity of the Nuyoricans who, surrounded by such despair and poverty, are able to not just survive, but also create, among other things, an entirely new language of their own. That language, Spanglish, the result of the Nuyoricans’ resistance to hegemonic acculturating forces, proves that transculturation can be a resistance strategy. As Aparicio observes “Language for Latinos in the U.S. is not merely a philo-sophical idea nor an intellectual luxury. It is a matter of survival, of life and death” (“Language” 59).This linguistic condition leads the poet to comment on the relations be-

tween the languages within the Nuyorican community in all of his collections. The ties between the languages directly reflect the world of acceptance, nega-tion, loss, uprooting, imposition, and transfer that the community has lived both on the Island and in the metropolis. Take for instance Laviera’s stance on the Spanish language. Although Laviera enthusiastically embraces Spanglish, the poet in no way abandons Spanish for Spanglish. Quite the opposite, La-viera sees in Spanish the strength to endure, and he is determined to preserve the language. Laviera observes in the poem “spanish”:

your language outlives your world power. but the english could not force you to change the folkloric flavorings of all your former colonies makes your language a major north and south american tongue. . . . (AmeRícan 33)

As Aparicio notes, in “spanish” “Laviera does not personally identify with the historical reality of Spanish as an imposed language” (“La vida” 157). How-ever, there is little doubt that Laviera is not aware of the imposition of Spanish by the first colonizers. What is curious is that he nevertheless does not reject the language. Perhaps, the reason for this may be that he sees in Spanish the same capacity for survival and creativity that Spanglish demonstrates. The key to this strength resides in Spanish’s more than one thousand years of transcul-turation. Thus, for Laviera, the Arab, African, and Indigenous influences make Spanish unique:

the atoms could not eradicate your pride, it was not your armada stubbornness that ultimately preserved your language it was the nativeness of the spanish, mixing with the indians and the blacks, who joined hands together, to maintain your precious tongue, just like the arabs, who visited you for eight hundred years, leaving the black skin flowers of andalucía, the flamenco still making beauty with your tongue . . . (“spanish” AmeRícan 33)

94 Spanglish

However, Laviera expresses frustration over the fact that Spain does not want to recognize the particular Spanish of the United States, perhaps because of the further transculturation taking place.9 He pleads:

. . . it was the stubbornness of the elders, refusing the gnp national economic language, not learning english at the expense of much poverty and suffering, yet we maintained your presence, without your material support Spain, you must speak on behalf of your language, we wait your affirmation of what we have fought to preserve. ESPAÑOL, one of my lenguas, part of my tongue, I’m gonna fight for you, i love you, spanish i’m your humble son. (“spanish” AmeRίcan 33)

Ironically, Laviera chooses to express his ideas on Spanish in English, thus further emphasizing the hybridity of his culture. He doesn’t need to address Spanish in Spanish, the reader knows that Laviera is capable of writing in standard/formal Spanish and in case one didn’t know, Laviera follows the poem “spanish” with “mundo-world” written in the so-called standard/formal Spanish to make it clear. A second interpretation of the use of English in the poem could lead one to conclude that if Spain does not speak on behalf of their language, it could ultimately disappear.10Attacks on the language of Nuyoricans, however, are not limited to Spain.

Perhaps the most painful attacks come from Puerto Ricans themselves. Per-formance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña accurately observes that “bicultural Latinos in the United States . . . and monocultural citizens of Latin America have a hard time getting along. This conflict represents one of the most pain-ful border wounds, a wound in the middle of a family, a bitter split between lovers from the same hometown” (47). Such conflict is beautifully displayed in “brava,” one of Laviera’s best expressions of bilingualism and the tension that language(s) can cause. As Rauline notes, “The poem starts with a tight separa-tion between the two codes to illustrate the lack of understanding, or rather the unwillingness to understand” (156). Brava reflects:

they kept on telling me “tú eres disparatera” they kept on telling me “no se entiende” they kept on telling me “habla claro, speak spanish” they kept on telling me telling me, telling me and so, the inevitable my span�sh arr�ved “tú quieres que yo hable en español” y le dije

Qué, qué?! 95

all the spanish words in the vocabulary, you know which ones, las que cortan, and then i proceeded to bilingualize it, i know yo sé that que you know tú sabes que yo soy that i am puertorriqueña in english and there’s nothing you can do but to accept it como yo soy sabrosa proud ask any streetcorner where pride is what you defend go ahead, ask me, on any streetcorner that i am not puertorriqueña, come dίmelo aquί en mi cara offend me, atrévete, a menos que tú quieras que yo te meta un tremendo bochinche de soplamoco pezcozá that’s gonna hurt you in either language, asί que no me jodas mucho, y si me jodes keep it to yourself, a menos que te quieras arriesgar y encuentres and you find pues, que el cementerio está lleno de desgracias prematuras, ¿estás claro? are you clear? the cemetery is full of premature shortcomings. (AmeRίcan 63 – 4)

Anzaldúa terms the anxiety and frustration expressed by “Brava” over re-peated attacks on her native tongue as “linguistic terrorism”(80). In discussing linguistic terrorism Anzaldúa writes “if you really want to hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity―I am my language” (81). “Brava” makes the same connection instantly, and one is not sure if she is lashing out because they are attacking her poor Spanish or be-cause they offended her by saying she is not Puerto Rican. Never in the poem is it stated that someone said she was not Puerto Rican, but “brava” corre-lates the attack on her language as an attack on her ethnic identity. Notice that the first few lines only address her language, and she is relatively calm until the tension explodes as she states, “Tú sabes que yo soy that / i am puertor-riqueña in / english and there’s nothing / you can do but to accept / it como yo soy sabrosa” (AmeRícan 63). Despite the fact that she proceeds to bilingualize it and use very specific Puerto Rican vocabulary to stress not just her ability to speak Spanish, but her Puerto Ricaness, she emphasizes “i am puertorriqueña

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in / english . . .” (AmeRícan 63). Thus, Laviera here, as in “spanish,” reaffirms the hybrid nature of Puerto Ricaness: a Puerto Ricaness that lives in either lan-guage, and in both languages.In “spanish,” Laviera underscores such hybridity on the island by giving

emphasis to “the nativeness of the spanish / mixing with the indians and the blacks” (AmeRícan 33). For the poet, the non-European roots of the language are the key to linguistic transculturation. Just as the Africans and Indigenous made the particular Spanish of the Americas unique, Puerto Ricans and other Latinos who come from these transcultural traditions transform both the Span-ish and English of the U.S. Nevertheless, at the same time Laviera is aware that transcultural representations are anything but a harmonious mestizaje. Apari-cio observes “la tensión entre el lenguaje popular y las expectativas creadas por la mentalidad europeizada en cuanto al uso ‘correcto’ del español es una de las problemáticas básicas que preocupa tanto a los escritores hispanos el los Estados Unidos como a sus coetáneos en América Latina” (“Tato Laviera” 8). Laviera reflects on these linguistic prejudices in the poem “melao”:

melao was nineteen years old when he arrived from santurce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

melaίto his son now answered in black american soul english talk with native plena sounds and pr�m�t�ve urban salsa beats

somehow melao was not concerned at the neighborly criticism of his son’s disparate sounding talk melao remembered he was criticized back in puerto rico for speaking arrabal black spanish in the required english class

melao knew that if anybody called his son american they would shout puertorro �n engl�sh and span�sh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

dual mixtures of melao and melaίtos spanglish speaking son asί es la cosa papá (Mainstream Ethics 27)

Here Laviera challenges the idea of the purity of any language, as both lan-guages, English and Spanish, are transformed by non-European elements. Melao’s Santurce Spanish was too black for teachers in Puerto Rico, and his exposure to this prejudice does not allow him to feel shameful of his own

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son’s language.11 However, the description of Melaíto’s speech as a “disparate sounding / talk” may cause some confusion as to whether that which draws censure from the barrio is Melaíto’s Spanish or his English. Given the last line of the poem, “así es la cosa papá,” most likely it is both. Clearly, Melaíto’s En-glish has been transformed just as Melao’s Spanish was. The standard/formal English is transformed first by “black american soul,” but Melaíto adds his own flavor of “native plena sounds / and primitive urban salsa beats” (“melao” Mainstream 27). The very language Laviera employs in “melao” demonstrates this as Juan Flores aptly notes that “though the narrative voice is in English, Spanish words, sounds and meanings burst through the monolingual seams; every shift in geographic and biographical reference undermines the ‘official’ status of either language standard. Close and repeated reading reveals a ver-nacular Spanish subtext that explodes at the end” (“Broken” 347). Two key words underscore this point: “disparate” and “son.” Hidden in the seeming English of the poem, these words, when read in Spanish, add a new dimension to the poem. Is Melaίto’s talk disparate as in different or disparate as �n atroci-dad? Is it a different kind of Spanish or a different kind of English? Or rather, an atrocious Spanish or an atrocious English? Or both? Or all four? When Laviera writes “dual mixtures/of melao and melaίto’s/spanglish speaking son,” does he refer to “son” as in child or son as in music?12 Indeed, Laviera seems to indi-cate all of the above. The hidden meanings reflect the undeniable transcultura-tion that has occurred in the language(s): a hispanized English, an anglicized Spanish, or rather Spanglish. Underscoring these transformations are the very names used in the text, which again highlight the non-European roots of such cultural renovations. The name Melao, which is the very Caribbean pronuncia-tion of melado, or sugar cane syrup, is a strong reference to the island’s history of slavery in connection with sugar production, the very industry that Ortiz uses as a point of departure in his creation of the neologism, transculturación.This emphasis on non-European roots as the basis for the rejection of lin-

guistic acculturation is further evidenced in the poem “asimilao”:

assimilated? qué assimilated, brother, yo soy asimilao, asί mi la o sί es verdad tengo un lado asimilao. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

but the sound LAO was too black for LATED, LAO could not be translated, assimilated, no asimilao, melao, it became a black spanish word but . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

how can it be analyzed as american? asί que se chavaron

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trataron pero no pudieron con el AO de la palabra principal, dénles gracias a los prietos que cambiaron asimilado al popular asimilao. (AmeRίcan 54)

Thus the “AO” of asimilao, Melao, and even Melaíto becomes the linguistic symbol for not only resistance to acculturation, but also creative neocultura-tion. Both reside in the African component of Puerto Rican culture, on the Island and in the metropolis.Laviera’s transculturating philosophy, therefore, is clear and appropriately

conveyed by “esquina dude:”

. . . nothing is better than nothing, bro i integrate what i like, i reject what i don’t like, bro, nothing of the past that �s the present �s sacred everything changes, bro, anything that remains the same is doomed to die, stubbornness must cover all my angles, bro, y te lo digo sincerely . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . i know you understood everything i said, i know you don’t need a bilingual dictionary, what i said can cut into any language, this is about your life . . . (AmeRícan 58–59)

The “esquina dude” verbalizes with the need for change in the form of trans-cultural syncretism for survival. Furthermore, because this philosophy is ex-pressed through the voice of a street hustler, it becomes evident that for the poet transculturation takes place at the level of popular culture, in the barrios, and this culture is first and foremost an oral culture. As Frances Aparicio re-flects, “Más que una reacción en contra de los criterios europeizados de la lit-eratura occidental, la lengua oral, que deviene en lenguaje poético, representa una aproximación al problema de la identidad personal y cultural del hispano en los Estados Unidos” (“Nombres” 47).The poem “doña cisa y su anafre” reinforces this clearly. Laviera, in an in-

terview remarks, “the poem ‘Doña Cisa y su anafre’ defines me as a Puerto Rican. That poem and that experience was my transition from the jíbaro to New York. . . . It is there I express the combination between the jíbaro, the language, and New York. That is the total coloring, the rainbow of my identity. When I realized that, everything came together and I went on from there” (“Interview” 84). How does a poem about a woman selling bacalaítos define Laviera as a Puerto Rican? First, it demonstrates the power of orality on the popular level. Ana Celia Zentella, who has done extensive studies regarding the language(s) of New York barrios, asserts that for Nuyorican artists “the pervasive influence

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in their work is that of the oral tradition, which may have been received by di-rect means such as the telling of family stories and traditional lore or through the influence of the radio, which many refer to as crucial in their artistic devel-opment” (Growing Up 13). For this reason, not surprisingly, Laviera elevates a street vendor to the class of poet. In examining the title of the poem, it appears that Laviera does consider the street vendor a poet as seen in the use of the word “anafre.” Here, it seems that perhaps Laviera cleverly plays with the Spanish words anafe (a portable kitchen) and anáfora (the poetic technique of repetition). Doña Cisa’s anáfora is her constant repetition of the word “bacalaí-tos” to attract clientele.13 The very name of the vendor, Doña Cisa, also appears to be another clever play with words. Doña could be read as another reference to the Doña Gabriela of Marqués’ La carreta. This is true especially if one con-siders that the name Cisa itself may be read as the Spanish prefix “cis-” mean-ing over here or acá, and therefore Doña Cisa may mean “the lady over here,” or in this case the “Doña de acá.” Laviera writes of Doña Cisa:

. . . dándole sabor al aire reumático creando sin vanidad al nuevo jíbaro que ponía firmes pies en el seno de américa quemando ritmos africanos y mitos indígenas . . . (la carreta 74)

Doña Cisa, then, like Laviera himself, recreates, or transculturates, the jíbaro in New York through her own poetry. A street vendor, she is elevated to the role of the poet because she, like Laviera, feeds the hungry barrio culture:

doña cisa no refunfuñaba, no maldecía el anafre gritaba de alegría cuando el rasca rasca rasca que rasca dientes jíbaritos, chúpandose las bocas mordiéndose los dedos del sabor olor bacalaítos fritos color oro dignidad. (la carreta 75)

Laviera, again indicates such a transcultural act as normal for the Puerto Rican when he emphasizes:

. . . gritaba doña cisa,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

escogiendo el camino n� regular n� suave ni cósmico pero el camino-carrito-cultural del pensamiento típico. (la carreta 75)

Here, Laviera’s Doña Cisa chooses her path, which, unlike Marqués’ Doña Gabriela, is to stay in New York. The choice to stay, then, is not forced upon her, but rather typical. Here, Laviera replaces the jíbaro symbol of the carreta,

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the oxcart, with the carrito, the shopping cart, being pushed up and down the streets of New York displaying the “the nuevo rumbón.”14 Again, this new path is the path the Nuyorican creates through transculturation and is clearly seen in the juxtaposition of the thoroughly Puerto Rican food bacalaítos with the American capitalist symbol of the shopping cart. The new path that shows how Puerto Ricans can and do create their own unique Nuyorican culture through ingenuity and persistence.The jíbaro, poetry, and music, for Laviera, are inseparable. All three form

part of the rich Puerto Rican oral tradition:

derramando décimas con lágrimas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

el cantor de las montañas sacaba el lo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

que congaba las tetas de cayey salía el le . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

de jorge brandon salía el lai lo le lo lai lo le lo lai . . .15 (“la música jíbara” la carreta 73)

While the author explores all three in his poems, and all are interrelated, Afro-Puerto Rican music forms the base of much of his poetry. The poem “the africa in pedro morejón,” reveals Laviera’s ideology in his use of Afro-Puerto Rican rhythm: “and the mambo sounds inside the plena / so close to what i really understand / . . . / musically rooted way way back / before any other language” (la carreta 57). Therefore, for a poet for whom language and the word are more than mere tools of composition, just as many hip-hop artists would say, the beat determines the rhyme and not the other way around. Given Laviera’s em-phasis on the African roots of Puerto Rican culture, this should not be surpris-ing. Laviera evidently indicates the importance of music before the word on the basis that Africans who came to the Caribbean were from many different areas of Africa and didn’t speak the same language, and so their primary form of communication became music. The emphasis, then, on rhythm and music is not done simply “en un anhelo de descubrir raíces ni de exaltar la tradición;” Laviera does so “sencillamente porque éstas son estructuras expresivas que ha escuchado toda su vida y ha llegado a formar parte de su manera de concebir el mundo y de proyectarse al mundo” (Kanellos “Canto” 105).Fundamental to this worldview projected through song is the idea that

cultural survival depends upon transculturation. Laviera recognizes that while the culture and its music are fundamentally African, it has been through transculturation that this root has survived as his poem “the salsa of bethesda fountain” reveals:

the internal soul of salsa is like don quijote de la mancha classical because the roots are from long ago, the symbol of cer-

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vantes writing in pain of a lost right arm and in society today, the cha-cha slow dance welfare the internal soul of salsa is an out bembé on sunday afternoons while felipe flipped his sides of the cuban based salsa which is also part of africa and a song of the caribbean the internal dance of salsa is of course plena . . . (la carreta 67)

Laviera here details the origin of salsa as the intricate transculturation of various musical genres from different locations and cultures. However, it is the com-ing together of these different components in New York that produces the new transcultural phenomenon salsa. First, the displacement of Africans in the Carib-bean and their interaction with the Spanish and Indigenous cultures produces son, bomba y plena, and mambo, among other genres. Then, the displacements of Latinos from various countries who bring their transcultural traditions and cosmology to the United States create, or rather neoculturate, salsa. Thus, the worldview displayed by salsa, is one of continuous transculturations. Since salsa is a transcultural representation, in the same poem African Americans instantly embrace the musical genre because the African core, while modified, is pure:

. . . la bomba y plena puro són16 de puerto rico que ismael es el rey y es el juez mean�ng the same as marv�n gaye singing spiritual social songs to black awareness a blackness in spanish a blackness in english mixture met on jam sessions in central park, there were no differences in the sounds emerging from inside soul-salsa is universal meaning a rhythm of mixtures . . . (la carreta 67)

Hence, we see Laviera’s idea of music coming before any language. Nobody at Bethesda Fountain needs to know Spanish to understand what is “musically rooted way way back / before any other language,” “all these sounds / about words” (“the africa in pedro morejón,” “tumbao [for eddie conde],” la carreta 57, 64). In the poems “the new rumbón” and “tumbao (for eddie conde),” Laviera insinuates that it is through transcultural production that not only do the two groups―Latinos and African Americans―come together, but that through transculturation one can fight and heal the wounds from acculturat-ing forces. Laviera in “tumbao” refers to the “conguero despojero . . . artista

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manipulador” and reflects “give us your tired / your beaten triste soledad” (la carreta 64). The alleviating nature of the conga and the connection with African Americans repeat in “the new rumbón,” as Laviera writes the following: “con-gas the biggest threat to heroin / congas make junkies hands healthier / . . . / y ahí vienen los morenos / a gozar con sus flautas y su soul jazz” (la carreta 53). The new path is clearly that of transculturation as the poet articulates “the congas burn out / everything not natural to our people.” Therefore, salsa and all Afro-Latino music, transcultural manifestations, come to represent resis-tance to acculturation because its African root along with all its other cultural roots―the European, the American, the Indigenous―are intact, yet different. The result, then, is an entirely new cultural phenomenon.The strength of transculturation through song is again displayed in “bomba,

para siempre.” First, Laviera makes the statement: “bomba: puerto rican his-tory for always, national pride” (ENCLAVE 68). Once again, the poet recovers and elevates the voice of the working class, this time to that of national history. Laviera’s previous statement along with “la bomba ya está mezclada con las rimas jibareñas” provides more evidence that for Laviera music and poetry are one and the same, since he himself calls his role as poet that of historian (ENCLAVE 68). Laviera goes on to demonstrate that national history is one of transculturation―“los carimbos en sus fiestas, español era su lengua / le ponían ritmo en bomba, a castañuelas de españa vieja” (ENCLAVE 68). Bomba specifi-cally comes to represent resistance to acculturation. The author asserts “por el frío yo la canto, por los parques caminando, / siento el calor en mi cuerpo, mis huesos en clave, / me dan aliento” (ENCLAVE 69). The poet continues the poem by challenging the United States’ acculturating tendencies and writes, “métele encima el jazz, el rock o fox trot inglesa, / la bomba se va debajo, ay virgen no hay quien la mueva.” Laviera does not worry about acculturating forces because bomba is proof of Puerto Rican cultural survival and Laviera’s switch to Spanish at the end of the poem underscores this point.

and at the end of these songs, in praise of many beats, my heart can only say: se queda allí. (ENCLAVE 69)

Therefore in “bomba, para siempre,” as Rosanna Rivero Marín notes, the poet “both challenges a Puerto Rican society that does not fully acknowledge the importance of its Black roots, and the United States society’s impulse to ‘acculturate’ its citizens . . . And he also confronts both by not settling for one language or the other language” (96). However, Laviera not only challenges Puerto Rico’s failure to fully recognize the importance of its Black roots, but also the Island’s failure to acknowledge the prominent role that the oral cul-ture has played on the Island.This challenge is evident not only in the poet’s insistence on the incorpora-

tion of music as a legitimate form of oral culture and even poetry, but also in the poems where he pays his respects to the declamadores Juan Boria and Jorge Brandon. Laviera studied at the age of six under Juan Boria,17 well known in

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Puerto Rico as a declamador of Afro-Caribbean poetry. Boria was particularly skillful at reciting the poetry of Luis Palés Matos, which proved to be a great influence in Laviera’s work. In the poem “juan boria” Laviera describes the declamador:

. . . director ejecutivo de la bemba burocracia huracán en remolino, un nuevo diccionario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

palesmatear y guillenear juan juan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

el presidente-comandante-caballero, recitando al todo negro de la cuna con sus versos. (ENCLAVE 65)

The other great influence on the poetry of Laviera is undoubtedly Jorge Bran-don,18 another Puerto Rican declamador who spent most of his life reciting both his own poetry and that of others, particularly Latin-American poetry, on Loisaida streets. Kanellos affirms that for Brandon “la única función del poeta es comunicar directamente con su auditorio. Brandon es uno de los pocos verdaderos declamadores que hayan sobrevivido en tiempos moder-nos” (“Canto” 103). Laviera’s poem “declamación” reflects his feelings to-wards him: “ . . . en tu poesía encomiendo mi madre / mis hijos, mi patria, mi abuela . . . / el pan nuestro de cada día dánoslo hoy” (la carreta 73).The importance of incorporating these two poets in his own work relates

to Laviera’s transculturation project in two ways. First, by including Boria in his work, Laviera situates himself into Puerto Rican literary history. Second, he brings Boria to the attention of his compatriots in the metropolis, thereby ex-tending another Island tradition to the mainland. The same is true for Brandon. Since Brandon is not only a poet but also a declamador, Laviera accomplishes first, to continue, and second, to insert a Latin-American tradition of oral culture in the United States, not just by reciting poetry, but also by inspiring Nuyoricans to continue the tradition of Puerto Rican letters as well. Laviera himself recalls that for the Nuyorican poets Brandon was “one of our great teachers . . . he was a great historical figure. He’s the tie that binds us to Puerto Rico” (“Interview” 80). Brandon, then, represents another great mediator between cultures. Just as Laviera brings Boria to the metropolis, he also brings Brandon to the Island, thereby inserting Brandon into the literary history of Puerto Rico. By insert-ing Brandon into Puerto Rican literary history, he also inserts the Nuyorican into that same history. Therefore, when Laviera inserts Brandon’s name into the poem of “música jíbara” and partially credits him with the thoroughly Puerto Rican “lo lei lo lai,” he not only further emphasizes the link to Puerto Rican culture, but also Nuyoricans as legitimate creators of that culture.Nowhere, however, is the legitimization of Nuyoricans as creators of

Puerto Rican culture more apparent than in Laviera’s warning poem to José Luis González, the author of the very important and seminal work on Puerto Rican culture: El país de cuatro pisos y otros ensayos (1980). The great value of

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González’ work lies in that he, like Laviera, emphasizes the importance of the African component in the making of Puerto Rican culture, a view pre-viously underappreciated and overlooked by most scholars.19 Nevertheless, González fails to acknowledge the Nuyorican component of Puerto Rican cul-ture.20 Laviera responds to the oversight in his “three-way warning poem (for José Luis González)”;

en el fon do del nu yo r� can hay un pu er to rr� que ño . . . (AmeRícan 49).

Thus, Laviera’s role as a mediator of cultures should not be seen solely as a mediator between Anglo and Puerto Rican and/or Nuyorican cultures, but also between Nuyorican and Puerto Rican cultures.Nicolás Guillén and Luis Palés Matos, two other great mediators of culture,

surfce in Laviera’s own poetry with his admiration of their ability to capture the transcultural voice of the Afro-Caribbean. His poem “cuban for Nicolás Guillén” demonstrates this clearly:

Base prieta jerigonza (escondida en lo cristiano) huracán secreto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

yemayado de orishas sacudiendo caderas de europa el origen se preserva al va�vén de �deas claras al va�vén de �deas claras ideas claras caribeñas! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

salió el sol, sus rayos atravesando rayos, largas piernas afriqueñas rayos, trompetas charanga europea

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rayos, tambores indígenas se encuentran rayos, rompiendo todo esclavo rayos, preservando colores de resguardo rayos, con los viejos africanos libremente exclamando: isomos los mismos, los mismos éramos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

somos humanos, respaldándonos, somos humanos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

yo le canto a la lumbre del glorioso despertar! (AmeRícan 21–2)

The homage to Guillén reveals Laviera’s admiration for the Cuban poet’s ability to awaken Cuban consciousness, an awakening that Laviera attributes to Guillén successfully capturing Afro-Cuban language, a “Base prieta jer-igonza” that leads to “la lumbre del glorioso/despertar!”In regards to Palés Matos, Laviera’s tribute reflects his admiration for Palés

Matos’ language alone, rather than any sort of awakening of consciousness. Many have correctly criticized Palés Matos for a “form of poetry character-ized by African sounding words, rhythms and language, yet, a shallow un-derstanding of Black culture . . . [which] is partly responsible for the negative and, at best one dimensional images of Blacks” (Jackson 469). Laviera, nev-ertheless, defends his verse. As Martín-Rodríguez notes, “From Palés Matos, Laviera takes his ability to construct a poetic language inspired in the music, the vocabulary, and the rhythms of African tongues” (265). The scholar con-tinues and accurately points out that “el moreno puertorriqueño” reflects this inspiration:

. . . ay baramba bamba suma acaba quimbombo de salsa la rumba matamba ñam ñam yo no soy de la masucamba papiri pata pata . . . (la carreta 60)

Laviera views Palés Matos as an important poetic figure because he is the first to interject the language of afro-caribeños into Spanish language literature, and as observed previously, the use of language in literature is very impor-tant to the legitimization of a marginalized people. In his poem “homenaje a don luis palés matos,” the contribution of Palés Matos to this legitimization becomes even clearer as he declares:

. . . orgullos cadereando acentos al español conspiración engrasando ritmos pleneros a la lengua española pa ponerle sabor.

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .despierta la clave chupando las cañas prucutú-piriquín-prucú-tembeando el secreto máximo: que luis palés matos también era grifo africano guillao de castellano. (ENCLAVE 66)21

Palés Matos’ work proves extremely important for Laviera, given not just his own intent to reclaim and legitimize the voice of the Afro Puerto Rican, but also his own attempts to insert the Spanglish voice of the Nuyorican into the Puerto Rican literary canon. Laviera’s task to recover the Nuyorican voice is not unlike Guillén and Palés Matos’ recovery of the Afro-Caribbean voice. Therefore, Laviera’s representation of both Guillén and Palés Matos proves also to be an attempt to insert himself and the Nuyorican voice into the Latin-American phenomenon of transculturation, represented by a tradition of both orality and bilingualism. Laviera essentially determines Guillén and Palés Matos as great poets because they capture the voice of the transculturated subject, an authentic and authoritative voice of the Americas.In conclusion, a thorough analysis of Laviera’s four poetry collections re-

veals the often difficult and even combative relationships between the lan-guages and how they affect the Nuyorican’s and Latino’s identity. However tenuous the relationships may be, Laviera finds that through a transcultura-tion of the languages a resistance strategy can combat the devastating effects such linguistic tension may have on one’s identity. As demonstrated, an em-phasis on the non-European roots in this transcultural process is key to this resistance strategy. Laviera’s homage to various transcultural innovators, the importance he places on popular culture, orality, and music, further reveal Laviera’s transcultural philosophy as a means of survival and creativity. His poems reveal that transculturation is a part of Latin America’s cultural her-itage that manifested itself with the arrival of the first Spaniards and Africans to the New World. Latin Americans, then, as a transculturated people con-tinue this tradition in the United States, and, therefore, instead of acculturat-ing and abandoning their culture, they transculturate. They transform their language to reflect their hybridity, and, by doing so, they have created and continue to create an entirely new language. Yet another authentic language of the Americas, “so it is, Spanglish to matao.”

noTeS

1. “conciencia” from the collection Mainstream Ethics (ética corriente) (51). 2. la carreta made a U-turn is now in its seventh edition and has sold more than 60,000 copies (Hernández 74). 3. Juan Flores remarks, “Marqués’ death in 1979―the same year that Laviera’s book was published signaled the close of an era in Puerto Rican letters. . . . La Carre-ta . . . became widely familiar to Puerto Rican and international audiences came to be extolled for over a generation as the classic literary rendition of recent Puerto Rican

Qué, qué?! 107

History” (Divided 169). René Marqués is also the author of the both popular and contro-vers�al El puertorriqueño dócil. 4. Jíbaro is a term used by Puerto Ricans to describe someone from the country-side. Sometimes used pejoratively to describe someone who is backwards in his or her ways, the term jíbaro is also upheld as the symbol of national culture. Cubans use the word guajiro s�m�larly. 5. “Operation Bootstrap,” referred to in Spanish as “Operación manos a la obra,” was the policy of the industrialization of the Island undertaken by governor Luis Muñoz Marín in the 1940s and 1950s, which displaced millions of Puerto Ricans first from the countryside to San Juan, and then to New York due to the lack of employment in San Juan. 6. Loisaida is a term used by Nuyorican Poets to refer to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. 7. The clave is the percussion instrument―two cylindrical wood sticks tapped together―which keeps the 2/3 or 3/2 beat of salsa. The clave is considered by many to be the most important instrument in salsa. 8. For a full discussion of transculturation, its many manifestations, and its ap-plication to the study of U.S. Latino literature, refer to: Alvarez, Stephanie. “Literary Trasculturation in Latino U.S.A.” Ph.D dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2006. 9. Interestingly, Fernando Ortiz himself observes the same linguistic snobbery from Spain regarding the vocabulary of Latin America, and specifically Cuba. In his own cataloging of Cubanisms, he discusses the origin of the word guayabo and expresses his dismay over the fact that the Spanish Academy attributes its origin as French. Ortiz refers to the academy’s analysis as an “inexplicable etimología gabacha,” and replies “¡Que no nos venga la Academia con guayabas!” (Nuevo Catauro 280). 10. Aparicio observes that among bilingual poets there exists “a basic dissatisfac-tion . . . against the linguistic prejudice which victimizes them and their community . . .[but] Laviera’s attitude towards this prejudice is much more challenging and aggressive than that of other poets” (“La vida” 155, 156). 11. Laviera reveals in an interview that “Santurce was settled mostly by free slaves, run aways from non-Hispanic islands of the Caribbean who found their freedom in Puerto Rico, and by poor people. It later became the prosperous, ‘new’ part of San Juan and is now in decay” (“Interview” 217). 12. Son is a type of African folk music that originated in Cuba. 13. Laviera’s choice of bacalaítos, which are codfish fritters, is interesting if one takes into consideration the previous discussion on the use of the suffix -ao instead of -ado. Laviera could perhaps be making the connection between the Puerto Rican culture of orality and its non-European roots. 14. Dominique repeats this idea in the photo on the front cover of la carreta made a U-turn. The photo reflects a shopping cart filled with a conga, guitar, machete, and a typical jíbaro straw hat, standing in the snow in front of a detour sign. 15. “Lo lei lo lai” is a common refrain particular to Puerto Rico repeated in many songs, both old and new. It is said that this refrain originated in the music of the Puerto Rican jíbaro. The refrain is often repeated in songs as a way of identifying it or the artist as Puerto Rican. 16. By articulating these transcultural manifestations as pure, Laviera challenges the traditional U.S. view of any cultural hybridity as bad, and even degenerate. The

108 Spanglish

importance of articulating such mixing as pure has proved fundamental in many emancipatory Latino projects. One of the most salient examples would be Corky Gon-zales’s “I am Joaquin,” in which he declares his mestizo blood as pure (20). 17. Juan Boria (1905–1995) “fue intérprete de los versos de Fortunato Vizcarrondo y Luis Palés Matos. Declamaba en actividades y en la radio. . . . Dentro de sus más nota-bles interpretaciones se pueden mencionar “Tangalatín” (de F. Vizcarrondo), “Majestad negra” (de L. Palés), “Enamorao” (de M. Jiménez) y “Para dormir un negrito” (de E. Ballaga). Recibió varias distinciones y un doctorado Honoris Causa que le otorgó la Universidad de Sagrado Corazón” (“Juan Boria”). 18. Jorge Brandon (1902–1995) is known as the “coco que habla” because he recited poems through a microphone attached to a speaker inside a painted coconut. While his fame is as a Nuyorican, Brandon actually began reciting poetry in Puerto Rico in the 1930s and 1940s. Brandon memorized and recited hundreds of poems and would record his own original poems in a secret code for fear that someone from a publishing house would steal them (Kanellos “Canto” 103). 19. One study is particularly important in this regard, Antonio S. Pedreira’s Insular-ismo (1930), which contributed greatly in creating the myth that Puerto Rican culture was largely Hispanic and white. González’ book, El país de cuatro pisos (1980), started to destroy this myth as González demonstrated the importance of African culture in the formation of Puerto Rican identity. However, González often receives criticism for overlooking the Indigenous component of Puerto Rican culture, and more recently for overlooking the Nuyorican component as well. 20. Arcadio Díaz-Quiñonez in La memoria rota offers an analysis of contemporary Puerto Rican culture that “identifies the most glaring lapses in Puerto Rican historical memory” (Flores “Broken” 338). One of the most important lapses commented on by Díaz-Quiñonez is the failure to acknowledge the contributions of the emigrant Puerto Rican community in the formation of Puerto Rican culture. 21. Much of the criticism against Palés Matos is based on the fact that he was not Black. However, with this line Laviera seems to challenge this critique. In the same poem he also writes, “qué de blanco: / . . . un negrindio sureño, rascacielo de mulato /patología criolla, ogoun-ochoun de barrio” (ENCLAVE 66). This challenge is perhaps better understood when one takes into consideration Laviera’s poem “the africa in pedro morejón” where he exclaims “two whites can never make a Black. . . . / but two Blacks, give them / time . . . can make mulatto . . . / can make brown . . . can make blends . . . /and ultimately . . . can make white” (la carreta 58).

RefeRenCeS

Algarín, Miguel. 1975. Introduction: Nuyorican Language. In Nuyorican Poetry: An An-thology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings, eds. Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero, 9–80. New York: William Morrow.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1999. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

Aparicio, Frances. 1986. “La Vida es un Spanglish Disparatero”: Bilingualism in Nu-yorican Poetry. In European Perspectives on Hispanic Literature of the United States, ed. Genevieve Fabre, 147–60. Houston: Arte Público Press.

Qué, qué?! 109

―――. 1991. Language on Language: Metalinguistic Discourse in the Poetry of U.S. Latinos. Latino Studies Journal 2(2): 58–74.

―――. 1986. Nombres, apellidos y lenguas: la disyuntiva ontológica del poeta hispano en los Estados Unidos. The Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe 13(3): 47–58.

―――. 1988. Tato Laviera y Alurista: hacia una poética bilingüe. Boletín del Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños 2(3): 7–13, 86–96.

Díaz Quiñonez, Arcadio. 1993. La memoria rota. Río Piedras: Huracán.Flores, Juan. 2000. Broken English Memories. Languages of the Transcolony. In Post-

colonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature, eds. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, 338–48. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

―――. 1993. Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity. Houston: Arte Público.Gonzales, Rodolpho. 1967. I am Joaquin: An Epic Poem. NP: Rodolpho Gonzales.González, José Luis. 1989. El país de cuatro pisos y otros ensayos. Río Piedras: Ediciones Huracán.

Hernández, Carmen Dolores. 1997. Puerto Rican Voices in English. Interviews with Writers. Westport: Praeger.

Jackson, Richard L. 1975. Black Phobia and the White Aesthetic in Spanish American L�terature. Hispania 58: 467–80.

“Juan Boria.” Gobierno.pr. Portal Oficial del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico. 17 November 2004 <http://www.gobierno.pr/GPRPortal/Inicio/Informacion General YTurismo/PersonajesIlustres/Meses/febrero/Juan+Boria.htm>.

Kanellos, Nicolas. 1985. Canto y declamación en la poesía nuyoriqueña. Confluencia. 1(1): 102–6.

―――. 1988. Introduction to Mainstream Ethics (ética corriente) by Tato Laviera. Hous-ton: Arte Público.

Laviera, Tato. 1985. AmeRícan. Houston: Arte Público.―――. 1985. ENCLAVE. Houston: Arte Público.―――. 1988. Mainstream Ethics (ética corriente). Houston: Arte Público.―――. 1992. la carreta made a U-turn. 2nd ed. Houston: Arte Público.―――. 1997. Interview with Carmen Dolores Hernández. In Puerto Rican Voices in

English. Interviews with Writers, ed. Carmen Dolores Hernández, 77–84. Westport: Praeger.

Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M. 1999. A Sense of (Dis)Place(Ment): Tato Laviera’s AmeRí-can Ident�ty. Monographic Review 15: 262–72.

Ortiz, Fernando. 1987. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho.

―――. 1985. Nuevo catauro de cubanismos. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.Pedreira, Antonio S. 1969. Insularismo. Río Piedras: Editorial Edil.Rauline, Véronique and Tato Laviera. 1998. Tato Laviera’s Nuyorican Poetry: The Choice of Bilingualism. In Strategies of Difference in Modern Poetry, ed. Pierre Lagayette, 146–63. Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickison Univesity Press.

Rivero Marín, Rosanna. 2004. Janus Identities and Forked Tongues. Two Caribbean Writers in the United States. New York: Peter Lang.

Zentella, Anna C. 1997. Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell.

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Tune in from the master console to this room’s dozen simultaneous-interpreting booths, and a torrent of Spanish pours forth.A class of seven students in the College of Charleston’s master’s program

in bilingual legal interpretation is battling a particularly difficult exercise in interpreting courtroom English.Fluent speakers of Spanish: Try translating, on the fly, terms like “vicarious

admission,” “mens rea,” “attractive nuisance,” and “failure to Shephardize.”A tape of a courtroom proceeding rolls; the students render it into Spanish

with strikingly varied styles. One near-whispers, as if confiding the mean-ing. A second speaks in spurts, concentrating intensely. A third, highly skilled, speaks assuredly, with the nuances of the original English, and its tone and cadences.“That’s what we all aim for,” says Virginia Benmaman, who is running the

class. For 20 years, the professor of Hispanic studies and legal interpretation advocate has been reminding the legal profession that the guarantee of a trial by one’s peers is little reassurance to the millions of Americans who are baffled by courtroom proceedings in a language they cannot understand.As the non-English-speaking population of the United States soars―Spanish

speakers alone now account for one in seven citizens, and for most of the esti-mated eight million illegal residents―federal, state, and municipal courts face severe shortages of qualified interpreters.In theory, Ms. Benmaman explains, participants in legal proceedings are

constitutionally and legislatively guaranteed the right to be effectively present at them. “That,” she says, “includes providing non-English speakers with the same opportunities that you and I have to understand what is being said. It’s not a matter of clarifying proceedings or providing special counsel, but just of allowing the same opportunity for access to the courts.”Even once the judiciary is persuaded of that, the interpreter’s task remains

daunt�ng.

Originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 2006. Courtesy of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Legal Language, On the fly

peter Monaghan

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114 Spanglish

Imagine, Ms. Benmaman says as her students labor on in their booths, si-multaneously interpreting, from and into Spanish, for a defendant and for court officials.Certain American legal concepts―such as plea bargaining, indictment,

arraignment, and legal precedent―may not exist in the client’s native coun-try. So parallel words and phrases don’t either, and have had to be created as neologisms.The defendant, unfamiliar with both the procedures and the language of

the judicial system, may be confused by talk of his case “going to trial” be-cause he thinks he has been on trial from the moment he was arrested, as would be the case in, say, Mexico or Colombia.The client may not even be acquainted with the correct Spanish terms as-

sociated with his trade in the United States. In his home country, he may have been a farmworker, while here he may work in construction, using Spanglish terms such as roofero for roofer and chiroquero for Sheetrock installer.On a bad day, the defendant may turn out not to be a Spanish speaker,

after all. His Spanish may be patchy because his first language is actually, say, Mixtec.Whatever is said in court, interpreters have to translate it. “Even nonstan-

dard speech such as cursing has to be translated,” explains Ms. Benmaman, a diminutive, dynamic woman who looks younger than her 67 years. “The interpreter also has to be able to match the legalese of judges. The worst is when lawyers and judges throw case law back and forth. That’s murder to �nterpret.”Ms. Benmaman pauses occasionally to listen in on different students and

offer corrections to their content or style of interpreting. She is firm, but hardly gruff in the way many judges and lawyers can be. They are often impatient with the time that interpreting consumes and ignorant of the proper role of interpreters―which is, says Ms. Benmaman, “solely to translate everything that is said in the courtroom.” It is not to counsel defendants or to explain proceedings to them. Nor is it to heed judges’ requests to run for coffee. In-terpreting being largely a female profession, Ms. Benmaman has many such stories to tell.Although the Court Interpreters Act, passed in 1978, mandates the provi-

sion of interpreters when needed, only 860 people in the United States are federally certified as English-Spanish courtroom interpreters.Judges often ignore the law, which in any case has a huge loophole: It re-

quires that interpreters be certified or “otherwise qualified.” Into that “bot-tomless pit,” as Ms. Benmaman calls it, courts have allowed family members, court officials, and even janitors who happened to be on hand to serve as �nterpreters.Such shortcomings, says Ms. Benmaman, make insufficient interpreting

ripe ground for appeals: “The issue is one that defense attorneys cannot ig-nore, and the courts cannot ignore, either.”But the problem has no easy solution, she acknowledges. Obtaining federal

certification to be an interpreter is difficult. Only about 4 percent of the English-Spanish exam’s 20,000 candidates since 1980 have passed. (Federal certification

Legal Language, On the fly 115

is offered only in Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Navajo, while 34 states test in a total of 12 languages with a pass rate of about 10 percent.)Most interpreters enter the trade through happenstance, as Ms. Benmaman

did. A Spanish major in college who married a native speaker and lived for a time in Spain and Venezuela, she became interested in becoming an inter-preter in her early 40s. Seeing that no colleges formally taught legal interpre-tation prompted her to start the program at Charleston, in 1996. Only six or seven students enroll each year, and the program has graduated 25 students to work in courtrooms around the country. As is her hope, many graduates teach private courses themselves.The small numbers stem from a reality of interpreting, she says: Being flu-

ent in more than one language is not enough.Cynthia Hernandez, a 2003 graduate of the program who has stopped by,

agrees. “Growing up bilingual doesn’t make you an interpreter,” she says. “I mean, I have two hands, but that doesn’t make me a concert pianist.”Ms. Hernandez is typical of many program participants in having come to

the profession late in life. She enrolled at 54, with a degree in Latin American studies from Tulane University and two decades’ residence in Mexico with her Mexican husband. She had also volunteered here in Charleston as a medical interpreter (a specialization that the program here will add next year).Like all students in the program, Ms. Hernandez took courses in legal

processes, legal language, and the history and variations of Spanish in the United States, as well as training in interpreting itself. Students also complete a court practicum and an internship of 300 hours in a court that has a staff of �nterpreters.Interpreting is a notoriously grueling profession, but it offers varied work

in changing settings―courtrooms, health clinics, and government offices, says Ms. Benmaman. The stories, too, are enthralling. She has interpreted in court for Mexicans who, handled by extortionist, people-smuggling “coy-otes,” trekked across deserts or crawled through tunnels to cross the border. She has interpreted for a Colombian found aboard a drug-courier vessel who convinced a jury he was merely a stowaway, and for a young man en route from Miami to New York who was caught with $800,000 in his possession and claimed, unsuccessfully, that it was for a shopping spree.Candra Allen, a recent graduate, recalls program field trips to law-

enforcement agencies to learn about firearms and illegal drugs and to listen to surveillance tapes of Mexican drug slang.In the program Ms. Allen, who was born in Memphis of a Bolivian mother,

learned the Spanish for terms like “blood spatter”: salpicadura de sangre. But most thrilling, she says, is jousting with languages in the courtroom: “It’s very mentally stimulating; when you leave the courtroom, it’s like you’ve just been base jumping.”

Spanglish, the composite language of Spanish and English that has crossed over from the street to Hispanic talk shows and advertising campaigns, poses a grave danger to Hispanic culture and to the advancement of Hispanics in mainstream America. Those who condone and even promote it as a harmless commingling do not realize that this is hardly a relationship based on equal-ity. Spanglish is an invasion of Spanish by English.The sad reality is that Spanglish is primarily the language of poor Hispan-

ics, many barely literate in either language. They incorporate English words and constructions into their daily speech because they lack the vocabulary and education in Spanish to adapt to the changing culture around them.Educated Hispanics who do likewise have a different motivation: Some

are embarrassed by their background and feel empowered by using English words and directly translated English idioms. Doing so, they think, is to claim membership in the mainstream. Politically, however, Spanglish is a capitula-tion; it indicates marginalization, not enfranchisement.Spanglish treats Spanish as if the language of Cervantes, Lorca, García Már-

quez, Borges and Paz does not have an essence and dignity of its own.It is not possible to speak of physics or metaphysics in Spanglish, whereas

Spanish has a more than adequate vocabulary for both. Yes, because of the pre-eminence of English in fields like technology, some terms, like “biper” for beeper, have to be incorporated into Spanish. But why give in when there are perfectly good Spanish words and phrases?If, as with so many of the trends of American Hispanics, Spanglish were to

spread to Latin America, it would constitute the ultimate imperialistic take-over, the final imposition of a way of life that is economically dominant but not culturally superior in any sense. Latin America is rich in many ways not measurable by calculators.

From the New York Times, March 27, 1997, © 2007 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of the Material without express written permission is prohibited.

Is “Spanglish” a Language?

roberto gonzález Echevarría

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Is “Spanglish” a Language? 117

Yet I worry every time I hear broadcasts by American-based TV stations that are beamed out across the hemisphere. The newscasts sound like Span-ish, but if one listens closely, it is English transposed, not even translated, into Spanish. Are they listening or laughing in Mexico City and San Juan?The same kind of surrender occurs with American companies hoping to

cash in on the Hispanic market. I cringe when I hear a clerk ask, “Cómo puedo ayudarlo?” (a literal transposition of the English “How can I help you?”), rather than the proper “Qué desea?” On a recent flight to Mexico, a Hispanic flight attendant read a statement that would not have been comprehensible to a Mexican, a Spaniard or an American Hispanic from any region other than his. Ads on Spanish-language TV and on the New York streets are full of howlers. I wonder if recent Latin American immigrants even can understand them.I suppose my Medievalist colleagues will say that without the contamina-

tion of Latin by local languages, there would be no Spanish (or French or Ital-ian). We are no longer in the Middle Ages, however, and it is naïve to think that we could create a new language that would be functional and culturally rich. Literature in Spanglish can only aspire to a sort of wit based on a rebel-lious gesture, which wears thin quickly. Those who practice it are doomed to writing not a minority literature but a minor literature.I do not apologize for my professorial biases: I think that people should

learn languages well and that learning English should be the first priority for Hispanics if they aspire, as they should, to influential positions.But we must remember that we are a special immigrant group. Whereas

the mother cultures of other ethnicities are far away in geography or time, ours are very near. Immigration from Latin America keeps our community in a state of continuous renewal. The last thing we need is to have each group carve out its own Spanglish, creating a Babel of hybrid tongues. Spanish is our strongest bond, and it is vital that we preserve it.

The airing last week on Hispanic radio stations of “Nuestro Himno,” a Spanish-language adaptation of the American national anthem, has been greeted with an unprecedented and, indeed, astonishing wave of denunciations all over the Un�ted States.Talk show hosts and academics have indignantly called this loving rendition

by a group of Latino artists a desecration of a national symbol. Senators―both the conservative Lamar Alexander and the liberal Edward M. Kennedy―have declared that “The Star-Spangled Banner” should be sung exclusively in En-glish. And they have been joined by President Bush, who has used the occa-sion to remind the citizenry that “one of the important things here is, when we debate this issue, that we not lose our national soul.”The national soul? In danger of being lost? Because Haitian American

singer Wyclef Jean and Cuban American rapper Pitbull are crooning “a la luz de la aurora” instead of “by the dawn’s early light”? Would such an outcry have erupted over a Navajo version of the national anthem? Or if the words had been rendered into Basque or Farsi or Inuit? Would anybody have cared if some nostalgic band had decided to recover and record the legendary 1860s translations of the song into Yiddish or Latin?Of course not.There’s a reason for the current uproar. The streets of America are not filled

with marching Eskimos or Basque patriots, and certainly not with scholars ardently shouting against discrimination in the lost language of Virgil. What resonated in Los Angeles and Atlanta, Chicago and New York, as recently as last Monday were the voices of hundreds of thousands of protesters de-manding that the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States be granted amnesty. And the language in which they were chanting was the same sacrilegious Spanish of “Nuestro Himno.”

Waving the Star-Spanglish Banner

ariel Dorfman

Ariel Dorfman, “Waving the Star-Spanglish Banner,” Washington Post, May 7, 2007. Courtesy of Ariel Dorfman.

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Waving the Star-Spanglish Banner 119

No wonder the Spanish version of the national anthem caused such alarm: It was a reminder that, along with their swarthy and laboring bodies, those immigrants had smuggled into El Norte the extremely vivacious language of Miguel de Cervantes and Octavio Paz. They weren’t coming here merely to work, bake bread, lay bricks, change diapers, wash dishes, pick strawberries, work, work, work; Dios mío, they might decide to speak! And not necessarily in English.Although English is what most immigrant parents have always wanted for

their children, what distinguishes these recent arrivals from earlier huddled masses is that they’re not prepared to abandon la lengua maternal, the mother tongue. Spanish is not going to fade away like Norwegian or Italian or Ger-man did during previous assimilative waves. It is not only whispered by the largest minority group in the United States, but is also being spoken and writ-ten and dreamed, right now, at this very moment, by hundreds of millions of men and women in the immense neighboring Latino South. Spanish is a language that has come to stay.I believe this is why “Nuestro Himno” has been received with such trepi-

dation. By infiltrating one of the safest symbols of U.S. national identity with Spanish syllables, this version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” has crossed a line. It has inadvertently announced something many Americans have dreaded for years: that their country is on its way to becoming a bilingual nation.If I’m right about this, and America will sometime be articulating its iden-

tity in two languages, then the question looms: How will the citizens of the United States react to this monumental challenge?One possibility, of course, is a nativist backlash, with more vigilante Min-

utemen swilling beer in the Arizona sun, more calls for deporting all illegal workers, more demands that an impenetrable wall be built against the foreign hordes, more attempts to dismantle bilingual education in U.S. schools.But others may tell themselves that the United States has been built on

diversity and tolerance and that, at a time when the national soul is indeed being tested, at a time when the democratic ideals at the heart of American identity are truly in danger of being sacrificed on the altar of false security, our better angels should welcome the wonders of Spanish to the struggle and the debate.For those who are afraid and claim it can’t be done and believe that the

United States can only endure if it is monolingual, there’s a simple answer. It comes in words that have been heard on the streets of America in recent days, sung and imagined by men and women who crossed deserts and risked everything to live the American dream. In words that the nation’s founders and pioneers might have embraced, and that have now become part of the national vocabulary:

Sí, se puede.Yes, it can be done.

part iii

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Deslenguadas. Somos los del español deficiente. We are your linguistic night-mare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestisaje, the subject of your burla. Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally cru-cified. Racially, culturally and linguistically somos buérfanos―we speak an orphan tongue.

Chicanas who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish have internalized the belief that we speak poor Spanish. It is illegitimate, a bastard language. And because we internalize how our language has been used against us by the dominant culture, we use our language differences against each other.Chicana feminists often skirt around each other with suspicion and hesita-

tion. For the longest time I couldn’t figure it out. Then it dawned on me. To be close to another Chicana is like looking into the mirror. We are afraid of what we’ll see there. Pena. Shame. Low estimation of self. In childhood we are told that our language is wrong. Repeated attacks on our native tongue diminish our sense of self. The attacks continue throughout our lives.Chicanas feel uncomfortable talking in Spanish to Latinas, afraid of their

censure. Their language was not outlawed in their countries. They had a whole lifetime of being immersed in their native tongue; generations, centuries in which Spanish was a first language, taught in school, heard on radio and TV, and read in the newspaper.If a person, Chicana or Latina, has a low estimation of my native tongue,

she also has a low estimation of me. Often with mexicans y latinas we’ll speak English as a neutral language. Even among Chicanas we tend to speak English at parties or conferences. Yet, at the same time, we’re afraid the other will think we’re agringadas because we don’t speak Chicano Spanish. We oppress each other trying to out-Chicano each other, vying to be the “real” Chicanas, to speak like Chicanos. There is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience. A monolingual Chicana whose first language is English

Linguistic Terrorism

gloria anzaldúa

From Borderlands=La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Copyright © 1987, 1999 by Gloria Anzaldúa. Reprinted by permission of Aunt Lute Books.

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124 Spanglish

or Spanish is just as much a Chicana as one who speaks several variants of Spanish. A Chicana from Michigan or Chicago or Detroit is just as much a Chicana as one from the Southwest. Chicano Spanish is as diverse linguisti-cally as it is regionally.By the end of this century, Spanish speakers will comprise the biggest mi-

nority group in the U.S., a country where students in high schools and col-leges are encouraged to take French classes because French is considered more “cultured.” But for a language to remain alive it must be used. By the end of this century English, and not Spanish, will be the mother tongue of most Chi-canos and Latinos.So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic

identity is twin skin to linguistic identity―I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legiti-mate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself. Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accom-modate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice:

Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue―my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.

My fingers move sly against your palm Like women everywhere, we speak in code . . . .

―Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz

16 junio 2001 Buenos Aires For JHS, in memoriam For JCS and for Willem J. Lindeque

Crossing the Riachuelo in a smudge-windowed bus, over into Avellaneda, Provincia de Buenos Aires. Roof patios, si se les puede llamar así (porque de encanto y relax tropical no tienen nada), sprout hanging rags on sagging clotheslines, como en “Walking Around,” mi poema favorito de Neruda, not drying in the icy, wet, near-winter air. Casi your birthday Saúl, Marissa, Brett. Almost summer allí en el norte donde están, almost winter here in the south. Paso slums, “villas miserias” they call them here, aquí en el sur. El sur de la ciudad. Corrugated tin shacks (coño, I sound like Chrissie Hynde, or like an Elvis song), carcasses of abandoned cars. Too-bright paint y crumbling brick blur by, y nos detenemos en el fare booth en un “Telepeaje” to La Plata, donde nos recogerá Gustavo en la estación.Moving again. Sauces, pampas grass (So this is what you are named for,

you transplanted creature! Antes sólo te había conocido small and contenida, in individual pots, “for large outside ground cover” aconsejaban los signs, en el Garden Center de Home Depot), leaden sky. Otro flat sprawl de villa miseria, just outside Avellaneda, just minutes from Puerto Madero. That riv-erside, all-brick, Ghirardelli Square-lookalike construction de lofts and fancy restaurants, donde visiting dignitaries como el Tiger Woods y Bill Clinton are taken when they grace Buenos Aires with a 48-hour visit. That monstrously incongruous neoliberal spawn, emblematic of Menem’s pizza and champagne-filled reino.Lonely caminante solitario in the early-morning industrial dark. Down in

that villa, al lado de esta moderna carretera, pasa el colectivo (bus) 134. Mangy dog slinks along. Sign for Sarandí the once middle-class now hardscrabble

Anniversary Crónica

Susana Chávez-Silverman

Chavez-Silverman, Susana. Killer Cronicas. © 2004. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press.

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126 Spanglish

Avellaneda barrio, birthplace de Alejandra Pizarnik. On the other side of el Río de La Plata. Yo fui. Yo ehtuve. Yo conocí.¿Se puede decir―ever―yo conozco? ¿Quién se atreve? And after how long?Conocí el otro día a un periodista Latino, reportero for the Los Angeles Times.

Hot-to-trot for his new field assignment en Latinoamérica. 3–5 years en Bue-nos Aires, all expenses paid. Pero creo que él no ve mucho. Not yet anyway.The Avellaneda garbage dump. It’s huge. Como de película. Como en esa

película neocelandesa “Smash Palace” (la que vi con mi phony press pass en ese International Film Festival en Johannesburg: you had to be “foreign press” para ver esas peligrosas, uncensored foreign films entonces), in which el main character trabajaba in a huge, broken-down car graveyard. Pues it’s big, this garbage dump, just like that one. Carrion birds wheel and flock over-head. La working class, self-taught poeta, Gladys Cepeda dice que la están poisoning, right here en Avellaneda. Que de niña no era asmática ni tenía al-lergies ni skin problems pero ahora. Casi no puede comer nada. Sólo carne. Red meat and lots of it. (Y Andrea Gutiérrez, alérgica al chicken. Can you imagine? Who could possibly be allergic to chicken? Un mal argentino). A un pasito de downtown, del famous and phallic Obelisco, de la Avenida Corri-entes, de Puerto Madero, este stinking, ponzoñoso trash heap. A un paso de la wide-open pampa.El Latino journalist, Tobías, dice que quiere salir, get his kids out of Los

Angeles. Lo siente anesthetized. Too much TNT and Gameboy. Does he think this―Latinoamérica, well, I mean Argentina, well OK, I mean Buenos Aires―is some sort of escape? (Acabamos de pasar un huge road sign que dice así: “Do you Yahoo?”) El teme. I can smell his apprehension. Seguro se irá a vivir a Beccar, out in the northern ‘burbs, pero whoa, not so far out he hits the villas miserias. Or to San Isidro, where the national TV stars “recycle” colonial man-sions or build American-style, sprawling ranch houses. Tobías vivirá en una casona, seguro. Donde no tendrá que presenciar a los neighbors que suicide-jump, from the sixth floor, al vacío del mediodía just 2 blocks away. Like he just saw on the way over to my apartment in Palermo. Pondrá a sus hijitos en el Lincoln International School en La Lucila (armed guards at the ready, out-side the gates), all expenses paid by the Los Angeles Times.¿Qué carajo va a ver? Sobre cuál argentinidad will he report back? ¿De

cuál “experiencia anestesiada” se va a escapar? Si se ve right away que es un nouveau-Latino, que teme el peligro. El contagio, ¿Cómo se le ocurre llamarse journalist, I muse, pensando en Carlos Ulanovsky (el cousin-by-marriage de la Alejandra Naftal), o en el controversial firebrand Miguel Bonasso. Thinking of so many others no longer here. Tortured, drugged and shoved out of planes still alive, desaparecidos during the Dirty War, Or in exile, por el furor y la insistencia de su mirada. De sus palabras. Ay utópica, girl. You still believe? Y . . . (pausa porteñísima) sí. “Siempre habrá,” la poeta Paulina Vinderman writes, “una historia que contar.”The moist reddish dirt. Burritos and kids and smoke-belching fábricas. A

curving wash, a sluice (como el que teníamos en Los Angeles, behind our house in the Valley, y al cual, decíamos―to scare my little sister―la muy martini-imbibing Mrs. Jean Haynes from next door bajaba de noche para verse con un

Anniversary Crónica 127

amante. O al que bajaba también, muy entrada la noche su hijo, John―ahora probably todo un aerospace engineer, like his dad Bill―para coleccionar saber-tooth tiger bones). Garbage piled detrasito mero de los tiny brick and tin hov-els. Looks like Soweto too I realize, sobresaltada.No writing now. Dejate sin palabras. Sin apuntes. Grabátelo. Now just look.

And remember. . . . Pampa on the left side of the bus, leading down toward el Río de la Plata.

Caballos, little clusters of tin shacks y factories del otro lado. Tierra adentro. Hacia la ciudad. Deso/lado. Desolate and it reeks. ¿Cómo puede oler tan mal entre all this green? Palmeras. Black dog. Lonesome, faded laundry. Hombres de overall y casco stand next to abandoned industrial maquinaria, buscando trabajo. “¿Disponible?” pregunta otro roadsign.“Los Ombúes de Hudson: Barrio Privado,” reads still another sign. ¿Aquí?

Sería el equivalente de vivir en un ritzy gated community right off Inter-state 10, I guess. Bien pero bien metidito en el Evil Empire (así le digo al oxymoronically-named “Inland Empire,” área de mi homestate que hace 10 años desconocía, pero . . . now I live there), surrounded by rusted traintracks, pale Califas desert dust donde antaño había naranjales y palmeras milenarias. Trailer parks now. El olor a grama sube, llega, penetra al “Rápido a La Plata.” Off to the side unpaved, muddy roads. Es sábado. Cannas, my cannas, como en L.A., growing pero aquí unchecked and enormous in the rich southern red d�rt.

aPPRoaCh To La PLaTa, PRoVInCIa De buenoS aIReS, aRgenTIna

Dirt roads. Where am I? Small, compact, South African-looking colonial houses. Si me quito las (innecesarias, casi ridículas: it’s freezing and overcast) sunglasses and look with my blurred-edge vision, podría estar en otra parte. Podría estar, casi, casi en ese otro sur, just outside Pretoria in South Africa. Dogs. Red dirt. Even the same southern aloes in huge, shocking, winter coral bloom. Even soldiers by the roadside, pointing big guns. ¿Dónde estoy? ¿En qué año estamos? Villa Elisa, reads the sign. “Talabartería El Gancho.” “La Casa del Freno y del Embrague.” I love these words. Ahora entran a mi mente, salen de mi boca without translation. Car words. Leather words. Me asombro de mí misma. Es la vivencia, I sigh. Sólo así. Don’t use it, you lose it. Así les decía a mis estudi-antes en California. Ah, pronto ya no estarás aquí: will this all fade away?

16 junIo, 2001: SaTuRDay

“Mañana. Día del Padre.” Another roadsign. Ay, Daddy, why did you leave me? Hoy tu aniversario de boda.Y nunca pudiste venir a ver nada de esto, mamá. Y ahora que estás en-

ferma, nearly paralyzed, you never will. A ti, que te fascinaba viajar. Viajar y vivir lejos. Equivocarte de palabras o de pronunciación (con tus nuevomexi-canismos in Spain) y luego reirte a más no poder. Y ay, todo ese papelón, the scandal we caused en el famoso concierto de Sofía Noel en ese fancy Madrid

128 Spanglish

theater! En el Centro Cultural de la Villa. Twisting our hankies in our laps, laughing, papá furioso. El público chistándonos y no podíamos. Stop laughing. A ti, estos painted signs “fileteados” te habrían encantado. No mom, nothing to do with filete de ternera. It’s not food at all, sino a frilly, 19th–century Ital-ian immigrant calligraphy. Hasta esos trendy, PoMo músicos, los “Fabulosos Cadillacs,” use it en un recent album cover. Y todo este strange léxico porteño. Mamarracho (an abomination of bad taste, tacky as hell), for example. Isn’t that the MOST hideously perfect word? Casi casi that byzantine roll-on-the-tongue Argentine mouthful even outdoes bombachas (chonies, panties). Sounds like a cross entre fireman and a strange vegetable. O pollera (skirt, falda). ¿Te habrías reconocido en algo aquí, como yo me re-conozco? Would you recognize me here, mom? ¿Y a tu nieto Joey, que vino a la Argentina de child y volverá a Califas de teen: cambiada la voz, pobladas las cejas y hablando un cahteshano aporteñado? Peroooo . . . qué te pasa, nena, he likes to ask me, con ese cerrado, whiny, slightly northern-barrio porteño accent I’ve grown to recognize in-stantly, to abhor, to adore.English Tudor. Tiny hibiscus. Aloe everywhere. Spanish-style. My dream

house, siempre digo. Pues dream on, bebé. On your teacher’s sueldo, yeah right. Rejas. Lavender trumpet vine. Just like mine.La Plata is small, low, provincial. Bonito. Se parece, y mucho, a las afueras

de Pretoria, South Africa. Precisamente a Cullinan. Teensy Afrikaner diamond mining town in the Transvaal donde caí al nada más llegar de California. And where I was so desperately unhappy. Tan apasionada. Pero tan CONTENIDA. Por ese pueblo. Por Howard. Su familia. Ese país: Donde por poco causé un accidente de tránsito por caminar down the main street, de día, in shorts. Ver esto, estos outskirts de La Plata, me recuerda (me hace acordar, they correct me, here) aquello. No lo había podido remember so clearly en años.A sudden McDonald’s on a corner y todo cambia. No se parece a nada. O se

parece, de repente, a todo. Y con este ugly global-twist, el Camino Centenario could be just off a Califas freeway. Cierro los ojos, disapointeada, horrorizada. Luckily, al abrirlos, it’s disappeared. Estoy en la Argentina again. Lajas, bou-gainvillea. Ah, alivio. Vuelve Argentina. Wet, wet. La diferencia entre esto y Pretoria, those searing, arid plains. Pero he aquí que no puedo mantenerme en mi reverie semi-esencialista: porque damn, Wal-Mart rears its ugly head. Y no. No puede ser. Pero it is.

MInI afRICan ReVeRIe

Remember, Wim. Onthou jy? It’s June 16th and I’m in the south again. Today, hoy, vandag: forever my parents’ aniversario de boda, linked en la historia and in my memory al aniversario de la masacre de los estudiantes en Soweto. Amandhla, Wimmie. Remember the “Park Five Saloon” in Johan-nesburg? Donde íbamos a bailar, gyrating with hot, dangerously multiracial crowds, to township jive, todos los weekends? Te acuerdas del concierto en Soweto, sponsored by the “Park Five” y nosotros tan high, en pleno apartheid, imagínate, Beth navigating that huge American station wagon right into el corazón de Soweto, y con tanto miedo pero then, entonces, you were a man in

Anniversary Crónica 129

uniform. Un policía, carajo. You got us through. Y ahora, oh how could you be doing this, you sexy beast: casi un cura! Oh, how could you be a polisie then? How could you be a Catholic cura-in-training now?Oh get me through. Through this in-between: países, lenguas, razas, reli-

giones, vivencias. Smash (me) through este looking glass que a veces se (me) vuelve funhouse mirror. Oh, quiero estar someplace. Ubicarme. Algún lugar mi lugar y no esta siempre intersticialidad que me corroe, me lleva out past the breakpoint me nutre me exalta washes me up extenuada onto playa de nadie dónde mi playa y Santa Cruz Santa Mónica Port Elizabeth Sea Point Durban Venice banks of el Río de la Plata. Soon, nena, me digo. Soon you’ll be. Ah pero it’s too soon and you know it. No quieres eso de verdad, admítelo. No quieras eso. Dejate estar dejate. Callate ahora y ehcuchá estas wild plants, este icy wind, este tu sur.

Nota bene: with the publication of my book Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language (2003) came a barrage of celebrations and attacks. The vol-ume included approximately 6,000 terms in Spanglish, all lexicographically defined, as well as a lengthy disquisition on the historical and linguistic de-velopment of this tongue in the United States and throughout the Americas and Spain. My thesis was that Spanglish was not a recent phenomenon, even though it had become enormously popular north of the Rio Grande in the last couple of decades. I suggested the need to understand Spanglish alongside other forms of hybrid communication, like Yiddish and Ebonics. The book also contained a translation into Spanglish of the first chapter of Part I of Don Quixote of La Mancha.The number of interviews, panel discussions, TV and radio shows I have

participated in surrounding the controversy is enormous. Spanish television even made a documentary. Readers were especially curious about the trans-lation. Why did I dare to engage in such endeavor? Isn’t the role of the scholar and philologist to describe, with cold eyes, what he witnesses, and not to get involved with his subject of study, i.e., to get his hands dirty? My response to these questions was always the same. In the humanities, objective knowl-edge is impossible. Research and researcher are intimately connected. This is particularly clear as I reflect on my own connection to Spanglish. This verbal code is no doubt a major cultural force in the English-speaking world on this side of the Atlantic Ocean today, spoken by millions of people in the process of defining their own identity. But I am myself one of those millions and the collective identity that ultimately emerges is mine, too.In the last two years, I have continued to translate the rest of Part I of Cer-

vantes’s masterpiece. I have also accepted numerous invitations to read in pub-l�c my Spangl�sh Don Quixote and to write for theater and film. One outcome of

Nomah

ilan Stavans

“Nomah,” by Ilan Stavans. © 2005. First published in Amerikastudien/American Studies (Univer-sitätsverlag, Heidelberg, Germany), vol. 51, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 9–12. Courtesy of Ilan Stavans.

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Nomah 131

these requests is the twelve-minute Chekhovian monologue that follows, first performed in Boston in fall 2003. The protagonist is a Puerto Rican baseball fan with a speech impediment: he has trouble pronouncing his r’s. He obses-sively roots for the Boston Red Sox. The target of his animosity is the Mexican-American short-stop Nomar Garcíaparra. By the way, the season he engages in his criminal act anteceded the championing season, in which the Red Sox finally overcame the so-called Curse of the Bambino. The conclusion of the monologue turned out to be prophetic.

Yeah, Nomah was d’man. Haven’t you visited mi apahtamento? You saw them poh todas pahtes . . . I bought los postehs en Fenway Pahk, in one of the concesionahias, hight donde venden las swetshihst y las balls and evehything. You know, hombhe! Los chavos siemphe ghitan Manny, Manny, Manny . . . Coolísimo! They ahe muy machos: Manny Hamíhez p’acá, Manny p’allá. But I phefieho Nomah. Yeah, I guess that’s why I did it, la puha vehdá, pa’ enseñahle a whole mundo que las Medias Hojas son el equipo más campeadoh, antes even que los Yankees, in spite de la maldición del Bambino.Yo qué sé, with the fukin’ phoblema que tengo con las ehes, I guess I should

simply phefeh the Yankees, o no? They have no ehes. Ouhs have it hight at the staht, and if you staht in the whong pié, then qué? En inglés it’s Hed Sox, peho yo phefieho en español: Medias Hojas. But it isn’t about the name, Misteh Señoh, es una cuestión of phinciple. En Nueva Yoh nos ghitan majadehías, but we ahe mucho mejoh, mucho, mucho mejoh. Sabe what I digo, vehdá?Usté no ha visto a Nomah en TV? Bastante handsome, even among las

Medias Hojas, . . . The gihls le applaudean, mohe even que Manny: Nomah, Nomah. They love him, heally. Not quite un gigoló but bien guapetón.Whehe am I de dónde, you me phegunta? You should know, Misteh Señoh.

Haven’t you done su tahea? Pues de Puehto Hico, si no de dónde? . . . San-tuhce the beautiful! But the family de Nomah Gahcíapahha es de México. He’s el mejoh shohtstop. His papá se llama Hamón but he invehtió el la wohd: N-O-M-A-H. He’s been in the Medias Hojas foh un bunche de yeahs. Five, quizá?No, I neveh killed a nadie. Busque usté en mi expediente. Que cómo do I spend

mi día? Faihly nohmal houtina. Sabe, de la oficina a la casa, on occasion al gym. Cómo se dice gym en español? I only know it en inglés. Pues sí, I speak un inglés bhoken, kind of lo que hablábamos at home. La gente de ahound these hegions quiebha también theih sentences. It’s muy cool, don’t you think, Misteh Señoh?Phobablemente 250 games. Foh yeahs I tengo un season’s ticket pa’ Fenway.

Usualmente I ahhive eahly to be next to Nomah. A Masteh Yogui! Debía usté de vehlo, Misteh Señoh. Hight next la tehceha base, se sthechea . . . He abhe las patas, he bendea los hombhes―yeah, a theat pa’ la vista. I have plenty de Kodak moments. Well, you saw el apahtamento, oh not?No estoy loco. Los fans somos así, full of passion latina, usté sabe. He de-

sehva su castigo. O yeah, Misteh Señoh, usté sabe que tengo hazón. Qué otho playeh deja que su equipo se vaya a la miehda so hápidamente? It was Mía, la tal Mía Ham, que juega sóqueh. Love is dihty and Nomah lost it, bho. Heal-mente he lost it. He needed to be punisheado.

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Lo leí en El Mundo. Oh maybe en Spohts Illusthated, ya no me acuebdo. I think que ella is youngeh. No sé, maybe dos o thes años. El punto es que they empeza-hon a dateahese. The season de beisbol empieza eahly en el año y la de sóqueh, at least the one of las mujehes, stahts en el fall. So . . . well, they got into the abismo: no había fohma of wacheabse uno al otho. El phone, el phone, but can you enamohahse de una ghingita como la Mía Ham―yo la llamo My Jamón―that way? She’s chula, pehhaps a bit too atlética. Ayway, ella y Nomah shouldn’t have stahted el homance. Allí metió la pata el Nomah, no doubt about it.I decided to ahheglah the asunto by my own. Oh else, me tahdé en decidih-

me: sevehal months, maybe dos o thes. Las Medias Hojas hestean cada cinco o seis días, sometimes cada week. El baisbol is tough! But it took me no time pa’ sabeh que las cosas wehe slideándose hacia abajo, sabe. Yeah, Nomah no comenzó con sus mistakes de un día to the next. It was poco a poco, the way the wohld wohks: despacito, despacito.Pobhe Nomah! He desehved it, though. O no?People in the island no phonuncian las ehhes. I don’t know why, phegún-

tele usté a un psychologist. Not only in Santuhce. Noyohicans ahe known como ehe dodgehs. Anyway, lo saben evehything, los psychologist, los odio poh eso. My Mamá una vez me mandó a visitah a uno de esos doctohes. I was still in la escuela phimahia. Not because of the phonunciation peho poh mis ghades. How do you say ghades en español? I guess mi ghades wehe not bue-nas. Yo qué sé: I didn’t pay mucha atención. La oficina del doctoh eha oscuha. He asked me questions, todo tipo de questions: que cuántos años tenía, if I had a gihlfhiend, if Papá was nice to the family . . . No me acuehdo lo que le dije. Soon el dihectoh of de escuela told me que me thanfehihían a otho lugah. Maybe it wasn’t because of my ghades . . . I must have done algo malo, you know. Thuth is, no me acuehdo.Not too bad, Misteh Señoh. I leahned el juego de pelota en el intehnado al

otho lado de la isla, hight thehe and then. I was neveh a stah. Left-fieldeh, de los que se dedican a veh the dandelions ghow. But at least aphendí to hespect the game.You mean, en Boston? Almost a decade, desde 1989. Tenía familia in Belmot.

No, no Vehmont sino Belmont. Usté debe acentuah the fihst syllable: B-E-L-mont. Uno de mis tíos helps en una pizzehía. Yeah, I got a job en el negocio. It was empacado with mexicanos and only a handful de bohicuas. Do you know que Nueva Yol has mohe mexicanos hoy que bohicuas? It’s la puhitita vehdá . . . Something similah pasa en Massachusetts, bho. Whehe do you think que empecé a spekeah with pochismos? Enthe los nacos de Aguascalientes. Sí, La Haza is all oveh Nueva Inglatehha. Lots and lots―un chingo. But I guess que se me sale lo bohicua in those stupid ehhes.Misteh Señoh, I’ve told you muchas veces alheady: I shouldn’t be convic-

teado pohque it ain’t a chime cuando uno ataca pa’ que’l equipo that so many gente endohsea mejohe. The damn Yankees, a esas altuhas de la season ya iban seven juegos ahead de nosothos. Cómo se dice ahead en español?Too many mistakes, muchísimas . . .La pelota se le iba in between the knees. O cachaba un fly out peho se hes-

balada y la pelota se caía en cuestión de segundos. Quite thiste!

Nomah 133

Planié el asalto muy cahefully. No, I didn’t talk con nadie. Paqué metehme en bhonca? I don’t wohk en la pizzehia any mohe. Saqué el diploma and soy un clehk en el banco. No se gana mal although yo no tengo que sopohtah una familia. I save a bit. Not enough. Gasto mucha lana en el estadio. Sabe, una cehveza cuesta $6 y un hotdog $3.Yeah, they stop you en la puehta si thaes fihe ahmas. Chequean tu bolsa

and they take away what they quiehen. But I know el jueguito. The night befohe, cheo que eha un jueves a fines de Septembeh, waitié que Fenway que-daha empty as a hunted castle. Entonces metí el cuchillo in a bag de plástico and I thhew it en una esquina del Gheen Monsteh whehe no staff people se pasean afteh midnight. You see, he estudiado el tehhitohio, I know quién cuida qué and so on. Next día, nobody enconthó la bag. May they thought it was gahbaje.I know que la confesión es selfinchiminante but qué puedo haceh? Al

menos Nomah y My Jamón ya no jodehán the entihe season. Betteh to go down con honoh, don’t you think? As always, los damn Yankees ganahán . . . They always do, de cualquieh maneha. But ouh Medias Hojas tendhán su honoh up high, bho.It needed to be en un pahtido contha los Yankees. Why? Well, pohque

todo el mundo nos wacheaba. Who doesn’t wacheah esos juegos? Nomah vehsus Dehek Jeteh. But clahamente Nomah ya no estaba en condiciones at that phecise time. He had alheady lost it, ya ‘staba desohientado. Too much passion . . .Pedho picheaba. Sí, Pedho Mahtínez. P-E-D-H-O. Waitié que tehminaha

el fifth inning. Quehía dahle otha opohtunidad a Nomah. I kept on thinking: Maybe he isn’t that bad, a lo majoh se mejoha, sabe? You gotta be un optimista, o no Misteh Señoh?He didn’t, though. So, well, actué como I had planed it. I was on la te-

hceha how. Súbitamente, I knew que la hoha había llegado. Well, I just knew it. Saqué el cuchillo and boom, jumpié hacia el field, cohhí en dihección a Nomah and . . . It was a supehb momento. Las cámahas began to flash. Boom, boom, boom . . . You saw it on TV, didn’t you?Actualmente, I don’t . . . No me hemohseo. It had to be done y yo eha la

pehsona to do it. Ouh Lohd acts in fohmas mystehious, doesn’t He? I didn’t want to kill him, no, simplemente quehía hehihto. I wanted que tuvieha que ihse a disability, que dejaha de jugah en la tempohada. Especially, I wanted que dejaha de jugah con nosothos, sus fans. If he wanted My Jamón, so be it. Nomah el convalesciente tendhía mohe than what he bahgained foh con la tal Mía Ham.The hehoe has fallen. Manny and Pedho tán allí, but de qué sihven sin

Nomah Gahcíapahha? Peho Nomah was too desohientado.I did him un favoh!Nomah también habla así, with a bhoken lengua. La mayohía de the La-

tino playehs do it. Misteh Señoh, in all honestidad, I’m suhphised you don’t follow el juego. De dónde chee que son los jgadohes hispanos? D.H. and P.H. phedominantemente, but also Panamá y Venezuela. Gente pobhe, sin edu-cación, like many of us. El beibol is whehe hope is, sabe? Nomah was un hehoe

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because of the ball. Un niño sin futuho and then . . . millones de dólahes. How much do you think Alex makes en un año? Lo sufiente to pay la deuda ex-tehna de Costa Hica.Nomah, Nomah . . . El beisbol is about honoh―I leahned that en la escuela.

El honoh!Wait un momento, poh favoh. No, I’m phetty seguho, Misteh Señoh: hadn’t

las Medias Hojas lost muchos pahtidos?Imposible. I know que es imposible. I was en Fenway Pahk, lo ví with my

ojos phopios: one mistake thas otha. Yeah, I counted Nomah’s mistakes: 32. Ya se los he deschito . . . I didn’t invent them!Los damn Yankees llevaban a total of siete pahtidos de ventaja, not the

otheh way ahound. Nosothos pehdíamos un juego afteh anotheh, las Medias Hojas. I’m phetty suhe. Why would I mentih, Misteh Señoh? Eh? You mean las Medias Hojas won la Sehie Mundial? Well, they shoodaf . . . No lo hacen poh eighty-five años―desde 1918. The cuhse of el Bambino! Well, if lo hiciehon, oh Lohd, I’m suhe it’s ghacias a Nomah Gahciapahha, el Masteh Yogui. But está en el hospital. So a quién knifié?So―ganahon o no, please dígame. Misteh Señoh, you must be kiddin.

I pensé que . . . No, Misteh Señoh, this isn’t coolísimo! Now I think que necesito one of esos psychologists, como los que I had in school. O phobablemente un lawyeh. Cómo se dice lawyeh en español?You mean Nomah is healthy y bien and . . . ? Veinte años in phison en un

asylum es mucho tiempo, don’t you think? Foh knifiah a Nomah? But I did it poh su bien! Lo hice poh el bien de las Medias Hojas―simply, you sabe, to save ouhselves del embahazamiento!

Selected Bibliography

Augenbraum, Harold, and Ilan Stavans, eds. Lengua Fresca: Latino Writers on the Edge. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Courtivron, Isabelle de, ed. Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativ-ity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Cruz, Bill. The Official Spanglish Dictionary: Un User’s Guía to More Than 300 Words and Phrases That Aren’t Exactly Español or Inglés. New York: Fireside, 1998.

Echávez-Solano, Nelsy, and Kenya C. Dwokin y Méndez, eds. Spanish and Empire. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2007.

Eddy, Terry, and Alberto Herrera. Learning Construction Spanglish: A Beginner’s Guide to Spanish On-the-Job. New York: McGraw Hill, 2005.

Morales, Ed. Living in Spanglish: The Search for a New Latino Identity in America. New York: An LA Weekly Book for St. Martin’s Press, 2002.

Sánchez, Rosaura. Chicano Discourse: Socio-Historic Perspective. Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1983.

Stavans, Ilan. Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. New York: Rayo/ Harper-Collins, 2003.

Varo, Carlos. Consideraciones antropológicas y políticas en torno a la enseñanza del spanglish en Nueva York. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Librería internacional, 1971.

Zentella, Ana Celia. Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997.

Zentella, Ana Celia, ed. Building on Strength: Language and Literacy in Latino Families and Communities. New York: Teacher’s College and California Association for Bilingual Education, 2005.

135

Acculturating forces, Spanglish, 102Adjectives: clauses, subjunctive mood, 20; lingusitic/social context, 27–29; predicate, 38

Adverbs/adverbial phrases: clauses, subjunctive mood, 20; lingusitic/social context, 27–29; syntactic hierarchy, 45

African American(s): as multilinguals, 49; musical genre, 101–2; roots of Puerto Rican culture, 100 –101

Afro-Caribbean voice/poetry, 103– 4, 106Afro-Puerto Rican voice/music, 100 –102, 106

Allen, Candra, 115América Latina: Palavra, Literatura e

Cultura (Pizarro), 81AmeRícan (Laviera), 73–74, 91Amnesty, illegal immigrants, 118Anglicisms, Hispanic culture, 69Anniversary Crónica (Chávez-Silverman), 125–29

Anzaldúa, Gloria, 89, 94 –95, 123–24Aparicio, Frances, 98Aphaeresis, 12Apocope, 14Argumentative suffixes, 29Arte Público Press, 90Asimilao (Laviera), 97–98Aspiration, 15Auxiliary rule, English interference, 39Ay bendito (Laviera), 74 –75

Benjamin, Walter, 79–80Benmaman, Virginia, 113–15

Bernsteinean notions (1968), 10Bilingualism: changes to, 42, 48; Chicano Spanish, 3, 35– 36; dynamic, 6; education, 8, 11, 81, 119; English-dominant, 60; gender inflection, 27–28; Latino writing, 81; legal interpretation, 113; lingusitic/social context, 6; vs. monolinguals, 60; in poetry, 74; Spanglish, 58; Spanish-English, 48– 50; as universal, 89; U.S and, 119

Bilingual narratives, translation of: bilanguaging, 77; Caribbean subjectivity, 73; cultural referents, 80; global identity, 75; Latino/American studies, 80 –83; Latino writing, 76; lingua franca, 77; linguistic hybridization, 73; mother tongue destabilization, 81; multi-version texts, 82; translation strategies, 77–79; unreadable texts, 71–76; untranslatable texts, 76 –80

Boria, Juan, 102– 3Brandon, Jorge, 103Brava (Anzaldúa), 94 –95

Caribbean: Africans, 100 –101; Catholic Spain, 65; Cyber-Spanglish, 70; Hispanic, 72; Spanish, 37; studies, 81; subjectivity, bilingual narratives, 73

La carreta made a U-turn (Laviera), 90Cartographies, Latino writing, 81Catholic Spain, in Caribbean, 65Cervantes, Miguel de, 71Chávez-Silverman, Susana, 125–29

Index

137

Chicana feminists, 123Chicano Spanish (Mexican origin): as bastard language, 123; bilingual discourse, 3, 35– 36; code switching, 124; economic situation, 4 – 5; ethnic identity, 124; false cognates vs. true cognates, 33– 34; loanwords, 31– 33; monolingualism, 3, 123; mother tongue respect, 123; occupational mobility, 4; population demographics, 4; progressive tenses, in speech, 40; Southwest, U.S., 3; university student, examples, 8–10

Chomskian generative grammar framework, 49– 50

Christianity, Spanglish, 67Code systems/switching: bilingualism, 43; Chicano Spanish, 124; dominant language assimilation, 40; English interference, 35– 40; evolution of, 57– 59; gerunds, 37; as haphazard jumble, 43; lexical system, 36, 49; linguistic constraints, 36; monolinguals, 76; nouns, 37; prevalence of, 53; Spanglish, 52– 59; Spanish language, 10 –11; syntactic categories, 43– 45

Colloquial dialect, Puerto Rico, 74Compound phrases, English interference, 34 – 35

Conditional, verb tenses, 18Consonant changes, phonetic variants, 14 –16

Constraints, Spanglish grammar, 55– 58Court Interpreters Act (1978), 124Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de, 66 – 67

Cuban for Nicolás Guillén (Laviera), 104 – 5Cultural referents, 80, 102Cyber-Spanglish, 70

Deculturation, Spanglish, 91Derivative suffixes, 29Diccionario latino/español (Nebrija), 66Dictionary of the English Language (Johnson), 68

Diglosia conceptualization, 76 –77Diphthongs, 13Dominant language assimilation, 40, 55– 57

Doña Cisa (Laviera), 99

Dorfman, Ariel, 118–19Double semilingualism, 56Dynamic bilingualism, 6

Ebonics vs. Spanglish, 70Echevarría, Roberto González, 116 –17Economic situation, Chicanos, 4 – 5Education: bilingual, 8, 11, 81, 119; failure of, 92; immigrant, 7; lingusitic/social context, 3, 5; in Spanish language, 116

English-dominant bilinguals, 60English interference/influence: auxiliary rule, 39; code-switching, 35– 40; compound phrases, 34 – 35; extensions of meaning, 33– 34; hybrid compounds, 35; interrogative pronouns, 27; lexical items, 34; loanwords, 29; morphosyntactic influence, 29; as mother tongue, 124; nouns, 32; prepositions, 31; progressive tense, 30; vs. Span�sh nouns, modified, 37– 38; Spanish varieties, 32, 117; vs. standard Span�sh phrasing, 35; translation, 30 – 31; verb complements, 40; in written texts, 31

English monolinguals, 5, 59Epenthesis, 14Epenthetic consonants, 16Equivalence constraint, 50 – 51Esquina dude (Laviera), 98Ethnic identity, 95, 124Expressions, Spanish language, 11

False cognates vs. true cognates, Chicano Spanish, 33– 34

Federal certification, legal interpretation, 114

Fricatives, 15–16Functional Head Constraint, 50

Ganga Spanglish, 69–70Gender inflection: bilingualism, 27–28; loanwords, 33; meaning of, 32– 33

Gerunds, code switching, 37Global identity, bilingual narratives, 75Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 94González, Luis, 103– 4Gramática la lengua castellana (Nebrija), 65– 66

Guillén, Nicolás, 104 – 5

138 Index

Index 139

Harshav, Benjamin, 71Hernandez, Cynthia, 115Hispanic culture: Anglicisms, 69; Caribbean, 72; intraethnic communication, 70; Spanglish danger to, 116; talk shows, 116; in U.S., 64; verbal miscegenation, 68

Hispanización of society, Spanglish, 65Homenaje a don luis palés matos (Laviera), 105– 6

Houston Mexican-American community, 43

Hybrid compounds, English interference, 35

Immigrants/immigration: education, 7; illegal, amnesty for, 118; lingusitic/social context, 5; mother tongue destabilization, 117, 119; Spanglish, 59; Spanish language, 7–8; workers, 5

Imperative, syntactic hierarchy, 46Imperfect, verb tenses, 18Impersonal construction, subjunctive mood, 21

Independent clauses, syntactic hierarchy, 45

Inflectional suffixes, 29Inflection changes, verbs, 24 –25Informal speech, Spanglish, 47– 48Interrogative pronouns, 26 –27Intraethnic communication, 70

Johnson, Samuel, 68Juan boria (Laviera), 103

Language: of linguistic minorities, 3–7; linking, Spanglish, 51– 52; purity challenges, 96. See also B�l�ngual�sm; Bilingual narratives; Chicano Spanish; Latino writing/language; Legal language interpretation; L�ngu�st�cs; Spangl�sh; Span�sh language

Lateralization, 16Latino writing/language: American studies (de boricula a Latino), 80 –83; bilingual narrative, 76; bilingualism, 81; cartographies, 81; diglosia conceptualization, 76 –77; as empowerment source, 88; sociological perspectives, 82

Laviera, Tato, 73–75, 88–106Lebrón, Lolita, 61Legal language interpretation: bilingual, 113; federal certification, 114; neologisms, 114

Lexical items/shifts: code switching, 36, 49; English interference, 34; gaps, 12, 59; loanwords, 10; markers, 9; rules, 7–8

Lingua franca, bilingual narratives, 77Linguistics: adjectives, 20, 27–29; adverbial clauses, 20; adverbs, 27–29; bilingualism, 3, 6; borrowing, 7; codes, 36; cosmovisión, 91; education, 5; English interference, 29– 40; gender inflection, 27–28; as heterogeneous, 6; hybridization, 73; impersonal construction, subjunctive mood, 21; inflection changes, 24 –25; Mexican immigration, 5; minority language, 3–7; nouns, 27–29; past participles, 23; phonetic variants, 12–16; pronouns, 25–27; in Southwest, U.S., 3; Spanglish, 68–70; subordinate clauses, subjunctive mood, 20; suffixes, 29; terrorism, 95, 123–24; verb conjugation, 24; verb morphology, 21–25; verb tenses, 16, 19–22. See also Chicano Spanish; Language

Loanwords: Chicano Spanish, 31– 33; compound phrases, 34; English interference, 29; gender inflection, 33; lexical shifts, 10; modern, 22; as verbs, 40

Mainstream Ethics (Laviera), 91Marín, Rosanna Rivero, 102Martínez, Stephanie Álvarez, 88–109Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda, 71–87

The Meaning of Yiddish (Harshav), 71Media Spanglish, 117Melao (Laviera), 96 –97Metathesis, 14 –16Mid-stem vowels, 22–23Mignolo, Walter, 77, 80 –81Monaghan, Peter, 113–15Monolinguals/monolingualism: vs. bilinguals, 60; Chicano Spanish, 3, 123; codes, 76; English, 5, 59;

140 Index

Spanglish, 5, 40; Spanish, 3, 5; translation, 82

El moreno puertorriqueño (Laviera), 105Morphosyntactic influence, 29Mother/native tongue: Chicano Spanish, respect, 123; destabilization, 81, 117, 119; English as, 124; in fiction, 80; linguistic terrorism, 95, 123

Multi-version texts, bilingual narratives, 82

Musical genre, Spanglish, 101–2My graduation speech (Laviera), 91–92

Narratives, Spanglish, 47– 48, 54 – 55Nebrija, Antonio de, 65– 66Neoculturation, Spanglish, 91Neologisms, legal language, 114Neutralization strategy, Spanglish, 58Nomah (Stavans), 130 – 34Nouns: clauses, subjunctive mood, 19; code-switching, 37; English interference/influence, 32; lingusitic/social context, 27–29; modified, English vs. Spanish, 37– 38; phrases, 39– 40; phrases, syntactic hierarchy, 45; predicate, 38

Nuestro Himno (Star-Spangled Banner), 118–19

Nuyorican community, 93–94, 100, 103– 4

Occupational mobility, 4One Hundred Years of Solitude (Márquez), 71

Otero, Ramos, 79Out-of-the-mouth factors, 42Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford Press), 68

El país de cuatro pisos y otros ensayos (González), 103– 4

Palés Matos, Luis, 104 – 5Past participles, 23Past perfect, verb tenses, 18Paz, Octavio, 64Personal pronouns, 25–26Phonetic variants: consonant changes, 14 –16; Spanish language, 7–8, 10, 12; vowel changes, 12–14

Pizarro, Ana, 81Plural proclitic accusative form, pronouns, 25

Poplack’s equivalence constraint, 49Predicates, 38Prepositional phrases, syntactic hierarchy, 46

Prepositions, 31Present, verb tenses, 17Present perfect, verb tenses, 17–18Preterit, verb tenses, 18Progressive tense, English interference, 30

Pronouns: interrogative, 26 –27; personal, 25–26; plural proclitic accusative form, 25; relative, 26 –27

Prosper- Sánchez, Gloria D., 77Prothesis, 14Puerto Rico: African American roots of, 100 –101; bilinguals of, 49; colloquial dialect, 74; cultural survival, 102; language contact, 89–90; literature, 72–73, 76, 103; oral tradition, 100; Spanglish, 67– 68; U.S. study of, 72

Ramos, Julio, 81Relative pronouns, 26 –27Rosenblatt, Angel, 65

The salsa of bethesda fountain (Laviera), 100 –101

Sánchez, Rosaura, 3– 31Santiago, Esmerelda, 77Second-language learners, 43Sentential switching, Spanglish, 48– 49Sociological perspectives, Latino writing, 82

Spanglish, as a language: education, 116; Hispanic culture, danger to, 116; in the media, 117; monolinguals, 5, 40; as transposed English, 117; verbal code, 130

Spanglish, grammar of: bilingualism, 42, 48, 58; code switching, 52– 59; constituents, 47– 49; constraints, 55– 58; dominant language assimilation, 55– 57; double semilingualism, 56; equivalence, 50 – 51; immigrants, 59; informal speech, 47– 48; language linking, 51– 52; narratives, 47– 48, 54 – 55; neutralization strategy, 58; out-of-the-mouth factors, 42; second-language learners, 43;

Index 141

sentential switching, 48– 49; standards, 55– 58; syntactic constraints, 48– 50; syntactic hierarchy, 43– 46, 53– 54; transfers, 51, 55– 58

Spanglish, gravitas of: attitudes toward, 71; Christianity, 67; vs. ebonics, 70; hispanización of society, 65; history, 65– 67; as intraethnic communication, 70; linguistic community, 68–70; multiplicity, 69–70; urban youth, 69–70; verbal cross-fertilization, 69; xenophobia, 65; vs. Yiddish, 70 –71

Spanglish, poetics of: acculturating forces, 102; bilingualism, 88; ethnic identity, 95; language purity, challenges, 96; Laviera, Tato, 88–106; linguistic cosmovisión, 91; linguistic terrorism, 95; musical genre, 101–2; Nuyorican community, 93–94, 100, 103– 4; transculturation (transculturación), 90, 97, 100 –101

Spanish-American War, 69Spanish-English bilingual’s, 48– 50Spanish language: code systems, 10 –11;

vs. English nouns, modified, 37– 38; examples, 8–11; expressions, 11; immigrants, 7–8; indigenous influences of, 93–94; Mexican immigration, 7–8; monolinguals, 3, 5; soul searching of, 67; of the Southwest, 7–12; vs. standard English phrasing, 35; terms, 10; varieties/variants, 7–8, 10, 12; verb tenses, indicative mood, 16 –17; vestigial, 40

Standards, Spanglish, 55– 58Star-Spanglish Banner, 118–19Stavans, Ilan, 64 –71, 130 – 34Stem vowels, 23Subordinate clauses, 20, 45Suffixes, lingusitic/social context, 29Syncope, 14Syntactic categories: code switching, 43– 45; constituents, 47– 49; constraints, Spanglish, 48– 50; hierarchy, Spanglish, 43– 46, 53– 54

Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Covarrubias Orozco), 66

Transculturation (transculturación), Spanglish, 90, 97, 100 –101

Transfers, Spanglish, 51, 55– 58Translation strategies: bilingual narratives, 77–79; English interference, 30 – 31; monolinguals, 82

United States (U.S.) as bilingual, 64, 119

Unreadable texts, bilingual narratives, 71–76

Untranslatable texts, bilingual narratives, 76 –80

Urban youth, Spanglish, 69–70

Verb phrases/verbs: complements, 40; conjugation, 24; English vs. Spanish, 39; loanwords as, 40; syntactic hierarchy, 45– 46

Verb tenses, indicative mood: conditional, 18; conditional perfect, 18; imperfect, 18; past perfect, 18; present, 17; present perfect, 17–18; present perfect tense, 17–18; preterit, 18; preterit/imperfect, 18; Southwest Spanish, 16 –17

Verb tenses, subjunctive mood: of influence, 19–20; lingusitic/social context, 19–22; noun clauses, 19

Verbal code, Spanglish, 130Verbal cross-fertilization, Spanglish, 69Verbal miscegenation, Hispanic culture, 68

Vestigial Spanish, 40Vocabulario español/latino (Nebrija), 66Vowels: change of, 13; mid-stem, 22–23; phonetic variants, 12–14; standard vs. popular varieties, 22–23; stem, 23; substitution of, 13; unstressed, 13

When I Was Puerto Rican/Cuando era puertorriqueña (Santiago), 77

Written texts, English interference, 31

Xenophobia, Spanglish, 65

Yiddish vs. Spanglish, 70 –71

Zentella, Ana Celia, 42– 63, 98–99

eDIToRIlan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Latin American and Latino Cul-ture and Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor at Amherst College. He is the author, among other books, of The Hispanic Condition (1995), The Riddle of Cantinflas (1998), On Borrowed Words (2001), Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language (2003), The Disappearance (2006), and Love and Language (2007); editor of Growing Up Latino (1993, with Harold Augenbraum), The Ox-ford Book of Latin American Essays (1997), The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (2003), En-cyclopedia Latina (2005), Lengua Fresca (2006, with Harold Augenbraum), and César Chávez: An Organizer’s Tale (2008).

ConTRIbuToRSStephanie Álvarez Martínez is a professor at University of Texas Pan American.

gloria anzaldúa is a writer and activist. Author: Borderlands=La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987, 2007). Editor: This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1983, with Cherríe Moraga).

Susana Chávez-Silverman is professor of Spanish at Pomona College. Au-thor: Killer Crónicas: Bilingual Memories (2004).

ariel Dorfman is Walter Hines Page Research Professor of Literature at Duke University. Author: Death and the Maiden (1992) and Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey (1998).

Roberto gonzález echevarría is Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Compara-tive Literature at Yale University. Author: The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball (1999). Editor: Cervantes’ Don Quixote: A Casebook (2005).

yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is professor of Spanish at Rutgers Univer-sity. Author: Caribe Two Ways: Cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico (2003).

Peter Monaghan is on staff at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

About the Editor and Contributors

143

Rosaura Sánchez is professor of Latin American Literature and Chicano Lit-erature, University of California at San Diego. Author: Chicano Discourse: Socio Historic Perspectives (1994) and Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios (1995).

ana Celia Zentella is professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at Uni-versity of California in San Diego. Author: Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York (1997). Editor: Building on Strength: Language and Literacy in Latino Families and Communities (2005).

144 About the Editor and Contributors

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