660DE Stavans I Spanglish PDF

Spanglish
Recent Titles in The Ilan Stavans Library of Latino Civilization Latina Writers Ilan Stavans, editor
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ibrary of L atino Civilization The Ilan Stavans L
Spanglish
Edited by Ilan Stavans
Greenwood Press Westport, Connecticut London

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Spanglish / edited by Ilan Stavans. p. cm. (The Ilan Stavans library of Latino civilization, ISSN 1938615X) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 9780313348044 (alk. paper) 1. Spanish languageForeign elementsEnglish. 2. English language Influence on Spanish. 3. Languages in contactAmerica. I. Stavans, Ilan. PC4582.E6S63 2008 460'.4221dc22 2008014855 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright 2008 by Ilan Stavans All rights reserved. No portion of this book maybe reproduced, by any process or technique, withoutthe express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008014855 ISBN: 978 0 313 34804 4 ISSN: 1938 615X First published in2008 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group,Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies withthe Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.481984). 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 Preface I Considerations Our Linguistic and Social Context Rosaura Snchez The Grammar of Spanglish Ana Celia Zentella The Gravitas of Spanglish Ilan Stavans
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Boricua (Between) Borders: On the Possibility of Translating Bilingual Narratives Yolanda Martnez-San Miguel Qu, qu?!Transculturacin and Tato Lavieras Spanglish Poetics Stephanie lvarez Martnez II TheMedia Legal Language, on the Fly Peter Monaghan Is Spanglish a Language? Roberto Gonzlez Echevarra Waving the Star-Spanglish Banner Ariel Dorfman
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III Testimonios Linguistic Terrorism Gloria Anzalda Anniversary Crnica Susana Chvez-Silverman Nomah Ilan Stavans Selected Bibliography Index About the Editor and Contributors
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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 theglobe. Out of every seven Americans, one traces his or her roots to the Spanishspeaking world. Mexicans make about 65 percent of the minority. Other major national groups are Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Ecuadorians, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, and Colombians. They are either immigrants, 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 abundance of stereotypes, which are a sign of lazy thinking. The twentieth-century Spanish philosopher Jos 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 different national, geographic, economic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds coalesce as an integrated whole? Is there an unum in the pluribus? Baruch Spinoza believed that everything in the universe wants to be preserved 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 Statesno 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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Series Foreword
of important resources. The compilation is designed to generate debate and foster research: to complicate our knowledge. Every attempt is made to balance the ideological viewpoint of the authors. The target audience is students, specialists, and the lay reader. Thematically, the volumes will range from politics to sports, from music to cuisine. Historical periods and benchmarks such as the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, the Zoot Suit Riots, the Bracero 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 transaction of information. By offering diverse, insightful collections of provocative, informed, insightful material about Hispanic life in the United States and inviting people to engage in critical thinking, The Ilan Stavans Library of Latino Civilization seeks to offer critical tools that open new vistas to appreciate the fastest growing, increasingly heterogeneous minority in the nationto be part of the encuentro. Ilan Stavans
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 segregates an ethnic minority already ghettoized by economic factors. In response, the supporters of Spanglish (among whom I count myself) celebrate this hybrid 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 Bogot and Ciudad Jurez. According to newspaper reports, echoes of Spanglish have been heard even in the Patagonia. Passionate about this linguistic phenomenon, I myself have been at the center 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. Its 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 embraced 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 recognizable grammar? Its too early to say. Languages develop over long periods of time. However, the impact of the Internet and of telecommunications in general 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
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Preface
sociolinguistic essays, by Rosaura Snchez and Ana Celia Zentella, among others, on the history and linguistic development of Spanglish and the challenges it poses on a number of areas, among them education. (Given its proportions, Ive deliberately left out of this book the debate surrounding the Quixote translation.) A bouquet of opinion pieces, pro and against, including those by Roberto Gonzlez Echevarra and Ariel Dorfman, is displayed, followed by representative artistic samples from Gloria Anzalda, Susana ChvezSilverman, and myself (the example of Nomah). Ive also included a chronology about the politics of the language in the United States. Spanglish, Im convinced, is a frame ofmind.
part I
Considerations
Our Linguistic and Social Context

Rosaura Snchez
Both material and social conditions determine whether the languages of national 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 language, the extent of its social functions, and the type of social and linguistic interaction between majority and minority language groups. Changes in material and social conditions necessarily produce changes in language and in the status of languages, ensuring their maintenance orloss. In the Southwest of the United States, the social and linguistic situation of the population of Mexican origin (Chicanos) is intrinsically connected to employment, 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 language 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 configurations 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 bilingual 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 function and domain, as we shall see later. Before exploring the particular Spanish
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.
Spanglish
varieties of this population, I will analyze briefly the various factors that create 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 geographic and occupational mobility, which has taken it out of largely agricultural work into the factory and into service industries. This occupational mobility, however, has not been accompanied by great strides in social mobility, 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 certain stability, and a secondary sector characterized by low wages and unstable employment. Workers within the secondary labor market are primarily members 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 production and the workers) and thereby, social relations between groups, classes, and individuals. Thus low-income jobs lead to the concentration of the minority 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 freeways, 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 members 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 secondary 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.
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 reside 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 Coronado 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 linguistic 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 generations, 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 contact 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 educational attainment has increased, formal and informal contact with English has also increased as new roles and situations have opened up for the population. 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 primarily low-income working-class persons explains the low status of Spanish in the United States, despite the presence of some middle-class Chicanos in professional, technical, and primary industry categories. Lack of socioeconomic success can lead to disparagement of oneself, ones group, and ones language. It is not surprising, then, that education and the acquisition of English are seen
Spanglish
to be the principal vehicles for social mobility and assimilation. For this reason, 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 themselves 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 languages may beused. 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 communities and is renewed by each incoming generation of immigrants. Transitional bilingualism, on the other hand, is a more advanced stage, in which one language completely appropriates some of the functions of the other, displacing 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 communities. The presence today of an increasingly larger Spanish-speaking community has allowed Spanish to be the second language of several domains in the Southwest. Although it is never the principal language, it sometimes functions 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 bilingual telephone operator services, bilingual salesclerks, and bilingual translators in government and the courts. Ironically, while gaining a certain visibility at the public level, Spanish has suffered losses of important functions in various 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 Chicanos 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 reflecting 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 America. 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 southwestern states), it is difficult to propose a classification in terms of regional dialects, 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 popular Southwest varieties are not exclusive to the Spanish of Chicanos; they can be found in popular varieties throughout the Spanish-speaking world, especially 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 influence 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. Quantitatively, 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 particular 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, morphological, syntactic, and lexical rules. I offer here an inventory of linguistic features that characterize the Spanish of Chicanos, not only in Texas and California 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
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informal styles, marked by differences in phonetic and lexical rules. Consider the following examples of both styles: Formal Style: Fuiste al cine? Ojal que vayamos. Lo empujaron. Ahora no me acuerdo. Informal Style: Tonces stbamos hablando ingls. St bueno. Horita no me acuerdo. Lueo te digo.
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 limited 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 characterize 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 qu no me alivianas con un aventn y me dejas en el chante? Y mientras que vas por el Chente, yo tiro clavao, me rasto la grea y me entacucho. Te trais al Chente a mi cantn y le digo a la jefa que nos aliviane con un calmante porque a m ya me trai la jaspia, y quiero refinar. Le dices al Chente que stoy invitao a un borlo y pa que se desagite el vato le digo a mi gisa que le consiga una jainita para irnos a borlotear todos. Cmo laves? Some comadres: Fjate que anoche lleg Juan echndole trancazos a la Filomena. Hizo una rejolina que Vlgame Dios! Y pa cabarla de amolar pos no se le antoj a Pedro irse a meter al borlote quesque pa pararle el alta al Juan. A se ni quin lo paciqe pero Pedro es mu cabezudo. Y a poco se le rajueli todo?
Ande, si ni chanza tuvo, porque lo-lo vino la chota y carg con toos. Diay la Filomena se dejvenir. A poco quera que se lo juera asacar? Pos s. Y como le dije yo, comadre: No me vengas con lloriqueos. Amrrate las naguas como las meras mujeres y djalo que se pudra nel bote. No s pa qu le habl a la ley. Ya no ms por no andar dejando. A jovencita: Hey, Mary, por qu 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...cmo se llaman...You know...los que cantan sa que tocaron...ahi nel jukebox when we were at the store. No, hombre, not that one, the other one, la que le gust much a Joe. I like it too porque tiene muy suave rhythm y las words tambin, muy suaves...yeah...what? really????...te llam? OOOOhhhhh, Mary. Ese est de aquellotas. A Chicano university student: Gento orita ya st despertando y st dijiendo pos que la nica modo de ganarle al gabacho en el juego, este...es metrnos haciendo cosas de nohotros como de la poltica y economa, metindonos, gente mexicana, que tiene el corazn 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. Toava 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 ms que yo que cree lomismo. 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 lexical 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 alcine? Cuando vulvamos, ledigo. Qu bueno que haiga venido! No sabe espelear. Me llam patras. Pagaron losbiles. Cal: Le taloni pal chante. Aliviname unfrajo.
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Code-shifting: All esta ms barato because the one que me trajo Maggie costaba noms one-ninety-eight. Y est muy loco el tripe ese porque mine is a cbula, you know, and liberacin tambin es cbula and is really a beautiful trip and... Rural: General: Y tamin me gustaba en la noche porque nos juntbanos, un grupo nos juntbanos y nos sentbanos debajo de eserbol. Qu hicites ayer? Adnde fuites? Vivemos por la Hill. On t? Pos t all por la ochenta ysiete. Lo vide ayer y me dijo que asina noms era pero como noms 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 est or t, 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 language, 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 common 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 as, that is, from a rural form to an urbanform. In the Spanish version of this article, I attempted to defend Chicano Spanish in view of attacks from various quarters about the inferior quality of its language varieties. Yet despite this defense, the article did not completely escape 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 demonstrated by Labov (1972), are linguistically complex codes with great syntactic 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 principal 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.
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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 is thus nothing strange that informal Spanish has a number of similar expressions containing the verb agarrar. These expressions, common in many Spanishspeaking nations and thus not unique to Southwest Spanish, are quite frequent 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 nio. (Tmalo en los brazos) 4. Agarra al nio. (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 agarrartacao) 9. Ah no agarran chicanos. (emplean) 10. Me agarr bien fuerte.(abraz) 11. No puedo agarrar la estacin. (sintonizar la emisora) 12. Agarr la paseada. (se tir al vicio) 13. Ya agarr juicio. (ya entr en razn) 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 elbus) 20. Me agarr bien fuerte la calentura.(dio)
As these examples indicate, informal expressions are useful for many language functions within contexts in which Spanish is used. Unfortunately, some language functions require particular experiences that have been either 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 varieties 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 government 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 Chicanos are much more Spanish dominant, however, than those in California because of their greater concentration in the Texas valley and stronger patterns 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 Spanish varieties of Chicanos but may be found throughout the rest of the Spanishspeaking 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 vowels 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 polysyllabic 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. Consequently it is common to hear, even in careful speech, Se hog en el ro or los hogados in certain varieties of Chicano Spanish.
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Other examples: haber > ber estar > tar hacer > cer haba > ba 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) a > ai cado > caido (traido, ahi, maiz, raiz) ae > ai traer > trai (caer > cai, or, sometimes, a contraction: trer, quer) trae > trai (cae > cai) oe > ue cohete > cuete oa > ua toalla > tualla eo > 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 > loo >lo (mueblera > moblera) graduar > gradar ua > a au > a aunque >anque ie > 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, poleca, decesiva, enmagino, dericion, defcil, ofecina, dejieron) u > o rumbo > rombo (complir, tovimos, joventud, imposieron, recoper, 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 (disilucion, manijar, siguridad, disconfiado, dishonesto, impidir, dicir, siguida) leche > lechi o > u morir > murir
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Apocope. One or more sounds may be lost at the end of aword. 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 desapareci > despareci 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 to > tiyo mo > miyo leer > leyer creer > creyer odo > oyido maestra > mayestra quera ir > quera yir of > oyi destruir > destruyir For other cases of epenthesis, see the section on consonants. Laxing of unstressed vowels: schwa [] pero > pr le > l me > m Metathesis. Two vowels are transposed.
ad > swid iu > ui ciudad > swid
Consonant Changes
In general, consonants in popular Chicano Spanish also tend to be nontense, with laxing of fricatives, especially voiced fricatives, the aspiration of sibilants and sometimes of the voiceless labiodental fricative f, and the simplification of consonant clusters. These consonantal changes are also common in the informal popular varieties of the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. Some are particularly prevalent in rural Spanish. Aspiration of the sibilant -s- in any position. This occurs especially in rural Spanish varieties in north central Mexico andTexas.
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nosotros > nohotros puertas > puertah decir > dihir este > ehte S, seor > h, heor Aspiration of the voiceless labiodental fricativef. fuimos > juimos fue > jue fuerte > juerte Aspiration of what is now only an orthographic h in urban Spanish. This aspiration was common in sixteenth-century Spanish. Se fue de hilo > Se fue de jilo. Se huy > Sejuy. Se hallo...> Se jall... Loss of voiced fricatives in intervocalic and final positions.
/ ], [d / ], [g /] 1. Intervocalic [b todava > toava, tuava todos > toos estado > estu lado > lau luego > lueo > loo > lo agua > awa abuelo > awelo iba > :a 2. Intervocalic -yella > ea ellos > eos botella > botea billetera > bietera orilla > ora cabello > cabeo, etc. 3. In final position vecindad > vecind usted > ust muy > mu
Interchangeable grave voiced fricatives [b /] and[g /]. aguja ~ abuja boato ~ guato abuelo ~ agelo Simplification of consonant clusters. ct > t nd > d mb > m rr > r rl > l rn > n, l Metathesis. pared > pader problema > porblema, pobrema impresiones > impersiones lengua > luenga magullado > mallugado estmago > estngamo, estgamo doctor > dotor / :mos andbamos > ad tambin > tamin barrio > bario correr > corer arrancar > arancar cierra > ciera arriba > ariba agarrar > garar tenerla > tenela pensarlo > pensalo pararnos > paranos, paralos
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Epenthetic consonants. lamer > lamber estornudar > destornudar querr > quedr podemos > podermos mucho > muncho nadie > nadien, naiden aire > aigre adrede > aldrede huelo > gelo Lateralization. d > l de > le advierto > alvierto desde > desle n > l nos > los nosotros > losotros noms > loms Use of archaic terms, common in rural Spanish. For example: semos, asina, ansina, truje, vide, naiden, haiga, endenantes Stress changes. mendigo > mndigo (change in stress paralleled by change in meaning) seamos > sanos, samos (affects all first person plural, present subjunctive 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 Englishdominant Chicanos. Rule differences between varieties may involve the sound system as well as the morphosyntactic component or the lexicon. Some of the differences involve rule simplification, as we shall see in relation to the verb system.
Verb Tenses of IndicativeMood

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
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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 andpast. 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. Saldr maana = Voy a salir maana Salgo maana
The future case is retained for nonsystemic cases, as in cases of prob ability: Ser tu pap (or, Ha de ser tu pap) Its probably your father No s que quedr (querr) I dont know what he wants (mightwant) 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 habr llegado = Va a llegar pa diciembre Two tenses are oriented toward the present (present and present perfect), and five tenses are oriented toward thepast.
PresentTense
The orientation is the same in the Spanish of Chicanos, but there is a tendency to add duration to the tense when the action is in progress, as in the following example: S, s te oigo = S, s te estoy oyendo Im listening
Present PerfectTense
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 thepast Perfect aspect Imperfect aspect Preterit tense Imperfect tense com coma
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Anterior to thepast Subsequent to the past Subsequent to the past but anterior to a subsequent point
Past perfect tense Conditional tense Conditional perfect tense
haba comido comera habra comido
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: Coma cuando entr = Estaba comiendo cuandoentr.
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 in iba comido for haba comido. Is it really from the verb ir or is it a case of metathesis: haba > ba > iba? Perhaps it is a case of confusion between two forms that suffer laxing of fricatives: haba > ba > a; iba > a. Or perhaps it is a case of an -er verb conjugated as an -ar verb: habiba (as in teniba, sentiba) >iba.
ConditionalTense
This tense is also rare except in nonsystemic cases indicating probability in the past: Quinsera? In place of the conditional we have the imperfect indicative tense and the imperfect subjunctive tense. The question Qu hara Ud. si tuviera mil dlares? is often answered with either Yo iba a Mxico or Yo fuera a Mxico. Thus the function of the conditional tense is maintained, but the form having this function is different.
Conditional PerfectTense
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 Qu habra hecho Ud. si hubiera recibido mil dlares? is often answered with (1) Yo fuera comprado un carro, (2) Yo (hu)biera comprado un carro, or (3) Yo (ha)ba comprado uncarro. Thus, tenses oriented toward the past are often simplified to the preterit, imperfect, and past perfect tenses. The imperfect tenses also function to indicate 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 Table1.)
Table 1 Indicative Verb Tenses
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Anterior Axis in the present Axis in the past Present perfect Past perfect
Simultaneous Present Imperfect and preterit
Subsequent Present Imperfect
Verb Tenses of the SubjunctiveMood

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 ridculo que salga). In the popular Southwest varieties, uses of the subjunctive 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 s 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 muchasganas. No creo que es necesario. No creo que hay slo una manera de hablar el espaol. No hay nada que puedehacer. No hay nada que yo puedo hacerbien. No hay seguridad que hallas trabajo. In some cases there is never a vacillation between the indicative and the subjunctive, as in expressions like jala (ojal) and jali (ojaly): jala yvenga. jala que tnganos tiempo. El espera que nos prtenosbien. El sueo de mi hermana es que algn da jntenos un poco de dinero. In clauses introduced by verbs of influence there is no uniformity ofuse: A nosotros los catlicos nos dice que estyamos preparados. El podr decir que tnganos un buen tiempo. Le gusta que lo van a buscar. Hizo que abandonaban el pueblo. Queran que la mujer les haca lacena. Quiere que vamos a San Antonio. Perdn que no lo ha entregado. A mi mam le gustaba que volvamos temprano. Pedro no quiso que su hijo se casaba porque pierda. Mand que paraban deir.
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Es mejor que fumamos. Quera 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 commands: Quiere que vyamos; Dijo que cirremos la puerta. In adjective clauses, the subjunctive is used to modify a nonspecific or indeterminate noun to express contingency or expectation: Se necesita una mujer que tenga vientiocho aos (any woman that might be twenty-eight years old) versus Vi una mujer que tiene vientiocho aos (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 ocupacin como maestra no la puede hacer menos que se casa con alguien que esrico. In adverbial clauses, the subjunctive is used where the action is subsequent to a given axis: El vendr a las cinco. Entonces iremos > Iremos cuando venga. Or Me dijo que vendra a las cinco. Yo com a las tres > Com antes de que viniera l. 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 mand pa que juera decirle a Demetrio. 2. ...antes que mefui. 3. El gobierno gasta miles de dlares cada ao para que no plantan variascosas. 4. Chicano Studies sern necesario hasta cuando la escuela pblica ensea, no adoctrina. 5. Cuando la sistema se cambia ms, 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, ira. If I had the money, I wouldgo. Si hubiera tenido dinero, haba, ido. If I had had the money, I would have gone. Southwest popular varieties offer several possible combinations. The auxiliary 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 classified according to patterns ofuse: Si ___________________, ______________________ subjuntivo subjuntivo
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1. Si biera tenido un auto, yo te biera visitado. 2. Si tuviera mil dlares, yo fuera a Europa. 3. Te dijiera si supiera. 4. Si ellos llegaran a nuestros escalones, fuera fcil para comenzar una revolucin. 5. Si yo fuera sido el pap, yo fuera visto que mi hijo... 6. Si yo fuera el pap, yo le fuera dicho al hijo que lo que va pasado, va pasado. 7. Si furanos tenido bastante ms tiempo, se me hace a m que pudiranos hablar con esos jvenes para dicirles que no tuvieran miedo de platicar la verd. Si ___________________, ______________________ subjuntivo indicativo
1. Te deca si supiera. 2. Si no fuera por la idea, ahorita no tuvamos Chicano Studies. 3. Si le biera pasado algo a mi mam, la familia no pueda, mi pap no pueda mantener la familia. Si ___________________, ______________________ indicativo subjuntivo
1. Te dijiera sisaba. 2. Le ofreciera trabajo sipoda. 3. Le diciera que es muy difcil. Si no le pueda ensear el mal de sus deseos, entonces le ayudara comenzar algn negocio. Si ___________________, ______________________ indicativo indicativo
1. Te deca sisaba. 2. Si yo era el pap, yo le deca de lavida. 3. Si yo tena dinero, iba a las vistas estatarde. There are other, unusual uses of the subjunctive. In some cases haber que plus infinitive is used as an equivalent of tendra que; in other words the impersonal construction with haber admits a subject: Un buen catlico hubiera que rechazar las cosas delmundo. This same construction also appears as an equivalent of debera haber plus past participle: Y los gringos van a tener que cer lo que hubieran hacido aos 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 is retained in infinitiveform: Puedo vivir la vida como si no juera ber pasado. (como si no hubiera pasado)
Morphology of theVerb
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 salgo sales sale salimos salen como comes come comemos comen Popular Varieties salgo sales sale salemos salen como comes come comemos comen
The only case where the thematic -i- vowel is retained, in the first person plural form, is eliminated in the popular varieties. Numerous instances exist of similar verb regularizations, as in the following examples: Standard venimos sentimos vestimos mentimos sequimos pedimos dormimos morimos Popular vinemos sintemos vistemos mintemos siguemos pidemos durmemos 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 regularization of the stem, as is evidentbelow:
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pid-o pid-es pid-e pid-emos (< pedimos) pid-en
vist-o vist-es vist-e vist-emos (< vestimos) vist-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 piens-as piens-a piens-amos (< pensamos) piens-an puedo/puedemos cuento/cuentando pierdo/pierda acuesto/acuest quiero/quieriendo vienen/vieneron juego/jueg despierto/ despiertando duermen/duermieron
Other stem changes that may occur include verbal forms derived from preterit or other tenses: tuve/tuva fui/juanos quiso/quisiendo vino/vina pido/pida/pidiste/pida
The simplification of the verb morphology seems to be a strong tendency. Numerous irregular verbs have become regularized in these Southwest popular varieties, as is common in the popular varieties of other Spanish-speaking areas of theworld: segu/segui decir/deciste componer/compon poner/pon producir/producieron entretener/entreten eres/ero costar/costa t has/yo ha/nosotros hamos decir-dicir/diciera/dica sent/senti caber/cabieron/cabo ando/and forzar/forzan
The same regularization is evident in the formation of past participles. Not only are there regular variants of irregular participles but there are also participles derived from new stems: abrir/abrido (abierto) decir/decido/dicido/dijido (dicho) morir/morido (muerto) resolver/resolvido (resuelto) volver/volvido (vuelto) supe/supido (sabido) tuvo/tuvido (tenido) escribir/escribido (escrito) hacer/hacido(hecho) poner/ponido (puesto) puedo/puedido (podido) romper/rompido(roto) niego/niegado (negado)
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In some cases regular verbs are conjugated like irregularverbs: entregar/entriego Or verbs in -er are conjugated like -arverbs: traer/traiba (traa) caer/caiba (caa) tener/teneba(tena) sentir/sentiba(senta)
The impersonal haber construction is also inflected for number: Habia muchos accidentes > Haban muchos accidentes Number inflections are also regularized for second person verb forms. In the Spanish verbal system, the second person morpheme is -s and it 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 likethese: fuiste > fuites tomaste > tomates viste >vites 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 person plural morpheme, for example, which is -mos is changed to -nos whenever stress falls on the antepenultimate syllable. Proparoxytones (esdrjulas) occur in first person plural forms in the following tenses: conditional tense: comeramos > comeranos imperfect tense: comamos > comanos imperfect subjunctive tense: comiramos > comiranos As I noted previously, regularization of verb stems is common in these popular 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 puedas pueda pudamos (< podamos) puedan piense penses piense pinsemos (< pensemos) piensen
This retention of stress on the stem vowel affects regular verbs as well, even when there is no diphthongization of stem vowels involved:
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coma comas coma cmamos (< comamos) coman
viva vivas viva vvamos (< vivamos) vivan
Once these verb forms take the stress on the antepenultimate syllable, all undergo changes from -mos to -nos in rural Southwest varieties: pudamos > pudanos cmamos > cmanos pinsemos > pinsenos vvamos > vvanos
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 aspect of verbs and the willingness with which one undertakes an action (Bull1965): Me fui a comer el taco. Me fui. Me tom el vino. Me sal de laclase. Me vine temprano. Me le todo ellibro.
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 is rarely used. Strangers and adults are immediately addressed as t. In Texas, on the other hand, the usted-t 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 t ella, el nosotros ustedes 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 (aellos). Les di la mesa a ellas. > Se las di (aellas). 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
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similar sibilant loss occurs in standard varieties when imperative forms lose the final s if followed by an enclitic nos: (Vamos + nos = Vmonos; peinemos + nos = peinmonos). The loss of final s after nos is thus an extension of the vowel loss rule plus transposition: Nos dio el dinero. > No losdio. Vndanoslo. > Vndanolos. Vndanoslos. > Vndanolos. A similar transposition of consonants is prevalent in imperative verbs, where verb final n is transposed to the end of the first enclitic pronoun: Dnmelo. > Dmenlo. Vnganse. > Vngansen. Bjense. > Bjensen. 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 lodio. No me gusta. > No mogusta. Se me olvida. > Se molvida. In some cases me is converted into mi, if there is an adjacent highvowel: Me dijo que no. > Mi dijo queno. Me encontr...> Mincontr... Other phonetic changes include the lateralization of nasals, affecting both personal and clitic pronouns. Often both nos and los appear in the same discourse: 1. Quiere que los slgamos. 2. Nos dice que los premos. 3. Pasamos da tras da sin jams pensar en lo que lospasar. 4. Los encontramos con unos jvenes.
Interrogative and Relative Pronouns

In the popular Spanish of the Southwest, the interrogative qu is often substituted for cul, especially in informational questions calling for what in En glish. Thus instead of Cul es tu direccin? or Cul es tu nmero de telfono? we often hear Qu es tu direccin? or Qu es tu nmero de telefn? Inflection for number often disappears in the case of quin/quines: Quines son? > Quinson?
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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 somewhat 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 acul forcul: Ah estaba el Piporro no sabiendo aculquera. Frequent in rural Spanish varieties, in the Southwest, and throughout the Americas are compound combinations of indefinite pronouns: algotro (algn otro), algotra, algotros, algotras, un otro (only in the Southwest following the English another) and cada quien (cadauno).
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 article 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 > lagua el oro > loro la amiga > lamiga el aguacate > laguacate la hermana > lhermana el humo >lhumo
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 automatically feminine nouns. Words like da, problema, sistema, and other words derived from Greek and ending in a are masculine in gender. In the popular varieties, on the other hand, all words that end in a (except for words of high frequency, like da) 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 sntoma la diploma la medioda 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 - and -, as in sofs or cafs. 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 and so that the plural morpheme after words ending in stressed vowels is -ses, as in the following examples: pie/pieses papa/papases caf/cafeses mam/mamases In nouns ending in unstressed vowel plus s, with stress on the penultimate syllable, the plural morpheme is zero, as in words like el lunes, los lunes. Since Spanish in the Americas is characterized by seseo (that is, by the absence of a phoneme), words like lpiz are pronounced with a final sibilant s sound as in lunes. It is not surprising then that in West Texas one often hears el lpiz and los lpiz. Another feature of popular Spanish, especially among the younger bilingual 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 escuelas muchoscosas Una mujer hecho para pelear. Una cadena que est conectado. El televisor esvieja. Las personas que son gordas son muy alegre. Yo creo que el tercer persona es hombre. No sonigual. Estas dos maneras son universal con nuestragente. Sometimes in the same discourse a speaker will select more than one gender for the sameword: las ideales, el ideal el funcin, la funcin Las ideales, el Ideal el pared, lapared el parte, laparte el pared, lapared
Agreement between numerals and nouns is also simplified. In popular varieties numbers ending in n tend to take a singular noun: Tiene veintin ao, rather than veintin aos, 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 thenouns: 400 mujerescuatrocientas mujeres 343 mujerestrecientos cuarenta y tres mujeres
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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 demonstrate affection or sympathy as well, as is common in other Spanish-speaking areas. For example: ms tardecita, al ratito, un momentito, loo 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 reiterate an intention, the adjectives, adverbs, or verbs are repeated or the prefixes re- and rete-, common in other areas, areused: Est azulazul. Est fuerte fuerte. Est retebonito. Vino luego luego. Vino looluego. Ponlo recio recio. (ms fuerte) Iba recio recio. (bienrpido) Ese hombre no ms trabaji trabaji y t de hoquis. (trabaja y trabaja) Anda canti canti. (cantando) Lo vi corri corri. (corriendo) Estaba chifli chifli. (silbando) El nio est 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 numerous 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 operating 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 automatically use the possessive all the time, as in English: Tengo las manos sucias. > Mis manos estn sucias. My hands aredirty. 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 withto: 1. Queran a comenzar. 2. Djeme atocar la colcha. 3. Lo quieren a quechar. 4. Qued de a ir para Mexico. 5. Ofreci a prestrnolas. 6. Porque es difcil a presentar todos loslados. 7. Es importante ayir. 8. Pero es asesinato a quitarlas del cuerpo? 9. Es difcil aleer. 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 Spanish 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 qu 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 functioning like gerunds rather than like participles:
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1. Para mis hermanitos viviendo en el proyecto erabueno. 2. El hijo quera poner al pap en una posicin de sintindose culpable de los problemas delhijo. 3. Autorizando abortos es algo que exige mucho pensamiento. 4. Usndolas es una manera de afirmar su mexicanidad. 5. El ideal de la hombra 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 composition 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 in Spanish. Chicano students, however, will often omit the article, as in English: 1. Capitalismo es un sistema econmico 2. Religin es algo muy personal 3. Gente ya orita est despertando 4. Todos creen que cambios son necesarios. 5. Estadsticas revelan que... Constant translation from one language to another, especially when dealing 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 aveces. 2. Quieren quedar vivos porque su vida es la nica vida que estn segurosde. 3. ...significa en realidad lo que nosotros tenemos feen. 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 ms caridad) Were not asking 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 languages 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 (pronounced iar) combinations having a higher frequency, as in the following examples: shine > chainear mop > mapear spell > espelear miss > mistear lock > laquear quit > cuitear catch > quechar type > taipear dust > dostear watch > huachar match > mechear
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 magasn (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 correspond to differences in meaning. For example, in some areas the term for truck is troque, whereas in others, it is troca. Often, troque is the larger vehicle 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 empuje: 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 additionally to English yard, the green space in front of a house, and match.
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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 system, 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 rularuler
The gender of some words is determined by its correlation with sex, as in the following examples: el bosero busdriver el broda brother el hueldeador welder la norsa nurse el troquero truckdriver la huayfawife
New loanwords ending in final e or in a consonant are generally masculine: el fil el fone el yin gin el estare el cloche el bil un nicle el suiche el bos el faite undaime elsaine
Phonetically, English sounds are adapted to the Spanish phonological system. 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 > champ. In some areas of the Southwest, however, the fricative variant sh exists, as we indicated previously, allowing the following pronunciations: sherife, mushasho, shamp. Words ending in a consonant other than d, l, r, n, or s arein corporated with an added final vowel, generally e, as in 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 in 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 cognates as true cognates is widespread. Below are just a few examples: Chicano Spanish librera carpeta conferencia lectura suceso realizar parientes Standard Spanish English biblioteca alfombra reunin conferencia xito darse cuenta padres library carpet conference lecture success realize 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 equivalent, as in the examplesbelow: competicin competition for competencia populacin population for poblacin telefn telephone for telfono perpetual perpetual for perpetuo materialstico materialistic for materialista asistante assistant for asistente exploitacin exploitation for explotacin practical practical for prctico distincto distinct for distinto farmacista pharmacist for farmacutico sadstico sadistic forsdico incapable incapable for incapaz correctar correct for corregir directar direct for dirigir
Compound Phrases
English phrases may be borrowed directly and translated literally to produce 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 country, unless the necessary English code is part of his or her repertoire. These compound phrases include expressions like the following:
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English Phrase
Loan: Compound Standard Spanish Phrase Equivalent
llamar patras volver a llamar to call back to put back poner patras devolver, volver aponer to have a good time tener un buen tiempo divertirse How do you like it? Cmo te gusta? Qu te parece? correr para un puesto ser candidato to run for office o una oficina to figure the figurar los problemas resolver los problems out problemas Your town is run Su pueblo est corrido est dirigido, by anglos. por anglos. gobernado he grew more confused creci ms confusido se puso ms 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 colegio to get a kick out of > agarrar patada Hybrid compounds. In some cases part of the original English phrase is translated, and part of the phrase is aloan: flour > harina deflor bedroom set > sete de recamara light meter > mira de laluz light bill > el bil de electricidad, el bil de laluz traffic sign > saine de trfico 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 connotations, the incorporation of loans allows for a richer repertoire. Series like the following are common in Chicano Spanish: el ch, el mono, las vistas, la pelcula, 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. Ingls y espaol. These shifts, triggered by shifts in speech act, theme, or language function, are often considered 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 stories, novels, poetry, and essays published in Chicano journals and magazines. In Magazn, published for a short while in San Antonio, the following sentence appeared in a story: Se encerr 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 puch are not examples of code-shifting, because the loanword puchar is a part of Chicano 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 likethese: Lo hizo slowly. but never likethese: *How lo hizo? *Whenvino? Vinoearly.
The explanation could be that English requires the particledo: 1. How did he doit? 2. When did hecome? Thus shifts like the following are not possible in Chicano discourse: 1. *Con quin Peter go? for Con quin vaPedro? 2. *Cundo is Mary coming? for Cundo vieneMara?
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The usual surface form for questions in the Southwest requires placing the verb before the subject: Cundo viene Mara? Con quin viene Pedro? Because some varieties of Spanish, like Caribbean Spanish, allow for the preposition of the subject before the verb (Cundo mi esposo lee? Cundo yo comer? Con quin ella baila?), it may be that shifts are being determined by surface structure rules operating in thisarea.3 Where surface forms are similar there are no problems, and shifts may occur even in the middle of phrases. As I have mentioned, English has verbal complementsgerundswhich function like nouns, whereas in Spanish only infinitive verbals function like nouns. In code-shifting, Spanish participial constructions function like English gerunds and English gerunds function like objects of Spanish prepositions: 1. Im talking about conocindonos. 2. est hablando de integration, de understanding other peoples 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 Englishrule. 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 sentencelevel. Shifts within noun phrases. The noun phrase in both English and Spanish consists 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 wedding 2. el building 3. los officials 4. metieron unsuit. 5. Tenemos un newspaper. Spanish nouns, however, are not preceded by English articles. Thus we did not find sentences like *The muchacho est aqu 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 Spanishnoun: Most of the barrio va por Gonzalo Barrientos. English nouns may be modified by adjectives in Spanish: 1. Tiene todo el building agujero. 2. en cualquier facet of schoollife
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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 Spanishverb: 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 adjective 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. Thats another bitch que tengo yo con los chicanos, que ponen msica americana. 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 qued surprised. 2. Te digo que est prejudiced. 3. Ap es el dominant. 4. La vida no noms es unparty. 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 Englishverbs. *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. (radicalin 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
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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 gathered from the recorded interviews, we found that sentences initiated in Spanish, with Spanish auxiliaries, could be followed by English participles: 1. No est hurting a la tierra 2. Te estn brain-washing 3. 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 Spanishrule: 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 Englishnoun: Dice el announcer... Spanish, of course, allows reordering of subject andverb. 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 followed by an English infinitive: Si va take una muchacha el dominant role... The opposite combination (verb go plus Spanish infinitive) does notoccur: *If youre going to tomar... Noun phrases after prepositions. Spanish prepositions may be followed by English nouns: 1. Yo estoy hablando de interaction, depower. 2. Siempre ando conhate.
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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 orgente: Im talking about interaction with lagente 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 Spanishverb: 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 sumadre Vestigial Spanish. One of the more frequent types of code-shifting is the introduction 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 rale! 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 contradictions within U.S. society, which contribute to segregation in residence, education, 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 monolingual. With the continuing immigration of Mexicans, popular Spanish varieties of the Southwest are constantly enriched and invigorated, especially where a great deal of social and linguistic interaction exists between new and older residents.
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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 important that Spanish classes for native speakers concentrate on making students 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 popular varieties share certain tendencies and certain rules. But despite similarities 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, SanDiego. 2. This section follows Weinreichs (1968) analysis of loanwords. 3. With thanks to Rosa Kestelman, East Los Angeles College, for the information on Caribbean Spanish.
References
Bernstein, Basil. 1968. Some sociological determinants of reception: an inquiry into subcultural differences. In Readings in the sociology of language, ed. J. Fishman, pp. 22339. Paris: Mouton. Bull, William. 1965. Spanish for teachers. New York: RonaldPress. Espinosa, Aurelio. 1930. Estudios sobre el espaol de Nuevo Mjico. Vol. 2. Buenos Aires: Universidad de BuenosAires. Labov, William. 1972. Language in the inner city: studies in the black English vernacular. Philadelphia: University of PennsylvaniaPress. Lewis, Glyn. 1972. Multilingualism in the Soviet Union. The Hague: Mouton. Weinreich, Uriel. 1968. Languages in contact. Paris: Mouton.
The Grammar of Spanglish

Ana Celia Zentella
The linguistic and cultural insecurity expressed by a second generation NYPR in Sandra Mara Estves poem, Not Neither (1984: 26), is all too common: Being Puertorriquea americana1 Born in the Bronx, not really jibara Not really hablando bien But yet, not Gringa either Pero ni portorra,2 Pero si portorra too.... (PR American) (PR peasant) (speakingwell) (US American) (But neitherPR) (but yesPR)
The narrators fear that she is Not really hablando bien reflects her internalization of the charge that her generations type of bilingualism is unacceptable, 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 childrens 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 switchs 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
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.
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so effortless actually required the complex coordination of social and linguistic 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 childrens age, dominant language, and social status, and those same variables determined their mastery of the grammar 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 bilingualsyoung and old and from diverse Latino backgroundsdemonstrate a shared knowledge of rules about appropriate boundary sites for SpanishEnglish linkages that distinguishes their code switching from the transferladen 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 ensear Mara leer (I have been able to teach Mara 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 ensearle a leer a Mara. 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 switching rates. Lipski compared their hierarchy with his analysis of 2,319 MexicanAmerican 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 categoriessentence, noun, object NPare 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, perhaps 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 bloques data, switches could begin within or at the boundaries of one sentence and extend into another
44
Spanglish
Table 2 Comparing syntactic hierarchies (five leading categories)* Poplack 1980 adult NYPRs (n = 1,835) Category Tag Sentence Noun Object NP Interjection (%) 22.5 20.3 9.5 7.6 6.3 Lipski 1985 adult Houston MAs (n = 2,319) Category (before & after) ^Preposition Sentence (before & after) ^and/or/but Tag Noun (%) 16.13 15.67 11.19 9.76 8.27 Zentella 1994 NYPR Children (n = 1,685) Category Sentence Noun Ind. Clause Object NP Conjunct. & Ind. Clause (%) 23 14 12 6 6
* Adapted from Lipski 1985.
sentence for one or more constituents, as is evident in Blancas warning about the Skylab rockets return toearth: Hey Lolita, but the Skylab, the Skylab no se cay pa(-ra) que se acabe el mundo. It falls in pieces. Si se cae completo, yeah. The Skylab es una cosa que (e-)st rodeando el moon taking pictures of it. Tiene tubos en el medio. Tiene tubos en el medio. Its like a rocket. Its like a rocket. Oste Lolita? Tiene tubo (s), pero como tubos en el medio, as, crossed over. The thirteenth its going to fall, pero si se cae completothat falls by piecespero no se acaba el mundo. Ahora una cosa s, everybody has to be in the house, porque si le cae encima de alguien se lo lleva ejmanda(d)o, cause those things areheavy! (Hey Lolita, but the Skylab, the Skylab (didnt fall for the world to end). It falls in pieces. (If it falls whole), yeah. The Skylab (is something thats going around) the moon taking pictures of it. (It has tubes in the middle [repeated]). Its like a rocket [repeated]. (You heard, Lolita? It has tubes, but like tubes in the middle, like this), crossed over. The thirteenth its going to fall, (but if it falls whole)that falls by pieces(but the world wont end). (Now one things for certain), everybody has to be in the house, (because if it falls on top of somebody itll blow them away), because those things areheavy!) This excerpt exemplifies the daunting task of assigning a grammatical cate gory to every switch. The bulk of the childrens switches consisted of complete sentences or syntactic categories that fell within the confines of a single sentence (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)-st rodeando el moon taking pictures of it were coded in accordance with the grammatical
45
form of the largest constituent at the switchs 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 distinguish nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs from their corresponding phrases: 1. Full sentence (n = 385, 22.8 percent)5 Pa, me va(-s) (a) comprar un jugo? It cos 25 cents. (Pa, are you gonna buy mejuice?) 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) T ests metiendo your big mouth. (Youre buttingin) (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 thanhers. 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 wont be over yourhead) (b) with coordinate conjunction (n = 96, 5.7 percent) My father took him to the ASPCA y lo mataron. (and they killedhim) 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 ma. (that this ball ismine) (b) without subordinate conjunction (n = 40, 2.4 percent) Because yo lo dije. (I saidit) 5. Adverb/adverbial phrases (n = 96, 5.7 percent) (a) Adverb (n = 58, 3.4 percent) Ima put it al revz. (backwards) (b) Adverbial phrase (n = 38, 2.2 percent) R/h/came all, all mismo, a little bit down. (Scratch me there, rightthere) 6. Verb/verb phrase (V/VP) (n = 60, 3.6 percent) (a) Verb phrase (n = 32, 1.9 percent) Her sister me e/h/pet una hebilla. (stuck a buckle inme)
46
Spanglish
(b) Verb (n = 28, 1.7 percent) Puede ser mnana means que no trae este da, trae mnana. (It can be tomorrow) (that he doesnt bring [it] this day, he brings tomorrow[sic]) 7. Prepositional phrase (n = 54, 3.2 percent) Im going with her a la esquina. (to the corner) 8. Filler or hesitation (n = 48, 2.8 percent) Wheres 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. (Im going tostay) (b) Adjectival phrase (n = 13, 0.8 percent) I saw honey bees, un montn, making honey. (a wholebunch) 10. Imperative (n = 33, 1.9 percent) Its 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 Millieshouse. (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 muri en ese cuarto that she sleeps in. (Somebody died in thatroom) 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) Cul? Whichone? 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 arent even) (or anything). 18. Determiner (n = 10, 0.6 percent) The little martians, los little aliens as, they were her family. (the) (likethis) 19. Preposition (n = 8, 0.5 percent) She was con (with) Lpezs mother.
47
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, object N/NPs, subordinate clauses, adverb/adverbial phrase, subject N/NPs, and exclamations. They added up to 58 percent (975/1,685) of the switches, contributing 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 childrens ability to produce major constituents in both languages. 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 wordstags, adjectives, predicate adjectives63 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), conjunctions (64 percent), and pronouns (62 percent). These data reinforce the prominence 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 constituents had the effect of continually reasserting and recreating childrens 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 childrens 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 relaxed speech. The bulk of the switches occurred during casual conversation and narratives; from 73 percent to 100 percent of each girls switches appeared in these two genres. Following Labov (1972a, b), a narrative is an account of a personal experience in the past that includes at least two sequential clauses. It may include an introductory abstract, an orientation, actions in the story, evaluations, a resolution, and a concluding coda. Labovs 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 bloques 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 Labovs analysis was borne out. Switching in narratives was more frequent: 27 switches occurred 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 narratives (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 switching 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 (03 percent difference). Thus, narratives and conversations 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 distinguished. Elli and Lolita switched complete sentences in casual conversation at more than twice their rate in narratives; only 6 percent of Lolitas and 4 percent of Ellis switches in narratives were full sentences. It was their preference for independent clauses in narrativestogether they produced 69 percent (53/77) of themthat 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 corroboratedbelow.
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 determiners 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, adverbs and adjectives also were switched alone more often than with their
49
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 similarities 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 Poplacks formulation of the equivalence constraint: the order of the sentence constituents immediately adjacent to and on both sides of the switch point must be grammatical 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 constituents are more likely to be inserted alone than those which are more tightly coupled. Constituents dominated by the same node under phrase structure grammarfor 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 (BerkSeligson 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 appropriate coupling points. Myers-Scotton (1993a, b, c) has proposed another approach to the analysis 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 explain the constraints; they analyze the process within the Chomskian generative grammar framework that purports to explain the deep structure of
50
Spanglish
all languages (Woolford 1983). Recent efforts to subsume a variety of constraint 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 SpanishEnglish bilinguals, is still unknown. Concerning 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 underlying 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, exhibit 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 regularities in code switching refute the notion that it precipitates the deterioration of one or both of a bilinguals languages, or that code switchers are semi-lingual or alingual.
Equivalence, Transfers, Standards

Not surprisingly, el bloques data corroborate the Sankoff-Poplack hierarchy and constraints, which were based on the switching of NYPR adults a few blocks from el bloque. Of the childrens switched utterances, 94.7 percent (1,596/1,685) complied with the equivalance constraint, that is, the grammatical 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 dialects rules of grammar, e.g., Man, you cheap! (zero copula). Also included in the nonstandard category were a few developmental errors, e.g., poniste for pusiste (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 medioday instead of medioda (mid-day, noon), which separated the morphemes of a compoundnoun. The few switches (3.6 percent) which defied the equivalence constraint usually ran afoul of the languages contradictory noun-adjective placement rules.
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Table 3 Percent of equivalent/standard/non-standard code switches Age* % + Equivalent, + Standard, Transfer Nonstandard vs Spanish vs English vs Bound morepheme Transfer Blanca 10 95.6% 2.4 1 0.5 0 0.5 (n) = (205) * December1980. Elli 13 95 1.4 1.4 0.7 0 1.4 (145) Lolita 10 88 4.9 3 2.2 0 1.9 (630) Paca 7 87 8.9 0 3 0 1 (281) Isabel 9 74.5 19.8 1.4 1.6 0.2 2.3 (424) Total N (1,449) (147) (30) (30) (1) (28) (1,685)
Spanish normally requires determiner-noun-adjective (una camisa roja) (a shirt red) and English demands determiner-adjective-noun (a red shirt). Consequently, a break between adjective and noun violates the equivalence constraint, e.g., *una camisa red, *a red camisa, *a shirt 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 languages 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 (deca) for saying and telling. 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 impressive compliance with the constraints that characterize adult Latinos bilingual behavior. Dexterous juxtaposition of English and Spanish segments was apparent 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 mathematical 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 speakers language dominance, often linked to age. The accuracy of the childrens self evaluations
52
Spanglish
of bilingual proficiency was confirmed by the language they chose for the syntactic constituents they switched mostoften. 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 constituentsfull sentences and subordinate clauseswould 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 preferred English for some small constituents which rarely were switched by the others and which appear at the bottom of the Sankoff and Poplack (1981) syntactic hierarchy of adult switch points, for example, determiners and prepositions. 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 observed and self-reported proficiency. Just as English-dominant Elli and Lolita preferred Spanish for object N/NPs, Spanishdominant 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 versions of another. Isabel, for example, produced the greatest number of Spanish 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, conjunctions 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 Lolitas switches were of this type, a proportion that was 715 percent higher than that of her friends. Some of Lolitas
53
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 Lolitas speech a more childish and sheltered quality than that of the oldergirls. Elli took second lead in the production of object N/NPs. They tended to be in Spanish like Lolitas, 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 Ellis switches were not objects but independent clauses (28 percent), which surpassed the others by 913 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 Isabels 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, pronouns, and relative conjunctions. She was the only speaker who switched determiners in both languages. The conflicting patterns of Elli and Isabel implied a relationship between each girls bilingual proficiency and the syntactic shape of her code switches. That relationship can be interpreted from contradictory perspectives. Switching like Ellis, at boundaries low on the syntactic hierarchy of major studies of SpanishEnglish 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 challenge the syntactic constraints. But Isabels 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 skillfully than the switchers who broke the confines of the sentence less frequently (Poplack 1980). Consequently, the fact that almost one half of Isabels 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. Ellis 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 effective 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
Table4 Infrequent syntactic boundary switch points Paca (%) Adjective phrase Pronoun Predicate adjective Determiner Preposition Total switches (number) Percent of total 0 0 0 0.7 0 281 0.7 Isabel (%) 0.2 0.5 0 0.5 0.5 424 1.7 Blanca (%) 0.5 1 1 0 0.5 205 3 Lolita (%) 1 1 1 0.6 0.5 630 4.1 Elli (%) 1.4 1.4 0 1.4 1.4 145 5.6 Total N 13 = 0.8% 13 = 0.8% 11 = 0.7% 10 = 0.6% 8 = 0.5% 1,685
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 unlikely that Pacas inhibition was attributable to greater awareness of syntactic hierarchies on her part than on Ellis, 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 switchedunits. 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, usually 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 intrasentential 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 advantage 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 agerelated contrast: 2 percent of Pacas switches, 8 percent of Isabels, 12 percent of Lolitas, 16 percent of Blancas, and 63 percent of Ellis switches appeared in narratives. Contrary to the expectation that narrativesbecause of their
55
informalitywould 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 children 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 as. (some eyes stuck on the wall going like this) Uuuu my God when I saw that, lo/h/ pelo(-s) se me pararon as. (my hairs stood up on me likethis.) 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 Pacas development (see The Evolution of Pacas Code Switchingbelow).
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-equivalent 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 Pacas 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 interference, 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 muequita (little doll) on black. In the 22nd or the 23rd. [re: dates] Youll find out in the end of school.
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Spanglish
English influence on Lolitas Spanish was apparent when she incorporated the English possessive s in El beibi de papis amigo es as (My fathers friends baby is like that.) This was a natural extension of her use of Spanish family titles in otherwise English sentences, as in my papis (fathers) book, my titis (aunts) house, and it did away with the repeated de prepositions that Spanish requires: el beibi del amigo de papi. On other occasions Lolita made obvious efforts to avoid Spanish interference, for example, she stopped to re-word It putsit gets mushy to avoid transferring the Spanish way of saying it gets/becomes (se pone literally it puts itself = it becomes) into English. Despite the presence of transfers and non-standard forms in Lolitas 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 Isabels 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. Isabels non-standard Spanish included regular conjugations of irregular verbs often found in young childrens speech, e.g., ponieron for pusieron (they put, third pl. pret.), and cabi 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?), hypercorrected comparatives (more better, worster), and it gots instead of it has. All the children employed similar constructions. What distinguished Isabels speech was their quantity, and some unique forms, for example: Mi catarro yo tena instead of El catarro que yo tena. (The cold that I had.) Cun/cul hora t vas? instead of A qu hora (t) te vas? (What time are you going?) You should dont say that. Yo dici we was gonna talk from Paca, instead of Yo dije we were gonna talk about Paca. (I said we were going to talk aboutPaca.) Sentences like these promote fears of double semilingualism (SkutnabbKangas 1984). In the last example, dici does not conform to the tense or person 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 Isabels code switches were in standard English and Spanish and without negative transfers in the majority of cases (75 percent).
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When switches that followed other dialect rules were distinguished from developmentally linked and unique forms in the non-standard category, over 90 percent of Isabels switches were grammatically well formed. A quantified analysis of Isabels 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 medioda 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, Isabels 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 pathologistsinformed by linguistic knowledgecould have determined why her bilingual language acquisition differed from that of the 36 other children in her community.
The Evolution of Pacas 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. During the first seven months Paca switched only twice in narratives, preferring to recount her short stories in Spanish. Reporting on the teachers discipline in her first grade class in Catholic school, she began to introduce English by quoting the teacherswords: ACZ: Y la maestra? (And the teacher?) P: Pue/h/la maestra cuando le da a uno se empieza a riir [rer] (Well, the teacher when she hits someone she starts tolaugh.) ACZ: Por qu le da? (Why does she hit somebody?) P: No, porque hacen algo malo, vel [verdad], y ella le da porque hacen algo malo. (No, because they do something wrong, right, and she hits them because they do somethingwrong.) Dipue [despus] hace, You should not do that!, [laughs.] (Then she does) [shouting] ACZ: Y te lo hizo a ti tambin? (And she did it to youtoo?) P: Nunca. Ella dice que yo soy good girl. T no sabe(-s) lo que e/h/ good girl? Ella dice que yo soy good girl y t sabe(-s) lo que e/h/ good girl. (Never. She says that I am good girl. You dont know what good girl is? She says that I am good girl and you know what good girlis.) ACZ: Qu (e-)/h/ good girl? (Whats goodgirl?) P: Que yo me porto bien. (That I behavewell.)
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Spanglish
Pacas ability to translate her teachers 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 teachers positive evaluation of her behavior and unhesitatingly translated it for me when requested. 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 teachers Spanish. It displays her own bilingual ability, and makes effective use of switching for a narrativecoda: Mi maestraesteella dice as: Ella dice en ingls 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/paol. Ella dice as: Erloone erloone. She dont know how to speak good Spanish. (My teacherumshe says like this: She says in English that its for Monday that were going to the gym and I and I say Its 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 Vickys newborn she switched for (a) full sentences, (b)independent clauses, (c) subordinate clauses with and (d) without conjunctions, (e) an object NP, and (f) an adverbial phrase. Ps mother: Vicky te puede cuidar. (Vicky can take care of you. [referring to upcoming school holiday] P: Vicky me cuida. (a) Shes my babysitter. (Vicky will take care ofme.) A: You likeVicky? P: Yeah. Shes 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 t no aguanta(-s) cabeza l te XXX cabeza, (c) because hes like that. ...when shes going to do something she says, Paca hold the baby, and I hold) the baby. (If you dont hold head he [unintelligible] head) because hes likethat. ACZ: Becausewhat? P: The baby of Vicky (f) (es-)t monguia (d) o. (is wobbly) ACZ: i(Es-)T monguia(d) o! [laughing] T lo cuida/h/? (Hes wobbly! Do you take care ofhim?) P: Yo, yo, yo aguanto. Todo el da (b) when I see the baby I tell Vicky, (b) Lo puedo aguantar? y ella dice S, (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 toVicky. In the presence of her monolingual mother, the researcher, and a bilingual peer, Paca mixed Spanish and English more than usual, perhaps as a neutralization strategy to accommodate us all instead of choosing one language over the other (Myers-Scotton1976).
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As Pacas contact with English-speaking and bilingual worlds intensified, she advanced from merely inserting quotations to imitating the code switching 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 das (every day) with todo el da (all day long). The development of Pacas 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 birthdays, Paca advanced through three code switching phaseseach 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 puertorriqueos raised 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 cooccurrence rules that predict that each interaction will be limited to either Spanish or English, or to standard or non-standard dialects. From a prescriptive grammarians 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 Urciuolis perspective of bilingualism as practice instead of bilingualism as fixed codes, NYPR code switching may be seen as part of an alternative form of resistance, not a deliberate ignorance of multicultural realities but a different and potentially more democratic way of apprehending them (Flores and Ydice 1990:74). The code switching of el bloques 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 communities, corroborating the syntactic hierarchy and constraints outlined by Sankoff and Poplack (1981). An older vs younger contrast that was linked to each groups dominant language (younger = Spanish, older = English) surfaced in favorite switch boundaries, adherence to constraints, and language of the switch. English-dominant bilinguals favored short Spanish insertions that distinguished them from monolingual English speakers, and younger Spanish-dominant childreneager to demonstrate their increasing
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command of Englishmade 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 others. The five most infrequently switched syntactic units constituted 5.6 percent of the oldest childs switches, but less than one percent of the youngest (and least bilingual) childs 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 position: Blanca produced more full-sentence switches than her English-dominant friends, but less than the younger Spanish-dominant children. She also produced 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 nonequivalent 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 anyones switches. These patterns link language ability with the type and number of grammatical 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 bilinguals competence. Isabels 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 girls 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 eachchild. Over the 18 months of the initial part of this study, the elementary schoolers 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 attention to ones membership in a bilingual speech community which recognizes the value of Spanish among in-group members (Alvarez 1989: 385). Similarly, the children of el bloque switched into Spanish to acknowledge the home languages value, while the consistent use of English as the base language reflected the symbolic domination of the dominant society. Sadly, their bilingual
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skills were disparaged within and beyond their community, and their Spanglish often became a source of embarrassment instead ofpride. The narrator of Not Neither, cited at the beginning of this chapter, ends by affirming her common heritage with the nationalist heroine Lolita Lebrn (Estves 1984:26): ... We defy translation Ni tengo nombre (Idont even have aname) Nameless, we are a whole culture once removed Lolita alive for 25years [in a US prison] Ni soy, pero soy Puertorriquea como ella (Im not even, but I am Puerto Rican likeher) Giving blood to the independentstar Daily transfusions into the river of La Sangre Viva. (The LivingBlood) The Spanglish of el bloques children was the principal artery of their daily bilingual transfusions. Its grammarparticularly the constraints it honors and violatesalerts us to their participation in the process of transculturacin (transculturation) (Ortiz 1947), i.e., a dominated group transforms the dominant culture in the process of transforming its own traditional language and culture. Individual code switching patterns exposed each girls 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 Mara 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 Puertorriquea-Dominicana, Boricua-Quisqueyana, Taino-Africana. 2. Portorra is a common abbreviation of puertorriquea. 3. Lipskis 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. Poplacks adults were interviewed by a researcher from the community, and el bloques children carried a tape recorder.
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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 recordings of narratives would have elicitedsome. 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 thatview.
References
Alvarez, C. 1989: Code switching in narrative performance. In O. Garcia and R. Otheguy (eds), English across cultures, cultures across English: A reader in cross-cultural communication, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 37386. . 1991: Code switching in narrative performance: social, structural and pragmatic functions in the Puerto Rican speech community of East Harlem. In C. Klee and L. Ramos-Garcia (eds), 27198. Belazi, A., E. Rubin, A. J. Toribio 1994: Codeswitching and X-bar theory: The functional head constraint. Linguistic Inquiry 25: 2. Bentahila, A. and Davies, E. E. 1983: Bilingualism and language contact: The syntax of Arabic-English code-switching. Lingua, 59, 30130. Berk-Seligson, S. 1986: Linguistic constraints on intra-sentential code-switching: A 48. study of Spanish/Hebrew bilingualism. Language in Society, 15, 313 Chomsky, N. 1992: A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics I. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT. Estves, S. M. 1984: Not Neither. Tropical rain: A bilingual downpour. The Bronx, NY: African Caribbean Poetry Theater. Flores, J. and Ydice, G. 1990: Living borders/buscando Amrica: Languages of Latino self-formation. Social Text [24], 8(2), 5784. Labov, W. 1966: The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. . 1972a: Language in the inner city: Studies in black English vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. . 1972b: Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lipski, J. M. 1985: Linguistic aspects of Spanish-English language switching. Tempe: Arizona State University, Center for Latin American Studies. Marlos, L. and Zentella, A. C. 1978: A quantified analysis of code switching by four Philadelphia Puerto Rican adolescents. University of Pennsylvania Review of Linguistics, 3, 46 57. McClure, E. 1977: Aspects of code-switching in the discourse of bilingual MexicanAmerican children. In M. Saville-Troike (ed.), Linguistics and Anthropology, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, GURT, 93 115. 41. Myers-Scotton, C. 1976: Strategies of neutrality, Language, 53(4), 919 . 1993a: Social motivations for codeswitching, evidence from Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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. 1993b: Duelling languages: Grammatical structure in codeswitching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . 1993c: Common and uncommon ground: social and structural factors in code 503. switching. Language in Society 22: 475 Ortiz, F. 1947: Cuban counterpoint; Tobacco and sugar. New York: A. A. Knopf. Pfaff, C. 1975, December: Constraints on code switching: A quantitative study of Spanish/English. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Poplack, S. 1980: Sometimes Ill start a sentence in Spanish y tennino en espaol: Toward 616. a typology of code-switching. Linguistics, 18, 581 . 1981a: Quantitative analysis of a functional and formal constraint on code switching (Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueos Working Paper No. 2). . 1981b: Syntactic structure and social function of code-switching. In R. P. Durn (ed.), 169 84. Romaine, S. 1989: Bilingualism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Sankoff, D. and Poplack, S. 1981: A formal grammar for code-switching. Papers in Linguistics, 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 porqu 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 Linguistics (Winter), 36386. Woolford, E. 1983: Bilingual code switching and syntactic theory. Linguistic Inquiry, 14, 52036. 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, 21838. . 1981c: T bien, you could answer me en cualquier idioms: Puerto Rican code switching in bilingual classrooms. In R. P. Durn (ed.), 10932. . 1982: Code switching and interactions among Puerto Rican children. In J. Amastae and L. Elas-Olivares (eds), 386 412.
The Gravitas of Spanglish

Ilan Stavans
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 espanglsone term used to refer to Spanglish south of the borderthe 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 Americas, 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 nonfictionoften merely sprinkling in a few words, but also using a full-blown dialect. Even on the campaign trail, George W. Bushs 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, Ive been working on a lexicon of the language, and this semester Im 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 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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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 anxietyand even xenophobia. In the United States, it announces to some people an overall hispanizacin 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 expression 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 compaera 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 spontaneous 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 nuancesfrom meaning to accent and emphasisdistinguish thetwo. 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, imposed on millions of Indian peoples who spoke such languages as Mayan, Huichol, and Tarascan in Mexico, and Arucanian, Guaran and Quechua in South America. The Spanish language spoken today on the continent that ranges from Ciudad Jurez to Tierra del Fuego is an acquired artifact. Of course, the fact that Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz and Jorge Luis Borges wrote their poems and stories in Cervantess tongue doesnt mean that they wrote in translation. Their Spanish was as much theirs as it was the property of Benito Jernimo Feijoo, Miguel de Unamuno, or Federico Garca 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 oceanblue. It is in this period that Spanish became a language of power, a global language with an army, a language through which Catholic Spain concentrated its strength and announced itself as a well-delineated nation to other countries, 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 Salamanca, published his Gramtica la lengua castellana, the first grammar of the
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Spanish language, and his Diccionario latino/espaol. Shortly after, around 1495, he came out with the Vocabulario espaol/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 structureand 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 period 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 artistic fertility. The 150 years that followed Nebrijas work was the so-called Golden Age of Spanish arts and literature, of poets, playwrights, and novelists like Fray Luis de Leon, Santa Teresa de Jess, Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, Caldern de la Barca, Luis de Gngora, 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 espaola was put together by a lexicographer of the name Sebastin de Covarrubias 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 produceit. For years, it was referred to in various sources as Etimologas, 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 Inquisition, and the title page lists Covarrubias as a consultor del santo oficio de la inquisicin. 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 volumes of a dictionary in 1612; the dictionary of the Acadmie Franaise, whose
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mandate was to purify the French tongue, took shape from 1639 to 1694.) But Nebrijas and Covarrubiass dictionaries were printed privately, and they sold poorly. It wasnt until 1713 that Juan Manuel Fernndez Pacheco, Marquis of Villena, founded the Real Academia Espaola 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 yearsfrom 1726 to 1740to produce the six volumes of the famously disappointing Diccionario de autoridades that were supposed to do that. The works limitations say much about Spanish character and history and the Spanish 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 esplendorclean, 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 distinguish between Old Christians and New Christians. The former made the nation proud; the latter (those Jews who, before and after the official expulsion 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 innuendoes, was represented in the dictionarys pages. Definitions were substantiated 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 linguistic heritageif 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 regime of Felipe Gonzlez, have produced an era of fractured identity, as various 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 recognized 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 consideration 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 Spanish take pride in the fact that their language is now the second-most-important tongue in the land of their former enemy. Noting Spains importance in the American past, King Juan Carlos proudly announced during the Quincentennial of Christopher Columbuss discovery of the Americas that Espaa est al centro del pasado de los Estados Unidos. That same year, Puerto Rico, in a nationwide referendum, established Spanish as the islands official language for which Spain awarded the Puerto Rican people the prestigious Prncipe de
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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 Shakespeares language has no official body like the Real Academia Espaola to protect it is reason to rejoice. Dictionaries have been produced by individuals unaffiliated with political causes, like Robert Cawdrey, Noah Webster, and, of course, Samuel Johnsonthe insuperable Dr. Johnsonwho remains a magisterialmodel. In many ways, Johnsons Dictionary of the English Language, which first appeared in 1755, followed the same pattern as the Spanish dictionary, using quotations from canonical figures to put a words 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 Johnsons task was not to promote the world-view of a state or empire. He was the quintessential individual. He argued against establishing an academy of the English language, lest the spirit of English liberty be hindered 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 influences, 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 fascicules 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 categorizing words from English-language regions far andwide. 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 Nez Cabeza de Vaca, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Gaspar Prez de Villagr, Fathers Eusebio Kino and Junpero 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 region that is now the Southwestern United States. Between 1803, when Thomas
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Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana Purchase, and 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed over almost one-third of Mexicos land to the United States, Anglo arrivals created a dialogue between English and Spanish, beginning a tentative merging of the two tongues. With the 1848 treaty, the Mexican people in the Southwest became, overnight, 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 dominant 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 didnt altogether cease; it was kept alive in areas like Miami and New York, which were becoming 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 worlda symptom of verbal cross-fertilization. Words like lasso, rodeo, amigo, maana, 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 Espaa as Americanismos. Out of this potpourri comes Spanglisha vital social code, whose sheer bravura is revolutionizing both Spanish and, to a lesser extent, English. There isnt 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 Yorks Lower East Side), but also ethnic ones (chale is a Chicano expression of disagreement, chompa is Nuyorican for jumper, Y.U.C.A. stands for Young Urban Cuban American in Florida). Ganga Spanglish, as Ive 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 Hills album Temple of Boom. Ebonics, Chicano Spanglish, and L.A. Spanglish are intertwined: Dont turn your back on a vato like me Cause Im one broke motherfucka in need Desperate! Whats going on in the mente Taking from the rich and not from my gente Look at that gabacho sipping borracho from the cerveza Hes 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
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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 Im 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, theres 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 comfortable 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 1920s 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 particularly by poor people in urban centers, is marked byclass. 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 AfricanAmerican counterparts. In literary works like Piri Thomass 1967 memoir of a black Puerto Rican in Spanish Harlem, Down These Mean Streets, the hybrid 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
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both Yiddish and Spanglish started as intraethnic minority languages, both quickly became transnational verbalcodes. 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 plentiful: Hebrew, German, Russian, Polish, and other Slavic languages. It was first known as a gibberish for women and children, looked down upon as unworthy of Talmudic dialogue by rabbis and the intelligentsia. Nevertheless, by the 19th century, a vast majority of poor, uneducated Jewsmale and female alikein the so-called Pale of Settlement that included 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 selfconfidence, by figures like Sholom Aleichem. Plays, stories, novels, poems, commentary, and translations were produced in Yiddish. In 1978, Isaac Bashevis Singer, a native of Poland and a New Yorker by choice, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his Yiddishworks. 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 wont go away. Instead, as time goes by, it will solidify its status. Indeed, it is already in the process of standardizing 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 obviously not at stake.) None of that is impossible, although the transformation is likely to take hundreds ofyears. We are, clearly, at once witnesses and participants to radical change. Imagine if, by a miracle, Miguel de Cervantes was given a copy of Gabriel Garca Mrquezs 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 Spanishand of Englishwill be affected byit. 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.
B oricua (B etween ) B orders : On the Possibility of Translating Bilingual Narratives

Yolanda Martnez-San Miguel
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 aotro? Juan Flores, Broken English Memories1
Textos ilegibles (UnreadableTexts)

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 definition 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 writing 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 Santiago in Puerto Rico, the parodies of island-based writers Ana Lydia Vega and Magali Garca Ramis featuring Nuyorican characters, and the debate around Rosario Ferrs novels and essays in English.3
Boricua (Between) Borders by Yolanda Martnez-San Miguel was published in None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era, edited by Frances Negrn-Muntaner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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Boricua (Between) Borders
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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 problemnamely, 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 Jos 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 Souths cultural practice.5 One way to examine Puerto Rican literatures liminal location is by referring to Tato Lavieras book, AmeRcan.6 Rooted in the diaspora, this book of poems questions a central motif in Latin American racial discourse miscegenationby 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 groupssuch as Boricuas, Arabs, Blacks, Chinese, Cubans, English, Greeks, Irish, Italians, Jamaicans, Japanese, Jewish, Russians, and Spanishchallenging traditional links between nationality and territory by proposing a complex set of interactions among different ethnic groups living in the United 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 jbaro, seen by many as the quintessential symbols of Puerto Ricanness. The text invokes these categories to transform them in yet another element of a Latino and Rcan discourse that is, however, produced from another location, beyond the culture and language of the island, 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 AmeRcan. The first title refers to the political status of the island, and uses this ambiguous and debated concept to propose an identity that lives in between various limits: im still in the commonwealth/stage of my life, observing/the many integrated experiences/we took everything/and became everybodyelse.7 The second term, AmeRcan, 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, Rcan. This reading depends heavily on Lavieras performance, because he employs an intermediate pronunciationtypographically signaled by his interesting use of capitalization and a grammatical accentthat mixes Spanish and English, producing a neologism that sounds very similar to the phrase Im a Rican, and also looks like a reconfiguration of the phrase a Rcan me following Spanish grammar: a me Rcan (un yo Rcan). This interlingual noun allows him to create a new national or ethnic name (in Spanish, gentilicio) that simultaneously
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Spanglish
acknowledges his belonging to both Puerto Rican and American societies. As a result, AmeRcans are proposed as a new identity produced and defined in a context of continuous transit and transition: AmeRcan, across forth and across back/back across and forth back/forth across and back and forth/our trips are walking bridges!8 I would also like to comment the poemAy benditoincluded in the second section of this book as an example of a text that even resists the bilingualism 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 language, 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! fjese, oiga, fjese. ay bendito. pero, qu se puede hacer? nada, verdad? ave mara. ah, si, ah, s, es as. pues, oiga, si es la verdad. pero, qu se puede hacer? nada, verdad? fjese, oiga, fjese. mire, mire. oh, s, hombre! oiga, as somos tan buenos, verdad? bendito. ay madre! ay, Dios mo! ay, Dios santo! me da una pena! ay, si la vida es as, oiga. pero qu se puede hacer? nada, verdad? fjese, oiga, fjese. oiga, fjese.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 meaning of each word to identify and convey very specific cultural contents for each term. For example, the title of the poem is a short phraseAy benditothat
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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 subalternyet uniqueidentity among Puerto Ricans. The lyrical voice of this text expresses Puerto Rican resignation to the constant difficulties 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 poemsAmeRcanthis 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 contemporary cultural manifestations among Nuyorcans, Diaspo-Ricans, or Puerto Ricans living in the United States.10 Taking 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-Rcan literature 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 national 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 Studies, 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 pretext not to study the intrinsic multilingual nature of many of these cultural productions. The untranslatability of some of these texts is also problematical, since it suggests that there are limits to the globalized exchanges within a multicultural society, and that there are significant areas within contemporary American cultures in the United States that cannot be easily rendered in English. Furthermore, many of these Latino cultural productions make us realize that linguistic hesitation or untranslatability cannot be understood as incompetence or lack of control over communicative skills, but quite to the contrary, as a discursive strategy that forces us as readers to reconsider our basic notions about the relationship of language and cultural identity.12 What is at stake in this disciplinary debate is also the urgency of reconfiguring the field of cultural and literary studies, to make multiculturalism mean a new way of reading, interpreting, and understanding cultural difference. I would also like to propose that Lavieras 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 American literature, I have quite often experienced how the inclusion of Latino/a
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Spanglish
texts in courses is questioned based on disciplinary argumentscan we consider Latino/a writings as a part of Latin American literature?or linguistic and pedagogical concernsin 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 thesetexts? 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 biculturalism, 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 theseworks.
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 exercise 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 happens when the rendition in one language literally eliminates the interlinguistic structure of a text? It seems, then, that what Bruce-Novoa describes as interlingual 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 junctures 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
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In some of these texts the interaction of Spanish and English can be superficialsuch as in the cases in which the author uses vocabulary from both languagesor it can be basis of the internal semantic and grammatical structuresuch as Sandra Cisneross use of the diminutive in English to express affection in the same way it is done in Spanish, or the calques (literal translations of Spanish idioms and colloquial phrases) in the works of Vctor Hernndez Cruz studied by Frances R. Aparicio. An example of these calques are the literal translation of Spanish names, like when Hernndez Cruz refers to his hometown Aguas Buenas as Good Water, or when a popular saying is literally translated into English: What doesnt kill you gets you fat18 (lo que no mata engorda). Juan Flores and George Ydice 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 Santiagos When I Was Puerto Rican/ Cuando era puertorriquea, a text written and published, almost simultaneously, in Spanish and English. According to linguist Gloria D. Prosper-Snchez, who studied both versions of the novel to compare the texts in lexical, phonological, and morphosyntactic terms, Santiago has native competence in academic English and colloquial Spanish. As a result, in the English version, the narration 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: Santiagos 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 Santiagos 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 bilanguaging.21 The use of internaland imperfecttranslations 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 charactersVicenza Vitale and Palmira Parsand 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 seanarrated in Spanish, English, and Italian by this couple living in New York Citybecomes 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 becomes the lingua franca that keeps both narrative voices sharing a communicative 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 abierta 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....Amndonos en la zona de un ingls 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 separation, 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 ciudades23 (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 puente invisible la Mujer del Mar24 (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 Pars and Vicenza Vitale in one single character that leads the life of both narrators: Uno es tanta gente a la misma vez. Yo slo puedo contar el cuento de la Mujer del Mar (la historia nunca antes contada de la poeta manatiea Palmira Pars) y Angelo slo pudo contar the story of the woman of the sea (tanto escuch la historia de Vicenza Vitale...: la viajera haba iniciado el viaje en un puerto de Napoli, detrs de un pasaje del Vesubio, vena de los parrales de Giocavaran llena de polvo, inmvil en la popa de un veleroimmobile...on the orange aft of a vaporous vessel, contaba el amado inmvil, atardeciendohaba atracado en Casablanca y en las Islas Azores haba zarpado camino del mar a las Antillas; con otros campesinos del agua salada, en el agosto caluroso de 1913 lleg a San Juan). El orden de sus vidas iba diluyndose en las palabras memoriosas 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 Manat, Palmira Pars) and Angelo could only narrate the story of the woman of the sea (he heard Vicenza Vitales story so many times [...]: the traveler began her journey in a port in Naples, behind a passage
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of the Vesuvius, she came from the vineyards of Giocavaran, covered with dust, immobile on the aft of a sailboatimmobile...on the orange aft of a vaporous vessel, the immobile lover narrated, as the sun was going downthe vessel docked in Casa Blanca and the Islas Azores, it had departed in route to the Antilless 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 Oteros 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, Angelos 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 thestory: 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 aosos de una Italia...de la que slo 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 ofmen)].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 coincide 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 interlocking 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 relationship 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 narrators discourse to the listeners imaginary: l me hablaba todava de aquella Vicenza Vitale...y yo slo vea puertos grises y mares solitarios, l hablaba de esas arrugas profundas (solcari profondo...) como si fueran surcos de una Italia remota quel exilio haba convertido en callejones, y yo slo vea un cementerio de islas, las tumbas verdes de Atlntida [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 interpretative process that makes possible or impossible the communication between these two storytellers and lovers. By incorporating each narrators referents, 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.29 Thus, fiction becomes an alternative native tongue that allows a communication 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 transmission of ideas between speakers. This new mother tongue is not a regional or specific code, but a broad and mutating discourse, as polysemic and boundless 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 usually 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 Rcan and Latino texts become readable? If, as Mignolo
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points out, changing linguistic cartographies implies a reordering of epistemology,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 nature of many of their referents. As Julio Ramos points out, Latino intellectuals 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 definition 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.34 By 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 surprise that The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature ends with two sections 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 Amrica Latina: Palavra, Literatura e Cultura. Volume 3: Vanguarda e Modernidade.36 Even though Rcan 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 possible 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 counterpoint to rethink Latin American cultural traditions by studying linguistic contacts as a crucial element in many canonical texts, such as Comentarios reales, Los ros profundos or Rigoberta Menchs testimony, not to mention the debates on bilingual education in Mxico, Paraguay, and Per. 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 Ferr, for example).37 In these cases the difference between the original and the translation 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 departments. 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 readings become crucial to study and interpret many of these ethnic narratives. Linguistic competence, code-switching, and linguistic registers all become productive areas of study to unravel the complexity of thesetexts. 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 sociological perspective, these writings make evident the need to reconceptualize the way we define the limits between fields of study. Interdisciplinarity or multidisciplinarity is not only crucial when addressing ethnic cultures,39 but in this case it seems that one thing Latino/a literature points out is the importance of disciplinary contact zonesto remember here Mary Louise Pratts illuminating conceptas a condition of possibility for new questions.40 For example, Saldvar 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 aesthetic can broaden the areas of research of a variety of intellectual fields.42 Finally, Frank Bonilla explores the productive interdependence between Latino/a and Latin American Studies by rethinking the usefulness of interdisciplinary approaches.43 I would like to suggest that the comments I am including 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 opposing the goals and objectives of each one of these disciplines to define a specific object of study45 or trying to find a home department or program to study
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Latino/a culture in all its complexity, I am proposing that one way to take advantage 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 disciplines from within. Perhaps, by looking at the disciplinary, linguistic, and cultural contacts, and sometimes the oppositions that these writings make possible, we could begin to explore the multiple translatability that Latino/a literature promotes and calls for within American and Latin American universities. Beyond the academic world, Latino cultural productionsalong with other ethnic and minority discourses present in many U.S. creolization and melting potspush 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 imaginaries as a point of departure to explore equivalence in difference.46
Notes
I would like to thank Ben. Sifuentes-Juregui 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 University Press, 2000),56. 2. Ramn Grosfoguel, Frances Negrn-Muntaner, and Chlo S. Georas, Introduction: Beyond Nationalist and Colonianist Discourses: The Jaiba Politics of the Puerto Rican Ethno-Nation, in Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism, ed. Frances Negrn-Muntaner and Ramn Grosfoguel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1019; 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),1518. 3. For more information, please see the debate between Nicholasa Mohr and Ana Lydia Vega about her short story Pollito chicken (in Vrgenes y mrtires (cuentos), [Ro Piedras: Editorial Antillana, 1983], 7379) included in Mohrs 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]: 8792); and the discussions on bilingualism and Puerto Rican literature in the case of Esmeralda Santiago (Gloria D. Prosper-Snchez, Washing Away the Stain of the Plantain: Esmeralda Santiago y la constitucin del relato autobiogrfico bilinge, in Actas del Congreso en torno a la cuestin del gnero y la expresin femenina actual. [Aguadilla: Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1998], 131138) and Rosario Ferr (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], 3241). Magali Garca 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 [Ro Piedras: Editorial Huracn, 1993], 919). 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 of1996. 4. Ramn Grosfoguel, The Divorce of Nationalist Discourses from the Puerto Rican People: A Sociohistorical Perspective, in Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism,6670. 5. Jos Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 8. Frances Aparicio has also noted Diana Taylors 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],331). 6. Tato Laviera, AmeRcan (Houston: Arte Pblico Press,1981). 7. Ibid.,80. 8. Ibid.,94. 9. Ibid.,45. 10. Jorge Duany has noted that, scholars cannot even agree on a common terminology 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 alternatives: Neo-Rican, Nuyorican, Niuyorrican, nuyorriqueo, mainland Puerto Rican, U.S.born Puerto Rican, Boricua, Diaspo-Rican, and even Tato Lavieras curious neologism AmeRcanbut 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 latino entre el ingls y el espaol: notas para una nueva educacin sentimental, Revista Iberoamericana 66, no. 193 (OctoberDecember 2000): 866; Julio Ramos, Genealogas de la moral latinoamericanista, in Nuevas perspectivas desde/sobre Amrica Latina: el desafo de los estudios culturales, ed. Mabel Moraa (Pittsburgh, PA: Instituto International de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2002),224. 12. This is one of the main arguments to devalue bilingual speakers who use codeswitching during spontaneous speech. This view of alternation of linguistic codes as a deviation that indicated a speakers inability to separate the two languages at her or his disposal is now recognized as a functional linguistic behavior which demonstrates the speakers ability to manipulate the grammar and lexicon of two languages at the same time (Holly Cashman, Language Choice in U.S. Latina First Person Narrative: The Effects of Language Standardization and Subordination, Discourse 21, no. 3 [Fall 1999]: 13250). This same view is presented by Lipski in his essay entitled SpanishEnglish Language Switching and Literature: Theories and Models, The Bilingual Review/La revista bilinge 9, no. 3 (SeptemberDecember 1982): 191212, and in Ana Celia Zentellas 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 in Gender Trouble: To what extent do regulatory practices of gender formation and division constitute identity, the internal coherence of the subject, indeed, the self-identical
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status of the person? To what extent is identity a normative ideal rather than a descriptive 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], 1617). Ipropose extending Butlers 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 ReImagining 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 Womens 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 Chvez-Silverman, Introduction, in Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad, ed. Frances Aparicio and Susana Chvez-Silverman (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 1997), 14; Pedro Cabn, 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 Citizens Dishonor in the Age of Cultural 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. 12 (SpringSummer 1990):97. 16. Ibid.,9697. 17. Juan Bruce-Novoa, Spanish-Language Loyalty and Literature, in Retrospace: Collected Essay on Chicano Literature Theory and History (Houston: Arte Pblico 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, 2045), while Juan Flores and George Ydice refer to this process of intercultural transferability as Transcreation (Living Borders/Buscando Amrica: Languages and Latino SelfFormation, in Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity [Houston: Arte Pblico Press, 1993], 21920). 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 Gonzlez Echevarra and Enrique Pupo-Walker [Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 208). I use Bruce-Novoas 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,2036. 19. Flores and Ydice, Living Borders/Buscando Amrica: Languages and Latino self-Formation,221. 20. For more information, see Gloria D. Prosper-Snchez, Washing Away the Stain of the Plantain: Esmeralda Santiago y la constitucin del relato autobiogrfico bilinge,
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in Actas del Congreso en torno a la cuestin del gnero y la expressin femenina actual. [Aguadilla: Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1998],131138. 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),21920. 23. Ibid.,221. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 21314; All emphases aremine. 26. Ibid.,22627. 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 Writers, 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 puertorriquea (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), a self-translation of her autobiographical narrative When I was Puerto Rican ([New York: Vintage Books, 1994], xvxvii). In both cases the contention is that for the exiled or migrant narrator some experiences occur in a particular 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 bilingismo: reflexiones sobre el lenguaje en la escritura latina contempornea, Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 12, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 1934. Ramos Oteros writing, however, proposes the formation of one single narrative between two different narrative voices and explores how the process of intermingling of languages and imaginaries can produce a space of commonality that promotes a communication that transcends the limits of the native or national tongues (El cuento de la mujer delmar). 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, Genealogas de la moral latinoamericanista. Paper presented at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Princeton University, April1998. 33. Martnez-San Miguel, Bitextualidad y bilingismo,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 relationship 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 Martn-Rodrguez, Chicano Literature, in The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, Volume 2: The Twentieth Century, 55786;
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William Luis, Latin American (Hispanic Caribbean) Literature Written in the United States,52656. 36. See Ana Pizarro ed., Amrica Latina: Palavra, Literatura e Cultura, Volume 3: Vanguarda e Modernidade (So Paulo: Editora da Unicamp,1995). 37. Rosario Ferr 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 Pblico 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 Knowing, 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 (London: Routledge,1992). 41. Jos David Saldvar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997),1. 42. Sommer, El contrapunteo Latino entre el ingls y el espaol,866. 43. Bonilla, Rethinking Latino/Latin American Interdependence,22128. 44. See Juan Poblete, ed., Critical Latin American and Latino Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,2003). 45. Cabn, The New Synthesis,20612. 46. Jakobson, quoted in Simon, Rites on Passage,97.
Qu, qu?!Transculturacin and Tato Lavieras Spanglish Poetics

Stephanie lvarez Martnez
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 Laviera, 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: bilingualism as conflict; the dismantling of institutionalized forms of discourse; the redefining of literacy; and Latino language(s) as a source of empowerment (Language 58). What makes Lavieras poetry so unique, powerful, and exceptional is that all four major poetic moments are present. In an interview, Laviera tells how he became apoet: So in May of 1960 I was Jess Laviera Snchez, and in September, three months afterward, when I started classes here [in New York], I was Abraham Laviera. That affected me a lot. Thats when I decided to be a writer, to go back to my name. When I became a writer, I said I dont want to go back to either Jess or Abraham; I used my nickname, Tato. (Interview83) Lavieras choice not to use either Jess or Abraham, but Tato, reflects his attitude toward his choice of language. Laviera does not choose between Spanish or English. His personal reality and the reality of his people, the Nuyoricans,
Transculturation and Tato Lavieras Spanglish Poetics, by Stephanie lvarez Martnez, was published in Centro. Courtesy of The Center for Puerto Rican Studies and Stephanie lvarez Martnez.
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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; its a universal situation. It may refer to urban English in Spanish form...its a Spanish with an English tonality, with an English spirituality, its a Spanish urbanized....Its an accent in English, its 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 Vernacular 2. Urban/African-American English Vernacular 3. Formal/Standard Spanish 4. Formal/Standard English 5. Afro-Spanish Vocabulary and Grammatical Constructions 6. Nuyorican Spanglish 7. Other Latino Spanglish Vernaculars Just as the choice to use his nickname, instead of Jess 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 Anzalda 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 Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate (81). Lavieras Spanglish constructions legitimize the language, and therefore, the people who use it. For these reasons, Vronique 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). Anzalda herself 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 Algarn 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 Lavieras work, which includes a number of unpublished plays, and four collections of poetry, all published by the Latino publishing house Arte Pblico Press: la carreta made a U-turn (1979),2 ENCLAVE (1981), AmeRcan (1985), and Mainstream Ethics (tica corriente) (1988). La carreta made a U-turn takes Ren Marqus 1953 production of La carreta as its point of departure.3 Marqus play, La carreta, describes the typical displacement of the Puerto Rican jbaro4 due to the politics of Operation Bootstrap.5 In the play, Doa 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 Marqus the only possible redemption for Doa Gabriela, and those like her, is a return to Puerto Rico. Flores observes that in Marqus play the oxcart, guiding symbol of the play and an abiding reminiscence of abandoned national roots, must be restored to its natural place in a world uncontaminated by inhuman modernity and incompatible foreign values (Divided169). Lavieras 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 Marqus play (Interview 81). The first section of la carreta made a U-turn, titled Metropolis Dreams, directly references the last act of Marqus play, La metrpoli. Lavieras metropolis, not unlike Marqus, portrays a harsh New York reality, filled with scenes of hunger, cold, poverty, drugs, abandoned buildings, subways, and homelessness. One may read the second section of U-turn, Loisaida Streets: Latinas Sing, as what became of the displaced Doa 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 Rumbn, 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 dcima. Unlike Marqus, Laviera 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 transculturation between the popular culture of the Island and that of New York. Lavieras nuevo rumbn, 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 collection indicates Lavieras linguistic aptitude. It can be seen as a possible reference 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 Lavieras capacity to use language in order to portray a unique worldview. Again divided into three sections,
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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 Introduction 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 Lavieras third collection, AmeRcan, Laviera proposes and defines a new, more humane America. Just as Laviera proposes in the two previous collections, the African and Indigenous are the humanizing factors and principal creators of a transcultural Puerto Rican culture. In AmeRcan, Laviera 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. Lavieras last collection, Mainstream Ethics (tica corriente), takes on a similar 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 mainstream. As Nicols Kanellos accurately observes, It would be futile to search for...waspish ideals in this book...we all can and do contribute to the common 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 Lavieras themes. Moving from English to Spanish, to urban English, to Spanglish, to Puerto Rican que corta vernacular, he creates a linguistic cosmovisin that reflects all of his values and hopes for the future. A cosmovisin of linguistic transculturation that reflects the transculturation of the people, where languages are not static, but ever evolving, mixing, colliding, and, of course, creating. Lavieras poems demonstrate the proceso doloroso of transculturation that Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz coined to describe Cuban culture. This process takes on three phases, as Ortiz defines it; acculturationthe partial acquisition of another culture; deculturationthe partial loss or displacement of a previous culture; and neoculturationthe creation of new cultural phenomena (Contrapunteo 96).8 Take for instance Lavieras poem my graduation speech: i think in spanish i write in english .....................
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tengo las venas aculturadas escribo en spanglish abraham in espaol abraham in english tato in spanish taro in english tonto in both languages ..................... ah supe que estoy jodo ah supe que estamos jodos english or spanish spanish or english spanenglish now, dig this: hablo lo ingls matao hablo lo espaol matao no s leer ninguno bien so it is, spanglish to matao what i digo iay virgen, yo no s hablar! (la carreta17) At first glance, it seems that the poetic voice is caught in a world of confusion, 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 buildingsel 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 Lavieras 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 hisname. However, just as Laviera comes to realize that neither his Spanish given nameJessnor his adopted English nameAbrahamwill 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 conclusion. Not only is it the first statement on language, but while the four previous 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
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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 philosophical idea nor an intellectual luxury. It is a matter of survival, of life and death (Language59). This linguistic condition leads the poet to comment on the relations between the languages within the Nuyorican community in all of his collections. The ties between the languages directly reflect the world of acceptance, negation, loss, uprooting, imposition, and transfer that the community has lived both on the Island and in the metropolis. Take for instance Lavieras stance on the Spanish language. Although Laviera enthusiastically embraces Spanglish, the poet in no way abandons Spanish for Spanglish. Quite the opposite, Laviera 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....(AmeRcan33) As Aparicio notes, in spanish Laviera does not personally identify with the historical reality of Spanish as an imposed language (La vida 157). However, 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 Spanishs more than one thousand years of transculturation. 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 andaluca, the flamenco still making beauty with your tongue... (spanish AmeRcan33)
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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. ESPAOL, one of my lenguas, part of my tongue, Im gonna fight for you, i love you, spanish im your humble son. (spanish AmeRcan33) Ironically, Laviera chooses to express his ideas on Spanish in English, thus further emphasizing the hybridity of his culture. He doesnt need to address Spanish in Spanish, the reader knows that Laviera is capable of writing in standard/formal Spanish and in case one didnt 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.10 Attacks on the language of Nuyoricans, however, are not limited to Spain. Perhaps the most painful attacks come from Puerto Ricans themselves. Performance artist Guillermo Gmez-Pea 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 painful 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 Lavieras best expressions of bilingualism and the tension that language(s) can cause. As Rauline notes, The poem starts with a tight separation between the two codes to illustrate the lack of understanding, or rather the unwillingness to understand (156). Brava reflects: they kept on telling me t 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 spanish arrived t quieres que yo hable en espaol y le dije
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all the spanish words in the vocabulary, you know which ones, las que cortan, and then i proceeded to bilingualize it, i know yo s that que you know t sabes que yo soy that i am puertorriquea in english and theres 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 puertorriquea, come dmelo aqu en mi cara offend me, atrvete, a menos que t quieras que yo te meta un tremendo bochinche de soplamoco pezcoz thats gonna hurt you in either language, as 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 est lleno de desgracias prematuras, ests claro? are you clear? the cemetery is full of premature short 4) comings. (AmeRcan63 Anzalda terms the anxiety and frustration expressed by Brava over repeated attacks on her native tongue as linguistic terrorism(80). In discussing linguistic terrorism Anzalda writes if you really want to hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identityI 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 because 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 correlates 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, T sabes que yo soy that/i am puertorriquea in/english and theres nothing/you can do but to accept/it como yo soy sabrosa (AmeRcan 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 puertorriquea
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in/english... (AmeRcan 63). Thus, Laviera here, as in spanish, reaffirms the hybrid nature of Puerto Ricaness: a Puerto Ricaness that lives in either language, 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 (AmeRcan 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 Spanish and English of the U.S. Nevertheless, at the same time Laviera is aware that transcultural representations are anything but a harmonious mestizaje. Aparicio observes la tensin entre el lenguaje popular y las expectativas creadas por la mentalidad europeizada en cuanto al uso correcto del espaol es una de las problemticas bsicas que preocupa tanto a los escritores hispanos el los Estados Unidos como a sus coetneos en Amrica Latina (Tato Laviera 8). Laviera reflects on these linguistic prejudices in the poemmelao: melao was nineteen years old when he arrived from santurce ..................... melato his son now answered in black american soul english talk with native plena sounds and primitive urban salsabeats somehow melao was not concerned at the neighborly criticism of his sons disparate sounding talk melao remembered he was criticized back in puerto rico for speaking arrabal black spanish in the required englishclass melao knew that if anybody called his son american they would shout puertorro in english and spanish ..................... dual mixtures of melao and melatos spanglish speaking son as es la cosa pap (Mainstream Ethics27) Here Laviera challenges the idea of the purity of any language, as both languages, English and Spanish, are transformed by non-European elements. Melaos 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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sons language.11 However, the description of Melatos speech as a disparate sounding/talk may cause some confusion as to whether that which draws censure from the barrio is Melatos Spanish or his English. Given the last line of the poem, as es la cosa pap, most likely it is both. Clearly, Melatos En glish has been transformed just as Melaos Spanish was. The standard/formal English is transformed first by black american soul, but Melato 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 vernacular 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 Melatos talk disparate as in different or disparate as in atrocidad? 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 melatos/spanglish speaking son, does he refer to son as in child or son as in music?12 Indeed, Laviera seems to indicate all of the above. The hidden meanings reflect the undeniable transculturation 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 pronunciation of melado, or sugar cane syrup, is a strong reference to the islands 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, transculturacin. This emphasis on non-European roots as the basis for the rejection of linguistic acculturation is further evidenced in the poem asimilao: assimilated? qu assimilated, brother, yo soy asimilao, as mi la o s 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? as que se chavaron
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trataron pero no pudieron con el AO de la palabra principal, dnles gracias a los prietos que cambiaron asimilado al popular asimilao. (AmeRcan54) Thus the AO of asimilao, Melao, and even Melato becomes the linguistic symbol for not only resistance to acculturation, but also creative neoculturation. Both reside in the African component of Puerto Rican culture, on the Island and in the metropolis. Lavieras transculturating philosophy, therefore, is clear and appropriately conveyed by esquinadude: ...nothing is better than nothing, bro i integrate what i like, i reject what i dont like, bro, nothing of the past that is the present is 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 dont need a bilingual dictionary, what i said can cut into any language, this is about your life...(AmeRcan5859) The esquina dude verbalizes with the need for change in the form of transcultural syncretism for survival. Furthermore, because this philosophy is expressed 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 reflects, Ms que una reaccin en contra de los criterios europeizados de la literatura occidental, la lengua oral, que deviene en lenguaje potico, representa una aproximacin al problema de la identidad personal y cultural del hispano en los Estados Unidos (Nombres47). The poem doa cisa y su anafre reinforces this clearly. Laviera, in an interview remarks, the poem Doa Cisa y su anafre defines me as a Puerto Rican. That poem and that experience was my transition from the jbaro to New York....It is there I express the combination between the jbaro, 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 bacalatos 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 direct 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 development (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 anfora (the poetic technique of repetition). Doa Cisas anfora is her constant repetition of the word bacalatos to attract clientele.13 The very name of the vendor, Doa Cisa, also appears to be another clever play with words. Doa could be read as another reference to the Doa Gabriela of Marqus La carreta. This is true especially if one considers that the name Cisa itself may be read as the Spanish prefix cis- meaning over here or ac, and therefore Doa Cisa may mean the lady over here, or in this case the Doa de ac. Laviera writes of DoaCisa: ...dndole sabor al aire reumtico creando sin vanidad al nuevo jbaro que pona firmes pies en el seno de amrica quemando ritmos africanos y mitos indgenas...(la carreta74) Doa Cisa, then, like Laviera himself, recreates, or transculturates, the jbaro 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: doa cisa no refunfuaba, no maldeca el anafre gritaba de alegra cuando el rasca rasca rasca que rasca dientes jbaritos, chpandose las bocas mordindose los dedos del sabor olor bacalatos fritos color oro dignidad. (la carreta75) Laviera, again indicates such a transcultural act as normal for the Puerto Rican when he emphasizes: ...gritaba doa cisa, ..................... escogiendo el camino ni regular ni suave ni csmico pero el camino-carrito-cultural del pensamiento tpico. (la carreta75) Here, Lavieras Doa Cisa chooses her path, which, unlike Marqus Doa Gabriela, is to stay in New York. The choice to stay, then, is not forced upon her, but rather typical. Here, Laviera replaces the jbaro 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 rumbn.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 bacalatos 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 jbaro, poetry, and music, for Laviera, are inseparable. All three form part of the rich Puerto Rican oral tradition: derramando dcimas con lgrimas ..................... el cantor de las montaas sacaba el lo ..................... que congaba las tetas de cayey sala el le ..................... de jorge brandon sala el lai lo le lo lai lo le lo lai...15 (la msica jbara la carreta73) While the author explores all three in his poems, and all are interrelated, AfroPuerto Rican music forms the base of much of his poetry. The poem the africa in pedro morejn, reveals Lavieras 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 Lavieras emphasis on the African roots of Puerto Rican culture, this should not be surprising. 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 didnt 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 races ni de exaltar la tradicin; Laviera does so sencillamente porque stas 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 Canto105). 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 bemb 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 carreta67) Laviera here details the origin of salsa as the intricate transculturation of various musical genres from different locations and cultures. However, it is the coming together of these different components in New York that produces the new transcultural phenomenon salsa. First, the displacement of Africans in the Caribbean 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, ispure: ...la bomba y plena puro sn16 de puerto rico que ismael es el rey y es el juez meaning the same as marvin 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 carreta67) Hence, we see Lavieras 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 morejn, tumbao [for eddie conde], la carreta 57, 64). In the poems the new rumbn and tumbao (for eddie conde), Laviera insinuates that it is through transcultural production that not only do the two groupsLatinos and African Americanscome together, but that through transculturation one can fight and heal the wounds from acculturating 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 rumbn, as Laviera writes the following: congas the biggest threat to heroin/congas make junkies hands healthier/.../y ah 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 resistance to acculturation because its African root along with all its other cultural rootsthe European, the American, the Indigenousare 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 history 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. Lavieras previous statement along with la bomba ya est mezclada con las rimas jibareas 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 transculturationlos carimbos en sus fiestas, espaol era su lengua/le ponan ritmo en bomba, a castauelas de espaa vieja (ENCLAVE 68). Bomba specifically comes to represent resistance to acculturation. The author asserts por el fro 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, mtele 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 Lavieras switch to Spanish at the end of the poem underscores thispoint. and at the end of these songs, in praise of many beats, my heart can only say: se queda all. (ENCLAVE69) Therefore in bomba, para siempre, as Rosanna Rivero Marn notes, the poet both challenges a Puerto Rican society that does not fully acknowledge the importance of its Black roots, and the United States societys 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 Ricos failure to fully recognize the importance of its Black roots, but also the Islands failure to acknowledge the prominent role that the oral culture has played on the Island. This challenge is evident not only in the poets insistence on the incorporation 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 Pals Matos, which proved to be a great influence in Lavieras work. In the poem juan boria Laviera describes the declamador: ...director ejecutivo de la bemba burocracia huracn en remolino, un nuevo diccionario ............... palesmatear y guillenear juan juan ............... el presidente-comandante-caballero, recitando al todo negro de la cuna con sus versos. (ENCLAVE65) The other great influence on the poetry of Laviera is undoubtedly Jorge Brandon,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 nica funcin del poeta es comunicar directamente con su auditorio. Brandon es uno de los pocos verdaderos declamadores que hayan sobrevivido en tiempos modernos (Canto 103). Lavieras poem declamacin reflects his feelings towards him: ...en tu poesa encomiendo mi madre/mis hijos, mi patria, mi abuela.../el pan nuestro de cada da dnoslo hoy (la carreta73). The importance of incorporating these two poets in his own work relates to Lavieras 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 extending 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. Hes 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 inserting Brandon into Puerto Rican literary history, he also inserts the Nuyorican into that same history. Therefore, when Laviera inserts Brandons name into the poem of msica jbara 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 Lavieras warning poem to Jos Luis Gonzlez, the author of the very important and seminal work on Puerto Rican culture: El pas de cuatro pisos y otros ensayos (1980). The great value of
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Gonzlez work lies in that he, like Laviera, emphasizes the importance of the African component in the making of Puerto Rican culture, a view previously underappreciated and overlooked by most scholars.19 Nevertheless, Gonzlez fails to acknowledge the Nuyorican component of Puerto Rican culture.20 Laviera responds to the oversight in his three-way warning poem (for Jos Luis Gonzlez); en el fon do del nu yo ri can hay un pu er to rri que o...(AmeRcan49). Thus, Lavieras 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. Nicols Guilln and Luis Pals Matos, two other great mediators of culture, surfce in Lavieras own poetry with his admiration of their ability to capture the transcultural voice of the Afro-Caribbean. His poem cuban for Nicols Guilln demonstrates this clearly: Base prieta jerigonza (escondida en lo cristiano) huracn secreto ..................... yemayado de orishas sacudiendo caderas de europa el origen se preserva al vaivn de ideas claras al vaivn de ideas claras ideas claras caribeas! ..................... sali el sol, sus rayos atravesando rayos, largas piernas afriqueas rayos, trompetas charanga europea
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rayos, tambores indgenas se encuentran rayos, rompiendo todo esclavo rayos, preservando colores de resguardo rayos, con los viejos africanos libremente exclamando: isomos los mismos, los mismos ramos ............... somos humanos, respaldndonos, somos humanos ............... yo le canto a la lumbre del glorioso despertar! (AmeRcan212) The homage to Guilln reveals Lavieras admiration for the Cuban poets ability to awaken Cuban consciousness, an awakening that Laviera attributes to Guilln successfully capturing Afro-Cuban language, a Base prieta jerigonza that leads to la lumbre del glorioso/despertar! In regards to Pals Matos, Lavieras tribute reflects his admiration for Pals Matos language alone, rather than any sort of awakening of consciousness. Many have correctly criticized Pals Matos for a form of poetry characterized by African sounding words, rhythms and language, yet, a shallow understanding of Black culture...[which] is partly responsible for the negative and, at best one dimensional images of Blacks (Jackson 469). Laviera, nevertheless, defends his verse. As Martn-Rodrguez notes, From Pals 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 continues and accurately points out that el moreno puertorriqueo reflects this inspiration: ...ay baramba bamba suma acaba quimbombo de salsa la rumba matamba am am yo no soy de la masucamba papiri pata pata...(la carreta60) Laviera views Pals Matos as an important poetic figure because he is the first to interject the language of afro-caribeos into Spanish language literature, and as observed previously, the use of language in literature is very important to the legitimization of a marginalized people. In his poem homenaje a don luis pals matos, the contribution of Pals Matos to this legitimization becomes even clearer as he declares: ...orgullos cadereando acentos al espaol conspiracin engrasando ritmos pleneros a la lengua espaola pa ponerle sabor.
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..................... despierta la clave chupando las caas prucut-piriqun-pruc-tembeando el secreto mximo: que luis pals matos tambin era grifo africano guillao de castellano. (ENCLAVE66)21 Pals 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. Lavieras task to recover the Nuyorican voice is not unlike Guilln and Pals Matos recovery of the Afro-Caribbean voice. Therefore, Lavieras representation of both Guilln and Pals Matos proves also to be an attempt to insert himself and the Nuyorican voice into the LatinAmerican phenomenon of transculturation, represented by a tradition of both orality and bilingualism. Laviera essentially determines Guilln and Pals 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 Lavieras four poetry collections reveals the often difficult and even combative relationships between the languages and how they affect the Nuyoricans and Latinos identity. However tenuous the relationships may be, Laviera finds that through a transculturation of the languages a resistance strategy can combat the devastating effects such linguistic tension may have on ones identity. As demonstrated, an emphasis on the non-European roots in this transcultural process is key to this resistance strategy. Lavieras homage to various transcultural innovators, the importance he places on popular culture, orality, and music, further reveal Lavieras transcultural philosophy as a means of survival and creativity. His poems reveal that transculturation is a part of Latin Americas 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 continue this tradition in the United States, and, therefore, instead of acculturating 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 tomatao.
Notes
1. conciencia from the collection Mainstream Ethics (tica corriente)(51). 2. la carreta made a U-turn is now in its seventh edition and has sold more than 60,000 copies (Hernndez74). 3. Juan Flores remarks, Marqus death in 1979the same year that Lavieras book was published signaled the close of an era in Puerto Rican letters....La Carreta...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
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History (Divided 169). Ren Marqus is also the author of the both popular and controversial El puertorriqueodcil. 4. Jbaro is a term used by Puerto Ricans to describe someone from the countryside. Sometimes used pejoratively to describe someone who is backwards in his or her ways, the term jbaro is also upheld as the symbol of national culture. Cubans use the word guajiro similarly. 5. Operation Bootstrap, referred to in Spanish as Operacin manos a la obra, was the policy of the industrialization of the Island undertaken by governor Luis Muoz Marn 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 instrumenttwo cylindrical wood sticks tapped togetherwhich keeps the 2/3 or 3/2 beat of salsa. The clave is considered by many to be the most important instrument insalsa. 8. For a full discussion of transculturation, its many manifestations, and its application 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 academys analysis as an inexplicable etimologa gabacha, and replies Que no nos venga la Academia con guayabas! (Nuevo Catauro280). 10. Aparicio observes that among bilingual poets there exists a basic dissatisfac tion...against the linguistic prejudice which victimizes them and their community... [but] Lavieras 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 (Interview217). 12. Son is a type of African folk music that originated inCuba. 13. Lavieras choice of bacalatos, 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-Europeanroots. 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 jbaro straw hat, standing in the snow in front of a detoursign. 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 jbaro. 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
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importance of articulating such mixing as pure has proved fundamental in many emancipatory Latino projects. One of the most salient examples would be Corky Gonzaless I am Joaquin, in which he declares his mestizo blood as pure(20). 17. Juan Boria (19051995) fue intrprete de los versos de Fortunato Vizcarrondo y Luis Pals Matos. Declamaba en actividades y en la radio....Dentro de sus ms notables interpretaciones se pueden mencionar Tangalatn (de F. Vizcarrondo), Majestad negra (de L. Pals), Enamorao (de M. Jimnez) y Para dormir un negrito (de E. Ballaga). Recibi varias distinciones y un doctorado Honoris Causa que le otorg la Universidad de Sagrado Corazn (JuanBoria). 18. Jorge Brandon (19021995) 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 Canto103). 19. One study is particularly important in this regard, Antonio S. Pedreiras Insularismo (1930), which contributed greatly in creating the myth that Puerto Rican culture was largely Hispanic and white. Gonzlez book, El pas de cuatro pisos (1980), started to destroy this myth as Gonzlez demonstrated the importance of African culture in the formation of Puerto Rican identity. However, Gonzlez often receives criticism for overlooking the Indigenous component of Puerto Rican culture, and more recently for overlooking the Nuyorican component aswell. 20. Arcadio Daz-Quionez 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 Daz-Quionez 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 Pals 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, qu de blanco:/...un negrindio sureo, rascacielo de mulato/ patologa criolla, ogoun-ochoun de barrio (ENCLAVE 66). This challenge is perhaps better understood when one takes into consideration Lavieras poem the africa in pedro morejn 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 carreta58).
References
Algarn, Miguel. 1975. Introduction: Nuyorican Language. In Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings, eds. Miguel Algarn and Miguel Piero, 980. New York: William Morrow. Anzalda, Gloria. 1999. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt LuteBooks. 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, 14760. Houston: Arte PblicoPress.
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. 1991. Language on Language: Metalinguistic Discourse in the Poetry of U.S. Latinos. Latino Studies Journal 2(2):5874. . 1986. Nombres, apellidos y lenguas: la disyuntiva ontolgica del poeta hispano en los Estados Unidos. The Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilinge 13(3):4758. . 1988. Tato Laviera y Alurista: hacia una potica bilinge. Boletn del Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueos 2(3): 713,8696. Daz Quionez, Arcadio. 1993. La memoria rota. Ro Piedras: Huracn. 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, 33848. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. . 1993. Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity. Houston: Arte Pblico. Gonzales, Rodolpho. 1967. I am Joaquin: An Epic Poem. NP: Rodolpho Gonzales. Gonzlez, Jos Luis. 1989. El pas de cuatro pisos y otros ensayos. Ro Piedras: Ediciones Huracn. Hernndez, 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 Literature. Hispania 58:46780. 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 declamacin en la poesa nuyoriquea. Confluencia. 1(1):1026. . 1988. Introduction to Mainstream Ethics (tica corriente) by Tato Laviera. Houston: Arte Pblico. Laviera, Tato. 1985. AmeRcan. Houston: Arte Pblico. . 1985. ENCLAVE. Houston: Arte Pblico. . 1988. Mainstream Ethics (tica corriente). Houston: Arte Pblico. . 1992. la carreta made a U-turn. 2nd ed. Houston: Arte Pblico. . 1997. Interview with Carmen Dolores Hernndez. In Puerto Rican Voices in English. Interviews with Writers, ed. Carmen Dolores Hernndez, 7784. Westport: Praeger. Martn-Rodrguez, Manuel M. 1999. A Sense of (Dis)Place(Ment): Tato Lavieras AmeRcan Identity. Monographic Review 15:26272. Ortiz, Fernando. 1987. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azcar. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho. . 1985. Nuevo catauro de cubanismos. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. Pedreira, Antonio S. 1969. Insularismo. Ro Piedras: EditorialEdil. Rauline, Vronique and Tato Laviera. 1998. Tato Lavieras Nuyorican Poetry: The Choice of Bilingualism. In Strategies of Difference in Modern Poetry, ed. Pierre Lagayette, 14663. Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickison UnivesityPress. Rivero Marn, Rosanna. 2004. Janus Identities and Forked Tongues. Two Caribbean Writers in the United States. New York: PeterLang. Zentella, Anna C. 1997. Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell.
Part II
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Legal Language, On the f ly

Peter Monaghan
Tune in from the master console to this rooms dozen simultaneous-interpreting booths, and a torrent of Spanish poursforth. A class of seven students in the College of Charlestons masters 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 meaning. 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. Thats 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 ones 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 soarsSpanish speakers alone now account for one in seven citizens, and for most of the estimated eight million illegal residentsfederal, 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. Its 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 interpreters task remains daunting.
Originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 2006. Courtesy of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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Imagine, Ms. Benmaman says as her students labor on in their booths, simultaneously interpreting, from and into Spanish, for a defendant and for court officials. Certain American legal conceptssuch as plea bargaining, indictment, arraignment, and legal precedentmay not exist in the clients native country. So parallel words and phrases dont 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 because 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 associated 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 nonstandard 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. Thats murder to interpret. 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 interpreterswhich 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. Interpreting being largely a female profession, Ms.Benmaman has many such stories totell. Although the Court Interpreters Act, passed in 1978, mandates the provision 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 requires that interpreters be certified or otherwise qualified. Into that bottomless 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 interpreters. Such shortcomings, says Ms. Benmaman, make insufficient interpreting ripe ground for appeals: The issue is one that defense attorneys cannot ignore, 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 EnglishSpanish exams 20,000 candidates since 1980 have passed. (Federal certification
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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 interpreter in her early 40s. Seeing that no colleges formally taught legal interpretation 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 fluent in more than one language is not enough. Cynthia Hernandez, a 2003 graduate of the program who has stopped by, agrees. Growing up bilingual doesnt make you an interpreter, she says. I mean, I have two hands, but that doesnt 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 nextyear). 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 interpreters. Interpreting is a notoriously grueling profession, but it offers varied work in changing settingscourtrooms, 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 coyotes, 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 $800,000in his possession and claimed, unsuccessfully, that it was for a shoppingspree. Candra Allen, a recent graduate, recalls program field trips to lawenforcement agencies to learn about firearms and illegal drugs and to listen to surveillance tapes of Mexican drugslang. 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: Its very mentally stimulating; when you leave the courtroom, its like youve just been base jumping.
Is Spanglish a Language?
Roberto Gonzlez Echevarra
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 equality. Spanglish is an invasion of Spanish by English. The sad reality is that Spanglish is primarily the language of poor Hispanics, 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 aroundthem. 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 capitulation; it indicates marginalization, not enfranchisement. Spanglish treats Spanish as if the language of Cervantes, Lorca, Garca Mr quez, Borges and Paz does not have an essence and dignity of itsown. 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 takeover, 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.
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Yet I worry every time I hear broadcasts by American-based TV stations that are beamed out across the hemisphere. The newscasts sound like Spanish, but if one listens closely, it is English transposed, not even translated, into Spanish. Are they listening or laughing in Mexico City and SanJuan? 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, Cmo puedo ayudarlo? (a literal transposition of the English How can I help you?), rather than the proper Qu 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 understandthem. I suppose my Medievalist colleagues will say that without the contamination of Latin by local languages, there would be no Spanish (or French or Italian). We are no longer in the Middle Ages, however, and it is nave 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 rebellious 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 preserveit.
Waving the Star-Spanglish Banner

Ariel Dorfman
The airing last week on Hispanic radio stations of Nuestro Himno, a Spanishlanguage adaptation of the American national anthem, has been greeted with an unprecedented and, indeed, astonishing wave of denunciations all over the United States. Talk show hosts and academics have indignantly called this loving rendition by a group of Latino artists a desecration of a national symbol. Senatorsboth the conservative Lamar Alexander and the liberal Edward M. Kennedyhave 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 occasion to remind the citizenry that one of the important things here is, when we debate this issue, that we not lose our nationalsoul. 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 dawns 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 orLatin? Of coursenot. Theres 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 demanding 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 NuestroHimno.
Ariel Dorfman, Waving the Star-Spanglish Banner, Washington Post, May 7, 2007. Courtesy of Ariel Dorfman.
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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 werent coming here merely to work, bake bread, lay bricks, change diapers, wash dishes, pick strawberries, work, work, work; Dios mo, 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 theyre not prepared to abandon la lengua maternal, the mother tongue. Spanish is not going to fade away like Norwegian or Italian or German 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 written 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 tostay. I believe this is why Nuestro Himno has been received with such trepidation. 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 Im right about this, and America will sometime be articulating its identity 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 Minutemen 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 cant be done and believe that the United States can only endure if it is monolingual, theres 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 nations founders and pioneers might have embraced, and that have now become part of the national vocabulary: S, sepuede. Yes, it can bedone.
Part III
Testimonios
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Linguistic Terrorism
Gloria Anzalda
Deslenguadas. Somos los del espaol deficiente. We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestisaje, the subject of your burla. Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally and linguistically somos burfanoswe 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 eachother. Chicana feminists often skirt around each other with suspicion and hesitation. For the longest time I couldnt 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 well 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 ourlives. 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 well speak English as a neutral language. Even among Chicanas we tend to speak English at parties or conferences. Yet, at the same time, were afraid the other will think were agringadas because we dont 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
From Borderlands=La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Copyright 1987, 1999 by Gloria Anzalda. Reprinted by permission of Aunt LuteBooks.
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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 linguistically as it is regionally. By the end of this century, Spanish speakers will comprise the biggest minority group in the U.S., a country where students in high schools and colleges 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 Chicanos and Latinos. So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identityI am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legitimate 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 accommodate 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 serpents tonguemy womans voice, my sexual voice, my poets 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
Anniversary Crnica
Susana Chvez-Silverman
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 as (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 Sal, Marissa, Brett. Almost summer all en el norte donde estn, almost winter here in the south. Paso slums, villas miserias they call them here, aqu en el sur. El sur de la ciudad. Corrugated tin shacks (coo, 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 recoger Gustavo en la estacin. Moving again. Sauces, pampas grass (So this is what you are named for, you transplanted creature! Antes slo te haba 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 riverside, 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 Menems pizza and champagnefilled 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 sarand the once middle-class now hardscrabble
Chavez-Silverman, Susana. Killer Cronicas. 2004. Reprinted by permission of the University of WisconsinPress.
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Avellaneda barrio, birthplace de Alejandra Pizarnik. On the other side of el Ro de La Plata. Yo fui. Yo ehtuve. Yoconoc. Se puede decireveryo conozco? Quin se atreve? And after how long? Conoc el otro da a un periodista Latino, reportero for the Los Angeles Times. Hot-to-trot for his new field assignment en Latinoamrica. 35 years en Buenos Aires, all expenses paid. Pero creo que l no ve mucho. Not yet anyway. The Avellaneda garbage dump. Its huge. Como de pelcula. Como en esa pelcula 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 its big, this garbage dump, just like that one. Carrion birds wheel and flock overhead. La working class, self-taught poeta, Gladys Cepeda dice que la estn poisoning, right here en Avellaneda. Que de nia no era asmtica ni tena allergies ni skin problems pero ahora. Casi no puede comer nada. Slo carne. Red meat and lots of it. (Y Andrea Gutirrez, alrgica 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 Corrientes, de Puerto Madero, este stinking, ponzooso trash heap. A un paso de la wide-open pampa. El Latino journalist, Tobas, dice que quiere salir, get his kids out of Los Angeles. Lo siente anesthetized. Too much TNT and Gameboy. Does he think thisLatinoamrica, well, I mean Argentina, well OK, I mean Buenos Aires is some sort of escape? (Acabamos de pasar un huge road sign que dice as: Do you Yahoo?) El teme. I can smell his apprehension. Seguro se ir 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 mansions or build American-style, sprawling ranch houses. Tobas vivir en una casona, seguro. Donde no tendr que presenciar a los neighbors que suicidejump, from the sixth floor, al vaco del medioda just 2 blocks away. Like he just saw on the way over to my apartment in Palermo. Pondr a sus hijitos en el Lincoln International School en La Lucila (armed guards at the ready, outside the gates), all expenses paid by the Los AngelesTimes. Qu carajo va a ver? Sobre cul argentinidad will he report back? De cul experiencia anestesiada se va a escapar? Si se ve right away que es un nouveau-Latino, que teme el peligro. El contagio, Cmo 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 utpica, girl. You still believe? Y...(pausa portesima) s. Siempre habr, la poeta Paulina Vinderman writes, una historia que contar. The moist reddish dirt. Burritos and kids and smoke-belching fbricas. A curving wash, a sluice (como el que tenamos en Los Angeles, behind our house in the Valley, y al cual, decamosto scare my little sisterla muy martiniimbibing Mrs. Jean Haynes from next door bajaba de noche para verse con un
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amante. O al que bajaba tambin, muy entrada la noche su hijo, Johnahora probably todo un aerospace engineer, like his dad Billpara coleccionar sabertooth tiger bones). Garbage piled detrasito mero de los tiny brick and tin hovels. Looks like Soweto too I realize, sobresaltada. No writing now. Dejate sin palabras. Sin apuntes. Grabtelo. Now just look. And remember.... Pampa on the left side of the bus, leading down toward el Ro 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. Cmo 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 Ombes de Hudson: Barrio Privado, reads still another sign. Aqu? Sera el equivalente de vivir en un ritzy gated community right offInter state 10, I guess. Bien pero bien metidito en el Evil Empire (as le digo al oxymoronically-named Inland Empire, rea de mi homestate que hace 10 aos desconoca, pero...now I live there), surrounded by rusted traintracks, pale Califas desert dust donde antao haba naranjales y palmeras milenarias. Trailer parks now. El olor a grama sube, llega, penetra al Rpido a La Plata. Off to the side unpaved, muddy roads. Es sbado. Cannas, my cannas, como en L.A., growing pero aqu unchecked and enormous in the rich southern red dirt.
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 ridculas: its freezing and overcast) sunglasses and look with my blurred-edge vision, podra estar en otra parte. Podra 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. Dnde estoy? En qu ao estamos? Villa Elisa, reads the sign. Talabartera 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 m misma. Es la vivencia, I sigh. Slo as. Dont use it, you lose it. As les deca a mis estudiantes en California. Ah, pronto ya no estars aqu: will this all fade away?
16 junio, 2001: Saturday

Maana. Da del Padre. Another roadsign. Ay, Daddy, why did you leave me? Hoy tu aniversario deboda. Y nunca pudiste venir a ver nada de esto, mam. Y ahora que ests enferma, nearly paralyzed, you never will. A ti, que te fascinaba viajar. Viajar y vivir lejos. Equivocarte de palabras o de pronunciacin (con tus nuevomexicanismos in Spain) y luego reirte a ms no poder. Y ay, todo ese papeln, the scandal we caused en el famoso concierto de sofa Noel en ese fancy Madrid
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theater! En el Centro Cultural de la Villa. Twisting our hankies in our laps, laughing, pap furioso. El pblico chistndonos y no podamos. Stop laughing. A ti, estos painted signs fileteados te habran encantado. No mom, nothing to do with filete de ternera. Its not food at all, sino a frilly, 19thcentury Italian immigrant calligraphy. Hasta esos trendy, PoMo msicos, los Fabulosos Cadillacs, use it en un recent album cover. Y todo este strange lxico porteo. Mamarracho (an abomination of bad taste, tacky as hell), for example. Isnt 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 habras reconocido en algo aqu, como yo me re-conozco? Would you recognize me here, mom? Y a tu nieto Joey, que vino a la Argentina de child y volver a Califas de teen: cambiada la voz, pobladas las cejas y hablando un cahteshano aporteado? Peroooo...qu te pasa, nena, he likes to ask me, con ese cerrado, whiny, slightly northern-barrio porteo accent Ive grown to recognize instantly, to abhor, toadore. English Tudor. Tiny hibiscus. Aloe everywhere. Spanish-style. My dream house, siempre digo. Pues dream on, beb. On your teachers sueldo, yeah right. Rejas. Lavender trumpet vine. Just likemine. 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 ca al nada ms llegar de California. And where I was so desperately unhappy. Tan apasionada. Pero tan CONTENIDA. Por ese pueblo. Por Howard. Su familia. Ese pas: Donde por poco caus un accidente de trnsito por caminar down the main street, de da, in shorts. Ver esto, estos outskirts de La Plata, me recuerda (me hace acordar, they correct me, here) aquello. No lo haba podido remember so clearly enaos. A sudden McDonalds 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, its disappeared. Estoy en la Argentina again. Lajas, bougainvillea. Ah, alivio. Vuelve Argentina. Wet, wet. La diferencia entre esto y Pretoria, those searing, arid plains. Pero he aqu que no puedo mantenerme en mi reverie semi-esencialista: porque damn, WalMart rears its ugly head. Y no. No puede ser. Pero itis.
Mini African Reverie

Remember, Wim. Onthou jy? Its June 16th and Im 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 Johannesburg? Donde bamos 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, imagnate, Beth navigating that huge American station wagon right into el corazn de Soweto, y con tanto miedo pero then, entonces, you were a man in
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uniform. Un polica, 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-trainingnow? Oh get me through. Through this in-between: pases, lenguas, razas, religiones, vivencias. Smash (me) through este looking glass que a veces se (me) vuelve funhouse mirror. Oh, quiero estar someplace. Ubicarme. Algn 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 dnde mi playa y Santa Cruz Santa Mnica Port Elizabeth Sea Point Durban Venice banks of el Ro de la Plata. Soon, nena, me digo. Soon youll be. Ah pero its too soon and you know it. No quieres eso de verdad, admtelo. No quieras eso. Dejate estar dejate. Callate ahora y ehcuch estas wild plants, este icy wind, este tusur.
Nomah
Ilan Stavans
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 volume included approximately 6,000 terms in Spanglish, all lexicographically defined, as well as a lengthy disquisition on the historical and linguistic development 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? Isnt 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 knowledge 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 Cervantess masterpiece. I have also accepted numerous invitations to read in public my Spanglish Don Quixote and to write for theater and film. One outcome of
Nomah, by Ilan Stavans. 2005. First published in Amerikastudien/American Studies (Universittsverlag, Heidelberg, Germany), vol. 51, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 912. Courtesy of Ilan Stavans.
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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 rs. He obsessively roots for the Boston Red Sox. The target of his animosity is the MexicanAmerican short-stop Nomar Garcaparra. 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 dman. Havent 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... Coolsimo! They ahe muy machos: Manny Hamhez pac, Manny pall. But I phefieho Nomah. Yeah, I guess thats why I did it, la puha vehd, pa enseahle a whole mundo que las Medias Hojas son el equipo ms campeadoh, antes even que los Yankees, in spite de la maldicin del Bambino. Yo qu s, 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 pi, then qu? En ingls its Hed Sox, peho yo phefieho en espaol: Medias Hojas. But it isnt about the name, Misteh Seoh, es una cuestin of phinciple. En Nueva Yoh nos ghitan majadehas, but we ahe mucho mejoh, mucho, mucho mejoh. Sabe what I digo,vehd? Ust 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 gigol but bien guapetn. Whehe am I de dnde, you me phegunta? You should know, Misteh Seoh. Havent you done su tahea? Pues de Puehto Hico, si no de dnde?...Santuhce the beautiful! But the family de Nomah Gahcapahha es de Mxico. Hes el mejoh shohtstop. His pap se llama Hamn but he invehti el la wohd: N-O-M-A-H. Hes been in the Medias Hojas foh un bunche de yeahs. Five, quiz? No, I neveh killed a nadie. Busque ust en mi expediente. Que cmo do I spend mi da? Faihly nohmal houtina. Sabe, de la oficina a la casa, on occasion al gym. Cmo se dice gym en espaol? I only know it en ingls. Pues s, I speak un ingls bhoken, kind of lo que hablbamos at home. La gente de ahound these hegions quiebha tambin theih sentences. Its muy cool, dont you think, MistehSeoh? Phobablemente 250 games. Foh yeahs I tengo un seasons ticket pa Fenway. Usualmente I ahhive eahly to be next to Nomah. A Masteh Yogui! Deba ust de vehlo, Misteh Seoh. Hight next la tehceha base, se sthechea...He abhe las patas, he bendea los hombhesyeah, a theat pa la vista. I have plenty de Kodak moments. Well, you saw el apahtamento, ohnot? No estoy loco. Los fans somos as, full of passion latina, ust sabe. He desehva su castigo. O yeah, Misteh Seoh, ust sabe que tengo hazn. Qu otho playeh deja que su equipo se vaya a la miehda so hpidamente? It was Ma, la tal Ma Ham, que juega squeh. Love is dihty and Nomah lost it, bho. Healmente he lost it. He needed to be punisheado.
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Lo le en El Mundo. Oh maybe en Spohts Illusthated, ya no me acuebdo. I think que ella is youngeh. No s, maybe dos o thes aos. El punto es que they empezahon a dateahese. The season de beisbol empieza eahly en el ao y la de squeh, at least the one of las mujehes, stahts en el fall. So...well, they got into the abismo: no haba fohma of wacheabse uno al otho. El phone, el phone, but can you enamohahse de una ghingita como la Ma Hamyo la llamo My Jamn that way? Shes chula, pehhaps a bit too atltica. Ayway, ella y Nomah shouldnt have stahted el homance. All meti la pata el Nomah, no doubt about it. I decided to ahheglah the asunto by my own. Oh else, me tahd en decidih me: sevehal months, maybe dos o thes. Las Medias Hojas hestean cada cinco o seis das, sometimes cada week. El baisbol is tough! But it took me no time pa sabeh que las cosas wehe slidendose hacia abajo, sabe. Yeah, Nomah no comenz con sus mistakes de un da to the next. It was poco a poco, the way the wohld wohks: despacito, despacito. Pobhe Nomah! He desehved it, though. Ono? People in the island no phonuncian las ehhes. I dont know why, phegntele ust a un psychologist. Not only in Santuhce. Noyohicans ahe known como ehe dodgehs. Anyway, lo saben evehything, los psychologist, los odio poh eso. My Mam una vez me mand 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 espaol? I guess mi ghades wehe not buenas. Yo qu s: I didnt pay mucha atencin. La oficina del doctoh eha oscuha. He asked me questions, todo tipo de questions: que cuntos aos tena, if I had a gihlfhiend, if Pap was nice to the family...No me acuehdo lo que le dije. Soon el dihectoh of de escuela told me que me thanfehihan a otho lugah. Maybe it wasnt because of my ghades...I must have done algo malo, you know. Thuth is, no me acuehdo. Not too bad, Misteh Seoh. 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 aphend to hespect thegame. You mean, en Boston? Almost a decade, desde 1989. Tena familia in Belmot. No, no Vehmont sino Belmont. Ust debe acentuah the fihst syllable: B-E-Lmont. Uno de mis tos helps en una pizzeha. 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? Its la puhitita vehd...Something similah pasa en Massachusetts, bho. Whehe do you think que empec a spekeah with pochismos? Enthe los nacos de Aguascalientes. S, La Haza is all oveh Nueva Inglatehha. Lots and lotsun chingo. But I guess que se me sale lo bohicua in those stupidehhes. Misteh Seoh, Ive told you muchas veces alheady: I shouldnt be convicteado pohque it aint a chime cuando uno ataca pa quel equipo that so many gente endohsea mejohe. The damn Yankees, a esas altuhas de la season ya iban seven juegos ahead de nosothos. Cmo se dice ahead en espaol? Too many mistakes, muchsimas... La pelota se le iba in between the knees. O cachaba un fly out peho se hesbalada y la pelota se caa en cuestin de segundos. Quite thiste!
Nomah
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Plani el asalto muy cahefully. No, I didnt talk con nadie. Paqu metehme en bhonca? I dont wohk en la pizzehia any mohe. Saqu 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, waiti que Fenway quedaha empty as a hunted castle. Entonces met el cuchillo in a bag de plstico 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 quin cuida qu and so on. Next da, nobody enconth la bag. May they thought it was gahbaje. I know que la confesin es selfinchiminante but qu puedo haceh? Al menos Nomah y My Jamn ya no jodehn the entihe season. Betteh to go down con honoh, dont you think? As always, los damn Yankees ganahn...They always do, de cualquieh maneha. But ouh Medias Hojas tendhn su honoh up high,bho. It needed to be en un pahtido contha los Yankees. Why? Well, pohque todo el mundo nos wacheaba. Who doesnt 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. S, Pedho Mahtnez. P-E-D-H-O. Waiti que tehminaha el fifth inning. Queha dahle otha opohtunidad a Nomah. I kept on thinking: Maybe he isnt that bad, a lo majoh se mejoha, sabe? You gotta be un optimista, o no MistehSeoh? He didnt, though. So, well, actu como I had planed it. I was on la tehceha how. Sbitamente, I knew que la hoha haba llegado. Well, I just knew it. Saqu el cuchillo and boom, jumpi hacia el field, cohh en diheccin a Nomah and...It was a supehb momento. Las cmahas began to flash. Boom, boom, boom...You saw it on TV, didntyou? Actualmente, I dont...No me hemohseo. It had to be done y yo eha la pehsona to do it. Ouh Lohd acts in fohmas mystehious, doesnt He? I didnt want to kill him, no, simplemente queha 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 Jamn, so be it. Nomah el convalesciente tendha mohe than what he bahgained foh con la tal MaHam. The hehoe has fallen. Manny and Pedho tn all, but de qu sihven sin Nomah Gahcapahha? Peho Nomah was too desohientado. I did him unfavoh! Nomah tambin habla as, with a bhoken lengua. La mayoha de the Latino playehs do it. Misteh Seoh, in all honestidad, Im suhphised you dont follow el juego. De dnde chee que son los jgadohes hispanos? D.H. and P.H. phedominantemente, but also Panam y Venezuela. Gente pobhe, sin educacin, like many of us. El beibol is whehe hope is, sabe? Nomah was un hehoe
134
Spanglish
because of the ball. Un nio sin futuho and then...millones de dlahes. How much do you think Alex makes en un ao? Lo sufiente to pay la deuda extehna de CostaHica. Nomah, Nomah...El beisbol is about honohI leahned that en la escuela. Elhonoh! Wait un momento, poh favoh. No, Im phetty seguho, Misteh Seoh: hadnt las Medias Hojas lost muchos pahtidos? Imposible. I know que es imposible. I was en Fenway Pahk, lo v with my ojos phopios: one mistake thas otha. Yeah, I counted Nomahs mistakes: 32. Ya se los he deschito...I didnt inventthem! Los damn Yankees llevaban a total of siete pahtidos de ventaja, not the otheh way ahound. Nosothos pehdamos un juego afteh anotheh, las Medias Hojas. Im phetty suhe. Why would I mentih, Misteh Seoh? Eh? You mean las Medias Hojas won la Sehie Mundial? Well, they shoodaf...No lo hacen poh eighty-five aosdesde 1918. The cuhse of el Bambino! Well, if lo hiciehon, oh Lohd, Im suhe its ghacias a Nomah Gahciapahha, el Masteh Yogui. But est en el hospital. So a quinknifi? Soganahon o no, please dgame. Misteh Seoh, you must be kiddin. I pens que...No, Misteh Seoh, this isnt coolsimo! Now I think que necesito one of esos psychologists, como los que I had in school. O phobablemente un lawyeh. Cmo se dice lawyeh en espaol? You mean Nomah is healthy y bien and...? Veinte aos in phison en un asylum es mucho tiempo, dont you think? Foh knifiah a Nomah? But I did it poh su bien! Lo hice poh el bien de las Medias Hojassimply, 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 Creativity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2003. Cruz, Bill. The Official Spanglish Dictionary: Un Users Gua to more than 300 Words and Phrases that Arent Exactly Espaol or Ingls. New York: Fireside,1998. Echvez-Solano, Nelsy, and Kenya C. Dwokin y Mndez, eds. Spanish and Empire. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press,2007. Eddy, Terry, and Alberto Herrera. Learning Construction Spanglish: A Beginners 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. Martins Press,2002. Snchez, Rosaura. Chicano Discourse: Socio-Historic Perspective. Rowley, MA: Newbury House,1983. Harper Stavans, Ilan. Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. New York: Rayo/ Collins,2003. Varo, Carlos. Consideraciones antropolgicas y polticas en torno a la enseanza del spanglish en Nueva York. Ro Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Librera 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: Teachers College and California Association for Bilingual Education,2005.
135
Index
Acculturating forces, Spanglish, 102 Adjectives: clauses, subjunctive mood, 20; lingusitic/social context, 2729; predicate, 38 Adverbs/adverbial phrases: clauses, subjunctive mood, 20; lingusitic/ social context, 2729; syntactic hierarchy, 45 African American(s): as multilinguals, 49; musical genre, 1012; roots of Puerto Rican culture, 100 101 Afro-Caribbean voice/poetry, 103 4, 106 Afro-Puerto Rican voice/music, 100 102, 106 Allen, Candra, 115 Amrica Latina: Palavra, Literatura e Cultura (Pizarro), 81 AmeRcan (Laviera), 7374, 91 Amnesty, illegal immigrants, 118 Anglicisms, Hispanic culture, 69 Anniversary Crnica (Chvez-Silverman), 12529 Anzalda, Gloria, 89, 94 95, 12324 Aparicio, Frances, 98 Aphaeresis, 12 Apocope, 14 Argumentative suffixes, 29 Arte Pblico Press, 90 Asimilao (Laviera), 9798 Aspiration, 15 Auxiliary rule, English interference, 39 Ay bendito (Laviera), 74 75 Benjamin, Walter, 7980 Benmaman, Virginia, 11315
Bernsteinean notions (1968), 10 Bilingualism: changes to, 42, 48; Chicano Spanish, 3, 35 36; dynamic, 6; education, 8, 11, 81,119; English-dominant, 60; gender inflection, 2728; 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, 7779; unreadable texts, 7176; untranslatable texts, 76 80 Boria, Juan, 102 3 Brandon, Jorge, 103 Brava (Anzalda), 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), 90 Cartographies, Latino writing, 81 Catholic Spain, in Caribbean, 65 Cervantes, Miguel de, 71 Chvez-Silverman, Susana, 12529
137
138
Index Dorfman, Ariel, 11819 Double semilingualism, 56 Dynamic bilingualism, 6 Ebonics vs. Spanglish, 70 Echevarra, Roberto Gonzlez, 116 17 Economic situation, Chicanos, 4 5 Education: bilingual, 8, 11, 81, 119; failure of, 92; immigrant, 7; lingusitic/social context, 3, 5; in Spanish language, 116 English-dominant bilinguals, 60 English 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. Spanish nouns, modified, 37 38; Spanish varieties, 32, 117; vs. standard Spanish phrasing, 35; translation, 30 31; verb complements, 40; in written texts, 31 English monolinguals, 5, 59 Epenthesis, 14 Epenthetic consonants, 16 Equivalence constraint, 50 51 Esquina dude (Laviera), 98 Ethnic identity, 95, 124 Expressions, Spanish language, 11 False cognates vs. true cognates, Chicano Spanish, 33 34 Federal certification, legal interpretation, 114 Fricatives, 1516 Functional Head Constraint, 50 Ganga Spanglish, 6970 Gender inflection: bilingualism, 2728; loanwords, 33; meaning of, 32 33 Gerunds, code switching, 37 Global identity, bilingual narratives, 75 Gmez-Pea, Guillermo, 94 Gonzlez, Luis, 103 4 Gramtica la lengua castellana (Nebrija), 65 66 Guilln, Nicols, 104 5
Chicana feminists, 123 Chicano 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, 810 Chomskian generative grammar framework, 49 50 Christianity, Spanglish, 67 Code 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, 74 Compound phrases, English interference, 34 35 Conditional, verb tenses, 18 Consonant changes, phonetic variants, 14 16 Constraints, Spanglish grammar, 55 58 Court Interpreters Act (1978), 124 Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastin de, 66 67 Cuban for Nicols Guilln (Laviera), 104 5 Cultural referents, 80, 102 Cyber-Spanglish, 70 Deculturation, Spanglish, 91 Derivative suffixes, 29 Diccionario latino/espaol (Nebrija), 66 Dictionary of the English Language (Johnson), 68 Diglosia conceptualization, 76 77 Diphthongs, 13 Dominant language assimilation, 40, 55 57 Doa Cisa (Laviera), 99
Harshav, Benjamin, 71 Hernandez, Cynthia, 115 Hispanic culture: Anglicisms,69; Caribbean, 72; intraethnic communication, 70; Spanglish danger to, 116; talk shows, 116; in U.S., 64; verbal miscegenation, 68 Hispanizacin of society, Spanglish, 65 Homenaje a don luis pals matos (Laviera), 105 6 Houston Mexican-American community, 43 Hybrid compounds, English interference, 35
Index
139
Immigrants/immigration: education, 7; illegal, amnesty for, 118; lingusitic/ social context, 5; mother tongue destabilization, 117, 119; Spanglish, 59; Spanish language, 78; workers, 5 Imperative, syntactic hierarchy, 46 Imperfect, verb tenses, 18 Impersonal construction, subjunctive mood, 21 Independent clauses, syntactic hierarchy, 45 Inflectional suffixes, 29 Inflection changes, verbs, 24 25 Informal speech, Spanglish, 47 48 Interrogative pronouns, 26 27 Intraethnic communication, 70 Johnson, Samuel, 68 Juan boria (Laviera), 103 Language: of linguistic minorities, 37; linking, Spanglish, 51 52; purity challenges, 96. See also Bilingualism; Bilingual narratives; Chicano Spanish; Latino writing/language; Legal language interpretation; Linguistics; Spanglish; Spanish language Lateralization, 16 Latino 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, 7375, 88106 Lebrn, Lolita, 61 Legal 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, 78 Lingua franca, bilingual narratives, 77 Linguistics: adjectives, 20, 2729; adverbial clauses, 20; adverbs, 2729; bilingualism, 3, 6; borrowing,7; codes, 36; cosmovisin, 91; education,5; English interference, 29 40; gender inflection, 2728; as heterogeneous, 6; hybridization, 73; impersonal construction, subjunctive mood, 21; inflection changes, 24 25; Mexican immigration, 5; minority language, 37; nouns, 2729; past participles, 23; phonetic variants, 1216; pronouns, 2527; in Southwest, U.S., 3; Spanglish, 6870; subordinate clauses, subjunctive mood, 20; suffixes, 29; terrorism, 95, 12324; verb conjugation, 24; verb morphology, 2125; verb tenses,16, 1922. 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), 91 Marn, Rosanna Rivero, 102 Martnez, Stephanie lvarez, 88109 Martnez-San Miguel, Yolanda, 7187 The Meaning of Yiddish (Harshav), 71 Media Spanglish, 117 Melao (Laviera), 96 97 Metathesis, 14 16 Mid-stem vowels, 2223 Mignolo, Walter, 77, 80 81 Monaghan, Peter, 11315 Monolinguals/monolingualism: vs. bilinguals, 60; Chicano Spanish, 3, 123; codes, 76; English, 5, 59;
140
Index Poplacks equivalence constraint, 49 Predicates, 38 Prepositional phrases, syntactic hierarchy, 46 Prepositions, 31 Present, verb tenses, 17 Present perfect, verb tenses, 1718 Preterit, verb tenses, 18 Progressive tense, English interference, 30 Pronouns: interrogative, 26 27; personal, 2526; plural proclitic accusative form, 25; relative, 26 27 Prosper- Snchez, Gloria D., 77 Prothesis, 14 Puerto Rico: African American roots of, 100 101; bilinguals of, 49; colloquial dialect, 74; cultural survival, 102; language contact, 8990; literature, 7273, 76, 103; oral tradition, 100; Spanglish, 67 68; U.S. study of, 72 Ramos, Julio, 81 Relative pronouns, 26 27 Rosenblatt, Angel, 65 The salsa of bethesda fountain (Laviera), 100 101 Snchez, Rosaura, 3 31 Santiago, Esmerelda, 77 Second-language learners, 43 Sentential switching, Spanglish, 48 49 Sociological 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;
Spanglish, 5, 40; Spanish, 3, 5; translation, 82 El moreno puertorriqueo (Laviera), 105 Morphosyntactic influence, 29 Mother/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, 1012 My graduation speech (Laviera), 9192 Narratives, Spanglish, 47 48, 54 55 Nebrija, Antonio de, 65 66 Neoculturation, Spanglish, 91 Neologisms, legal language, 114 Neutralization strategy, Spanglish, 58 Nomah (Stavans), 130 34 Nouns: clauses, subjunctive mood, 19; code-switching, 37; English interference/influence, 32; lingusitic/ social context, 2729; modified, English vs. Spanish, 37 38; phrases, 39 40; phrases, syntactic hierarchy, 45; predicate, 38 Nuestro Himno (Star-Spangled Banner), 11819 Nuyorican community, 9394, 100, 103 4 Occupational mobility, 4 One Hundred Years of Solitude (Mrquez), 71 Otero, Ramos, 79 Out-of-the-mouth factors, 42 Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford Press), 68 El pas de cuatro pisos y otros ensayos (Gonzlez), 103 4 Pals Matos, Luis, 104 5 Past participles, 23 Past perfect, verb tenses, 18 Paz, Octavio, 64 Personal pronouns, 2526 Phonetic variants: consonant changes, 14 16; Spanish language, 78, 10, 12; vowel changes, 1214 Pizarro, Ana, 81 Plural proclitic accusative form, pronouns, 25
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; hispanizacin of society, 65; history, 65 67; as intraethnic communication, 70; linguistic community, 6870; multiplicity, 6970; urban youth, 6970; 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, 88106; linguistic cosmovisin, 91; linguistic terrorism, 95; musical genre, 1012; Nuyorican community, 9394, 100, 103 4; transculturation (transculturacin), 90, 97, 100 101 Spanish-American War, 69 Spanish-English bilinguals, 48 50 Spanish language: code systems, 10 11; vs. English nouns, modified, 37 38; examples, 811; expressions,11; immigrants, 78; indigenous influences of, 9394; Mexican immigration, 78; monolinguals,3,5; soul searching of, 67; of the Southwest, 712; vs. standard English phrasing, 35; terms, 10; varieties/ variants, 78, 10, 12; verb tenses, indicative mood, 16 17; vestigial, 40 Standards, Spanglish, 55 58 Star-Spanglish Banner, 11819 Stavans, Ilan, 64 71, 130 34 Stem vowels, 23 Subordinate clauses, 20, 45 Suffixes, lingusitic/social context, 29 Syncope, 14 Syntactic categories: code switching, 43 45; constituents, 47 49; constraints, Spanglish, 48 50; hierarchy, Spanglish, 43 46, 53 54 Tesoro de la lengua castellana o espaola (Covarrubias Orozco), 66
Transculturation (transculturacin), Spanglish, 90, 97, 100 101 Transfers, Spanglish, 51, 55 58 Translation strategies: bilingual narratives, 7779; English interference, 30 31; monolinguals, 82 United States (U.S.) as bilingual, 64, 119 Unreadable texts, bilingual narratives, 7176 Untranslatable texts, bilingual narratives, 76 80 Urban youth, Spanglish, 6970 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, 1718; present perfect tense, 1718; preterit, 18; preterit/imperfect, 18; Southwest Spanish, 16 17 Verb tenses, subjunctive mood: of influence, 1920; lingusitic/social context, 1922; noun clauses, 19 Verbal code, Spanglish, 130 Verbal cross-fertilization, Spanglish, 69 Verbal miscegenation, Hispanic culture, 68 Vestigial Spanish, 40 Vocabulario espaol/latino (Nebrija), 66 Vowels: change of, 13; mid-stem, 2223; phonetic variants, 1214; standard vs. popular varieties, 2223; stem, 23; substitution of, 13; unstressed, 13 When I Was Puerto Rican/Cuando era puertorriquea (Santiago), 77 Written texts, English interference, 31 Xenophobia, Spanglish, 65 71 Yiddish vs. Spanglish, 70 Zentella, Ana Celia, 42 63, 9899
About the Editor and Contributors
Editor
Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Latin American and Latino Culture 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 Oxford Book of Latin American Essays (1997), The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (2003), Encyclopedia Latina (2005), Lengua Fresca (2006, with Harold Augenbraum), and Csar Chvez: An Organizers Tale(2008).
Contributors
Stephanie lvarez Martnez is a professor at University of Texas Pan American. Gloria Anzalda 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 Cherre Moraga). Susana Chvez-Silverman is professor of Spanish at Pomona College. Author: Killer Crnicas: 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 Gonzlez Echevarra is Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Author: The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball (1999). Editor: Cervantes Don Quixote: A Casebook(2005). Yolanda Martnez-San Miguel is professor of Spanish at Rutgers University. Author: Caribe Two Ways: Cultura de la migracin en el Caribe insular hispnico(2003). Peter Monaghan is on staff at the Chronicle of Higher Education.
143
144
About the Editor and Contributors
Rosaura Snchez is professor of Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature, 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 University 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).

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ibrary of L atino Civilization The Ilan Stavans L

Greenwood Press Westport, Connecticut London

111 113 116 118

121 123 125 130 135 137 143

Our Linguistic and Social Context

Our Linguistic and Social Context

Our Linguistic and Social Context

Spanish of the Southwest

Our Linguistic and Social Context

Our Linguistic and Social Context

Our Linguistic and Social Context

ad > swid iu > ui ciudad > swid

Our Linguistic and Social Context

Verb Tenses of IndicativeMood

Our Linguistic and Social Context

Past perfect tense Conditional tense Conditional perfect tense

haba comido comera habra comido

Preterit and Imperfect Tenses

Past Perfect Tense

Table 1 Indicative Verb Tenses

Our Linguistic and Social Context

Simultaneous Present Imperfect and preterit

Subsequent Present Imperfect

Verb Tenses of the SubjunctiveMood

Our Linguistic and Social Context

Our Linguistic and Social Context

pid-o pid-es pid-e pid-emos (< pedimos) pid-en

vist-o vist-es vist-e vist-emos (< vestimos) vist-en

Our Linguistic and Social Context

coma comas coma cmamos (< comamos) coman

viva vivas viva vvamos (< vivamos) vivan

Pronouns Personal Pronouns

Interrogative and Relative Pronouns

Our Linguistic and Social Context

Nouns, Adjectives, and Adverbs

Our Linguistic and Social Context

Our Linguistic and Social Context

Our Linguistic and Social Context

Our Linguistic and Social Context

Loan: Compound Standard Spanish Phrase Equivalent

Our Linguistic and Social Context

Our Linguistic and Social Context

Our Linguistic and Social Context

The Grammar of Spanglish

The Grammar of Spanglish

Honoring the Syntactic Hierarchy

* Adapted from Lipski 1985.

The Grammar of Spanglish

The Grammar of Spanglish

Spanish and English Constituents

Grammar and Informal Speech

The Grammar of Spanglish

Equivalence, Transfers, Standards

The Grammar of Spanglish

Linking Language, Constituents, Grammaticality, and Developmental Patterns

1 The Language Linked to Particular Constituents

2 Frequent and Infrequent Switches

The Grammar of Spanglish

The Grammar of Spanglish

3 Standards, Constraints, and Transfers

The Grammar of Spanglish

Loan: Compound Standard Spanish Phrase Equivalent