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Related papers
Anthropology & Aging, 2022
Road Map Born respectively in 1907 and 1910, my great-grandparents Chucho and Manuela were the pillars of the González family. They had four children, Toni, Chuy, Tita and my Abuelito, 1 all of whom, minus one, had children of their own. Their children include my aunts, my uncles, and my mother who then ended up having me. My great-grandparents used to tell many stories to their grandchildren who shared these stories long after Chucho and Manuela were gone. In this portfolio, I talk about my journey into the stories about my great-grandparents Chucho and Manuela and the multiple ways in which my family remembers them.
Centro Journal, 2018
The critical readings of “Pollito chicken” continue referring to the story’s use of language as “Spanglish.” This article suggests that this short story cannot be read through the notion of code-switching or the erroneous concept of “Spanglish.” This conceptualization prolongs the dualistic non-fluid metaphor of the hyphen, or the bridge. Instead, Ana Lydia Vega’s well-known “Pollito chicken” reflects a transgressive, purposeful use of an artificial and impossible “Spanglish.” I read the controversial, debatable “Spanglish” used by the narrative voice not as a mere critique of Nuyoricans or Puerto Rican assimilation to the American ways, but as showing the complexity of diasporic female characters like Suzie and texts like “Pollito chicken.” I argue that Vega’s intentional depiction of an artificial, static “Spanglish” disputes the hyphen ideology behind this notion, and advocates for a more fluid conceptualization of languages in contact, and national and gender imaginaries both in the US and the Caribbean. The artificiality of the story’s code-switching, as the representation/manifestation of the hyphen ontology, places language and identity in sharp relief, to the end of emphasizing that the hyphen is itself an equally artificial (and enforced) construct.
¡¿Qué, qué?!— Transculturación and Tato Laviera’s Spanglish poetics
25 ] ¡¿Qué, qué?!-Transculturación and Tato Laviera's Spanglish poetics STEPHANIE ÁLVAREZ MARTÍNEZ In this article, I begin with a brief synopsis of Laviera's four poetry collections, followed by a detailed analysis of selected poems from all four collections in order to demonstrate how Laviera displays a unique transcultural cosmology through language. First, I discuss poems that deal with the relationships between languages and how they affect one's identity. Next, I explore Laviera's emphasis on the non-European roots in the transcultural process and how this emphasis reveals transculturation as a resistance strategy. Similarly, an analysis of Laviera's stress on popular culture, orality, and music further emphasizes Laviera's transcult-ural philosophy as a means of survival and creativity. Lastly, I describe Laviera's homage to certain poets and declamadores, as well as his insistence upon the Nuyorican's contribution to the formation of Puerto Rican culture. Together, these various points demonstrate how through transculturation Nuyoricans and Latinos transform their language to reflect their biculturalism, and create an entirely new code. [
PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies
This creative non-fiction piece written in Spanglish is called "La vaca.” The overarching themes of this story are birth, motherhood, siblings and the creative force in a non-conventional American family raised in Mexico. The narrative voice in this piece provides a unique perspective broadening dialogue(s) on Mexican American identity.
Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds, 2021
Nepantla Familias brings together Mexican American narratives that explore and negotiate the many permutations of living in between different worlds—how the authors or their characters create, or fail to create, a cohesive identity amid the contradictions in their lives. Nepantla—or living in the in-between space of the borderland—is the focus of this anthology. The essays, poems, and short stories explore the in-between moments in Mexican American life—the family dynamics of living between traditional and contemporary worlds, between Spanish and English, between cultures with traditional and shifting identities. In times of change, family values are either adapted or discarded in the quest for self-discovery, part of the process of selecting and composing elements of a changing identity. Edited by award-winning writer and scholar Sergio Troncoso, this anthology includes works from familiar and acclaimed voices such as David Dorado Romo, Sandra Cisneros, Alex Espinoza, Reyna Grande, and Francisco Cantú, as well as from important new voices, such as Stephanie Li, David Dominguez, and ire’ne lara silva. These are writers who open and expose the in-between places: through or at borders; among the past, present, and future; from tradition to innovation; between languages; in gender; about the wounds of the past and the victories of the present; of life and death. Sergio Troncoso, David Dorado Romo, Reyna Grande, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Francisco Cantú, Rigoberto González, Alex Espinoza, Domingo Martinez, Oscar Cásares, Lorraine M. López, David Dominguez, Stephanie Li, Sheryl Luna, José Antonio Rodríguez, Deborah Paredez, Octavio Quintanilla, Sandra Cisneros, Diana Marie Delgado, Diana López, Severo Perez, Octavio Solis, ire'ne lara silva, Rubén Degollado, Helena María Viramontes, Daniel Chacón, Matt Mendez.
IAFOR Journal of Arts & Humanities
The constant movement of populations in search of a better standard of living is a phenomenon that has always defined the human condition. In recent decades, Europe has been facing a relentless migratory wave that has been transforming its social, political, cultural and economic dynamics. Spain has experienced the impact of this movement by accepting migrants from Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. In an effort to better portray the migratory situation in the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish playwrights have been staging characters who are either torn by stereotypes confronting the unknown Other or who turn their backs to the cruel reality of drowned bodies. Ignacio del Moral in La Mirada del hombre oscuro (1991) and José Moreno Arenas in La playa (2004) endow their Spanish characters with sharp and provocative language while at the same time questioning their assumptions regarding the Other. In both plays, migrant characters remain silent, immobile and unable to react to or communicate with the Spaniards. This paper aims to discuss the silence and immobility of migrant characters and portray how they actually become an essential point of reference and eventually overpower the Spanish protagonists. José Moreno Arenas and Ignacio del Moral invite the audience/reader to reflect upon the accuracy of certain judgments toward the Other, to reexamine the way in which we perceive ourselves and the ones around us, and to gain a deeper understanding of human commonalities.
It’s a Dog’s Life: Canine Ethics in Leonardo Padura’s El hombre que amaba a los perros
2015
El hombre que amaba a los perros (the man who loved dogs), the title of Leonardo Padura’s 2009 novel, is also the nickname that the novel’s protagonist Ivan Cardenas Maturell, a frustrated writer and sometime veterinarian’s assistant, gives to the elderly Spanish gentleman that he meets walking his borzois on a Havana beach. The man is later revealed to be Ramon Mercader, Catalan Stalinist and Leon Trotsky’s infamous assasin. Mercader is not the only character who could be identified as “a man who loves dogs,” however, as an unusually strong affection for their canine companions unites all three of the novel’s protagonists: the exiled communist Trotsky, his assassin Mercader, and Ivan, Mercader’s Cuban interlocutor, who will go on to record their interwoven stories. The appearance of dogs at significant moments in the narrative is one of the ways that Padura guides the reader through a complex web of stories and shifting alliances and identities. Yet dogs are more than a simple leit...