If assertions of the Real Academia Española de la Lengua Castellana are true, Stavans has legitimized Spanglish as a “true” language (Torres 331). His feat? Translating Cervantes’ Don Quijote into Spanglish, the first portion of which was published in 2002. While the RAE and other Spanish language conservatives were summarily appalled (and predictably, did not “grant” Spanglish any improvement in status), Spanglish scholars celebrated the work as a marker of Spanglish as a language, not a dialect. While linguists prefer to work in the realm of spoken language, it is hard to argue that written language does not receive special recognition by the general public. In creating a written work of Spanglish, Stavans reasserts claims that Spanglish has its own grammar and vocabulary and that it is not a corrupt form of Spanish or English.
Escúchalo aquí (Stavans reads from his chapter of Don Quijote en Spanglish, the second link): http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1438900
While Stavans’ efforts should be lauded, his translation is far from the first piece of Spanglish literature. Since the 1960’s, hundreds of Latino authors and poets have utilized Spanglish as a tool to capture their own voices and stories more authentically than would English or Spanish (Morales 69). Among the more famous Spanglish poets are Miguel Algarin, Alurista (or Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia), and Corky Gonzales.
Un ejemplo of poetry Spanglish, por Ed Morales (100-101):
Only a multiculture pueblo can understand
El adentro y the outside of the dynamic
Culturally, we possess ritmos y sueños que no se
Pueden sacar de our essences
They are reflected in our speech and our manner
No matter what language or banner we choose
Freeing us from being aquí or allá, here, there, everywhere
Mixed race is the place
It feels good to be neither
It’s a relief to deny racial purity
We’re amused as America slowly comes to see
The beauty of negritude and the Native American attitude
We’ve been living it day-to-day since 1492
Jimmy Santiago Baca reading his poem “Rita and Julia”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYdLAorJImU
Gloria Anzaldúa and Susana Chávez-Silverman write autobiographical pieces on their Latina identities, a task which must, of course, be completed in Spanglish. In Anzaldúa’s work, Borderlands/La Frontera, she laments the pressures felt to conform to English and writes of her pride for her identity. Susana Chávez-Silverman’s Killer Crónicas is a series of vignettes describing Chávez-Silverman’s life and culture. She writes as though recording thoughts and conversations with herself, fluidly switching from Spanish to English mid-sentence. She often employs phonetic spellings of Spanish words to capture the spoken quality of the language, as opposed to a more stilted “correct” Spanish. From p. xix of the introduction:
“…I began to transcribe an “h” where the “s” is just a breath, down there. Ehto. Quereh? Ehplicar. O Ponía la “sh” o “zh” instead of “y” or “ll,” para transmitir la realidad fonética de los northern suburbs de Buenoas Aires. Sha. Shuvia. Te shamo luego. Ever daddy’s girl, supongo, ehtudiante de la tradición oral. Heredé su crackshot oído también. Ex-estudiante, too, de los lingüista-fonetistas donde hice mi B.A…, I learned their lessons well. I can’t not write it like I hear it.”
Chávez-Silverman is very aware of her “mixed” status, and writes of her origins and former residences, each having played a part in shaping her language. In doing so she captures the multicultural feel of Spanglish; rather than hailing from only one (or even two) formative homes, she pays homage to Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Puerto Rica and Guadalajara. “Y siempre, signs de mi daily Latinidad, mi Chicana, code-switching life, right here in la cuenca de Los Angeles” (xx).
Other Spanglish authors include award-winning Oscar Hijuelos and Junot Díaz, who offer no translations of the frequent Spanish found in their code-switching novels. Without a good Spanish dictionary (which would have to include thousands of pieces of Dominican and Cuban slang, phonetic transcriptions and a cultural dictionary), a reader could only fully understand their works if he or she was bilingual. This type of inclusion offers special status to Spanglish-speakers, as neither Spanish nor English speakers have full access to the works. This is not to say that the novels (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, respectively) are not enjoyable to all audiences (and how could they not be, having each won a Pulitzer?) but their recognition of Spanglish audiences is another step towards the recognition of the language as “authentic.”
From The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, page 108:
“Those of you who have stood at the corner of 142nd and Broadway can guess what it was she spoke: the blunt, irreverent cant of the pueblo that gives all dominicanos cultos nightmares on their 400-thread-count sheets and that La Inca had assumed had perished along with Beli’s first life in Outer Azua, but here it was so alive, it was like it had never left: Oye, parigüayo, y qué pasó con esa esposa tuya? Gordo, no me digas que tú todavía tienes hambre?
Eventually there came a moment when she’d pause at La Inca’s table: Do you want anything else?”
Though Díaz uses Spanglish throughout the novel, this passage in particular marks the conscious distinction between Spanish and English. Beli clearly feels more at ease talking the “cant of the pueblo” than stiffly, formally in English to her mother, La Inca.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999.
Chávez-Silverman, Susana. Killer Crónicas. University of Wisconon Press, 2002.
Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.
Hijuelos, Oscar. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. New York: Harper Collins, 1990.
Morales, Ed. Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America. New York: St Martin's Press, 2002.
Torres, Lourdes. “Don Quixote in Spanglish: Traducttore, traditore?”. Romance Quarterly 52.4 (2005 Fall), pp. 328-334
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