Abstract
This essay provides an analysis of Huerta’s poetry by examining references to a life experience, his own and that of others, one that involves a social reality concerned with crossing borders, immigration, and silenced voices. I posit that the literary voice underlying Huerta’s poetry in Some Clarifications y otros poemas (2007), American Copia: An Immigrant Epic (2012), and Almost as Beautiful as an Immigrant Rights March Down International (2009), can be understood in terms of Charles Taylor’s notion of the subject as engaged in self-interpretation within a language community that bridges two social spaces—Mexico and the United States, as well as two languages—English and Spanish.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Works Cited
Evan-Zohar, Itamar. “Polysystem Studies.” Poetics Today, vol. 11, no. 1, Spring 1990, pp. 1–26.
Huerta, Javier O. Some Clarifications y otros poemas. Arte Público Press, 2007.
———. Almost as Beautiful as an Immigrant Rights March Down International, 2009.
———. American Copia: An Immigrant Epic. Arte Público Press, 2012.
Lotman, Yuri. “Un modelo dinámica del sistema semiótico.” La semiosfera II: Semiótica de la cultura, del texto, de la conducta y del espacio, translated by Desiderio Navarro, Ediciones Cátedra, 1998, pp. 43–56.
Olney, James. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton University Press, 1972.
Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Sánchez, Rosaura. “On a Critical Realist Theory of Identity Politics.” Identity Politics Reconsidered, edited by Linda Martin Alcoff et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 31–52.
Singh, Amritjit, Joseph T. Skerrett, and Robert E. Hogan. “Introduction.” Memory, Narrative and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures, edited by Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, and Robert E. Hogan, Northwestern University Press, 1994, pp. 3–18.
Spengemann, William C. The Forms of Autobiography. Yale University Press, 1980.
Taylor, Charles. Philosophical Arguments. Harvard University Press, 1991.
———. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge University Press, 1992.
———. Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kabalen de Bichara, D.M. (2018). Self-Representation and the Dual Reality of Identity in the Spanish-Language Poetry of Javier O. Huerta. In: Das, A., Quinn-Sánchez, K., Shaul, M. (eds) Contemporary U.S. Latinx Literature in Spanish. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02598-4_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02598-4_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02597-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-02598-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)