Abstract
Given the number and size of the Spanish-speaking communities of the United States, it is perhaps surprising that what has come to be known as “Latino literature,” the imaginative writing by and about Hispanics in this country, exists almost entirely in English. As the monolingual expression of a largely bilingual population, Latino literature detaches culture from language, celebrating the former even as it silences the latter. Even the English of Latino writers, with some exceptions, bears little resemblance to the hybrid sounds and rhythms of the barrios where many of them grew up. What happened to the Garcia girls has also happened to the writers: They have lost their accents. For every Latino writer like Gloria Anzaldúa and Roberto Fernández, who endeavor to reproduce the actual speech, the idioma, of a particular group of Latinos, there are several like Cristina Garcia and Julia Alvarez, who translate it into something like George Santayana’s Received Standard English.
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Hey, I just do Spanish, I don’t explain it.
—Judith Ortiz Cofer
Notes
Esmeralda Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican (New York: Vintage, 1994), 43.
Julia Alvarez interview with Mike Chasar and Constance Pierce, Glimmer Train Stories 25 (winter 1998): 140–141.
Julia Alvarez, The Other Side (New York: Dutton, 1995), 3.
Ernst Rudin, Tender Accents of Sound: Spanish in the Chicano Novel in English (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 1996), 152–181.
Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2000), 15.
Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek (New York: Random House, 1991), 153.
Sandra Cisneros, “Dulzura,” in Loose Woman (NewYork, Vintage, 1995), 27. From LOOSE WOMAN. Copyright 1994 by Sandra Cisneros. Published by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., and originally in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York. All rights reserved.
Paul De Man, “Autobiography as Defacement,” MLN 94 (1979): 920.
Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory (New York: Bantam, 1983), 179. Further page references will be incorporated in the text.
For discussions of the reference to Caliban, see Ramón Saldívar, “Ideologies of the Self: Chicano Autobiography,” Diacritics 15, no. 3 (1985): 26–27
Lauro Flores, “Chicano Autobiography: Culture, Ideology and the Self,” The Americas Review 18, no. 2 (1980): 86.
Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 117–37.
Richard Rodriguez, “An American Writer,” in The Invention of Ethnicity, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 4.
Calvert Casey, Notas de un simulador (Madrid: Montesinos, 1997), 227.
Tomás Rivera, “Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory as Humanistic Antithesis,” Melus 11, no. 4 (1984): 10.
On Paz and Rodriguez, see José Limón, “Editor’s Note on Richard Rodriguez,” Texas Studies in Literczture and Language 40, no. 4 (winter 1998): 391.
For an energetic queer reading of Rodriguez, see Randy Rodriguez, “Richard Rodriguez Reconsidered: Queering the Sissy (Ethnic) Subject,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40, no. 4 (winter 1998): 396–423. Issues of sexuality (his own) are somewhat more visible in Rodriguez’s second book, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (New York: Penguin, 1992), particularly in the chapter “Late Victorians,” a discussion of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco that is also Rodriguez’s characteristically reticent coming-out piece; but it is only in Brown (New York: Viking, 2002) that he describes himself as “a queer Catholic Indian Spaniard” (35). In a recent interview, Rodriguez explained that he kept his homosexuality out of Hunger of Memory because its inclusion would have induced too “sociological” a reading of the book (Timothy S. Sedore, “Violating the Boundaries: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez,” Michigan Quarterly Review 38 [1999]: 424–446). But one might say just the opposite: that the exclusion of his homosexuality from the memoir tips the balance toward race and class rather than gender.
For a perceptive Derridean reading of the distinction between writing and reading in Hunger of Memory, see Henry Staten, “Ethnic Authenticity, Class, and Autobiography: The Case of Hunger of Memory, PMLA 113 (1998): 103–116
see also Rolando J. Romero, “Spanish and English: The Question of Literacy in Hunger of Memory, Confluencia 6, no. 2 (1991): 89–90.
Richard Rodriguez, “Going Home Again,” in The Norton Book of Personal Essays, ed. Joseph Epstein (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 410–411. This essay was originally published in The American Scholar in 1974.
Richard Rodriguez, “The New, New World: Richard Rodriguez on Culture and Assimilation,” interview with Virginia I. Postel and Nick Gillespie, Reason 26, no. 4 (August–September 1994): 41.
Judith Ortiz Cofer, Woman in Front of the Sun (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 120.
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© 2003 Gustavo Pérez Firmat
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Firmat, G.P. (2003). Words That Smell Like Home. In: Tongue Ties. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980922_8
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