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Reviews | Short Takes | What
They Are Reading
Reviews
 Spanglish: The Making of a New American
Language. By Ilán
Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture. New York:
Rayo, 2003. 274 pp. $24.95 hardcover.
With numerous articles, books and
anthologies to his name, Ilán Stavans is an amazingly prolific author.
Through short stories, memoirs, biographies and critical essays, Stavans has
explored diverse topics, ranging from the Jewish
experience in Latin America to the works of the Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio
Paz. With his latest publication, Spanglish: The Making
of a New American Language, Stavans has added to our understanding
of Latino culture while officially opening a Pandora’s box.
In the 1990s Stavans incited heated
debate and even fury among linguistic purists when he began to verbalize his
acknowledgement of Spanglish, or espanglés, as a legitimate form
of speech. I myself lean toward the purists. That said, even
I admit that Spanglish is an important
phenomenon that is transforming the U.S. landscape at a pace few thought possible
a generation ago. As an improvised hybrid of English and Spanish, Spanglish should
be recognized as a realistic socio-cultural mirroring of the spoken vernacular
of a large segment of the present Latino population, especially the younger generations.
But alongside an institutionalized Spanglish agenda, I think that curricula should
be made available for anyone wishing to attain true bilingual proficiency. When
you write in Spanish, write in Spanish. When you write in English, write in
English.
At the dawn of the 21st century, how
do you attempt to codify an expanding
and primarily spoken vernacular that permeates all levels of the Spanish-speaking
community in the U.S. and obeys no set rules for grammar and syntax? Stavans’
answer is three-fold: create a dictionary, translate a chapter of Don
Quixote de la Mancha and write in academic Spanglish. Interestingly, he compares Spanglish
to
the Ebonics controversy of the 1990s and to Yiddish (as an example of a language
with clear hybrid origins). Historically driven, he highlights throughout his
text significant events that have led to the
present socio-cultural and linguistic tensions that English and Spanish share.
He analyzes, among other historical episodes, the Spanish-American War and the
loss
of Spain’s colonies in the Americas. For Stavans, the Anglo-Spanish tension
began earlier than the Monroe Doctrine. The
defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 marks a turning point when the British Empire
began to rival the Spanish crown for supremacy. Are we now witnessing
revenge, a collective Hispanic revancha? Stavans says we only have to turn on
the radio, zip through our cable TV stations
or take a walk to the newspaper stand to realize that times are changing.
Stavans also takes on the question of artistic interpretation: Can you, should
you, try to transmute the spoken language of the lower classes into literature?
Stavans defends the possibility of this transmutation against the position held
by the Real Academia Española de la Lengua Española. For him, Spanglish,
much like Yiddish, should be allowed to grow creatively and be codified. At the
heart of this book we find the first serious dictionary dedicated to the codification
of contemporary pan-Latino Spanglish terms. After years of teaching specialized
courses on the subject and carefully researching hundreds of
documents, Stavans compiled more than 2,000 words that appear in this lexicon.
Because Spanglish terminology changes frequently, a word was included only if
it appeared in a minimum of three texts.
As an added bonus, Stavans, exercising his own powers of bilingual creativity,
includes his Spanglish translation of the first chapter of Don Quixote de la
Mancha. The translation, tinged with much humor, first appeared in the Catalonian
newspaper La Vanguardia, much to the dismay of many who thought the rendition
demeaned Cervantes’ work. Not surprisingly, the translation of Spain’s
most venerated Golden Age writer made international headlines and helped the
Spanglish controversy reach a worldwide audience.
Spanglish: The Making
of a New American Language clearly reflects Stavans’
academic background, as well as his sensibility toward
exploring new ways of comprehending the multicultural present and Hispanic future
of the United States. Spanglish speakers will find themselves drawn to the personalized
Spanglish style that Stavans incorporates, while students and academics will
learn immensely from the excellent bibliography. Whether you are for or against
the codification of Spanglish, this book
has undoubtedly broken new ground and is representative of the growing number
of Latino studies that challenge the socio-linguistic hegemony and orthodoxy
of
the U.S.-Anglo society. Quite simply, it highlights the importance of the Latin(o)
Diaspora in los Unaited Estaits.
—Héctor García ’94
The reviewer is a
doctoral candidate in the Department of Romance
Languages and Literatures at
The University of Chicago.
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Cartoon: Lalo Lopez Alcarez. From Latino
USA: A Cartoon History, by Ilan Stevens. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Used by permission.
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