English-Spanish Code-switching in Literary Texts: Is It Still Spanglish as We Know It?

Encouraged by the success of the session on “Spanglish” organized by the AATSP last year at the MLA Convention in Boston (see the 2013 MLA Convention Feature in Hispania 96.3), the AATSP organized a follow-up session this year in Chicago, this time focusing on the use of code-switching between English and Spanish in literary writings rather than in oral interaction among bilinguals. Its title (which preserves the popular name of code-switching as “Spanglish,” to facilitate understanding) was “English-Spanish Code-switching in Literary Texts: Is It Still Spanglish as We Know It?”

One reason for focusing on this particular aspect of the US literature written by Hispanics is that, as Aparicio (1994) pointed out:

While some prescriptive linguists, editors, and authorities in education would judge the interference of Spanish and English as a deficit, a postmodern and transcreative approach would validate it as a positively creative innovation in literature. Indeed, the most important contributions of US Latino/a writers to American literature lie not only in the multiple cultural and hybrid subjectivities that they textualize, but also in the new possibilities for metaphors, imagery, syntax, and rhythms that the Spanish subtexts provide literary English.

(797)

The other, related reason (which the question in the subtitle of the session tries to answer) is that there has been a long debate about whether or not, or at least to what extent, literary code-switching is “authentic,” that is, reflective or mimetic, of what is taking place in the “real world” of the bilingual Hispanic communities in the United States. In the past, the prevalent positions (based almost exclusively on analyses of Chicano literary productions, in particular poetry) seemed to have been that “not only there may be but that there must be significant differences between literary code-switching and real life code-switching” (Keller 1979: 269), or that one can clearly distinguish between mimetic code-switching (which tries to mirror society) and literary code-switching (which pursues other goals of aesthetic nature) (Keller 1984: 178). More recent studies, however, emphasize the fusion of both types of code-switching, in particular in narrative texts. So, for instance, Montes-Alcalá (2012)—based on the careful examination of a selection of contemporary bilingual novels by Mexican-American, Nuyorican, and Cuban-American writers where Spanish and English alternate—claims that “the socio-pragmatic functions that have been traditionally ascribed to oral discourse” can also be found in a bilingual literary corpus, and she concludes that “code-switching in these texts may be considered authentic and not just purely rhetorical” (85). Therefore, as Torres (2007) has pointed out, in an often cited article:

[A]n important contribution of these texts is that they continue to document the multilingual reality that exists in this country. Latino/a fictional texts are an example of a contact zone where English and Spanish confront each other and comfortably or uncomfortably coexist.

(92)

The four papers presented in the aforementioned MLA session provide, each one in its own manner, insights into these issues. The first paper, by Covadonga Lamar-Prieto, documents the existence of code-switching in a written corpus of documents (including early Spanish local periodicals) from California’s nineteenth century. These documents prove the continuity (contested by some previous scholars) between the Californio dialect of Spanish and contemporary Spanish spoken in California. Moreover, it demonstrates that “many words and expressions that are considered ‘recent corruptions’ or the result of recent linguistic accommodation have, however, a very extensive history in the community,” and that “Spanish-English code-switching is not ‘something new’ that appears in contemporary times, but an inherent feature of the Spanish language spoken in Southern California,” and probably other states from the southwest, I should add.

The second paper, by Jorgelina Corbatta, was originally titled “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Discourse as a Mestiza and Queer Writer,” and it analyzed the concept of mestizaje in Anzalduá’s theory of borderland identity as “a way of challenging binary thinking and being beyond either/or,” which includes a multiplicity of discourses, or speaking “Tex-Mex with a...