Editor’s Message

This issue of Hispania launches the new year with a special interview: Alejandra Timmins sat down with the writer Bahia Mahmud Awah in central Madrid to discuss Western Saharan literature as well as matters of culture, language, and identity. The interviewer’s personalized introduction to the piece establishes the necessary background in a way that proves accessible for all, whether specialists, general readers, or advanced students. Also intended for the AATSP’s wide readership is the first short-form article of the year. In “Discussing Language and Discrimination: Toward Anti-discriminatory Instructional Strategies in the Spanish Language Classroom,” Paola Guerrero-Rodriguez provides and contextualizes these strategies (referred to as ADIS) as an extension of the Critical-Thinking Framework. As the conclusion of the article underscores, “developing an anti-discriminatory linguistic repertoire can encourage learners to become active agents of change.”

The seven research articles published here range across continents and language traditions. In “News Media in the Work of Claudia Piñeiro,” Lidia Bezerra joins journalism and literature in a study of two twenty-first-century crime novels by the Argentine writer. Adrian Kane’s “US Central American Identities in Roberto Quesada’s Big Banana and Nunca entres por Miami” theorizes representations of the Central American diaspora in two works by the Honduran-born author who has resided in New York City since 1989. In “La gran semejanza ideológica entre Bernardo de Aldrete y la teoría del castellano primitivo: El multilingüismo ibérico,” Vicente Lledó-Guillem engages in debates over language and social value. “Motivación de los estudiantes chinos en el aprendizaje del español,” by Chenxi Luo, Chantal Biencinto López, and José María Ruiz, gathers and analyzes data from over three hundred learners of Spanish in Chinese universities. Paulo Moreira’s “Machado de Assis and the Marvelous in ‘The Devil’s Church,’ ‘An Alexandrian Tale,’ and ‘The Academies of Siam’” dialogues with Todorov’s use of the term “marvelous” to account for the provocations of selected short stories. In “Biología e intelecto: Las intersecciones de Margarita Nelken y Federica Montseny,” Sandra Ortiz-València threads together discussions of anarchism and socialism with notions of gender and class to analyze two Iberian texts from the 1920s. Finally, in “El guardián invisible, un procedimiento policial femenino científico-mitológico,” Emilio Ramón García concludes that the 2013 novel by Dolores Redondo “rompe además con la primacía del método científico detectivesco para prestar especial atención a la mitología vasco-navarra.”

As always, we are grateful to Book/Media Review Editor Domnita Dumitrescu for organizing such a robust selection of reviews. Additionally, with this issue, we are fortunate to be welcoming Conxita Domènech to her new role as Managing Editor, and we also celebrate our new team member Haley Osborn, who has stepped in as Assistant Managing Editor!!