By Ilán Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture. New York: Rayo, 2003. 274 pp. $24.95 hardcover.
Reviewed by Héctor García ’94
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.
The reviewer is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at The University of Chicago.