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March 24, 2005
spanglish, smanglish
Today in my comp history class, I blew a fuse. I guess I think that languages, ALL LANGUAGES, deserve to be recognized as the social construction that they are. I don't care how many scholars are out there professing to know what the hell their talking about, when they are talking about nothing that pertains to me as a Latina or a burgeoning scholar of rhetoric. So I spend the semester reading about all this stuff, but I can't use any of it in my paper, because I am not the target audience, and thus none of it pertains to me. These "experts" do, however, tell me how I can compose a history, that I have to decide what's important enough for me to bother to include in this construction (except for my man Vico who says throw it all in!), and that I
should be a responsible enough scholar to table my subjectivity throughout the process. Argggghhhh!
Well, I've been chewing on it all day, and thanks to my Prof. (Becky, who loves to make trouble as much as I do) and taking the advice of one of my colleagues (Diana), I get to include what has so sadly been lost; Spanglish; a language that has allowed my Latina/o brethren to negotiate the addition of a foreign Germanic language into our beautiful lyrical language. I also get to sound and signify on those that thought that they could sweep it under the table and ignore the fact that Latinos are absolutely not going to "go quietly into the night" without making their social and linguistic presence known. Spanglish is spreading like wildfire, and that in and of itself is intimidating, because it has managed to survive premature interment, lack of societal validation, and probably more importantly, linguistic nativism. And, what makes Spanglish even more threatening than languages of command, is that it does not want to be boss, it simply wants to survive...and to be recognized and acknowledged.
And... contrary to those that say it marginalizes Latina/os, I believe it simply speaks to who we are; a little bit of everything, some good, some bad, but all of it legitimately ours...as is Spanglish.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec03/spanglish_10-23.html
Posted by dvaldesd at March 24, 2005 09:19 PM
Comments
You can do it! What's that famous phrase? "Have it your way." Yea. Pioneer that path.
On another note, I'm not getting your updated posts. I don't know what happened. I'll try and update your URL in my feed.
Posted by: digitalpenny at March 27, 2005 09:42 PM