Tender accents of sound: Spanish in the Chicano novel in English

Abstract

Tender Accents of Sound: Spanish in the Chicano Novel in English. Ernst Rudin. Tempe: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 1996. xiii + 285 pages. $20.00. The analysis of is nothing new to Chicano/a social and literary studies. After all, language constructs personal, social, and literary identity, so the studies of Chicano/a poetry and theater inevitably examine code-switching between English and Spanish as an interlingual literary technique that registers the liminal social position of Chicano/a identity between Anglo and Mexican culture. However, despite the linguistic richness of Chicano/a literary production, Ernst Rudin is correct in asserting that neither in the field of the Chicano novel nor in the more spectacularly ones of poetry and theater has there been a book-length analysis on the subject to date. Rudin's project, then, is quite unique and also quite daunting: he examines the use of Spanish in nineteen Chicano/a prose narratives written in English and concludes, among other things, that [t]he Chicano novels published between the late sixties and the mid-eighties offsprings of the Chicano movement, ... and often marked as `revolutionary literature,' are--on the level of language--very reluctant to use experimental techniques and to be subversive. In the first of his three-part study, Rudin judiciously clarifies his project: he is not analyzing texts--texts written in both English and Spanish. Rather, he embarks to examine the bilingual strategies of Chicano/a narratives in English written between 1967 and 1985 to show that they are, generally speaking, as `monolingual' or `bilingual' as Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Except for The House on Mango Street and Victuum, the literary corpus Rudin examines are by men, and Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, from which Rudin's study takes it title, seems to be the master narrative informing Rudin's reading of other Chicano/a narratives, since the structuring theme of his text selection is the assimilation of the Chicano (author-narrator-) protagonists [who] cease at the end of the text to belong to the world, the society, and the value system that surrounded them at its beginning, and try reconstruct their former cultural self for an Anglo American audience whose culture has now become theirs. Along these lines, the first section culminates with Rudin's lucid discussion of the levels of linguistic and cultural translation in Chicano texts, which he demonstrates with an effective analysis of Rolando Hinojosa's English translation of his own Spanish narrative Estampas del valle y otras obras. Unfortunately, parts two and three of the study only show glimpses of the detailed literary analysis with which the first part concludes. Generally concerned with the types of Spanish-language entries in Chicano/a texts, the second part does not offer significant textual analysis until it specifically examines the works of Estela Portillo Trambley, Alma Luz Villanueva, Mary Helen Ponce, and Ana Castillo, all of whom are not included in the primary corpus of the study. And the final section offers a series of lists categorizing the number of times specific words or phrases appear in a text. Granted, Rudin implores that the statistics tables have to be taken with a grain of salt, but the section highlights the study's tendency to point out Spanish-language entries without fully developing an analysis of how and why they function as competing forms of social discourses. …

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