On Sub-Versive Signifiers: U. S. Latina/o Writers Tropicalize English

Abstract

As Victor Hernandez Cruz suggests in Snaps of Immigration, 1 the Spanish words of many Latino writers melt into the English of their otherness, like the guayaberas that dissolve in the cold of snow and into the neutral homogeneity of polyester. It is significant that here Spanish is metaphorized as illegal tropical fruits-mangoes, guavas, and plantains come to mind-not allowed to enter the United States due to federal agricultural restrictions. These fruits-in the poet's fancy-allegorically reveal, among other possible cultural icons, the absent presence of Spanish in the United States, a language analogously restricted, colonized, and ultimately erased by linguistic racism and English-Only Laws. While the image of white guayaberas that dissolved / into snowflaked polyester suggests cultural loss and assimilation, inevitably the position of the fruits, interned between the typical Latin American shirts (guayaberas), allows for the possibility of contaminating or allegorically staining the purity of the white, English signifiers (the polyester). These succinct verses by Victor Hema'ndez Cruz propose, in poetic language, what Juan Flores and George Yuidice have termed transcre-

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