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Silvia Betti

Poco después de la investidura del presidente Joe Biden, en el mes de enero de 2021, reapareció en la web de la Casa Blanca la página en español. Como es sabido, el ex presidente Donald Trump había eliminado la versión creada por la Administración de George W. Bush y continuada por la de Barack Obama, en reconocimiento de los millones de hispanohablantes que viven en los Estados Unidos.

You have to speak ‘American’. The public rejection of Spanish in the United States during the Trump presidency

Silvia Betti

Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in 43 out of 50 states in the United States of America, according to data from the US Census Bureau dating back to 2017. However, in Trump’s “America First”, there was no space for Spanish and that which is Hispanic. Once elected president, deleting Spanish from the official page of the White House did not represent, as was said at the time, a transitional measure which was intended to improve the information that it contained, but rather “a true declaration of principles.” This text seeks to investigate the last years of the presidency of Donald Trump and show the linguistic attitudes of a part of US citizens towards the use of Spanish in public places.

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People who speak Spanish as a heritage language in the US are just as legitimate speakers as everyone else

Ángel López García-Molins

There is an idea that second language users are a kind of flawed speakers who will never reach the native level. In this paper it is argued that the command of a language is established in three dimensions: that of the linguistic system, that of the complexity of the texts and that of the communicative situation. From them, various expressive possibilities result and all are legitimate. This perspective allows for a novel consideration of heritage Spanish speakers in the US, who have Spanish as an appropriate second language, not their own. This means that Spanish speakers learn it because it was the language of their ancestors and they emotionally appropriate it, but they do not want it to replace their native English, but rather to live with it. In this way, heritage speakers become integrated into Hispanophony, the Hispanic equivalent of what in the domain of English is the outer circle of speakers of India, Nigeria or Jamaica.

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The use of proverbs in basic and intermediate Spanish courses based on a Los Angeles, California corpus

Frank Nuessel

Proverbs are an essential part of knowing how to speak Spanish because they represent Hispanic anonymous popular wisdom so frequently used in conversational language in order to maintain close ties with family members and acquaintances. They can be used to teach various linguistic and cultural aspects of Spanish. This article uses a limited corpus of the most frequent proverbs in Los Angeles. It shows their pedagogical value for the teaching of Spanish in basic and intermediate Spanish courses.

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(Neo)baroque Spanglish

Marcos Rico Domínguez

These brief notes about “Spanglish” and the “(Neo)Baroque” are presented as a first approach to this creative and communicational phenomenon which I will develop and consolidate in a larger research endeavor. This brief article intends to be an initial overture to delve into the matter of the intersection of both terms. My interest in “(Neo)Baroque Spanglish” stems from the cross between both concepts that define phenomena and realities which are vaster and more complex. Indeed, this represents a discourse as well about language, culture, and identity. My research takes off from the fact that “Spanglish”, as a mix of cultures, reveals within itself its hybrid and anthropological characteristics; that is to say, a cultural phenomenon of great reach and confluence quite close to the “(Neo)Baroque”. If, on the one hand, the presence of the border or of that which is bordering, is fundamental in understanding “Spanglish” as a cultural phenomenon, on the other hand, the “(Neo) Baroque” is also an expressive and creative strategy (an aesthetic) that goes beyond its frontiers and that can be rewritten in modernity related to a reinterpretation of the Latin-American baroque tradition in the United States. “(Neo)Baroque Spanglish”, as a reality made into a border, a cross and a mix, is also a performative foundational act of the subversion and resistance of the Latino cultures in the US, through a historical and cultural reinterpretation that leads to recreate the bordering into an expression of the mix and the interference as both enriching and valuable aspects.

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Ivorian students and american spanish: between attraction and apprehension

Bi Drombé Djandué + Kouakou Béhégbin Désiré Konan

American Spanish both seduces and frightens Ivorian students of Hispanic Philology. This ambivalent attitude is explained by the ways of pronouncing of Hispanic Americans and a lexicon enriched by voices coming from the indigenous linguistic background and from African languages that arrived in the New World with enslaved Africans. Based on personal experience and a survey applied to 300 students from the public universities of Abidjan and Bouaké, we seek to understand the objective and subjective reasons for these attitudes towards American Spanish. As far as seduction is concerned, these reasons are fundamentally due to a greater cultural identification of the Ivorians with Latin America despite the geographical distance, thanks to the strong presence of Afro-descendants in this part of the world. As for apprehension, it is explained by the scarcity of contacts with Hispanic Americans and the relative difficulty of understanding their speech for people who naturally tend to associate Spanish more with Spain than with America.

PDF (0.32 MB)