Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA by Julia Alvarez

[afterannabel.livejournal.com]

3) Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA by Julia Alvarez

I have mixed feelings about this book. My biggest complaint was that I was often frustrated by Alvarez's use of Spanish words and idioms, of which she rarely provided translation. I took Spanish on and off in high school and college, and some words' meanings are intuitive (familia) or obvious from the context, so that was helpful. But it made me stumble many times throughout the book. I really liked the fact that Alvarez dug deeper and explored how young Latina women in America struggle with incorporating both cultures into their lives in meaningful ways, without compromising themselves.

Comments

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

What's codeswitching?

[sophinisba]

Ack, I guess I should have spelled that with a hyphen. Here's the Wikipedia article, but basically it's when multilingual people switch between languages within the same conversation.

One of the things it mentions in that article is that in the past linguists considered it substandard language use but they've since come to believe it's a normal thing that's appropriate in some contexts. A lot of US Latino writers have grown up not only being told by English speakers that they shouldn't speak Spanish but being told by Spanish speakers (especially upper-class Spanish speakers) that they shouldn't code-switch, that their way of speaking and writing is inferior to real. Spanish. Mixing Spanish with English in their literature can be a way of contesting that voice of authority, of saying, "No, my language is legitimate." For me that makes the situation of Latino writers using Spanish a lot different from British authors using French, though I can see where it would be equally frustrating for some readers.

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

Ah. I hadn't heard of code-switching before. That article makes sense, and I can see why Alvarez would be doing it in her writing.

(And I've certainly heard the "Puerto Rican/Cuban/Mexican/Latin American Spanish isn't REAL Spanish" argument, just as I've heard the "Quebecois French isn't REAL French" bit. I can see that hearing that your language wasn't quite real would be annoying, because it would mean that you weren't quite real either.)

Okay. I think I'm beginning to get this. Thank you.

And as I said upthread, I'm going to look for her books in the library and see for myself what I think.

[sophinisba]

Cool, I hope you enjoy her books! I haven't read the book being reviewed here but I liked the novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, a story about an immigrant family, and loved In the Time of the Butterflies, a historical novel about young women who opposed the Trujillo dictatorship in the D.R. :)