Chapter 4 Latino Immigrants at the Threshold: a Sociolinguistic Approach to Hospitality in US Barriocentric Narratives1
In: The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in U.S. Literature and CultureSearch for other papers by Luisa María González Rodríguez in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Abstract
Drawing on Levinas’s contention that language is inextricably connected to hospitality because it allows us to share the world with the Other, this article explores controversial issues related to language exchanges and linguistic tensions that spring when power, hospitality, and space are being questioned and contested. US barriocentric novels vividly portray how linguistic barricades separate outsiders from insiders by delimiting a psychical and linguistic territory where the immigrant is at a disadvantage in a decidedly monolingual host country. This article examines the metaphor of hospitality in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street and Piri Thomas’s Down these Mean Streets through the magnifying lens of language use and code switching in order to gain a deeper insight into the ways in which ethnolinguistic identities are constructed and power relationships negotiated and challenged. In these novels, the use of the home language versus the host language brings to the fore other concerns connected to displacement and unstable resettlement as well as identity issues that reflect a fractured mode of belonging. In Cisneros’s novel, the main issues posed by the dichotomy of the use of homeland versus host-country language create a breach between immigrants who are willing to accept assimilation and sameness as a sign of empowerment, and those who prefer to protect their linguistic space in order to maintain the link that connects them to their homeland’s culture and values, as well as to delimit identitarian borders. In Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1997) the linguistic enactment of identity becomes even more complex since the characters are forced to either resort to their homeland language or to code switching to challenge stereotypical social and ethnic categories. Most of the characters of Piri’s novel have hybrid sociolects and, therefore, use linguistic forms from different language varieties of Spanish and English to display multifaceted identities that undermine the negative clichés attached to the immigrants living in depressed and impoverished inner cities. These characters, by challenging the power expressed though language, are also questioning the possibility of experiencing these migrant sites as habitable places. Their refusal to use Standard English clearly proves they know that the spatial limitations are also linguistic barricades. Furthermore, as Smith (2013) aptly points out, by refraining from crossing the linguistic threshold, the viability of experiencing hospitable encounters and the host country’s capacity to open up spaces of hospitality are seriously questioned. A further aim is to explore how the language is used in these two autobiographical novels to establish sociocultural boundaries and activate different social roles or multiple facets of their shattered identities.