Crimes of the Tongue

Crimes of the Tongue

Essays and Stories

  • Autor: Gaspar de Alba, Alicia
  • Editor: Arte Público Press
  • ISBN: 9781558859579
  • eISBN Pdf: 9781518507328
  • eISBN Epub: 9781518507304
  • Lloc de publicació:  Houston , United States
  • Any de publicació: 2022
  • Pàgines: 232

A native of the El Paso / Ciudad Juárez region, acclaimed author and scholar Alicia Gaspar de Alba writes that she grew up with “a forked tongue and a severe case of cultural schizophrenia, the split in the psyche that happens to someone who grows up in the borderlands between nations, languages and cultures.” Border dwellers struggle with place and identity in the short fiction included in this collection. An El Paso-born American citizen with a high school diploma and a talent for writing seeks a job as a reporter at the El Paso Herald after World War I, but gets hired as a janitor and research specialist instead. A Mexican woman takes her young daughter north to protect her from sexual abuse, only to leave the girl with relatives while she crosses the river in search of a job and a new life. And a college student gets a Tarot reading to help her discern the historical symbolism of her bicultural identity. The award-winning writer explores other “crimes of the tongue” in the essays in this volume: pochismo, or the mixing of English and Spanish, as both a family taboo and a politics of identity; the haunting memory of La Llorona, protector of undocumented immigrants and abandoned children, and her blood-curdling cry of loss and revenge; the intersection of the personal and the political in the transgressive work of Chicana/Latina artists; the sexual and linguistic rebellions of La Malinche and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; and the reverse coyotaje, or border crossing, of Chicana lesbian feminist theory translated into Spanish and visual art as a way of sneaking this counterhegemonic pocha poetic thought into Mexico. These essays and stories are always intellectually rigorous and often achingly personal.

  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Dedication
  • Contents
  • List of Figures
  • 1 Crimes of the Tongue, or, a Malinche Tree Inside Me
  • 2 The Border Beat, 1921
  • 3 Ten Fronteriza Meditations on La Llorona
  • 4 The Mystery of Survival
  • 5 Mujeres Necias/Decolonial Feminists Unite! Dorothy Schons and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
  • 6 The Piñata Dream
  • 7 “Ella Tiene Su Tono”: Conocimiento and Mestiza Consciousness in Liliana Wilson’s Art
  • 8 Bad Girls Rise Again: The Sinful Saints & Saintly Sinners at the Margins of the Americas Exhibition
  • 9 Malinche’s Rights
  • 10 The Codex Nepantla Project: Transinterpretation as Pocha Poetics, Politics and Praxis
  • Notes
  • Acknowledgements

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