Bilingual Writers Creating and Recreating Hybrid Identities in Puerto Rico and in the US Diaspora: A postcolonial look at Esmeralda Santiago’s América’s Dream and Rosario Ferré’s The House on the Lagoon

• In Event: Sin murallas:Puerto Rico, ciudad e identidades híbridas

Abstract

This presentation aims to portray self-translation as a postcolonial, social, political, cultural and linguistic phenomenon. It will focus on how self-translation in the cases of Puerto Rican writers Rosario Ferré and Esmeralda Santiago, and their novels The House on the Lagoon and América’s Dream, communicate a hybrid transcultural identity that not only challenges the monolingual literary canons and concepts of national homogeneous identities, but also subverts to patriarchal society. Thus, I understand self-translation as a mean of empowerment and contestation.

I believe that Rosario Ferré and Esmeralda Santiago are representative of a group of writers, artists and intellectuals who through their work, originated from the island and from the U.S. Diaspora, have aimed to give voice to a Puerto Rican postcolonial hybrid identity that has been silenced until recently. Therefore, they disrupt the official national cultural and linguistic discourse about the Puerto Rican identity that has been weaved by the Spanish language in opposition to U.S. colonialist attempts of linguistic and cultural assimilation.

The main goal of my presentation is to expose the deep connection between socio-political context, language, culture, identity, power and translation that supports the idea that self-translation is a postcolonial act, which in the case of Puerto Rico it is strongly related to hybridity as an everyday practice of identity affirmation, and in the case of the chosen cases it is also an instrument of female agency.

Author

• Aurora Sambolin Santiago, Universidad de Santiago de Chile