Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Decolonizing American Spanish: Eurocentrism and Foreignness in the Imperial Ecosystem
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022
published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (New York) 106 (June 2023)
In his ambitious proposals for a fundamental realignment in American perspectives on language and literature, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera locates the primary field of action in the institution he knows best: the university system. Specifically, he is focused on Spanish departments as indicative of larger issues. “Overloading faculties, canons, and curricula toward Spain has occurred for five hundred years—transitioning our professoriate toward local realities is an ethical imperative that is long overdue.” From the start, he reminds us of the facts, that there are more Spanish speakers in the U.S. than in any other country except Mexico. Yet, Spanish continues to be considered a foreign language at nearly all levels of scholarly activity (and despite its presence in the country since before English). University programs have long reinforced that foreignizing cast with an outsize emphasis on Spain; even where they have reached a semblance of parity between Peninsular and Latin American studies, standards are ultimately routed through the colonial framework.
The structural imbalance that the author lays out is hardly an abstract matter. He examines its effects through a number of cultural and critical angles, but what grounds him is his interest in the lived experience. Illustrating how the system marginalizes Latinx perspectives, he cites a student from South Texas who had a shock of the familiar on reading Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street in a university class, since it was the first time in her education that she’d been given a text written by someone like her. Cisneros herself, from an interview quoted in the book, tells of writing as someone who is speaking Spanish in English. That fertile overlap of the two languages in America, and the rich variations of Spanish itself in countless communities across the land—for the many ways they do not conform to notions of a pure Spanish—are circumstances to celebrate and value, as Herlihy-Mera reminds us.
Advocating for local practices, he also seeks to turn away from institutional habits of monolingualism as too restrictive. At the center of the book, a chapter on multilingual cognition takes the reader through a consideration of Latinx and border writing, and into the realm of Latin American writers working in France. Just as important here is a brief tour through the opposite door to English-language communities where Spanish may nonetheless lie at the foundations. Such linguistic complexities are far more common in America than official culture wants to let on. John Wayne spoke Spanish at home, and Cormac McCarthy’s characters navigate the two languages like it’s second nature, as did John Steinbeck growing up in Salinas which helped propel his later affinities with Mexican culture. Lauded for his nuanced ear for the idiom of American English, William Carlos Williams’s mother tongue was Spanish as a child. And Ernest Hemingway, whom the author has written about extensively elsewhere, was so devoted to Spanish-language cultures through the latter half of his life that he lived mostly in Cuba and liked to describe himself as a Cuban writer.
But to open up the landscape of American Spanish that we may appreciate its true dimensions, it is also necessary to question faulty premises. Even the Castilian mirage of a unified language has a polyphonic core. One might dwell on the many parts of Spain where Spanish is not in fact the mother tongue, instead the book probes into the more fundamental issue of Spain’s half-submerged Islamic heritage. This too is part of the overdue reckoning among American scholarly institutions to achieve a more multipolar concept of Spanish-language studies, and certainly Herlihy-Mera recognizes that such a project has to do with long-term, generational change. Yet he also sees what is right in front of him as a possible model for how a university might respond to local contexts and defuse old hierarchies. For the past decade and a half, he has taught in the humanities department at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez, where linguistic plurality is the norm. If Spanish is dominant there, English has co-official status and blending the two happens all the time. Both tongues are at home in that space, which is the beginning of a wider understanding.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022
published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (New York) 106 (June 2023)
In his ambitious proposals for a fundamental realignment in American perspectives on language and literature, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera locates the primary field of action in the institution he knows best: the university system. Specifically, he is focused on Spanish departments as indicative of larger issues. “Overloading faculties, canons, and curricula toward Spain has occurred for five hundred years—transitioning our professoriate toward local realities is an ethical imperative that is long overdue.” From the start, he reminds us of the facts, that there are more Spanish speakers in the U.S. than in any other country except Mexico. Yet, Spanish continues to be considered a foreign language at nearly all levels of scholarly activity (and despite its presence in the country since before English). University programs have long reinforced that foreignizing cast with an outsize emphasis on Spain; even where they have reached a semblance of parity between Peninsular and Latin American studies, standards are ultimately routed through the colonial framework.
The structural imbalance that the author lays out is hardly an abstract matter. He examines its effects through a number of cultural and critical angles, but what grounds him is his interest in the lived experience. Illustrating how the system marginalizes Latinx perspectives, he cites a student from South Texas who had a shock of the familiar on reading Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street in a university class, since it was the first time in her education that she’d been given a text written by someone like her. Cisneros herself, from an interview quoted in the book, tells of writing as someone who is speaking Spanish in English. That fertile overlap of the two languages in America, and the rich variations of Spanish itself in countless communities across the land—for the many ways they do not conform to notions of a pure Spanish—are circumstances to celebrate and value, as Herlihy-Mera reminds us.
Advocating for local practices, he also seeks to turn away from institutional habits of monolingualism as too restrictive. At the center of the book, a chapter on multilingual cognition takes the reader through a consideration of Latinx and border writing, and into the realm of Latin American writers working in France. Just as important here is a brief tour through the opposite door to English-language communities where Spanish may nonetheless lie at the foundations. Such linguistic complexities are far more common in America than official culture wants to let on. John Wayne spoke Spanish at home, and Cormac McCarthy’s characters navigate the two languages like it’s second nature, as did John Steinbeck growing up in Salinas which helped propel his later affinities with Mexican culture. Lauded for his nuanced ear for the idiom of American English, William Carlos Williams’s mother tongue was Spanish as a child. And Ernest Hemingway, whom the author has written about extensively elsewhere, was so devoted to Spanish-language cultures through the latter half of his life that he lived mostly in Cuba and liked to describe himself as a Cuban writer.
But to open up the landscape of American Spanish that we may appreciate its true dimensions, it is also necessary to question faulty premises. Even the Castilian mirage of a unified language has a polyphonic core. One might dwell on the many parts of Spain where Spanish is not in fact the mother tongue, instead the book probes into the more fundamental issue of Spain’s half-submerged Islamic heritage. This too is part of the overdue reckoning among American scholarly institutions to achieve a more multipolar concept of Spanish-language studies, and certainly Herlihy-Mera recognizes that such a project has to do with long-term, generational change. Yet he also sees what is right in front of him as a possible model for how a university might respond to local contexts and defuse old hierarchies. For the past decade and a half, he has taught in the humanities department at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez, where linguistic plurality is the norm. If Spanish is dominant there, English has co-official status and blending the two happens all the time. Both tongues are at home in that space, which is the beginning of a wider understanding.