This article examines the life and work of Mary J. Serrano (1840-1923), a successful translator and popularizer of Spanish literature in late nineteenth-century United States. It provides a short biography of Serrano and focuses on her work for the Spanish Legation in in Washington D.C. during the Cuban War of Independence (1895-98), a period of…

The present study explores Spanish-English speakers' attitudes toward bilingual discourse in the Upstate of South Carolina. Implementing a mixed methods approach, survey data and sociolinguistic interviews targeting bilinguals' attitudes toward English-origin nonce borrowings, loanshifts, and codeswitching were examined. Quantitative analyses…

Following several calls in recent scholarship for increased attention to the study of the Central American diaspora in the United States, this article offers readings of Honduran-born author Roberto Quesada's novels "Big Banana" (1999) and "Nunca entres por Miami" (2003). Written in New York City, where he has resided since…

The most effective way to address the critical social and political issues confronting students today is to promote intercultural competence with empathy at the core of language instruction. Language has the ability to shape our thoughts and to alter our consciousness. As students view the world through the prism of cultural openness, they are…

The Digital Humanities (DH) has been for many years, even decades, in constant development and self-definition and has been able to gather a diverse and international community that goes beyond the traditional framework of academia. Modern Languages (ML) also finds itself in the process of establishing the terms in which it intersects with the…

Carmen Montañez's novel "Pelo bueno, pelo malo" acknowledges the struggle that some Caribbean individuals face in accepting their blackness. The novel integrates the union of ancestors with the living, thus reflecting the Bantu concept known as "Muntu". This Puerto Rican novel presents a deep social problem of internalized…

A growing number of scholars invested in Iberian Studies are asking how peninsular literary and cultural studies might be reimagined, and reinvigorated, by placing the Spanish and Portuguese canons into critical dialogue with each other, and with Galician, Catalan, Basque/Euskadi, and Latin American and North African immigrant writers, cultural…

Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya offers a provocative example of postwar cynicism in his 1997 novel "El asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador." By telling the story of Edgardo Vega, an emigrant who returns to El Salvador in the mid-1990s after living in Canada for eighteen years, "El asco" represents the mass exodus…

In times of crisis when literature and world languages are threatened by economic hardship, they should draw closer to African diaspora studies. The African diaspora is so vast, longstanding, and diverse that it must be studied using a comparative, multilingual, interdisciplinary, and international approach that includes study in French,…

This article argues the pedagogical and scholarly benefits to Spanish language faculty who themselves conduct community-engaged service projects in Spanish-speaking communities. The author explores the term "service" as it is understood in higher education in relationship to teaching and scholarship, positing that service projects…

This study is part of a larger project to reassemble the historical presence of Spanish in what has always been complex multilingual ecologies of language use, policy, and ideology in California. In order to re-establish the place of Spanish, language educators and linguists need to rethink Spanish and Spanglish beyond English-centric memory.…

Detailing the integration of Spanish language teaching in an authentic setting, this article contributes to empirical research on the positive value of community-engaged learning in foreign language pedagogy. "Reading to Play, Playing to Read" is an innovative model for community-engaged teaching that combines learning goals from…

Central America, including El Salvador, has been cited as the least studied of the Spanish-language dialect zones. The paucity of linguistic research extends to the language use of these populations in the United States, including that of Salvadorans who have relocated there. This paper analyzes Salvadorans' utilization of "voseo" and…

This qualitative study investigated the language ideologies and instructional practices of an entire Spanish language faculty at a high school in a new gateway state for immigration. The study examined additive and subtractive practices of teachers as they strived to teach Spanish to heritage language learners (HLLs) enrolled in mixed…

The session that the AATSP organized at this year's MLA Convention in Boston (held on January 4, 2013) was dedicated to a topic that has been the object of constant debate in the past decades: the use of "Spanglish" as a marker of identity among US Latinos. The author states that she puts "Spanglish" into quotation marks…