How did Spanglish develop as a topic of interest?
IS: Spanglish isn t a beginning for me, but rather a consummation. I began to think about it seriously in the mid 90s. My first impression was that it was similar to Yiddish. I lived in London with a Guggenheim grant at the end of that decade. I was completely devoted to the autobiography, in which I set out to explain my personal journey from the verbal perspective: the languages of my childhood and adolescence were Yiddish and Spanish, then came Hebrew, and finally English appeared in 1985 when I left my native Mexico and moved to New York. Strangely, as the manuscript of On Borrowed Words moved forward, I felt more drawn to Spanglish. At the time I didn t understand why, but now I do. The autobiography shows how languages compartmentalize our lives. Yiddish and Spanish were never mixed in my childhood. My parents as well as my teachers did what they could to keep these languages separate. Why so much effort? How to explain our rejection of mixed languages? Where does the attitude we
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- How did Spanglish develop as a topic of interest?
