Los Atrevidos Analysis

The fixation with language is very much present in the literary productions by usanas and caribeñas del Gran Caribe. For them, crossing language(s) in their texts is a way to perform a transformation of the world around them. Usanacaribeñas write mostly in English because this is the language in which they received instruction. English is the language in which they got their intellectual ideas (Eduardo Machado in del Rio 19) and for most of them there is an intimate connection between “acquiring the [English] language and developing as writers” (19). Eduardo del Rio proposes in the introduction of his Conversations with Cuban-American Writers –which include interviews with Cristina García and Achy Obejas among the selected twelve—that
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Hospital provides them with an agency to “choose” that these writers do not always possess. Their audacity is true if we consider the accusations of inauthenticity they must face from other writers, readers and critics alike. But whereas some of usanacaribeña authors can create both in Spanish and English, most of them can only do it in English or feel comfortable or proficient enough uniquely doing so in that language. I seek to deconstruct in the present study the notion that “by choosing either Spanish or English these writers intentionally give up the idea of belonging to intellectual communities that are essential for their creative survival” (Álvarez-Borland 9. My emphasis). Something that does occur to, for example, Puerto Rican Rosario Ferré, who affirms that writing in English has opened the US and European literary markets for her. On the contrary, trough their language crossings, grancaribeña writers gradually transform and insert themselves into both the US and the Caribbean literary traditions, which they mesh while creating both a grancaribeña and a global literature that –whereas written in the global language(s) par excellence—is multilingual and multiaccented. For example, in her introduction to the

Christian deliberates, why should literary canons be mutually exclusive? (20) Why should writing in a language or another automatically place these works and authors in stable national identity categories or literary traditions? (18) Should then Cristina García, who hardly ever writes in Spanish, be placed in a different national identity or literary canon than Achy Obejas, who goes back and forth one language and the other? Or should Julia Alvarez, who writes mostly in English, be placed in a different national identity or literary tradition than Mayra Santos Febres, who writes mainly in Spanish? Can’t they both be placed in a Caribbean literary tradition? What happens when all of them cross languages in their narratives? As it was not easy the act of classifying the so-called US Latina writers and give them a label (see Introduction), it remains extremely complicated to make a direct connection between language and (national) identity or literary canons in these writers, as made by Álvarez-Borland when referring to Cuban-American authors writing in