Chicana/o Studies Commons^™

Volume 8 (2025) The Spanish Language, Language Variations, Cultures And Responsibility

International Journal on Responsibility

This issue reflects an intentional and profound commitment to linguistic inclusion, cultural diversity, and the shared responsibility of scholars to broaden the scope of academic dialogue beyond the boundaries of English. The essays collected here invite us to reimagine bilingualism not only as a communicative skill but also as a moral, social, and institutional responsibility.

Esta edición representa un compromiso intencional y profundo con la inclusión lingüística, la diversidad cultural y la responsabilidad compartida de ampliar los horizontes del diálogo académico más allá de los límites del inglés. Los ensayos aquí reunidos nos invitan a reimaginar el bilingüismo no solo …

Stolen, Lost, And Replaced: Testimonios Regarding Chicana Responsibilities To The Spanish Language, Fawn-Amber Montoya, Ashley Martinez

International Journal on Responsibility

Using testimonio, the authors address how the Spanish language represents a component of Chicana identity. They illustrate how geography, history, and colonization impact Chicanas’ relationship with the Spanish language. Using testimonio allows the writers to explore the Spanish language in the United States through their personal experiences.

Resumen

Usando “testimonio”, las autoras abordan cómo el idioma español representa un componente de la identidad chicana. Ilustran cómo la geografía, la historia y la colonización afectan la relación de las chicanas con el idioma español. El uso de “testimonio” permite a las autoras explorar el idioma español en los Estados Unidos a …

Deslenguadas: A Photo Essay On The Performative Remembering Of The Impact Of 1940s Americanization Programs In Northern New Mexico, Yvonne M. Montoya, Fawn-Amber Montoya

International Journal on Responsibility

This photo essay captures the dance performance Deslenguadas by choreographer Yvonne Montoya. Deslenguadas, a dance inspired by a writing of the same name published in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, is a series of three dances – one duet and two solos. The dances in the series explore the impact the forced loss of the Spanish language had on three generations of one nuevomexicano family from the 1940s to the present day. Through dance, movement, projected animation, and spoken word, the dances explore how each generation internalized racism and shame. At the same time, these generations …

Reading The Archival Remains Of Arturo Islas's La Mollie And The King Of Tears, Allison Fagan

Department of English - Faculty Scholarship

This essay considers Arturo Islas’s posthumously published novel, La Mollie and the King of Tears (1996), arguing that an examination of its “archival remains”—its drafted and rejected material found in Islas’s archive—offers compelling evidence of the text’s anxious resistances to bodily, narrative, and cultural annihilation. Drawing on textual scholarship that prioritizes notions of texts as “fluid” or “in process” as well as on theories of queer and asycnhronous temporalities, I argue for a reading of the novel as haunted by its erasures and absences, and for a reading practice that more purposefully imagines the role of the body—of the author, …

"La Vida Es El Honor Y El Recuerdo": Oscar Zeta Acosta's Paratextual Struggle For Survival, Allison Fagan

Department of English - Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores the publishing history surrounding Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973) by examining two key paratextual elements: the introduction to the 1989 reprint edition, supplied by Hunter S. Thompson, and the illustrated cockroaches inserted throughout the narrative by Straight Arrow Books designer Jon Goodchild. It examines Acosta’s tandem efforts to employ and destabilize the singular identity at the heart of Chicano nationalism through the figure of the cockroach, and it suggests that such strategic essentialism is also at the heart of the publishing process.

It argues that Acosta combatively collaborates with his friends and …