From Divided to Diasporic: Re-envisioning Italian American Texts through Transformative Translingual Practices

Translingualism—as theorized in linguistics, English-language instruction, and college writing pedagogy—dramatically shifts the way we view language use and development. It engages us in a deeper analysis of how users produce meaning, which resources they draw from, and how they deviate from or use conventions of writing. Written communication is seen as a translation process involving both writers and audience, for translingualism shifts our focus from language to language user, thereby valuing the agency of writers. Finally, it brings to light the asymmetrical relations of power in language use. More importantly, translingualism fundamentally recognizes that languages are always in contact and mutually influencing each other rather than being static, separated, and fixed; language use is a dynamic social process of negotiation and renegotiation and translation in which users, conventions, and contexts are continually changing (Canagarajah 2013b, 6). While translingualism applies to the qualities and characteristics of many languages, the main focus has been on English or rather Englishes, for it recognizes the various forms of World Englishes, as theorized by Braj Kachru (2017).Ariel Dorfman's writings are also useful for understanding translingualism. Dorfman sees the globalization of English as a “mongrelization that inevitably comes when transnational people breed bodies and syllables” (2002, 93). Dorfman recognizes how English is, indeed, transformed by its users in a continually flowing dynamic process that contrasts its static, monolithic status, which characterizes a monolingual orientation. Reflecting on his own bilingual journey, Dorfman reveals tensions between the dualistic concept of the divided self and that of the hybridized diasporic subject (93). Gloria Anzaldúa's (1999, 2002) work also transforms the divided self with a new mestiza consciousness and new approach to language that arises in the space between borders. Suresh Canagarajah's prolific work on translingual practices, Dorfman's concept of hybridity, and Anzaldúa's new mestiza consciousness can re-envision the ways in which we understand Italian American texts, and they provide the theoretical focus of this essay.Over the past decade, college writing professionals have urged their colleagues to adopt a translingual approach in their writing classrooms as a way of understanding and treating language difference (Horner et al. 2011). This approach recognizes that “the formation and definition of languages and language varieties are fluid” and should be viewed as “resources to be preserved, developed, and utilized,” not viewed as interference, substandard, or deficient (304). It asks what “writers are doing with language and why” not which language is standard, as it recognizes the many variations of English and other languages, the “global” or “world Englishes” (306). In sum, this approach encourages us to honor “the power of all language users to shape language to specific ends,” to recognize “the linguistic heterogeneity” of language users, and to interrogate monolingualist expectations (305).Suresh A. Canagarajah has written extensively on translingual practices that represent a paradigm shift for our understanding of communicative practices. Drawing on Jan Blommaert's work, which inaugurated the sociolinguistics of globalization, Canagarajah conceptualizes language in terms of its globalization and views it as mobile. As Blommaert explains, “Language varieties, texts, images travel across time and space, and . . . this is a journey across repertoires and sets of indexicalities attached to ingredients of repertoires” (2003, 611). One's linguistic repertoire, whether with one language or more, encompasses all its varieties, including its dialects, styles, and accents, yet these forms reflect inequality (612). Such inequality is seen in “dominant” languages or the ideology of Standard English or any attempt at standardization and the devaluation of local dialects or negative views of accents, views associated with a monolingual orientation. A monolingual orientation considers a language as homogenous and pure; it is decontextualized from cultural, social, or environmental influences. In such an orientation, language users are also immobile and limited to their community. The process of languages becoming codified and standardized coincided with nation-building.1In contrast, with a translingual orientation, languages are not conceptualized with labels, for such an act separates languages and enshrines them with unequal value; labels mask their mutual influence and integration. The influence of one language on another can be inventive and imaginative and not necessarily an interference. Canagarajah explains further, “Though language patterns (in the form of dialects, registers, and genres) and grammatical norms do evolve from local language practices sedimented over time, they are always open to renegotiation and reconstruction as users engage with new communicative contexts” (2013b, 7). Canagarajah's case studies of migrant language users confirm that users “treat all available codes as a repertoire in their everyday communication” (6). Most importantly, users construct meaning from multiple modalities and semiotic resources. Thus, for Canagarajah, the paradigm shift depends upon the principal concepts that “communication transcends individual languages” and that “communication transcends words and involves diverse semiotic resources and ecological affordances” (6). Translingualism captures language as it evolves, created and re-created by user and receptors, particularly the diasporic subject, in contrast to a monolingualist view of language as a fixed standard, located outside of its users (6).Ariel Dorfman also critiques the monolingual orientation and envisions a multilingual world in his work. In “The Nomads of Language,” he dismisses the “monolingual option” of learning or rejecting a new language that is presented to migrants when crossing borders (2002, 91). Instead, Dorfman encourages “migrants and the states in which they dwell to embark fully and without fear upon the adventure of being bilingual, and ask them also to celebrate, as so many of the young do, the many intermediate tongues (condescendingly termed patois) that prosper in the spaces between established linguistic systems, the myriad creole zones of confluence where languages can mix and experiment and express the fluctuating frontiers of a mingled humanity” (91). Dorfman encourages multilingualism “as a real alternative,” especially in the context of our new globalized world with its constant motion and flux (92). Dorfman's description of the history of languages compares to translingual practices: “Languages . . . have themselves always been maddeningly migrant, borrowing from here and there and everywhere . . . taking words out on loan and returning them in different, wonderfully twisted and often funny guises, pawning these words, stealing them, renting them out, eating them, making love to them, and spawning splendidly unrecognizable children” (93). Dorfman celebrates the translingual view of languages that meet at the border.It took Dorfman almost his whole life to arrive at these insights about language. In his literacy autobiography, Heading South, Looking North (1998), he documents a life tormented by his bicultural identity: born in Argentina, exiled to the United States, exiled to Chile, resettled in the United States. Dorfman attempted “to escape the bifurcation of tongue and vocabulary” as he decisively moved from Spanish to English, English to Spanish, from American to South American (2002, 92). He attempts to resolve his dichotomy at one point by living in Chile, speaking Spanish, but writing in English.But he could not resolve his tormented duality until he extricated himself from a monolingual orientation: “For me—resident of this dual existence, married to two tongues, inhabited by English and Spanish in equal measure, in love with them both now that they have called a truce for my throat—the distress of being double and somewhat homeless is overshadowed by the glory of being hybrid and open” (2002, 91). To celebrate the “glory of being hybrid and open,” and move toward translingualism, Dorfman must disable his use of “divided worlds.”The metaphor of divided worlds captures the socio-psychological impact of conflict experienced by those who move from one locus to another. It is often employed by those who move from home to school, from a native country to America, from working-class homes to university, from Black worlds to white worlds, from straight to queer. While the binary appears reductive, it is an almost universal metaphor in numerous autobiographical poems, plays, short stories, novels, and contemporary cinema, particularly when used by those with immigrant or minority cultural identities. It is also visible in the contentiousness of the hyphenated American. And though many writers employ this metaphor, it almost always implies multiplicity. The binary implied in divided worlds is constructed from a monolingual orientation, and one cannot move toward reconciliation without its dismantling. Further, as I will show, Gloria Anzaldúa's theory of mestiza consciousness redirects our focus to the space between these worlds. From this position we can interrogate the binary.Dorfman can disable the divided-worlds trope because his life experience belies their static construction. For one, his movement across borders, however dichotomized as north and south, makes him transnational and a “diasporic subject” (McClennen 2005, 171). Sophia A. McClennen claims that while it is obvious that Dorfman's multiple exiles and his family's legacy of “forced migrations” as Russian Jews characterize his experience as diasporic, they also frame his expression of self-identity. Yet she provides only a brief analysis of the etymology of diaspora in which “‘speirein’ means ‘to sow or scatter’” to indicate “the intricate ways that Dorfman's text layers subjectivity” (171). McClennen posits that “scattering suggests the polyvalent self and, on the other hand, sowing suggests the binary tension between the attributes found in the seed and those found in the land” (171). McClennen's understanding of the diasporic subject, within the context of life writing, helps us see the complexities of identity formation, from divided to diasporic; however, a deeper understanding of the diasporic subject is needed.Robin Cohen's scholarship on global diasporas provides a comprehensive description of the common features of a diaspora, despite the many variations in historical experiences. Such features include “dispersal from an original homeland, often traumatically, to two or more foreign regions” (1997, 26). Key to diasporic communities is the “collective memory and myth about the homeland” in addition to “an idealization of the putative ancestral home and a collective commitment to its maintenance, restoration, safety and prosperity, even to its creation” and “a strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time” (26). Cohen's typology includes victim, labor, trade, and imperial diasporas. Donna Gabaccia draws on Cohen's work to delineate a broad historical account of “Italy's many diasporas,” reminding us that migrants from Italy left an impact on the places to which they migrated (2000, 10). Gabaccia informs us that those migrants were primarily low-wage workers who supplied the ever-expanding demand for labor in the global labor market of the nineteenth century (2000, 59). With the high rate of return to Italy, these workers embarked on a “transnational way of life” in which family economies were constructed across borders to achieve stability and American customs and ideas seeped into their villages (2000, 82). Gabaccia concludes that for Italians, “home” is always a place that can be anywhere (191). Similarly, Cohen acknowledges postmodern understandings of diaspora that view the “collective identity of homeland and nation [as] a vibrant and constantly changing set of cultural interactions that fundamentally question the very ideas of ‘home’ and ‘host’” (1997, 127).Consequently, Cohen proposes that the definition of diaspora be loosened to accommodate these new identities and subjectivities that can be encompassed with the term “cultural diasporas” (1997, 128). Cohen's recognition that “diasporas are positioned somewhere between nation-states and ‘travelling cultures’ in that they involve dwelling in a nation-state in a physical sense, but travelling in an astral or spiritual sense that falls outside the nation-state's space/time zone” connects to Dorfman's ever-shifting physical and psychosocial identities (135–136). Indeed, Dorfman forces us to examine both the artificiality of national borders and also how those borders become embedded in one's consciousness. Further, Dorfman relies on his writing and political activity to creatively construct his national identity, thus asserting his autonomy. He clearly illustrates the limits of monolingualism and its problematic enactment of separation and division, the main causes of his destabilization. His final acceptance of his hybridity stabilizes him; such hybridity parallels translingual practices.Dorfman performs hybridity and translingual practices throughout his literacy narrative. Though Dorfman uses English, Spanish phrases abound, always italicized: “This is the last time I will ever see him, the last story I will ever tell him, la última vez” (1998, 12). We witness translingual practice in a retelling of a scene from his mother's childhood, when classmates refuse to let her in the music room, and his mother hears “No podés . . . porque sos judia,” which he informs us means, “You can't open the door, because you're a Jew” (16). When young “Edward” takes Spanish at the British school, he is forced to say, “‘Hablo este idioma en forma execrable,’ I speak this language execrably” (111). Usually when his memory takes him to Argentina or Chile, he uses more Spanish phrases. Unlike Anzaldúa, who purposefully refuses to translate her various forms of Spanish in order to deny the dominating power of English, Dorfman almost always translates.While some may refer to this use of multiple languages as “code switching,” it is now more clearly understood, through translingual practices, as “code meshing.” As college English educator Russell Durst has pointed out, the “progressive-seeming concept of code-switching actually favors the dominant group, because users of minority language forms are asked to switch to Standard English in formal or professional discourse, while users of the Standard need never code switch” (2014, 65). In contrast, Canagarajah's definition of code meshing is “a form of writing in which multilinguals merge their diverse language resources with the dominant genre conventions to construct hybrid texts for voice” (2013a, 40). Thus, it would be more accurate to understand one's use of multiple repertoires and/or multiple languages as dynamic, translingual interchanges. Dorfman captures this process not only to reflect on his “bilingual journey” but also to show a peaceful path toward negotiated hybridity as a cultural diasporic subject.For Dorfman, the metaphor of borders, whether national or personal, is essential to understanding his life narrative. He deconstructs these borders, exhibiting the fluidity of identity in a postmodern world. Perhaps, as Gloria Anzaldúa envisions with her mestiza consciousness, Dorfman's divided self creates a space in which to move toward a more expansive consciousness that incorporates the multicultural, multilingual, “half and half” (Anzaldúa 1999, 41). For although Anzaldúa claims her duality as Mexican and American, this divided construction leads her to articulate multiple subjectivities: Tejana, Chicana, indigena. Anzaldúa's mestiza consciousness and her paths toward higher consciousness envision a holistic self to heal the divisions, and this is what Dorfman was finally able to achieve. Dorfman, too, is always aware of the layers of subjectivities that exist within himself. Further, like Anzaldúa, Dorfman believes in the power of language to incite and transform others.Like Dorfman, Anzaldúa draws on an expansive linguistic repertoire; she actively expresses eight languages throughout her book that are used in various contexts, including Standard English, working-class and slang English, Standard Spanish, Standard Mexican Spanish, North Mexican Spanish dialect, Chicano Spanish (which has regional variations), Tex-Mex, and Pachuco or caló (1999, 77). Her use of multiple languages progresses her new mestiza project, for this consciousness requires recognition of its multiple subjectivities. With her belief that “ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language,” she cannot feel pride or legitimacy in herself until her languages also have those qualities (81). It would not be achieved until she is “free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate” and to use Spanglish instead of being forced to use English or Spanish; she anticipates a time when English speakers will accommodate her (81). Anyone who reads Borderlands/La Frontera can see how she has accomplished just that with her code meshing.Similar to Dorfman, Anzaldúa moves from divided to multiple: Her “divided self” empowers her with double perspectives that transform and create new identities, such as mestiza, but also with new ways of seeing. The divided nature of Chicano experience illustrates the problem of naming these identities: “Nosotros los Chicanos straddle the borderlands. On one side of us, we are constantly exposed to the Spanish of the Mexicans, on the other side we hear the Anglos’ incessant clamoring so that we forget our language” (Anzaldúa 1999, 84). Part of the difficulty in naming is the result of duality: “This voluntary (yet forced) alienation makes for psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity. . . . We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness” (85). It is the conflict of the borderlands. Duality creates the borderland; as a result, multiplicity embodies her experience and that of the new mestiza consciousness. This consciousness embraces multiple subjectivities as we see in this poem that appears in a section, “Una lucha de fronteras/ A Struggle of Borders.”Because I, a mestiza,continually walk out of one cultureand into another,because I am in all cultures at the same time,alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro,me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio.Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me habiansimultáneamente. (Anzaldúa 1999, 99)The poem begins with the duality of her lived experience but concludes with multiplicity as Anzaldúa consciously adds “tres, cuatro” (three, four) after “alma entre dos mundos” (soul between two worlds). As we see in the final line of the poem “I am disoriented by all the voices that inhabit me simultaneously,” competing voices create the self with contradictory messages that may lead to “mental and emotional states of perplexity,” which Anzaldúa characterizes as “a struggle of borders” (1999, 99–100). Anzaldúa imagines a new consciousness in order to disengage from the struggle. By expanding to “a tolerance for ambiguity,” the new mestiza becomes pluralistic. This new consciousness “break[s] down subject-object duality . . . healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts” (102). She believes it can end violence against women and even war. But the new mestiza must reinvent “a new story to explain our world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet” (103). Anzaldúa's new mestiza consciousness requires a new, authentic language, which she exhibits throughout Borderlands/La Frontera.Anzaldúa employs the metaphor of crossing a bridge to symbolize how this new consciousness develops. She explains, “The bridge (boundary between the world you've just left and the one ahead) is both a barrier and point of transformation. By crossing, you invite a turning point, initiate a change” (2002, 557). Writing is essential to rebuilding the self and voicing this new identity. Anzaldúa explains that “writing is an archetypal journey home to the self, un proceso de crear puentes (bridges) to the next phase, next place, next culture, next reality” (574). “Home” is the bridge until there is a time when bridges are no longer needed. Anzaldúa reconfigures the space between divided worlds as the locus of transformation. For this reason, I choose to leave the space open between Italian and American to signify the potentiality and promise of transformation, though I acknowledge the meaning of the slash mark in Italian/American.In their journeys from Italy to America, millions of immigrants crossed a border that transformed them and divided them, even if they returned home. Those who stayed developed a linguistic identity, “a way of speaking and writing as an Italian American,” though it was an identity born from estrangement (D'Acierno 1999, xlvii). Pellegrino D'Acierno describes how Italians were “estranged from the mother tongue, the standard Tuscan-based language that had been imposed as the official, and effectively utopian, language of Italian unification, the language of the signori (masters), of bourgeois domination, and of the system that marginalized them. . . . Their original estrangement from standard Italian was compounded by a second linguistic estrangement: their exile within their new mother tongue, English” (xlviii). D'Acierno's broad strokes provide a foundation for a more vivid, contextual, and detailed understanding of how the dialects the immigrants brought over were transformed, or hybridized, as we shall see in the works of Herman Haller and Nancy Carnevale in the next section. We shall also see how the space between Italian and American cultivated new linguistic identities and thus how the reconceptualization of language use established by Canagarajah, Dorfman, and Anzaldúa can transform our understanding of Italian American languages and texts.In recent years, scholars in Italian American studies have reimagined the field as Italian diaspora studies, which acknowledges the impact of Italian immigrants on other lands as well as the impact of those who migrate to Italy (Gabaccia 2000). As Eleonora Federici and Fred Gardaphé point out, “Now Italy has become a country of immigration, and this makes a great change in our understanding of what it means to feel and think Italian. Italian culture and everyday life is nonetheless changing before our eyes” (2016, 7). Such changes can be seen in social, political, cultural, and linguistic views: “From a literary point of view, Italian literature is acquiring new accents thanks to authors born and bred in foreign countries (the same Italian language is changing and is enriched by the influences of other languages)” (7). Without using the word translingual, Federici and Gardaphé identify that very process and practice. Thus, translingual practices can deepen our understanding of Italian diaspora studies.A reexamination of the scholarship on Italian American languages offers evidence of translingual practices. Michael La Sorte, who provides one of the first catalogs of “Italglish,” shows how it developed as a “utilitarian, everyday language of great flexibility, spoken within the family, at work, and among peers” (1985, 159). La Sorte uncovers its existence in as early as the 1860s and describes it as a mix of Italian words, dialect, and English. It often sounds Italian, but there's extensive borrowing from English so it is viewed as “broken” (160). Though La Sorte acknowledges this negative view among educated Italians, who saw it as a bastardization of their language, he also notes that some saw it as “an interesting aesthetic development and a practical necessity” (161). Further, La Sorte identifies a key concept of translingualism—that languages often develop with mutual influence—in his acknowledgment that the language of Italian immigrants showed a “use of creative imagination to produce a necessary form of communication, which in fact evolved following the familiar laws of language development” (162). This idea of linguistic confluence contrasts, as Canagarajah shows, monolingual orientation's support and enforcement of linguistic purism. Yet La Sorte insightfully notes that “linguistic purism is a luxury in certain situations; in the Italian colony there was a need for a common linguistic denominator, a lingua franca, a pidgin Italian dialect” (161–162). This “need” has historically been a driver in language development since pidgins arise from one or more existing languages and may be used as a lingua franca, or common language. Due to the nature of language development, these linguistic varieties seem to overlap. For example, a creole develops from a pidgin, once it becomes the native language of a community or its children learn the pidgin as their first language (Sebba 1997; Hudson 2000; Nordquist 2020). Grover Hudson points out that pidgin languages disappear “as the pidgin-speaking community develops, and one of its established languages becomes widely known and takes over the role of the pidgin as the lingua franca” (2000, 443). According to La Sorte, this is exactly what happened to Italglish: With the cessation of mass migration and rapid immigrant Americanization after the First World War, the idiom began to erode long before it reached a mature stage of development. Its final vestiges are to be found within the household. In those cases where the idiom was transmitted from immigrants to their American-born offspring, it was done in a piecemeal fashion—a word here, a phrase there—rather than as a major means of communication. Once the idiom had served its purpose, it was quietly aborted by the very community that had conceived it and was replaced by a working-class American English containing only trace elements of the earlier pronunciation and syntax. (1985, 163)But did it really disappear? As English became the dominant language of Italian Americans, did their dialects, or their hybrid languages fall into disuse? While Italian Americans seemed to recognize that their immigrant language created an obstacle to greater socioeconomic and political equality and embraced the preeminence of English, as La Sorte shows, other studies show that they did not entirely give up their hybrid languages. Herman Haller, one of the foremost experts on Italian American language varieties, uncovered the existence of linguistic varieties still in existence in the 1980s, spoken by the oldest and newest generations of immigrants from Italy. In one study, Haller identifies four distinct linguistic varieties still heard in Italian American households, primarily in New York (and that we will see in some Italian American texts), as: (1)the ancient dialect, often in a form that is no longer found in Italy;(2)the dialect koinés, the result of interference between two or more dialects;(3)an Americanized version of a dialect or Standard Italian, considered Italian-American proper;(4)an Italianized type of English. (1981,184)In a later study, Haller similarly categorizes them as “‘Standard’ Italian, dialectal Italian, Italianized dialect, pidginized American Italian and archaic dialects” (1987, 396). At this point, it's difficult to pinpoint whether Italian American languages developed as pidgins, creoles, koinés, or some other linguistic variety, as they have features found in almost all of these. For the purposes of my own work, it's important to revisit these kinds of studies on Italian American language varieties and try to understand them from the perspective of a translingual approach. For example, Haller usually describes the admixtures of English and Italian dialects or Italianized English as “interferences” (1981, 184), which a translingual orientation would see as the mutual influences of semiotic resources.There's one linguistic variety Haller does not include in his studies, most likely because of its negative connotations (as a “low” language) and its humorous affordances, yet it seems to describe Italian American language development more accurately while embodying translingual concepts. It's the “macaronic” language, which first appeared during medieval Europe when poets mixed Latin with vernacular languages in their comic compositions. It was first popularized in 1517 by the Benedictine monk Teofilo Folengo, who “applied Latin rules of form and syntax to an Italian vocabulary in his burlesque epic of chivalry, Baldus,” which has been translated as “Le maccheronee,” as Folengo likened his compositions to the peasant Italian dish (Britannica). Rather than perpetuate the false binary between high and low language, Amila Buturović (2001; 2020) sees macaronic language as a way to describe the hybridity of Bosnian languages: “The term ‘macaronic’ names a particular type of semantic production in which the speaker moves through several languages to create a multilingual phrase and effect. In other words, one does not switch from language to language; one uses them all at once. Words in two or more languages are cast in the grammar of one of the languages employed, usually the author's native language” (2020). Buturović’s modern definition aligns with a translingual approach, particularly for seeing all forms of speech as equally accessible resources and not as “interferences.” Further, she provides evidence that for hundreds of years most societies were multilingual and translingual, not monolingual (2001). In addition, she locates the historical shift from “polyglot environments” throughout the world to monolin