Title: The politics of multilingualism in the works of Richard Rodriguez and Sandra Cisneros
Description: This dissertation explores multilingualism as trope and fact in the works of two Chicano/a writers: Richard Rodriguez and Sandra Cisneros. In Part One, I examine Rodriguez's most controversial book, Hunger of Memory (1982), and argue that its greatest aesthetic accomplishment has been the ways in which it forces us to rethink the boundaries of Chicano/a identity--and therefore politics--by calling attention to the significant forms of linguistic, class, and racial difference (among others) within the Chicano/a community. I suggest that Rodriguez's awareness of the mediating and socially binding functions of language can be seen as connected to the author's ethical scrutiny of the forms of inclusion and exclusion made possible by any given "language". Ultimately, I argue that Rodriguez parallels his inability openly to articulate the issue of his homosexuality (in other words, to find a "public language" for it) to the social invisibility and lack of public power of poor, undocumented persons. Rodriguez sets up a pattern of mirroring in his text which, while not equalizing qualitatively different identities, suggests that they both exist in a parallel marginality which exposes the central fiction of the universality of the public sphere and calls for ethical scrutiny of the norms that undemocratically regulate public inclusion.

In addition to the metaphorical ways in which Rodriguez employs a notion of multilingualism, I further argue that Rodriguez's writing actively attempts to create a transnational Chicano/a-Mexican literary space through its allusions to Octavio Paz's El laberinto de la soledad . I demonstrate that Rodriguez adopts specific ideas from Paz--in particular, Paz's critique of the closures of Mexican nationalism, his critique of the cult of machismo, and most importantly, his notion of a utopic and redemptive universalism--in order to critique the identity discourses of the Chicano/a Movement. Part Two of the dissertation considers the novel Caramelo (2002) by Sandra Cisneros. I argue that Cisneros's witty translations throughout the novel produce an important effect of linguistic estrangement in both English and Spanish. I suggest that the friction produced by translation between languages can be used as an important resource for critical thought and political activity.