Hispanic language and culture. (Letters).

Marquez, Ismael P.

I was pleased to find in your Summer 2000 issue two engaging pieces on Hispanic literature, language, and culture: Marta Caminero-Santangelo's "Contesting the Boundaries of Exile Latino/a Literature" and Ilan Stavans's "Spanglish: Tickling the Tongue." Caminero-Santangelo, after acknowledging the inadequacy and irrelevance of the terms Latino/a and Hispanic, challenges the growing differentiation being made in academic circles between "Latino/a literature of exile" and "ethnic" Latino/a literature as separate and distinct forms of writing. Stavans's essay deals with the never-ending process of mestizaje of languages, a process not new to the continent. In his Comentarios Reales, Garcilaso de la Vega Inca, the son of an Inca princess and a Spanish conquistador, writes, from his voluntary exile in Spain, on the mutual intrusion of Quechua and Spanish and on the power derived from knowing both.

Though at the time I enjoyed reading these two essays, I was soon thereafter brought back to reality by a newspaper article giving some very troubling statistics concerning the Hispanic community in the United States. The article states that "Hispanic girls have a higher high-school dropout rate than girls in any other racial or ethnic group and are least likely to earn a college degree, according to the American Association of University Women."

I am perfectly aware that WLT is not the venue in which to air social problems, yet I wonder nevertheless about the pertinence of some of our academic concerns. We are zealous in defending gender differences in language ("Latino/a literature"), and are dismayed when we are invited to chatear online by a colorful "haga click aqui." Are we as disturbed by the fact that the dropout rate for Latinas aged sixteen to twenty-four is reported by the U.S. Census Bureau to be 30 percent, compared with 12.9 percent for blacks and 8.2 percent for whites?

Ismael P. Marquez
University of Oklahoma