The Bilingualisms of Latino/a Literatures

This essay deals with the multiple languages of Latino/a literature: English, English and Spanish (code-switching), Spanglish, and Spanish. It traces the linguistically and thematically diverse Latino/a literatures of today back to the Nuyorican literary movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. The argument here is that Latino/a writers like Sandra Cisneros, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Cristina García, and even those who write exclusively in Spanish today, as for example, Tina Escaja, Marta López Luaces, and Miguel Ángel Zapata are the literary heirs of Miguel Algarín, Sandra María Esteves, Pedro Pietri, Miguel Piñero, and Tato Laviera, the writers who bravely paved the way for them.