On transplanting Iberian LatinX

Inspecting the roots

Like Chenta, I, too, decided one fine day (almost 30 years ago) to “go home.” Perhaps, on some unconscious level, I was prompted by the pent-up frustration of having heard that phrase spewed out at me and my family one too many times growing up as the child of a mixed marriage in the United States. This was in the 1980s, when people of Latin American origin and other Spanish-speakers were lumped together into the US category of “Hispanic,” and the directive to go home was often preceded or followed by the disparaging term “spic.” Born of a Spanish mother and a Colombian father who had also migrated to the United States as a child, this concept of home was, for me, tenuous to say the least. It probably didn’t help that between the ages of two and fourteen I had already lived in six dwellings, four cities, and two countries. Technically, though, I was actually born in Spain, so I figured if I had a home to go back to, this should be it. Yet, despite this accident of birth, I never really thought of myself as Spanish. When we visited my maternal grandparents in Zaragoza, in northeastern Spain, every two or 3 years, my experience was similar to what Chenta describes: I suddenly felt more American than I ever did in the United States. I felt destined to be forever foreign. I never imagined that I would one day end up putting down roots in Madrid, in fact, moving here was more of an accident than a conscious decision.

Probably due to the aforementioned anecdotal bits of genealogical and natal trivia, I always thought of myself more as “Hispanic” than Spanish. Though, to be frank, it would probably be more accurate to say that I identify as a case study for the efficacy of Sesame Street. My sense of belonging has always been tied to the multi-diasporic reality of the US East Coast and, more specifically, the New York Metropolitan Area. In high school, my friends were first- and second-generation Americans of Chinese, Indian, Irish, and Easter European origin. The people my family shared holiday meals with were mainly of “Hispanic” origin, many of them Spanish or Colombian, but also Ecuadorian, Venezuelan, Mexican, Argentinian, Costa Rican, Peruvian, and so on, and many had married into other ethnic groups. Our friends were Baptist, Taoist, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, and Catholic. The one thing we all had in common is that we were all transplants who strongly identified as being “of X origin.”

It wasn’t until I went off to college and discovered identity politics that it began to dawn on me that this persistent identification with one’s origins—and the resulting need to categorize and label one’s roots—is a characteristic trait of people whose lives have been marked by deracination. I became sensitized to the political relevance of personal history in courses on feminist theory, while a class called “Race in the US: Immigrants and Refugees” helped me contextualize my family’s experience. My third year, I joined the newly formed association for students of Latin American origin. From what I recall, the first meeting I went to was mainly dedicated to debating whether to call the organization “La Raza” (“The Race”) or “Raíces” (“Roots”). To make a long story short, by the time I graduated from college I was self-identifying as “Latina,” a term that, for me, had the advantage of asserting both my identity as a woman and my ancestral heritage.

Finding a new pot

I landed in Madrid a year after graduating college, more than a decade before the expression LatinX made its initial appearance. My intention when I first arrived was to stay in Spain just long enough to establish EU residency before applying to graduate school in England; but I got sidetracked, among other reasons, because I had grossly underestimated how long my meager savings would last. I was not yet skilled in the art of adulting, and Madrid, like many big cities, is costly. It also has a reputation for taking people in and not letting them go, which is what I feel it has done with me. Less than a week after I realized I needed to find a source of income, I was hired at a language academy and offered an eight-month contract. From there, one thing led to the proverbial other….

Of course, as an English speaker with Spanish citizenship, staying was relatively easy. My struggles with paperwork were limited to having to get a Spanish driver’s license and legalize my academic credentials—a far cry from living in fear of being deported or being unable to find decent work for lack of a permit. I did take it quite personally the few times I called to inquire about apartments for rent and was told they did not want foreigners; this took me back to my childhood in Miami when, on more than one occasion, we went to visit apartments as a family only to be told there were no children allowed in the building. Although Madrid has changed a lot since I first arrived and has become palpably more cosmopolitan, I suspect plenty of proprietors are still reluctant to rent to “foreigners,” whatever their parental status may be.

As for me, I’ve managed to build a life for myself here that is pretty much a continuation of my Sesame Street-like childhood. I chose to settle in a neighborhood where nearly 30% of the population is foreign-born (Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 2023). I also chose a profession which tends to attract people with multicultural backgrounds who are given to reflecting on issues of representation and identity. The professional organizations in which I am involved, such as the Spanish Audiovisual Translator’s Association (ATRAE), use gender-inclusive language in our official communications, replacing the (masculine) “o/os” and (feminine) “a/as” with the indeterminate “e/es” (2020). This is not entirely without controversy as many stalwarts (Spain’s royal language academy, the RAE, among them) insist that we should all be happy and satisfied to use the plural masculine form as inclusive whenever possible (Real Academia Española, 2020). However, as translators, we are keenly aware that translation is, as some have pointed out, “a cultural political practice” (Venuti, 1995: 19) and that the way we choose to use language creates reality as much as it reflects it. In that sense, the so-called “inclusive masculine” can often end up rendering other gender identities invisible, which explains why I once found it so liberating to identify as “Latina” versus “Hispanic” and why a non-binary or gender dissident person might find it liberating to self-identify as “LatinX.” Inclusivity matters.

Adding new potting mix

All this baggage I’ve just unloaded on the unsuspecting reader is meant to explain why I found working on this issue of Cultural Dynamics so deeply moving. Back to 1 November 2023 and the Day of the Dead celebration at my community garden. I placed photos of my Spanish and Colombian grandparents on the altar, offered them a handful of mixed nuts, and lit a candle. It was a rainy night, and the altar was set up inside a geodesic dome covered with a plastic tarp. The children were outside the dome under another tarp making decorations out of modeling clay. Every once in a while, a little group would come in and add their contribution to the altar. Most of them were children of Moroccan and Bangladeshi migrants. A neighbor from Senegal who had come down to walk his dog stood just outside the dome urging the children to mind the candles. A woman from the British West Indies whom I know from choir came in and placed photos of her mother and grandmother on the altar. As I contemplated the pictures of my own and my friends’ deceased loved ones, I kept thinking about Chenta’s suggestion that the dead are more likely to understand complex identities than the living. The anachronistic compilation of photos of complete strangers from all walks of life and different time periods seemed to exude a much stronger sense of belonging than many of us transplants and hybrids ever get to feel.

Standing at the altar, I cried with gratitude that I had not had to add my father’s photo. Just a couple of weeks before, during a visit to Cartagena, Colombia, his city of birth, my dad had suddenly grown pale and weak and had to be rushed to the ICU. He was hospitalized for 5 days and had to have three blood transfusions before the doctors managed to patch up the ulcer that had caused the bleeding. This time, it was just a scare. With any luck, my father will turn eighty next fall. But this sort of near miss takes on a whole other meaning when there is an entire ocean separating you from your aging parents, and I realize that the possibility of this sort of scenario recurring is all too real. That is no doubt what the man Chenta mentions meant when he said that migrating was like confronting death ahead of time.

At this point, I must resist the temptation of indulging in self-pity and check my privilege. I know that, if things had taken a turn for the worse, I would have made the effort to buy a last-minute airplane ticket so that I could be at my father’s bedside. Not many people can even contemplate that possibility. I mention this because we all have our blind spots, and translators are no exception. A case in point is that my own relative privilege initially blinded me to some of the nuances of Yeison F. García Lopez’s poem “Crecer sin tierra.” When I first read it—possibly in an unchecked fit of homesickness—I interpreted it as being about longing for his homeland, so I proposed titling it “Growing Up Without a Land.” When Yeison’s friend, the poet Abdiel Segarra Ríos—also featured in the anthology Matria Poética (“Poetic Mater,” 2023)—suggested that I might consider omitting the article and call it “Growing Up Without Land,” I realized that I had completely glossed over an essential part of the author’s experience: growing up not just without a homeland but without a home, with the whole family sleeping on the floor of a living room in a shared flat.

This poem isn’t just about being homesick; it’s about being homeless on top of being homesick, about being uprooted and having to be in constant motion so that it becomes impossible to regrow roots. By including the article “a,” I had made the title exclusively about homesickness; however, “Growing Up Without Land” limits the interpretation to the idea of not owning real estate, which does not quite convey Yeison’s experience either. That’s how it dawned on me that this “sin tierra” had more to do with the “landless.” This should have been obvious from the start because I was perfectly aware of the existence of the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimiento de los Trabajadores Rurales Sin Tierra) and, clearly, so is Yeison. I had simply been highjacked by my own emotional reaction to the poem and completely missed the reference. “Growing Up Landless” is truer to the author’s intent in every respect. It includes this direct appeal to class struggle and prioritizes the notion of not owning land while allowing for a certain degree of ambiguity that makes room for the sense of loss provoked by uprootedness. I am grateful to Abdiel for leading me to this insight.

Adding your plant

All of the authors I have translated for this special issue have reviewed the translated versions of their texts, provided feedback, and sometimes questioned my choices—often rightly so as in the example above with the comments from Yeison’s friend. Throughout this project, translation has been approached as a situated practice that requires an in-depth immersion in the context, history, and ideology of the original works and its authors (Risku, 2002: 524). This immersion was made possible through a collaborative effort. All the contributors, myself included, were involved in many different projects at once, which made the process arduous at times. Nevertheless, it was well worth the effort.

Far from simply transposing the authors’ words from one language to another, as a translator, I see my role as being steeped in the original author’s particular cosmology and doing my best to see the world through their eyes so that I can present their unique perspective to readers. This often entails going back to the sources cited in the original to gain a deeper understanding of the author’s analysis. It means doing everything possible to understand where the author is coming from, getting a grasp of the author’s “X origin” so to speak. In a less complex world, we could summarize this by saying that the translator’s job is to facilitate intercultural communication. But what does “intercultural communication” even mean in a world where each individual in essence has their own unique cultural identity? The more the translator understands context-specific references, codes, and conventions, the better equipped they will be to adapt these in a way that conveys the original author’s vision. This adaptation is essentially a creative act, though it is nevertheless “distinct and clearly different from the task of the poet” (Benjamin, 1996: 258).

With all the texts, and especially with Yeison’s poetry, I initially intended to stick as closely as possible to the original form, even down to the last comma. However, just as trying to stick too closely to word choice can actually steer you away from the original intent, trying to reproduce the exact form produces similar problems. Perhaps because we share the experience of having migrated as children, Yeison’s poetry really resonates with me, and I thought it was crucial to respect his intention at every turn. I have to confess that I literally wept every time I revised “Arrival” (“Llegada”). In it, Yeison uses a comma between just about every line, giving the impression that the poem is meant to be recited out loud with a certain sense of urgency. I initially sought to mimic this in the English version. However, with subsequent revisions, I realized that the translation will likely be read on paper more often than not, and because Yeison’s poetry is essentially social and more concerned with the message than with formal experimentation, it became apparent that sticking too closely to the punctuation might distract readers from the urgency of his message. In the words of Walter Benjamin, “fidelity in reproducing the form impedes the rendering of the sense” (1996: 260). In the end, I decided to follow standard English punctuation rules and prioritize fluidity in the reading experience. I hope this will encourage readers to put themselves in the young Yeison’s shoes and fully share his sense of loss and apprehension mixed with joy over being reunited with his mother.

Punctuation and decisions about whether or not to use italics or quotation marks are everyday decisions for translators, of course, and also for scholars. This can be challenging in a project like this one where much of the material combines texts in different languages, each with its own set of rules. These issues came up repeatedly while working on Elia Romera-Figueroa’s interview with Gad Yola. In her introduction, Elia cites a wealth of original works that exist only in Spanish and often make strategic use of their titles. Elia and I debated at length about whether certain neologisms that bend the obligate gender-defining forms of Spanish to express gender neutrality or indeterminacy could even be expressed in English, as is the case with Dagmary Olívar Graterol’s (2021) concept of Otrxs, or Gad Yola’s term Migranta. We felt it was imperative to provide translations (“Other Xs” and “Mx. Migrant”), but we were worried that the readers, many of whom we assume speak or can at least read both languages, would be annoyed at having to read everything twice.

For the hypothetical monolingual reader who may be lost at this point, I asked you to imagine what it’s like to live in a language where nearly every article, noun, and adjective are gendered, where it’s impossible to call someone wise, witty, or silly or explain that they are a translator, teacher, or cab driver without indicating a gender binary or resorting to so-called epicene nouns like “person” that often result in awkward constructions (“the person that drives the cab”) to avoid specifying the gender. In Spanish, expressing anything in gender-neutral terms goes way beyond choosing pronouns. Of course, as a translator in line with Octavio Paz’s reflection that “translating is very difficult… but not impossible” (1971: 12), I initially asserted rather insistingly that these gender-bending words can and should be translated, that it was merely a matter of playing with grammar to give non-Spanish speakers a sense of how these neologisms had been constructed. But Elia was equally convinced of the importance of respecting the context and genealogy of the terms, which for her are intrinsically tied to their utterance in Spanish. This made for a very enriching debate until, in the end, we decided to provide a translation the first time each of these terms is mentioned and leave subsequent appearances in Spanish, except for titles of works with an official English translation.

The sort of issues that arose while translating Dagmary, Nilo Palenzuela, and Silvia M. Serrano were fairly similar. It’s not always easy to reconcile different writing styles or “ways of meaning” and try to convey a similar tone in the target language when the codes at work are so vastly different (Benjamin, 1996: 257). Sentences in formal Spanish tend to be much longer than in English. There’s always the danger of falling into the trap of literality and ending up with much-maligned run-on sentences in the translation. I tried to avoid this as much as possible and did my best to do so without putting words in the authors’ mouths or misinterpreting their intent. Another challenge was that, in Spanish academic writing, the historical present is used as a matter of convention to describe past events, whereas in English we tend to reserve this tense to describe works of fiction. This was sometimes confusing when translating Nilo’s beautifully written and evocative essay on the evolution of the Canary Island’s art scene and its interplay with the rise of tourism, written almost entirely in the historical present. I decided to respect Nilo’s decision to draw upon this convention by converting the tense to the simple past conventionally used to refer to historical events in English. Nilo also included a couple of very local expressions that I had to ask him to clarify. Not wanting to over burden me, he initially told me to just omit them, but I felt it was important to give readers of the translated article a sense of the worldview of Canary Islanders. One example is the expression “mitología de cascarrón”—literally, “shell mythology”—which, upon clarification, turns out to mean something to the effect of “overblown myths espoused by Canary Islanders.”

Watering

Having the sort of intimate contact with other people’s writing and thought processes that translation requires changes you, and all of the pieces in this issue have marked me in one way or another, leaving me with the sense that, in the process, I have expanded beyond the limits that previously contained me. I think I’ve made it abundantly clear how deeply Chenta’s piece touched me. But Nilo’s piece made me think about whether it is possible to fully disengage identity from geography and whether those of us who have been uprooted can simply mutate into air plants. Discovering Gad Yola’s work and struggles to establish a nourishing root system has left me feeling a profound sense of respect for the art of drag, something that I had not previously explored. Similarly, with both Dagmary’s piece and Yeison’s interview I have gained a newfound appreciation for the importance of having access to spaces, like the urban garden in my neighborhood, that offer optimum conditions for growing roots as a community and establishing a healthy rhizosphere. And lastly, Silvia’s introduction to Yeison’s work has inspired a deep curiosity about exploring Afro-Colombian literature, lest I become an air plant after all. This is a part of my own roots with which I am completely unfamiliar, despite the fact that my paternal grandfather was born in the same city as the writer Candelario Obeso, whose work Silvia discusses. For the transplanted translator, this has been a period of vigorous growth, and I hope the experience of reading the resulting works will have a similar effect on readers.