Junot Diaz and His Use of Language

This is an assignment I just completed for my Latin American Literature class and felt this was a good topic to put up here.  Enjoy!!!

When reading Junot Diaz's, “The Pura Principle”, I was noticing that Diaz went back and forth writing in English and then using Spanish phrases to capture the authenticity of the story. I say authenticity because most households that speak both English and Spanish speak with a hybrid of both languages. Though this was never practiced in my immediate family, my father's cousins' families did use a hybrid of both English and Spanish when speaking because they grew up learning both Spanish and English. It was more dominant when expressing emotions. Only my father and his siblings were able to keep up with their cousins in the interchanging of languages.

Like his story, in the interview, Diaz switches back from Spanish to English on occasion. This is because this is authentic for him as he is familiar with both languages due to “[speaking] only his mother tongue when he moved to the U.S., but in his adolescence he went years without reading in Spanish, reconnecting with the language as an adult.” (Cresci) Diaz's reaction to this was that “returning to a language is like returning to an old relationship—it often requires more courage than striking up a new one.” (Cresci) The reader can sense this while reading the narrator's story using the intermingling hybrid of using both Spanish and English; this use of both languages in the story gathers the household's emotions and environments the narrator captures. It is present in the interactions between Rafa and the narrator as they insult each other with rude exchanges; it is clearly dominant in the expressions of Mami's love over Rafa and her hatred toward his new girlfriend, Pura.

Another idea that Diaz has captured in this story is the prejudice of cultures, not only of ethnicities of other countries—such as the word “Polack” to describe Polish decendants—but also the prejudices of other Latino communities. We see this in Mami and the narrator when they express their hatred toward Pura, who is not legal immigrant of the United States. Diaz is expressing the differences of both communities, even thought it is subtle by allowing Mami to call Pura a “puta”, or slut in Spanish. Diaz says in his interview, “We don’t consider each other’s Spanishes as anything more that idiosyncratic local peculiarities that are wonderful to make jokes about, but we don’t see them as sources of knowledge and experiences. We see them somehow as signifying cultural essences or being part of a moral code or calculus, some sort of moral metric. Because the way you speak represents “Argentineness,” which is a moral position, when we should be thinking of each other’s Spanishes as enormously rich bodies of knowledge, bodies of histories, bodies of experience, and inside of them, embedded in them, there’s an enormous amount of political apparatus. It’s the heartbreak of those of us who work in languages to understand this and to try to find a way to fight it.” (Cressi) If we think about this, languages can evolve over time and intermingle with other language. The English language itself used a combination of words from other languages, such as Arabic and German and some Latin. Even the Spanish language has evolved from the beginnings of European Spanish dialects to evolving in different dialects of the South American and Central American countries. My own father's dialect and his families Spanish was more European than Latin American as his family has always lived in Albuquerque since the 1700's (maybe earlier). Over time, it has evolved into what some would consider Spanglish or what my father called “garbage Spanish”. These dialects were completely different from what I learned in high school Spanish—Mexican Spanish-- so communication can be crossed and seem foreign. Yet Diaz makes a point that we should see our languages not as barriers of each other's dialects but as experiences to bring knowledge. Language will continue to evolve and develop and instead of using dialect as a barrier of differences, it should be used as extension of sharing to others.

Works Cited

Cresci, Karen. “Junot Díaz: 'We exist in a constant state of translation. We just don’t like it.'” The Buenos Aires Review. Buenos Aires Review. 4 May 2013. Web. 30 August 2014.