What Is "Minor" in Latino Literature

Rolando Perez
Hunter College

In memory of my father, Rolando R. Perez, MD (1927-2005), who spoke

two languages with one heart.

If it is true that, as the slogan ofthe 1960s declared, "the per-

sonal is the political," then this article is personal, ergo political.
The fact that it is written in English, the language of Latino litera-
ture, by a native speaker of Spanish makes it politically personal or
personally political, right from the outset. In 2000 I was invited to
submit material for editorial consideration regarding the forthcom-
ing Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. It was my induction
into the world of Latino literature. And oddly enough my work was
chosen for inclusion in the "canon maker" anthology because, as
one of the editors explained to me, it was unlike anything else that
bore the label "Latino literature." Certainly, the Spanish language
plays a very small direct part in my work, and my subjects have
little to do with the so-called "Latino experience."
The Odyssey (1990) is a book of "Deleuzean" fables; The Lin-
ing of Our Souls (1995/2002) is prose poetry based on selected
paintings of Edward Hopper; The Divine Duty of Servants (1999)
is a literary "collage" exploring issues of sexuality and power in
the artwork of Polish writer/artist, Bruno Schulz; The Electric
Comedy (2001) is a modem version of Dante's Divine Comedy.
And yet there is something particularly Cuban and generally
Latino in all of my work, for inscribed in the white, empty spaces,
between all the English words on the page is my history, as is the
undeniable history of all Latinos who write in English. Gail Levin,

MELUS, Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2005)

90 ROLANDO PEREZ

Hopper's biographer, who wrote the Foreword to the second

edition of The Lining of Our Souls, a bit mystified herself by my
interest in such a prototypical "American" painter as Edward
Hopper, wrote almost by way of explanation, to herself and to the
reader: "Today Hopper boasts admirers in the United States and
elsewhere, who agree that his work is very American. Yet Hopper
remains quite obscure in Cuba, where Perez was bom and raised"
(viii). What Levin clearly understood, however, was that my
interest in Hopper was one of translation—that is to say, of trans-
lating images into words, and that the English of a non-native
speaker who entered "the United States at age eleven" (viii) was
bound to transform Hopper's images, and the reader's reception of
them. She likened my general interpretation of Hopper to that of
the Japanese American painter, Ushio Shinohara; our cultural
outsideness being the tacit link to this "other" Hopper. But she
made no mention of The Lining of Our Souls in connection with
the work of other American' poets like Mark Strand, John Updike,
Joyce Carol Oates, John Hollander, et al., who have been inspired
by Hopper's evocative images.
What is clear is that regardless of my choice to write in English
about an American painter, I remain an outsider, using a language
which is simultaneously mine and not mine, as did Kafka who
wrote in German, and not in his native Czech. And this brings us to
the question at hand, for I believe that Deleuze and Guattari's idea
that a minority can create new linguistic forms "within a major
language" (Kafka 16) as happens with Spanglish, for instance, can
help us to arrive at a better understanding of the way "Latino
literature" as a "minor literature" functions within the mainstream
culture. Apart from vanity, I have begun by citing my own writing
because it is particularly problematic with respect to the label in a
way that the work of Junot Diaz, Cristina Garcia, and Oscar
Hijuelos is not, and perhaps if we take the most difficult, resistant
case, we can come to understand what is "minor" in Latino litera-
ture, even through the prism of marginally Latino work, such as
mine.
I begin with a discussion of bilingualism, something that
Deleuze and Guattari mention only in passing, but that is central to
the "minor" element of Latino literature. What does it mean to be
bilingual? How does the bilingual assemblage function? I also
WHAT IS "MINOR" IN LATINO LITERATURE 91

examine the relation between language and power. How does a

minority writer writing in a major European language (English or
Spanish) subvert the imperialism of the major language? And
lastly, how is Latino literature as a minor literature, revolutionary?

Bilingualism and the Minor

Every Latino writer carries within her/him a linguistic micro-

Hamlet, who uncomfortably rears his head at the moment of
writing.^ The question posed by this Latino Hamlet is that of
language itself: to write in English or to write in Spanish, which
for many Latino writers literally means ser o no ser . . . Latino (the
existential half of the verb "to be" in Spanish).^ And whether 'tis
nobler to write in one or the other, or even in both, can only
provoke anxiety in a writer torn between his/her mother tongue or
the "adopted" language. For ultimately, the question of language
choice has a lot more to do with self-concept and one's affective
relations to a language than with linguistic competence.
The problem stems from a major misunderstanding concerning
what it means to be bilingual. And strangely enough, it begins with
surnames. For just as no one would expect a writer by the name of
say, Stephen King, to write in Spanish, it would seem equally
anomalous if a writer by the name of Oscar Hijuelos or Cristina
Garcia did not, or, worse yet, could not, write in Spanish. Latinos
are supposed to be bicultural and bilingual. And their Spanish
names are supposed to be sufficient proof of it (though no one
expects an Irish American with the name O'Reilly to speak
Gaelic). Entrenched in this view is the false belief that the so-
called bilingual individual can move from one language to the
other with the greatest of ease: the competence of the
speaker/writer being nearly equivalent in the two languages."* But
as Perez Firmat points out: "The true bilingual is not someone who
possesses 'native competence' in two languages, but someone who
is equally attached to, or torn between, competing tongues"
(Tongue Ties 4). It is the feeling of being attached to and torn
between two languages that lies at the heart of the Latino writer's
angst. The micro-Hamlet he carries inside him puts his identity in
question. And the choice or lack thereof to write in English often
feels like the worst kind of betrayal.^ Perez Firmat aptly begins
92 ROLANDO PEREZ

Tongue Ties with a quote from the Russian writer,'lvan Turgenev,

who mercilessly declared that anyone who wrote in a language
other than his own mother tongue was a pig and a thief. This
collapsing of lengua into patria or father land, is at the root of a
territorializing vision of language. Imposing and dictatorial,
language becomes an extension of linguistic dominance: demand-
ing respect and loyalty from its sons and daughters.
But, of course, the relations between languages are not always
so rational, so patriarchal. The frinction of language for Deleuze
and Guattari, and obviously, for Perez Firmat, is primarily libidi-
nal. Critical of Chomskyean linguistics, Deleuze and Guattari
challenge everything in Chomsky that supports the idea of a rigid
model of "competence."^ And Perez Firmat writes: "Tongue ties
have little to do with linguistic competence. Affective rather than
cognitive in nature, tongue ties do not presuppose mastery of a
language. Just as it is possible never to have met one's parents, it is
possible to be ignorant of one's mother tongue. The maternal
denotes attachment, not skill; affinity, not fluency; familialness,
not familiarity" (Tongue Ties 4). As Latina writer, Judith Ortiz
Cofer states in an interview with Edna Acosta-Belen:

I went to the escuela publica (public school) for about six months;
that is my total time in a school in Hormigueros. So how can I write
well in Spanish when Spanish is my second language? When I say it
is my second language, it means that English is the language of my
schooling. However, my language was Spanish; I spoke only in
Spanish with my mother; I dream in Spanish. I know because my
husband tells me I say things in Spanish when I'm asleep. I think this
may sound romantic, but I think of Spanish as my subconscious
language, my cultural language, my birth language. But I cannot write
in Spanish because much of the grammar is alien to me. (Acosta-
Belen/Ortiz Cofer 90, my italics).

For Ortiz Cofer, English is the language of her formal education,

and thus the language in which she writes, while Spanish is the
affective linguistic substratum that makes English resonate in her
poetry. On this point, Perez Firmat reports: "U.S. Latino writers
habitually pledge allegiance to a mother tongue that, for the most
part, they no longer possess. Swearing loyalty to Spanish in
English, they do not bear false witness, for even when the words
WHAT IS "MINOR" IN LATINO LITERATURE 93

have become unintelligible, even when the attempts at Spanish are

riddled with solecisms, the emotional bonds remain unbroken"
(Tongue Ties 4).
But the Latino writer is no purist. He or she understands that
language is primarily affective, and, as a result, often switches
back and forth from English to Spanish in a way that makes
English vibrate'' in a certain kind of way. This becomes evident in
a poem like Ortiz Cofer's Las Malas Lenguas where the Spanish
words (or "Palabras," as she entitles this section)—campesino,
maldita seas, asi dicen las malas lenguas—of traditional patriar-
chal Puerto Rican culture are what lend the poem its force:

It happened to a plump fair daughter

of an honest campesino
who was caught on her knees pledging her soul
and her body to the devil.
(Terms of Survival 17)

That the story of the poem happened to the daughter of a cam-

pesino—a man who works the land (el campo)—already frames
the cultural context. For the campesino of Ortiz Cofer's Puerto
Rico (like the contadini of Giovanni Verga's southem Italy) is not
the American peasant. In fact, "farmer" and not peasant is the word
usually employed in the United States to refer to someone who
works the land, the word "farmer" connoting someone of a higher
socio-economic class than a peasant. Moreover, had Ortiz Cofer
chosen "farmer" or "peasant" over campesino then her poem
would not have been about her homeland of Puerto Rico.
But Ortiz Cofer's juxtaposition of English and Spanish is what
gives the poem both its cultural universality and specificity at the
same time. For in the blank space between "honest" and campesino
lies the universal myth of the "honest" and religious peasant, who
judges his^ daughter's sexuality as evil: "pledging her soul and her
body to the devil":

Nothing could save her from the acid

of her neighbors' tongues,
or her father's curse, maldita seas. (17)
94 ROLANDO PEREZ

Caught in a sexual act the girl is damned by her neighbors' rumors,

and worse, her father's curse. This harsh parental damnation—
reminiscent of the. Father's curse in Kafka's short story. The
Judgment—damns the girl to banishment and eventual madness.
The maldita seas ["damn you"], which follows "her father's
curse," goes well beyond providing a linguistic equivalent to the
English word "curse" or the phrase "be damned" because in the
word maldita there is the frirther moral implication of evil. Thus, it
is precisely because maldita seas finishes the sentence that the
English which precedes it vibrates with intensity. If Ortiz Cofer
can't write in Spanish, the English she writes is changed by the
Spanish she introduces into her writing.
For language is not solely communicational; more importantly,
it is intensive and affective. Just as the Father's judgment in the
Kafka story leads the son to kill himself by jumping off a bridge,
the Father's^ judgment in the Ortiz Cofer poem drives the daughter
to madness:

She grew old quickly, and went mad.

They say her demons lover's cloven prints
can still be seen on that pasture by moonlight,
asi dicen las malas lenguas. (17)

However, the difference between the fate of Ortiz Cofer's peasant

girl and Kafka's son is that in the former the curse is both personal
and social. Damned by her father and by her community, she is
said—as it was said of the women of Salem, Massachusetts—to
have had relations with the devil, whose hooves are seen on the
grass by the moonlight. And her guilt is incorporated by the
community into its folklore.'" Ortiz Cofer, however, redeems her
character when she turns the mai [evil or bad] of maldita seas into
the communal evil of "asi dicen la malas lenguas" ["so say the evil
tongues"]. Lenguas, or the Spanish and English tongues (the organ
with which we produce sounds and the lengua or lenguaje we
speak) is invoked in the English of Latino literature to transform
what Juan Bruce-Novoa has called "interlingual"" expression
itself "I use Spanish words and phrases almost as an incantation to
lead me back to the images I need" (91), says Ortiz Cofer. And the
combination of Spanish and English words she uses to convey the
WHAT IS "MINOR" IN LATINO LITERATURE 95

images she "needs" are those not only of a Puerto Rican writer, but
of a Latina who subverts the major English and Spanish'^ language
of social, economic, and gender marginalization by turning it into a
minor language of hybridization or mestizaje.

What is Revolutionary in Latino (Minor) Literature

Spanish is no less a major language than is English. And yet to

say "Spanish" as opposed to the way we used to speak not too long
ago—when we reverently spoke of Castilian with so much respect
for the lisped zeta—is a step in the deterritorialization of language.
It amounts to treating the once revered and despotic Castilian as a
linguistic variation ofthe koine (or common language) we know as
Spanish.'^ For what every Latino/a writer knows is that just as
his/her confrontation with English represents a lucha, a political
struggle with the language of her/his present economic marginali-
zation, the confrontation with Spanish is no less political—that
being a struggle against the language of empire. To that extent,
then, the Spanish of Latino/a writers functions by deterritorializing
(read decolonizing) the imperial Castilian, making Latino literature
as a "minor literature," a revolutionary literature (with Galician,
Catalan, Basque, and Andalusian literature)''* of the Spanish
language. For as Deleuze and Guattari remind us: "[t]here is
nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor. To hate all
languages of masters" (Kafka 26). A minor literature, they say, is
not necessarily one that comes from a minor language, but instead
one "which a minority'^ constructs within a major language" (16).
Therefore, they conclude in A Thousand Plateaus, it is not a
question of there being two kinds of languages, "but two possible
treatments of the same language" (102). In Latino/a writers and
poets this applies as much to Spanish as to English, and in both
cases it represents a political struggle. Consequently many Latino/a
writers see the linguistic struggle as inseparable from other social
struggles. Lesbian Chicano writer, Cherrie Moraga, for example,
places the Chicano literature of today within the history of the
ethnic liberation movement. Moraga writes: "The generation of
Chicano literature being read today sprang forth from a grassroots
social and political movement of the sixties and seventies . . . . It
responded to a stated mandate: art is political" (57).
96 ROLANDO PEREZ

And language, whether it be the language of poets or the lan-

guage ofthe street, is clearly, also political.'^ The poetry of Neuyo-
rican poets like Algarin or Hernandez Cruz, says Carmelo Ester-
rich "locates itself between two languages, producing almost a
bellicose interaction between Spanish and English" (50). But
where Ortiz Cofer interprets her own use of Spanish as a cultural
invocation, Frances R. Aparicio views these conjuros as a political
act of protest against the uprooting of historical, personal, and
ethnic identity. Referring to the use of Spanish by Neuyorican
poets, Aparicio writes: "These words are not only unique in their
cultural denotations, but more importantly, they function as
'conjuros' as ways of bringing back an original, primordial real-
ity—Puerto Ricanness—from which these poets have been up-
rooted in a political and cultural way" (149). At one level, the
linguistic mestizaje of Latino literature functions as a weapon in
the struggle against marginalization, while at another as a confron-
tation with the major language(s): actively creating new forms of
American expression, moving forward, never looking back as their
predecessors once did—to something like the barroco as the origin
of their cultural and literary identity.
And this is because Latino writers, in contradistinction to writ-
ers like Borges, Carpentier, and Lezama Lima, locate the source of
their literature in the spoken word, and not in the pages of colonial
European classics, far removed from their own experience. Call it
"invocation," call it conjuro, it is the mouth that is moving to
produce these words, for even in English "voca" is there in all its
(ontological) presence. What destroys the girl of Ortiz Cofer's
poem is not what people have written about her, but rather what
people say about her: "asi dicen la malas lenguas." Her damnation
is invoked orally: "maldita seas"\ Curse words vibrate in Latino
literature as in no other because they jump out of the page through
the mouth. They challenge the graphism of ontological absence by
taking on fiesh.
"Fuck fuck chinga'o man, fuck" repeats Moraga in "La Fuerza
Femenina" in describing her first lesbian encounter (83). And later
she writes/sings:

dyke
jota
WHAT IS "MINOR" IN LATINO LITERATURE 97

mai
flor
I kissed her where she had never spoken
where she had never sang. (84)

Here Moraga ignores the grammaticality of "correct" punctuation

as she privileges the fieshiness of orality that gives flight to a line
of escape, and to agrammatical fiows of desire. For as Lecercle
does well to point out, agrammaticality is as much an integral part
of language" (89) as is grammar. At the heart of Deleuze and
Guattari's idea of expression (differentiated from content) is a
rejection of the Saussurean separation of langue from parole,
which is only reconciled when parole, lapalabra, is integrated into
langue (e.g., Castilian); in other words, at the point at which
syntactic rules govern the way an individual speaks and writes.
The synchronic factor of linguistics presupposes that langue is
homogenous and static, while in all actuality the reverse is the
case. This is what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they speak of
being multilingual in one's own (major) language—the only
constant of language being variation.'^ If "Black English" is a
variation of "WASP English," then Spanish is a variation of
Castilian and WASP English, and without it both English and
Spanish would soon follow the same fate as Latin. As Deleuze and
Guattari argue:

It is futile to criticize the worldwide imperialism of a language by

denouncing the corruptions it introduces into other languages (for
example, the purists' criticisms of English influences in French, the
petit-bourgeois or academic denunciations of "Franglais"). For if a
language such as British English or American English is major on a
world scale, it is necessarily worked upon by all the minorities of the
world, using very diverse procedures of variation. Take the way
Gaelic and Irish English set English in variation. Or the way Black
English and any number of "ghetto languages" set American English
in variation. (Thousand Plateaus 102-103)

For instance, the stories of Junot Diaz, declares Julio Ortega, are
written "in an English that one reads as though it were Spanish"
(14). But furthermore, "there is no language that does not have
intralinguistic, endogenous, internal minorities" (Deleuze and
98 ROLANDO PEREZ

Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 102-103). Speech and not writing is

what moves a language forward. By the time Celine and Joyce
wrote their works, French and English had already gone through
great transformations.
It is within a context of intralinguistic variation, then, that we
can best appreciate literary innovations. According to psycholo-
gists, even in a multi-lingual individual there is variation in lan-
guage performance over time. As Amati-Mehler et al argue: "In
fact, the linguistic endowment of an individual is not a solid and
stable system but, rather, an ever-changing constellation in which
the supremacy of one language over the other, the internal hierar-
chy, and the absolute and relative degree of mastery, vary continu-
ously in time and space" (101). Such could not be the case if
language acquisition were truly to follow the synchronic model
proposed by the adherents of universal generative grammar. To
illustrate the case, Perez Firmat recounts how a few years ago he
made the conscious decision to return to the language of his birth,
which for him meant writing only in Spanish. In the process of
writing Cincuenta lecciones de exilio y desexilio in 2000, Perez
Firmat came to wonder how he could have spent so many years in
"another dwelling" (162). In fact, he says, he swore he would
never write another English sentence. But after Cincuenta lec-
ciones and a translation of his own book. Life on the Hyphen, he
began to miss the English language: "I began to miss words like
'miss.' I began to miss words like 'word,' so different from the
Spanish palabra, which in English is simply palaver. Just as it
hadn't been enough to speak Spanish with my mother and my
students, it wasn't enough to speak English with my wife and my
children. If I needed Spanish, I needed English no less" (Tongue
Ties 162).
And Perez Firmat no more and no less than any other Latino
writer has pushed the envelope of Spanish-English expression. In a
poem from Bilingual Blues entitled "Turning the Times Tables" in
which he cites the American philosopher of language, Charles
Sanders Peirce, Perez Firmat writes in Spanish:

^Y si soy mas de uno, Peirce?

^Y si soy dos,
o tres
WHAT IS "MINOR" IN LATINO LITERATURE 99

o—como diria David-

un millon?
^En que momento, en que participio del mundo
se convierte tu suma en mi resta, Peirce? (26)

In what can best be described in Bakhtinian terms, as a dialogical

exchange, the response to the existential question posed in Spanish
comes in English:

I am what is left
after the subtraction of my languages.
I am the division that resists
the multiplication of my languages.
I am the number that won't square,
the figure you can't figure,
the remainder of my languages. (26)

Characterizing Latino literature is the multiple, the plis of Deleuze

and our pliegos that endlessly unfold.
The irreducibility of Bakhtin's dialogical principle lies in the
fact that when we speak, we not only communicate linguistic
meaning, but beliefs, judgments, social and economic distinctions
that transcend the normative stasis of abstract grammar.'^ Kafka is
a writer of becoming-minor: beetles, dogs, birds, etc, and that is
why Deleuze and Guattari have placed him at the center of their
study. Where the Being of metaphysics is reductive, placing every
individual into the straight jacket of an exclusionary and disjunc-
tive logic (the "maldicion"'^ of you as either A or B: man or
woman, gay or straight. Latino or White,^° etc.), the logic of
becoming turns points into lines of fiight ("you" can become a . . .
b . . . c . . . d . . . etc: woman . . . animal . . . molecular, and as
Nietzsche declared "all the names in history" [347]). In the folds of
the Latino/a writer's "yo," infinite worlds reside which resist
division; in fact, they constitute the revolutionary vilo/fdo, hy-
phen/edge of Latino literature; which is to say, its political strug-
gles against the despotic Castilian and WASP signifier in all its
social, economic, and psychic formations.
100 ROLANDO PEREZ

Conclusion: The Personal, the Literary, and the Political

The year is 1961, January 6, Three Kings Day in Cuba. In the

photograph I am still in my pajamas and I am removing an Indian
headgear from one of the many boxes on the floor. And off to the
side on a box, yet to be opened, we see the words: MOTOR
SPACE GUN, silent testament to de donde son los juguetes (where
the toys are from). Happy with the toys before him, the four-year-
old boy never noticed the English words on the box, for clearly a
space gun is a just space gun for a child, as a cigar is just a cigar
for the cigar smoker. But I have ofren looked at this photograph
because of everything that it says about the place of English in
Cuba, and, of course, the political-economic relations between the
United States and the island. Sixteen years later I would write a
thesis on Severo Sarduy, a writer who left Cuba the same year the
photograph was taken, and went on to write all of his books from
Paris.'^' And then the year 1990 saw the publication of two of my
books. On An(archy) and Schizoanalysis (an interpretation of
Deleuze and Guattari's work), and The Odyssey (a book of non-
linear prose, inspired by Cortazar's Rayuela, composed of
(Deleuzean) plateaus, instead of chapters).
I wrote these and subsequent books out of my own personal and
intellectual interests. I never set out to write a "Latino" book, or
worried about whether I was crossing some prohibited cultural
border by not writing in Spanish. But I have come to realize over
the years that even the choice to write in a language other than
Spanish, raises—at least for some—important questions concern-
ing cultural/literary identity. Roberto Ignacio Diaz, for one,
challenges this very collapse of language into cultural status in his
2002 book, Unhomely Rooms. What got Diaz thinking about the
cultural status of Latino writers who wrote in languages other than
Spanish, he says, was the discovery of La Havane, a three-volume
work on Cuba written in French by Comtesse de Merlin: "Bom in
Havana at the end of the eighteenth century and a longtime resi-
dent of Paris, Merlin had written a lengthy travel narrative in
French about Cuba"(13). The question then becomes, could Merlin
be considered a Spanish American writer in the literature of the
nation? Diaz's conclusion, with which I agree, is that she can and
that she should be included in the corpus of Cuban literature (14).
WHAT IS "MINOR" IN LATINO LITERATURE 101

For Merlin's case, perplexing as it may seem, is not unique. As

Diaz reminds us: "In virtually every period of Spanish America's
history, one can find writers biographically linked with the conti-
nent (a term that I employ not only as a geographical, but as a
cultural concept) who compose works in languages other than
Spanish, or in a mixture of languages" (14).
The prejudice that drives the exclusion of writers like Merlin
from the literature of a particular country is based on the old idea
that one nation equals one language. However, closer examination
reveals that quite the opposite is the case everywhere; that is to
say, that heteroglossia is, in fact, the unacknowledged, suppressed
norm. The English words on the toy box of my childhood are as
much a part of the political and linguistic history of Cuba, as are
the words of Jose Marti, who wrote a number of his essays in
English, most of which were published outside of Cuba.^^ And yet
even when Marti wrote on non-Cuban subjects, he transformed
them, he made them his own. As Oscar Montero has recently
pointed out, Marti's essay on Ralph Waldo Emerson is an example
not so much of linguistic but of cultural translation: "In his elegiac
essay Marti summarizes, translates, glosses and appropriates
Emerson, creating in the end something entirely original" (105).
But that is only proper, for when the Cuban revolutionary read
Emerson, he read it as a Cuban, the son of a Spaniard, who could
write in either Spanish, English, or French. And yet, who would
question Marti's place in the Cuban literary canon?
Not even in terms of theoretical linguistics is monolingualism a
lived reality. As Michael Holquist notes: "It has widely been
assumed that bilingualism is a term that describes a relation
between two languages (Spanish/English, let us say). It is on this
crude basis that most schemes for curricular reform in schools,
psychological theories of child development, or restrictions in the
workplace get started" (33). But, he continues: "[e]verybody, even
the farmer in Kansas who has never left his land and thinks he
knows only English, is already bilingual insofar as he is between
the level of phonemes and allophones, the parametric level of
syntax in Universal Grammar and the syntax individual speakers
actually use" (33). And thus Deleuze and Guattari rightly encour-
age us to "make use of the polylingualism" inherent in a major
language, as an arm of struggle against "its oppressive quality"
102 ROLANDO PEREZ

(Kafka 27). This struggle, which for the Latino/a author can be
traced back to the sixteenth century mestizo writer, Inca Garcilaso
de la Vega (1539-1616),^'' is as much internal as it is external.
What all of the authors mentioned here, and many whose
names, unfortunately for reasons of space, do not appear in these
pages, have in common is a political, but, more significantly, a
personal struggle with their intercuitural/interlingual identity, as
fiuid and unrestrictive as that may be. As Perez Firmat has put it,
there is no bilingualism without pain. "For every merry bilingualist
. .. there is a somber bilingual who bites his tongues" (Tongue Ties
6), a feeling shared by Maghrebi writers and countless others torn
between multiple cultures and languages.
It is rather easy to speak of being a stranger in one's own lan-
guage when that language happens to be a major language, but it's
quite different when language becomes a horizon against which
one has to struggle.'^'' It is because of their awareness of this
struggle that I have used Deleuze and Guattari here, and why some
critics have applied their theory to the revolutionary becoming of
"minority" literatures.^^ But, of course, everything that is in
Deleuze and Guattari can be found already in the corpus of La-
tino/a literature. Ultimately it will be minor literature that will push
the limits of the English language, transform it, and enrich it, and
not the John Updikes and Jonathan Franzens of American letters.
The paranoiac's fear of this new literature is best summarized in a
comment made by a colleague when I told her that my work was
going to be included in the Norton Anthology. She asked, "will that
be the regular Norton Anthology or just the Hispanic one?" Obvi-
ously, Latino literature is already making the English language
vibrate in a different way, and therein lies its revolutionary, active
force.

Notes

1. Not included among these "American" poets is Pablo Medina whose poem,
"Gas" (37-38), is based on a Hopper painting ofthe same title.
2. "[B]efore it becomes a political, social, or even linguistic issue, bilingualism
is a private affair, intimate theater" (Perez Firmat, Tongue Ties 163, my italics).
3. Estar, the other half of the Spanish verb, "to be," refers to a conditional state
of being or location: as when one says "I am well" ("Estoy bien") or "I am at
home" ("Estoy en casa"). It is relational and not ontological or existential.
WHAT IS "MINOR" IN LATINO LITERATURE 103

4. "We may consider the enormous differences that exist, beyond specifically
linguistic factors, between a person who becomes bilingual as the result of
migration, and a person who is brought up and continues to live in a country
such as Canada where bilingualism is a common and shared fact. Moreover, we
must not forget that the 'ideal' bilingual or polylingual speaker, who is equally
and consistently fluent in two or more languages, is a conventional abstraction"
(Amati-Mehler et al. 100-01).
5. Bensmaia writes of a similar sense of betrayal with respect to many Franco-
phone Maghrebi writers who found themselves writing "in the language of ex-
colonial power" (90). Like most Latino writers, the Maghrebi writers have had
to face the cultural dilemma of "How to live in several languages and write only
in one" (90).
6. "Chomsky's grammaticality, the categorical S symbol that dominates every
sentence, is more fundamentally a marker of power than a syntactic marker: you
will construct grammatically correct sentences, you will divide each statement
into a noun phrase and a verb phrase (first dichotomy. . .)" (Deleuze and
Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 7).
7. The Deleuzean concept of vibration—applied here to linguistics—takes
language out of the abstraction of grammaticality and places it in the realm of
speech. The Spanish "dulzura" is sweeter than "sweetness" because ofthe way it
vibrates in the back of our throats as we utter it. It is this that Perez Firmat has
aptly called "logo eroticism."
8. The daughter's status as the father's possession is marked by the phrase
"daughter of an honest campesino" (17). In minor literature "the family triangle
connects to other triangles^commercial, economic, bureaucratic, juridical—
that detennine its values" (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 17).
9. Just as there is a internal theater of language, for the Latina writer there is also
an Oedipal theater where the omnipresent Father, owner of her sexuality, lurks.
"[T]he place ofthe Father in the Oedipal triangle is the place ofthe provider, on
which woman depends. . . . Thus the Father becomes a figure of authority, the
Law itself, and the eternal Referent. . . . The Father is Capital, the Father is
Money, the Father is the System, the Father is the Word, the Father is God, the
Father is the Creator, the Father is the Author of Woman, and last but not least,
the Father is the World. . . . Man declares: there exists only One Subject, and
only One Self; woman is object, and woman is Other; moreover there exists only
One flow of desire (or libido), and it, of course, is masculine. The fascism of
phallocentrism demands that there only be One source of libidinal energies. Oh,
yes, women's flows of desire "must" be territorialized, demarcated, and
grounded, in such a way that they are only possible by coupling to the body of
the One, the paranoiac, the fascist" (Perez, On An(archy) 107-08).
10. Again, this brings to mind Verga's short story, "La lupa" or "The She-Wolf'
in which a peasant woman's sexuality is likened to that of a folkloric voracious
and dangerous she-wolf
11. "Bilingualism implies moving from one language code to another; 'interlin-
gualism' implies the constant tension ofthe two at once" (Bruce-Novoa 226).
104 ROLANDO PEREZ

12. "What I really want to say is that the idyllic imaginary place which my
mother always called la isia, la casa [the island, the home], existed only in her
mind and still does. For her, there is no better place in the world. So I feel that
anyone who tried to break out of those boundaries, especially a woman, would
have to pay a price" (Acosta-Belen/Ortiz Cofer 88). As Nina M. Scott has
pointed out, "gender identity is another place where they [Latina writers] are
caught between two cultures. Whereas many of these women writers identify
with their ethnic roots through their mothers or grandmothers . . . they are also
aware that it was often these same mothers who had denied them their language
and their culture" (64).
13. An excellent treatment of Spanish as the koine ofthe Iberian peninsula, and
Castilian as of one its languages, can be found in Lopez Garcia.
14. For an excellent introduction to the linguistic politics ofthe minor literatures
of Spain, see Bernardez.
15. "Majority, the pretext for democracy, is for Deleuze not a quantity, a mass of
people, but a standard: the acronym WASP describes the American version of
majority. Against such a majorify there is a multiplicity not so much of minori-
ties (with fixed boundaries and identities) as of becoming-minor: thus there is a
becoming-woman of men (but no becoming man of women, masculinity being a
constituent part of the standard). Minority, therefore, is linked to becoming, a
combination of active forces, of forces for change, whereas majority, is a nexus
of static, reactive forces. There is also a certain creativity in minority, due to its
capacity to struggle for change" (Lecercle 194).
16. Just as the Sex Pistols ofthe 1970s took on King's English to turn it into a
chant, and even into a rant against the economic policies of the Thatcher
government, the Hip-Hop art movement in its practice collapses the old
hierarchical distinction between the vernacular and the literate: for the same
political reasons.
17. "Language doesn't exist in the abstract, only our speech acts exist; for each
one of us speaks the same language differently, thus creating a multiplicity of
languages as speakers, and leaving our own individual, affective trace in all our
linguistic formulations" (Soler-Espiauba 2, my translation).
18. "Language—like the living concrete environment in which the conscious-
ness of the verbal artist lives—is never unitary. It is unitary only as an abstract
grammatical system of normative forms, taken in isolation from the concrete,
ideological conceptualizations that fill it, and in isolation from the uninterrupted
process of historical becoming that is a characteristic of all living language.
Actual social and historical becoming create within an abstractly unitary
national language a multitude of concrete worlds" (Bakhtin 288).
19. "My brother's sex was white, mine brown. I still believe that to my core. But
regardless of how the dice were tossed and what series of accidents put our two
parents—one white and one colored—together, we their offspring, have to chose
who we are in racist America. . . . In the choice resides the curse, the
'maldicion'" (Moraga 125-26). And the 'maldicion' of having an identity forced
upon one, is as the word denotes something said (dicho) with bad (mat)
WHAT IS "MINOR" IN LATINO LITERATURE .105

intentions. Once again, the question of power goes back to the voice: how the
major speaks for and of the minor—a fact never forgotten by the Latino/a
(minor) writer,
20, White is not a race but a signifier of power—a racial piane of organization,
as it were (Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line 80), "Historically 'racial dissimi-
larities' have not only been artificially used, they are themselves artificial. In
colonial Hispanic America, it was possible for a person, regardless of phenotype
(physical appearance), to become 'white' by purchasing a royal certificate of
'whiteness,' With less formality, but equal success, one may move from one
'racial category' to another in today's Brazil, where it is said 'money whitens.'
On the other hand, in the United States the organizing principle of society is that
no such 'whitening' be recognized—whether 'whitening' by genetic variation or
by simple wealth" (Allen 27).
21, Severo Sarduy has been unjustly accused of not being a truly "Cuban" writer
because of the French structuralist "influence" that informs his theoretical
ideas—this despite the fact that Cuban culture is the central theme of much of
his work, and that he wrote almost exclusively in Spanish.
22, A writer like Teresa Dovalpage (a,k,a, Teresa de la Caridad Doval) perhaps
marks the continuation of a Cuban tradition of multi- and interlingual writers
that spans nearly two centuries: from Marti to Calvert Casey and Cabrera-
Infante. A Cuban exile in the United States since 1996, Dovalpage writes both in
Spanish (Posesas de la Habana, 2004) and in English (A Giri Like Che
Guevara, 2004), A former teacher of English in Cuba, who crosses over from
one language to another, free of the internal "micro Hamlet" that tortures many
Latino/a writers, Dovalpage represents an entirely new attitude towards culture
and language in Latino/a literature. As of this writing Dovalpage is working on
another English language novel on the theme of santeria.
23, Bom in Cuzco, Peru, the son of a Spanish colonialist and the granddaughter
of Inca chieftain Tupac Yupanki, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega wrote of his
experiences as a mestizo who felt as much admiration for his, Peruvian, Inca
origins as he did for the European culture of his father. His Commentaries
provides us with insights into the psychological and linguistic "bicul-
tural/bilingual blues" still felt today by many Latino/a writers in the United
States. In some ways, one might consider him the founder of Latino literature,
24, The difficulties facing writers from "small nations" was first addressed by
Kafka in a December 25, 1911 diary entry (Diaries 148-52), It is at the base of
Deleuze and Guattari's concept of minor literature. The topic has been explored
in recent years by Kundera, The concept of "small nations," he says "is not
quantitative, it describes a situation; a destiny: small nations haven't the
comfortable sense of being there always, past and ftiture, they have all, at some
point passed through the antechamber of death; always faced with the arrogant
ignorance of the large nations, they see their existence perpetually threatened or
called into question: for their very existence is a question" (192), Hence, the
writers of "small nations" have a different responsibility towards their culture
and language than do those of nations like France, Spain, or the US, "When
106 ROLANDO PEREZ

Nietzsche noisily savaged the German character, when Stendhal announced that
he preferred Italy to his homeland, no Gennan or Frenchman took offense; if a
Greek or Czech dared to say the same thing, his family would curse him as a
detestable traitor" (193). Moreover, he says, writers from small nations are
usually relegated to the small context of a national literature, and he cites
Gombrowicz as a writer who has been marginalized by being "Polonized" (193-
94). For more on this, see my essay "Milan Kundera."
25. Two recent dissertations apply the theory of minor literature to American
ethnic and gay literature: Bland and Goshert. The former applies the theory to
African American literature and culture, and the latter to Asian American,
African America, and Queer literature.

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