Speaking Like An Immigrant

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Mariana Romo-Carmona. Speaking Like An Immigrant

Preface to the Second Edition

Publication Acknowledgments

Introduction

Speaking Like An Immigrant

Dream of Something Lost

Cuento de Jalohuín

Fear

La virgen en el desierto

Love Story

Gabriela

2280

La bruja pirata de Chiloé

Kissing Susana

The Foreign Girl

The Meal

New England Reconsidered

Orphans

Idylls of a Girl

Idilio

The Web

Contraband

Tracks

Passage

This is What We Say

Отрывок из книги

In 1999 this small book was printed, boxed, shipped here and there in a hopscotch journey of presentations and readings from New York City to Toronto, shelved in the last remaining independent bookstores of the twentieth century, and eventually spent many years stacked in a slowly dwindling edifice of boxes as it sold or was given away. Very slowly.

Collectively, I think in those days we were also witnessing the aftermath of the first Iraq war, perhaps the most disgraceful and horrific hostile action by the US until then, and the entire world seemed to wake up to what an empire can do, given enough fire power and five hundred years. I understood that what I often found myself writing about had to do with the significance of the quincentenary age that changed an entire continent, but I could not express, not adequately, the pain and the fragmentation of our history as Latin/Americans. I only knew, as a writer of small moments, of small truths, that these are every bit as relevant today as they were the day before and the day before that. What I could write, was about a personal process of shifting from one language to another, the creation of an immigrant culture, identity found in words, a small metaphor for existentialist angst of the political kind.

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Puerto Rico and Central Pennsylvania, 1998

“They wanted to go for a ride,” answered the girl.

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