![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
Lalo Alcaraz’s work centres on the life of Latinos in the United States. The son of Mexican immigrants to the United States, he is well aware of the conflicts between Latinos and Anglos, the dominant English-speaking group, particularly in the domain of politics. Alcaraz is a Latino spokesperson, presenting the point of view of this segment of the American population and denouncing the incongruities and absurdities that it faces. His main target is politicians, even if others can also feel his barbs. Alcaraz is relentless in his criticism and has exposed the political motives for decades. His critiques are timeless, evident in the recent resurgence of his older cartoons and strips, highlighting the continued marginalisation suffered by Latinos. This paper looks at how Alcaraz uses bilingual and bicultural punning to present his case. Alcaraz is a master at double entendre and has an uncanny ability to encapsulate the problems while straddling two languages.
Notes
1. Proposition 187 was on the ballot for the California gubernatorial election in 1994. The proposition meant to impede access to all social services for illegal immigrants. Heath care and education were the main targets.
2. Leave it to Beaver was a situation comedy, popular in the 1950s, that portrayed an ideal American middle-class family. Because of its over-the-top idealism, it has become the butt of many jokes and synonym for absurdly or unrealistically perfect life.
3. Whitlock and Poletti (Citation2008) discuss autobiographical texts presented in multiple modes and media and define autographics as life narratives ‘fabricated in and through drawing and design’ (v).
4. I refer to La Curaracha as ‘he’, precisely because he is Alcaraz’s double. The gender of the word in Spanish is a grammatical gender which does not imply a feminine nature. The use of neutral in English leads also to confusion in the discussion.
5. According to Ilan Stavans, ‘Chicanos in the 1950’s and 1960’s called themselves “La Raza” and ”the people of Aztlán”. Aztlán is the Chicano homeland-home of La Raza’ (Citation2000, 73). Pocho is the term minted in Mexico for Mexicans who have emigrated to the United States, and is derogatory – it literally means unwell or sick in a familiar way of speaking. The word has been reclaimed by the immigrants as a proud moniker, in the same fashion that Chicano is no longer a demeaning term. The traits of pochismo can be seen in language as ‘lexical borrowings’ that immigrants embed in their ‘working-class-inflected form of American English’ (Ramírez Citation2006, 2). It can also be seen as a movement bent on creating its own rules, linguistic or otherwise. Catherine Sue Ramírez states that a pocho ‘is an Americanized Mexican or a Mexicanized American’, and that the term ‘originally signifies cultural and linguistic degradation’ (4). Alcaraz’s Chicano website is called Pocho.com.
6. Oscar Zeta Acosta, lawyer and activist, helped define the Chicano identity though its political and social struggles in this and another novel, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (Pérez-Torres Citation1998, 156).
7. Until 1994, the digraph ch was considered one letter by the Real Academia Española de la Lengua, which legislates grammatical matters. MEChA was created in 1969, hence the spelling of the organisation.
8. I chose myself to use the term ‘Latino’ throughout my writing and am equally guilty. However, the term is commonly accepted and recognised in the United States. It is indeed a simplification and a short-cut, but its practicality cannot be denied.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Agnes Ragone
Agnes Ragone is Professor of Spanish and French at Shippensburg University. Her research focuses on discourse analysis and languages in contact. She has published in Geolinguistics, Lexis, Journal of Anthropological Linguistics, and Names. Her essays have appeared in Language and Identity (2004, Cummings and Hathaway), and Barbarians at the Gate: Language Attitudes and the Standards Debate (2010, Cambridge Scholars Press). Her essay on the use of ‘ain’t’ in Latino comics has appeared in Ain’thology (2015, Cambridge Scholars Press).