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Recovering the Culture
Nicolás Kanellos
First off, let’s establish that
Latinos in the United States
communicate in two languages.
This has been the case since
the 19th-century expansion of
the United States into lands
formerly owned by Spanishspeaking
peoples, and because
the U.S. achieved economic
and often political domination
of lands to the South, which
resulted in directing their
migrant streams northward. As
the major publisher of Latino
literature, Arte Público Press of the University of Houston not
only reflects this bilingual/bicultural reality, but also helps it
to flourish by publishing works in the original language of
composition, be that Spanish or English or a blending of both.
On the latter, while literary texts have mixed both languages
since the late 19th century, it has only been since the 1960s that
Latino writers have adapted what linguists call code-switching
(and popularly but inappropriately called “Spanglish”), that
is, the free-wheeling switching from one language to another
in common everyday discourse in Latino communities. Avantgarde
authors explore this bilingualism as not only a means of
remaining faithful and accessible to working-class communities
but also as a means of esthetic experimentation, creating a
meta-language or new meaning in the interstices and between
the junctures of Spanish-English discourse—no translation
permitted here!
One of Arte Público’s main audiences include high school
and university classes that are often made up of bilingual
readers. However, we are not beyond reaching broader
English-language markets with bestsellers. For general
readers as well as those in school, we publish separate works
in the original English or original Spanish. Because there is
a dearth of bookstores in Hispanic communities—very few
distributors and wholesalers and even fewer reviewers of
books published in Spanish—we are forced to publish fewer
Spanish-language books for our adult market, despite some 40
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National Endowment for the Arts