Writing in Spanish Elevates Academia
An estimated fifty-three million Spanish speakers live in the United States. This is the largest Spanishspeaking population outside of Mexico and makes Spanish the second-most-spoken language in the United States. Reflecting this growing demographic, several creative writing programs that are taught in Spanish or taught bilingually have launched over the past few years. By bringing another language into an academic system that privileges English, programs such as those at the University of Houston, the University of Iowa, and the University of Texas in El Paso provide alternative and radical frameworks that challenge a historically white academy’s assumptions about writing—how it should be taught, who belongs in the U.S. graduate classroom, and why we write.
In 2017, the same year that Donald Trump was inaugurated—and the surge of racist rhetoric around the border wall and Latinx communities intensified—the University of Houston launched a PhD track in Spanish with a concentration in creative writing. The program is practical and theoretical in its approach to literary arts—graduate students take
workshops in poetry and prose, all conducted in Spanish, as well as literary seminars within the Hispanic Studies and English departments, guaranteeing an interdisciplinary experience. Set in downtown Houston near the Second Ward, a historically Mexican neighborhood, the program places a strong emphasis on writing and community. Through Writers in the Schools and Inprint, two local nonprofit arts organizations, many graduate students have taught bilingual, Spanish, and English writing workshops to children, adults, and older people to engage the community in the power of reading and writing. Students have also organized public readings in defense of the thousands of immigrant children who are currently in cages at detention centers at the border as well as to advance other social causes. Additionally students have access to the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage program, a comprehensive archival project operated by Arte Público Press and housed within the University of writers from around the globe working solely in Spanish are engaged in similar explorations. A number of graduates of the program, which was founded in 2012, have already found success in publishing globally and within the United States. Program director Luis Muñoz highlights the work of graduate Elisa Ferrer, who won the prestigious Premio Tusquets Editores de Novela for Temporada de avispas (Tusquets Editores S.A., 2019), which was her thesis, directed by the Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya.
Students from the program frequently take courses at other creative writing programs within the University of Iowa, including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Literary Translation program, and the Nonfiction MFA program. This convergence of cultures and language allows students from all programs to socialize and to interact through events such as the Subtituladxs reading series, in which participants recite work in Spanish accompanied
by projected translation “subtitles” to invite a larger audience. Leticia Fernández-Fontecha, a student in the program, says she started learning English in her late twenties. For her, each language offers a different space in which to think and express thoughts, differences that in turn shape her writing in the two languages. The program provides space to explore this: “English tends to be more precise, the narrative structures are more defined as well, whereas Spanish tends to longer (Arsenal Pulp Press, September 2020), editor Joshua Whitehead writes that it was important “to queer it towards the utopian.” He adds: “We have already survived the apocalypse—this, right here, right now is a dystopian present.” The result is a collection of stories from writers such as Darcie Little Badger, Adam Garnet Jones, and Mari Kurisato that “enumerate the beauty, care, deadliness, and majesty of Two-spirited folx from a variety of Indigenous nations.” sentences,” she says. “There is a different emphasis on words and the sound of words…. Both offer spaces of freedom and rules.”
An interest in the possibility that comes with work between and across languages helped inspire the founding of the bilingual MFA at the University of Texas in El Paso (UTEP), the first such program in the world. “It was a radical experiment,” says Daniel Chacón, chair of the MFA program in creative writing. “We gave students the freedom to work
(Big Shoulders Books, May 2020), established luminaries, teen writers, and other Chicago poets contribute stanzas to a collaborative response to gun violence in their city’s streets. Editor Chris Green chose to shape the poem as a pantoum—a traditional form in which lines recur—to mimic the action of an automatic weapon and the cyclical nature of violence. Poets continue to add to the book, which is available as a free e-book at bigshouldersbooks .com/americangun.
(Nightboat Books, October 2020), edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, engages and interrogates poetry as a means of trans liberation. Offerings from poets such as Ching-In Chen and Aaron El Sabrout “pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture, and the working day.”
in either tongue or to code-switch,” he says, referring to the process in which writers alternate between Spanish and English within a single piece. Set in a bilingual border town, unique and culturally rich, UTEP has been attracting students from Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Spain since it was established in 1992.
Admission to the program does not require fluency in either language; coursework includes Spanish, English, and bilingual elements. Recent graduates include Betina González and Yuri Herrera, who have won critical acclaim and prestigious awards such as the Premio Clarín de Novela. Óscar Godoy Barbosa, a professor of creative writing at Universidad Central (UC) in Colombia, began his studies at UTEP in 2009. “In Latin American countries there is a focus on literary analysis and comparative literature but not the creation of literature,” he says. Upon returning to Colombia, Godoy Barbosa applied the methodologies he observed in El Paso to the emerging undergraduate and graduate programs at UC, which has been seen with much interest by other universities in the continent.
Godoy Barbosa’s son, Sergio, came with him to Texas in 2009, when he was sixteen. He started studying at UTEP last fall and hopes to also contribute to Colombia’s literary culture. “I think there are important stories that need to be told about my country—about masculinity, about war, about poverty, and much, much more—and if I can be part of the conversation, I’m in.”
The work emerging from all three programs testifies to the talent of an existing community of Spanish-language writers that a predominantly white academy has been late to recognize. “There is a common belief, a misconception that communities of color have to be legitimized by the white academy,” says Chacón. “But Spanish has had communities of influence meeting to discuss ideas for thousands of years. Spanish does not need legitimacy.”