Bilingual and bicultural Chicano identity in the hybrid prose of Gloria Anzaldúa and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas

The aim of this paper is to discuss the linguistic and cultural identity of the Chicano community on the basis of two pieces of hybrid prose, i.e. Borderlands/ La Frontera. The New Mestiza written by Gloria Anzaldúa and Puppet by Margarita Cota-Cárdenas. In order to provide some basic features of the above mentioned community, some of its historical, political, social and cultural issues are addressed. The analysis of both Chicano/a texts reveals, in the first place, the heterogeneous nature of the community. Secondly, they illustrate myriads of linguistic procedures evoking the Mexican-American “border space” condition and Spanish–English code–switching, including dialects, some subaltern languages: Spanglish, Pachuco and Chicano, as well as the Nahuatl language. The texts also expose a natural translational condition of the Chicano individuals in Anzaldúa’s essays and poems along with a linguistic attitude of the Chicano fictional characters in Cota-Cárdenas’ novella