9 - Argentine Writers in the US: Writing South, Living North

Summary

I begin this chapter by admitting a certain amount of skepticism, for it is not at all clear to me that the handful of Argentine writers whom I will be discussing here – Argentine writers who have spent significant portions of their careers living and writing, primarily in Spanish, in the United States – belong in a volume on US Latino literature. If US Latino literary identity includes a movement towards writing mostly in English from a Latin American heritage, then the Argentine writers discussed here will seem out of place. But issues of identity and language in US Latino literature are considerably more complex than this, while the category of the US Latino itself can still be said to be in a process of formation. In addition, I strongly believe that there is much to be gained by expanding the dialogue between the fields of US Latino and Latin American literary and critical studies, and that such a dialogue could offer important contributions to both fields. The presence of a number of South American writers in the US presents us with an unexpected ‘contact zone’, to borrow Mary Louise Pratt's term, which raises important issues related to the relationships between language, nation, tradition, exile, and identity.

Two seemingly disparate but actually quite related questions arise immediately. First, how does writing from abroad, from the US in this case, affect the place of a Latin American writer in Latin America? And second, what place does a Latin American writer living and writing in the US occupy in the US? Both questions involve a North–South flow, of writers and texts alike. Both questions involve traveling and translation, they both involve a displacement, a recontextualization, spatial and temporal, physical and literary, imaginary and real. As we will see, when texts and writers travel, their movement affects the cartographies and traditions of both source and target languages and cultures.