I am thrilled to announce that my book
Immigration to Transtierro:
A
Bilingual, Bicultural and Bifurcated Life
is finally out!!
While
this book was first published in its original Spanish in 2015, and an Italian
version came out last year (2025), it is now out in its English version
(translated by Erin Goodman), and it could not have timelier, given the current
assault on the simple existence of immigrants in the United States of América.
Alessandro Oricchio, Sapienza University of Rome, wrote:
“Transtierro is presented as both a theoretical lens and an existential
testimony, capable of showing how the migrant is not a body in transit but a
subject in relation, an individual who inhabits the space of the in-between,
transforming it into a laboratory of cultural and linguistic creativity.”
The book
includes:
A foreword
by Alessandro Oricchio, Sapienza University of Rome; and an afterword by
Graziella Parati, Dartmouth College.
Chapter
1 introduces and
defines Transtierro, and denotes how it is different from exile.
It examines various influential factors in the process of adaptation when a
person first arrives in a country with a new culture and a new language;
factors such as: Level of education, Class or socio‑economic status, Age at time of emigration
(child, teen, adult), Reasons for emigrating, Attitude towards the new country,
Employment, Where they get to live, Plans for the future, & Distance and
connection to their country of origin.
Based on these factors, immigrants tend to settle in one of three
linguistic/identity option: Assimilation, Rejection, or Coexistence (bilingual
alternative/Transtierro).
Chapter
2 provides a historical
framework of immigration from Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and
the linguistic identities of representative literary figure from those
countries.
Chapter
3 contextualizes
the term diaspora as applicable tranterrados.
Chapter
4 offers a personal
account of the bilingual/bicultural alternative vis‑à‑vis identity and creativity.
Here,
you will see my approach to questions such as:
What
does it mean to speak "English as a Second Language"?
Do
you know why some immigrants, after years in the US, still do not speak
English?
How
does one live a bicultural life?
What
happens to a person when, one day (at any age) they arrive in a new country
(new language, culture, climate) to start anew?
