Tongue Ties

Perez Firmat looks at the effect of writing in Spanish and English - what he calls "tongue ties" - in a group of bilingual Hispanic writers (Spanish, Spanish American and US Latino). He includes George Santayana (American philosopher), Spanish poets (Pedro Salinas, Luis Cernuda), Spanish-American fiction writers (Calvert Casey, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Maria Luisa Bombal) and US Latino writers (Sandra Cisneros, Richard Rodriguez, Judith Ortiz Cofer). Perez Firmat writes: "the group is heterogeneous, but its members have one thing in common: their careers are shaped, in whole or in part, by a linguistic family romance that involves negotiating between the competing claims and attractions of Spanish and English".