La Chabacaneria Guaracheada A Vindication of the Puerto Rican Identity through a Linguistic and Stylistic Study of Luis Rafael Sanchez's La Guaracha del Macho Camacho

Andrea Gomez

Date of Award

2003

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Labrador-Rodriguez, Sonia

Keywords

Puerto Rican Identity, Anti-Language, Hyper-Grammer, Narrative Experimentation, Translation/Hybrid Terms, Linguistic Manipulation, Ungrammaticality, Linguistic Anthropology, Fiction

Area of Concentration

International and Area Studies

Abstract

This study presents a critical and detailed analysis of Luis Rafael Sanchez's La guaracha del Macho Camacho. A literary and socio-political context of Puerto Rico forms the backdrop to this work. Initially included are the necessary elements for a first reading of the novel, such as its structure, point of view, various linguistic markers and narrative techniques. Language proves to be the center of the novel and is primarily considered at a linguistic level and is the basis for the content and its analysis. The grammatically incorrect language of La guaracha del Macho Camacho is made up of the Puerto Rican spoken dialect (the urban slang of San Juan), intertextual references to cultural and literary texts and English words and phrases. The approach to this study was based in the aspiration that the linguistic structure of the novel could impart semantic value beyond that basic linguistic level. Within this work M.A.K. Halliday's term anti-language was borrowed and modified in order to explain how language functions in the novel. The exaggerated, vulgar and comic nature of La guaracha is seen parallel to the constant subversion of granunatical linguistic and literary rules. The latent social commentary regarding representations of Puerto Rican identity is unearthed through the analysis of minute linguistic features. This thesis reveals an empowerment of the Puerto Rican identity through the novel's specific and distorted representation of the Island's urban language. Finally, this study explores the possibility of the successful translation the social commentary within the original text in Gregory Rabassa's Macho Camacho's Beat. Even though the English version adequately translates the poetic and linguistic aspects of La guaracha, it does not refer to an actual speech code. No matter how successful the Beat was in terms of rhythm, overall semantic meanings and the manipulation of linguistic forms, it cannot achieve an accurate linguistic image of any one community, much less a social commentary of Puerto Rico's class dialectic. This thesis explores the capacity of language to be a tool in representing and making social change within literature, and attempts to highlight bicultural and hybrid speech codes.

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