"Dad, yo soy una chica americana": Migration, Identity and Language in Eduardo González Viaña's El Corrido de Dante

The focus of this article is the representation of language and identity in Hispanic immigrant literature. It provides a framework for the analysis of linguistic and cultural constructions of migrant identities in literary texts, on the basis of the exploration of the novel El Corrido de Dante, by Eduardo González Viaña. The most significant finding is that González Viaña applies linguistic homogenization in order to stress a common Hispanic identity without effacing cultural, national and ethnic differences, as these are stylistically marked by means of strategic (re)creations of different varieties of Spanish and instances of code-switching between Spanish and English (Spanglish) that require no bilingual competence. The article also sheds light on three crucial language and identity conflicts in the novel: intergenerational conflicts between undocumented migrants and their U.S.-born children; conflicts between Chicano/as and “new” Latino/as; and asymmetric power relations between Hispanics and Anglo-Americans.