Language, culture and identity at a crossroads. Chicana literature, reflections and borders

Resumen

In her collection of seminal essays titled Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa acknowledges that “for some of us, language is a homeland”. The idea of language as a territory to inhabit, and as a space that belongs to those who speak it remains a constant throughout this paper. In order to identify and reflect on some of these issues, we present a didactic sequence carried out in the context of classes of English as a foreign language in a secondary school in the Province of Buenos Aires. Our starting point is the figure and work of Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954) and our aim is to disentangle some of the connections between language, culture and identity. The tasks which make up the sequence seek not only to foster communicative and discursive competence in the English language, but also to promote processes of reflection and creative and critical thinking. We have chosen to explore the relations between language, culture and identity through literature because, as Chicote (2013) points out, literary texts are not just samples of language in use; they show how people relate to one another and how communities process experience, remember the past and project the future. As the tasks unfold, we dare ask some crucial questions: What English/esdo we teach and learn? Who does it/do they belong to? What role do the languages we know and/or speak play in the  construction of our identities? And most importantly, in what ways can (or should?) the English class contribute to raising awareness in relation to these issues?