0 Mixing Spanish and English to Excellent Effect in Junot Diaz’s Work, “Fiesta, 1980”.

Coming of age narratives are as old as time – they usually relate the story of how a young person reaches a status that allows them some kind of worth or value in the community that they developed in, and essentially act as tales of acceptance, of communing with one’s culture. In modern times, however, things are not so simple, and many people around the world are coming to terms with coming of age in multicultural spaces that have vastly different expectations of the transition from childhood to adulthood. “Fiesta, 1980” is a work that grapples with this problem, and it does so in ingenious ways – through the use of mixed language. This short fiction tells the story of a boy, the son of immigrants, who grows up in New York City. He attempts to deal both with his family and with the expectations of the white society that surrounds him, not ever fully being able to make sense of either of them. One of his greatest struggles is the use of language – his family grew up speaking Spanish, but the expectations of him in American culture requires him to speak predominately English. The author uses this conflict to great power by the intermingling of Spanish and English words in the main character’s dialogue, revealing him for what he is: a mix of both places. Fiesta, 1980 written by Junot Diaz is a short story of a dysfunctional family told from the point of view of a teenage boy Yunior. Diaz ingeniously combines both English and Spanish languages into this narrative to capture the true voice of his main character, ultimately producing an exceptionally relatable tale. 

One of the best examples of Diaz’s mixing of languages to show the state that his main character is in rests in the main character’s name: Junior (Diaz 73). This is the name the character goes by throughout the entire text. This name has meaning in several ways. Firstly, it is an English word – showing the importance of the adopted country in the development of Junior’s identity – his very existence is tied to English, rather than to a similar word in Spanish. This shows a necessity or a desire to adopt the dominant cultural traits of the area that his family moved to, in that they identified their son using terminology that would only exist in that context. So fundamentally, the name Junior represents the central conflict of the work, and the central element of the character of the main character: the difference between his origins and his destiny, and huge impact the dominant society has on his life and his development. 

Beyond simply representing the Americanness that Junior must simultaneously embrace and separate himself from, the name Junior also functions as a reminder of his divided state. Junior is not, in fact, a name, it is two names: to people who speak are primarily English speakers he is Junior, and to his family and others that speak primarily Spanish he is Yunior (76). The author’s choice to use this name consistently, beyond simply representing it as an artifact of accent (which he pays little attention to otherwise) is genius. It tells the reader that Junior/Yunior does not simply have one identity that is represented or interpreted differently depending on his context, but that he actually has two identities – the Junior that must deal with the massive white, American word around him, and the Yunior that must relate to his family and his original culture. This is an entirely unique representation of the plight that he faces – it really drives home to the reader that he must contend with a split identity, not just two things pulling on him, and that the quest of his coming of age story is really about trying to unite these two halves of himself into some kind of united whole. 

Growing up in a split culture, or even two different cultures, is far from unique. Countless people all around the world do so consistently. Their situation, however, is not very well understood. Diaz’s effort to bridge this gap of understanding in “Fiesta, 1980” is quite clever. He uses the mixing of Spanish and English to point to the split identity that anyone growing up in such a situation must develop. Beyond that, however, he uses different spellings of the main character’s name, Junior/Yunior, to emphasize this divide.

Works Cited
Díaz, Junot. “Fiesta, 1980” in Drown. New York: Riverhead, 1996. Print.