SOURCE: “Bilingualism and Dialogism: Another Reading of Lorna Dee Cervantes's Poetry,” Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, edited by Alfred Artega, Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 215-23.

In the following essay, Savin examines bilingualism in the work of Cervantes and the ways in which her use of dialogue involves the reader on many levels.

The “consistent fineness” of Lorna Dee Cervantes's poetry has aroused a wide response among literary critics.¹ Thus Marta Sánchez considers the opposition between the militant Chicana and the lyrical poet to be the major paradigm underlying the poems' inner tension, a view which fails to account for the diverse intersecting voices in Cervantes's poetry. And Cordelia Candelaria's otherwise insightful analysis of the Emplumada poems similarly falls short of providing a cohesive analysis of the manifold threads that are interwoven into the author's poetic persona.

This essay will attempt to provide a...