I’m pleased to mention that my October 8 post, “La Migra and the Lessons of History,” has been published in both English and Spanish at the Substack of Radio Jornalera NJ, where some of my migrant defense posts will, going forward, be cross-posted. Many thanks to Radio Jornalera’s editor Paulo Almiron for translating the piece into Spanish. I’m also grateful for Radio Jornalera’s posting an earlier piece of mine, on activism and its critics.

While you’re there, check out Paulo’s own posts, including this one on Delaney Hall, and this one on the challenges of bilingual communication in a monolingual country. I’ve linked to the English versions, but both are in Spanish as well.

Masaya Volcano, near Managua, Nicaragua (photo: Irfan Khawaja)

In reading my post in translation, I’m made uncomfortably aware of how idiosyncratically parochial my writing is. The translation, though flawless in itself, makes painfully clear to me that I write like an American, in American English, for college-educated, middle class Americans. I simply don’t write with a Spanish-speaking audience in mind, much less Spanish-speaking day laborers, so that even if flawlessly translated, my writing might well be unintelligible to them.

There’s no reason, for example, why a Nicaraguan or Guatemalan would understand my allusions to the “American Revolution” or the “American Civil War,” or why someone from Peru or Ecuador would catch my references to “Quantrill,” or “the Hessians.” The only way to communicate with people is to understand and allude to their history–a steep learning curve, but one with a better view from the top.

My hope is to do a bit of that at Radio Jornalera, but also (writing directly in Spanish) at La Talacha, the Spanish-English newspaper of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). “Talacha” is a Mexican Spanish word that literally refers to a hand-ax, but is also slang for “grunt work.” Leave it to a white collar worker to appropriate the semantic surplus of the working class, but talacha also seems the right word to use for the hard slog of learning to write in a second language. Stay tuned. Mantente atento.