Ilan Stavans, professor of Spanish at Amherst College and a widely published critic, editor, and author, will speak at MHC’s Eliana Ortega House Sunday, April 22, at 8 pm.

Ilan Stavans, professor of Spanish at Amherst College and a widely published critic, editor, and author, will speak at MHC's Eliana Ortega House Sunday, April 22, at 8 pm. The town-meeting-style discussion will focus on the cultural dilemmas of Latinos and trace the difficulty of defining patterns of assimilation. Stavans will also examine the challenge faced by small liberal arts colleges to understand the Latino community.

At forty, Stavans has emerged as a preeminent figure in the world of Latino arts and letters. He has published volumes of essays and criticism, edited anthologies of essays and fiction by others, and authored a novel and a collection of short stories. He is also the founder of Hopscotch: a Cultural Review, an English-language magazine on Hispanic culture and politics. He is perhaps best known for the controversial book The Hispanic Condition, a new expanded edition of which is scheduled to appear this fall. Among his most recent publications are The Inveterate Dreamer: Essays and Conversations on Jewish Culture, and, due out in August, his autobiography entitled On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language. The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, for which Stavans is the general editor, will be published next year. Reviews and articles by Stavans have appeared in such venues as the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, the Washington Post, the Nation, and in many of the nation's literary magazines and journals.

Stavans, born Ilan Stavchansky Slomianski, grew up in a Jewish community in Mexico, the son of a popular soap-opera actor, and was educated in a Yiddish day school. It was not until his college years that he fully realized the unique nature of his upbringing and the complex mix of his heritages. Referring to himself as a "Diaspora Jew" in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stavans noted that he traveled to Spain, North Africa, and Israel to write, before completing his undergraduate degree in psychology at Universidad Autonoma Metroplitana. Soon after college he wrote a novel in Spanish, as well as numerous articles, and began publishing under his father's stage name "Stavans." He left Mexico in 1985 and completed a Ph.D. in Latin American letters at Columbia University in 1990, at which time he had already acquired a tenure-track position at Baruch College of the City University of New York. Three years later he was hired by Amherst College, where he quickly gained tenure.

The prolific professor has written on culture and identity from the perspective of one who is "living in the hyphen" between Latin and American experience. One of his recent projects represents the merging of those two worlds. He is now compiling a dictionary of Spanglish, a patois born out of the hybridization of Spanish and English. Stavans says Spanglish is a legitimate “third way” that Latinos in America have chosen to express themselves. Spanglish, which is not new, has absorbed English terms from popular culture as well as technology, reflecting shifts in the Latino culture. As noted in a recent article in the New York Times, ten percent of the six thousand terms collected by Stavans are "cyber-Spanglish," which underscores the influence of the Internet on the Hispanic world. The complexities of this rapidly changing Hispanic world has inspired much of Stavans's writing and will be part of the focus of his talk at MHC.