Killer Crónicas: Bilingual Memories (Writing in Latinidad: Autobiographical Voices of U.S. Latinos/as)

I love that Killer Crónicas that it takes the traditions of a crónica, a travel journal about encountering distant lands and creates it into the notion of distance between reader and writer…yes, the author travels and writers about them in this book, but communication and knowing is idiosyncratic. She speaks in Spanglish, SoCal English slang, and uses Argentine Spanish. I’m okay with Spanglish and trip now and then, but reading the book would only challenge those who can’t roll with what they don’t immediately understand. The effect is to questions who is on the inside of the audience? It’s a crónica of the author and her life which we are also travelling and the familiarity that builds with every vignette, every place and time of travel in the ultimate crónica of exploring another’s mind.

Killer Crónicas asks the following questions, among others: * What is the nature of the exquisitely ambiguous pleasure we experience in passing as members of the local community? * What are the costs of being identified as an insider, or outsider, by members of the communities in which we travel? * How might the experience of being at once inside and outside be specific to pan-Latin and Jewish post-holocaust cultural identity, without regard to location? * How to develop a language limited enough to connote specific geopolitical contexts, yet broad enough to denote the simultaneity in memory of related circumstances separated by distance and time? Killer Crónicas draws from multiple genres, such as the literature of travel in Spanish (cartas de exploración, of discovery) and in English (here, the Anglo-American category of life-writing, which includes biography, autobiography, and letters, is helpful.) Particulary original is the sustained and studied attention to the traveler's status as a consumer. Underlying the internationalism and bilingualism of Chávez-Silverman's accomplishment is a creativity comparable to Latino performance artists such as Coco Fusco (author of English is Broken Here) Guillermo Gómez-Peña, or code-switching poets such as Tino Villanueva. I personally find Gloria Anzaldua's work almost unreadable (there's no rhyme, reason, or inventiveness) while I think that Cherrie Moraga is good for her work's characters and dynamic. In Killer Crónicas what's original is how the writer focuses attention on the relation between what we say and how we say it in one or both languages, showing how the mind moves at the moment of the "switch." This work demonstrates a mode of thought familiar to those of us who work in multiple cultural locations, reproducing the habit of thinking in multiple languages. This challenges the hegemonic attitudes about what constitutes linguistic propriety in either Spanish or English by pointing up the complexities of both languages. Also the mixture of languages legitimates a practice that is very widespread: the INVENTIVE use of multiple languages, registers. Read this very contemporary, brilliant book for the puns, for the writer's inspired, faux, alternative, and refused translations. Killer Crónicas is steeped in multiple literary traditions: Argentine, CalifAtzlan, On the Road-Trippers, but most of that incomparable Spanish-language genre that is so definitive in the New World: the Crónica. Let Susana Chavez-Silverman be your guide and you will travel far, far indeed.

Clever, sassy, intelligent, poetic... continual code-switching is a wonderful vehicle to convey the sensations and experiences of a multi-cultural life. Her poetry invokes the intimacy I often feel when back in a long-lost land. Her quick wit and carefully-chosen details chronical well the feelings of isolation and observer-looking-in that seem to dog me wherever I land. This is well worth the read.

A fantastic, funny, smart collection of memoirs. You have probably never read anything like it.