Castellanos, Rosario (Vol. 39) | Cynthia Duncan (essay date 1991)
Cynthia Duncan (essay date 1991)
SOURCE: “Language as a Barrier to Communication Between the Classes in Rosario Castellanos's ‘La tregua’ and José Revueltas's ‘El lenguaje de nadie,’” in Hispania, Vol. 74, No. 4, December, 1991, pp. 868-75.
[In the following essay, Duncan examines language used as an instrument of oppression by middle- and upper-class Spanish-speaking Mexicans against native Mexicans in Castellanos's “La tregua” and José Revueltas's “El lenguaje de nadie.”]
Language is normally perceived to be a vehicle that facilitates communication rather than impedes it. Yet, when cultural, social, and economic barriers exist between two or more interlocutors, attempts at communication often fail, and language becomes a useless, empty vessel which neither contains nor carries real meaning. In Mexico, for example, where an unbridgeable gulf separates the working class from the bourgeoisie, an Indian peasant may...
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