Latina/o Canadian Literature: The Issues of Migratory Mourning and Bilingualism in Guillermo Verdecchia’s Fronteras Americanas: American Borders (1993) and Carmen Rodríguez’s and a body to remember with (1997)

Canada comprises a wide variety of people of multifarious ethnic and cultural heritages with immigrants constituting 23% of the entire population (Statistics Canada 2022). Among those groups, Latina/o Canadians are a small but vibrant community whose artistic output is often overlooked. This paper provides a brief overview of the history and characteristics of Latina/o presence and literary output in Canada as well as discusses two Latina/o Canadian texts, namely and a body to remember with (1997), a short story collection by Chilean-Canadian author, Carmen Rodríguez, and Fronteras Americanas: American Borders (1993) by Argentinian-Canadian playwright, Guillermo Verdecchia. The analysis is focused on the discussion of the characters’ migratory mourning, as defined by Joseba Achotegui (2019), which is involved in the formation of immigrants’ hybrid identities as they continually reevaluate their relationship with the host and home country. Additionally, this paper touches upon the textual representations of military trauma that has impacted generations of Latina/o immigrants fleeing dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s (Hazelton 2007). Finally, this paper investigates the ways in which the Spanish language is employed in the texts. This paper argues that bilingualism underscores Rodríguez’s and Verdecchia’s hybridity and decolonial approach as they undermine the notion of America as a predominantly English-speaking continent dominated by the imperial US.