Creolization of language is an ongoing process that is occurring up and down the Americas and accelerating in certain areas. Here are some of the most recent avatars of the generalized mongrelization: Spanglish, Portuñol or Portunhol, Jopará-- and heavily hispanicized Quechua, spoken everywhere in the Andes, with thousands of borrowed words peppering it (and a dynamic relationship with the Spanish-speaking linguistic context). In the past I've also written about a new emerging language, a written language more than a spoken one, called Engañol, which I postulated as a more radical version of Spanglish.
Some of the other representatives of this expanding creole genre, some long established: Haitian Kreyol, Jamaican Patois, Papiamento, Belizean Kriol, Saramaccan.
I'm sure linguists and university types argue about whether Spanglish is a dialect, a more minor linguistic aberration, or a creole-in-formation, or whatever. But in my mind, and thinking of friends' speech patterns as an example, it represents the same trend as those that led to the more established creoles: the melting down of standardization in established languages, cross-pollination, the softening in general of hardened patterns by a combinatory, inventive juxtaposition and/or fusion.
In any case, the creolization trend is seeping into the culture, not only in song lyrics: dancehall reggae, reggaetón, Belizean Punta Rock, but also in literature. In Brazil, poet Douglas Diegues, raised on the Paraguayan-Brazilian border, writes in what he calls "Portunhol Selvagem."
People are beginning to publish novels in the United States with titles like Loosing my Espanish (I don't like that title at all). Junot Diaz has been praised for his use of Spanglish, although having read Drown twice and begun The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I think what he's notable for is a wise, sparing and responsible use of Spanglish and a more liberal but also responsible use of Spanish-- in other words, the correct measures of each so as to avoid cheesiness and the sometimes gratuitous act of trotting out Spanish and/or Spanglish simply to impress upon the reader that, yes, this is an exotic piece of work.
One day at a book fair I heard a very well known Cuban American author refer to the "rich pulse of Spanish" or something like that, which "beat like a heart" beneath her English prose, and I almost wanted to vomit. People talk as if Spanish were somehow a less sober and exact language than English, more impassioned or something. In my opinion those are silly ideas to get caught up in.
Unless one is experimenting responsibly as Diaz does, or writing simply as one knows best, the same way one speaks, then one should leave the "exotic" sauce on ice in the fridge.
Until someone writes a book that deploys a hybrid of Spanish and English with the same fluidity and seamlessness that Anthony Burgess for example displayed with his invented language or dialect in A Clockwork Orange, then the correct measure for an English-Spanish hyrbid creole literature I think will always be restraint.
