Resumen de Conceptualizing language and gender in the global urban context: Jennine Capó Crucet on "How to (never) leave Hialeah"
Jennine Capó Crucet is a Miami-born writer of Cuban immigrant parents. Although her work has yet to gain much recognition in the academy, Capó Crucet is the first Latina to win the Iowa Short Fiction Award in 2009 for How to Leave Hialeah, among numerous other honors. The present article analyzes Capó Crucet’s short story “How to Leave Hialeah,” the ending story of her debut collection. The narrative voice and protagonist satirize the notion of (not) returning to the homeland as an authenticator of cultural identity in diasporic communities in Miami. However, once the main character leaves, she inevitably reproduces and lives in the same discourses of (not) coming back. Thus, the idea of returning home in exiled characters is both reproduced and destabilized in the protagonist, who finally understands hers is a fluid, multiple identity, beyond the effects of internal-external migration processes on language, culture, and gender. I explore how the short story contests monolithic notions of belonging—in terms of nation(ality) and masculinist national imaginaries, spatiality, and family bonds and origins—by asserting, both linguistically and socially, new discourses that negotiate the global and the local in novel, nondichotomous ways.
