Lengua, cultura e identidad mestizas en el teatro de Carlos Morton y en sus traducciones

This article analyzes a selection of plays written by Chicano playwright Carlos Morton (Chicago, 1947), namely El jardín (1974a and 1974b) and Johnny Tenorio(1983) and their translations into Spanish (Morton 1999a), as well as Frontera sin fi n(2010) and its translation into English (unpublished). I argue that these works are repre-sentative of the stages of Morton’s existential and artistic evolution toward the rediscovery of his own mestizo roots. This negotiation of a multi-cultural identity clearly emerges in the themes of Morton’s oeuvre, as well as in his style and linguistic choices, which make the most of English–Spanish bilingual resources (e.g., borrowings, code-switching, etc.). Due to their strong culture-bound nature, hybrid texts are notoriously a translation challenge. The second research question I tackle, drawing on Venuti’s domestication–foregnization paradigm (1995) and on the post-colonial perspective applied to Translation Studies (Tymoczko 1999), is how cultural difference expressed through hardly translatable lan-guage choices in Morton’s source texts is re-created in existing translations into Spanish and English