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"Pollito Chicken" (1981) by Ana Lydia Vega, included in the co-authored collection of short stories Vírgenes y mártires, reflects the inconsistencies and complex binary identity of the Puerto Rican colonial subject.1 Due to its polemic subject matter, the story has been widely criticized and not always cast in a positive light; critics Aurea María Sotomayor and Margarita Fernández Olmos deem the story "superficial" and "uncontrolled" while Nicholasa Mohr points to Vega's neglect of her homeland community, emphasizing the importance of defending Puerto Rico against the "Island's intellectuals" (90).2The defining feature of the story is the incessant code switching between Spanish and English. Although the grammatical structure adheres to Spanish norms, the Spanglish that Vega utilizes distinguishes her as a writer capable of writing in two voices and two languages. However, Vega's fragmented voice is not the only one heard in "Pollito Chicken." The story's female protagonist, Suzie Bermudez, is an Americanized second-generation Puerto Rican, a proud resident of New York City. Suzie, unsure of, and often denying, whether she is at all boricua, is caught in a constant interior battle between the ideologies and cultures of two different countries, Puerto Rico and the United States.3 In the same sense that Vega's use of Spanglish represents a satirical and political agenda, Suzie's use of the same represents a colonial mask. So-called "good English" serves as the best strategy to hide any trace of, to employ her own vocabulary, "Spik." Suzie's voice, through Vega's own-not necessarily conscious- creation, juxtaposes the author's apparent political and ideological project, and places Vega in an ambivalent and seemingly ambiguous role in regards to language.
In this essay, I will explore the meaning of Vega's code switching as part of a two-pronged approach to decipher the significance behind the author's use of Spanglish. I will first consider Vega's code switching to be a conscious decision, driven by her political and ideo- logical project aiming to generate a sense of national unity for Puerto Rican islanders-islanders rejecting English and its remnants in Spanish, in the form of Spanglish-through repeated use of sarcasm and parody in the text. The second reason for Vega's code switching in "Pollito Chicken" will be considered an unconscious one and will compose the latter half of the study. This...