This book proposes community service-learning as a critical pedagogy that connects learners and communities to address key challenges in heritage language education. The book’s purpose is two-fold: to fill a crucial gap in empirical research on community service-learning in the heritage language context, as well as to provide language educators and practitioners essential guidelines for designing community service-learning courses, with particular attention paid to the characteristics and needs of Spanish heritage language learners. This book presents compelling evidence demonstrating the central role community service-learning plays in developing heritage language learners’ identities, connections to the heritage language community, language attitudes, and social, cultural, and sociolinguistic awareness. Importantly, this book also addresses the often-overlooked perspectives of community partners and liaisons. As the first original research monograph on community service-learning for Spanish heritage language learners, this pioneering book will undoubtedly aid students, instructors and administrators across all levels of language education.

This book develops the communication and literacy skills of heritage Spanish speakers with exercises that are designed to improve oral and written proficiency in the language. Nuevos mundos uses the cultures and voices of the major Hispanic groups in the United States, as well as those of Latin America and Spain, to familiarize students with a variety of issues and topics, which are sometimes controversial and always thought-provoking.

This book develops the communication and literacy skills of heritage Spanish speakers with exercises that are designed to improve oral and written proficiency in the language. Nuevos mundos uses the cultures and voices of the major Hispanic groups in the United States, as well as those of Latin America and Spain, to familiarize students with a variety of issues and topics, which are sometimes controversial and always thought-provoking.

“This collection, because of its exceptional theoretical coherence and sophistication, is qualitatively superior to the most frequently consulted anthologies on Latin American women’s history and literature . . . [and] represents a new, more theoretically rigorous stage in the feminist debate on Latin American women.”—Elizabeth Garrels, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Twentieth-century Spanish poetry has received comparatively little attention from critics writing in English. Andrew Debicki now presents the first English-language history published in the United States to examine the sweep of modern Spanish verse. More important, he is the first to situate Spanish poetry in the context of European modernity, to trace its trajectory from the symbolists to the postmodernists. Avoiding the rigid generational schemes and catalogs of names found in traditional Hispanic literary histories, Debicki offers detailed discussions of salient books and texts to construct an original and compelling view of his subject. He demonstrates that contemporary Spanish verse is rooted in the modem tradition and poetics that see the text as a unique embodiment of complex experiences. He then traces the evolution of that tradition in the early decades of the century and its gradual disintegration from the 1950s to the present as Spanish poetry came to reflect features of the postmodern, especially the poetics of text as process rather than as product. By centering his study on major periods and examining within each the work of poets of different ages, Debicki develops novel perspectives. The late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, were not merely the setting for a new aestheticist generation but an era of exceptional creativity in which both established and new writers engendered a profound, intertextual, and often self-referential lyricism. This book will be essential reading for specialists in modern Spanish letters, for advanced students, and for readers inter-ested in comparative literature.