“Viejas pisadas”: Activating Postvernacular Ladino in the Works of Myriam Moscona

In both her hybrid-language novel Tela de Sevoya (2012) and in her Ladino poetry collec­tion Ansina (2015), Mexican author Myriam Moscona (1955) embraces Ladino as a post­vernacular language without any illusions of recuperating it for daily speech. Although her grandparents spoke Ladino, she herself is not a native speaker. While she recognizes that Ladino is a dying tongue, Moscona makes explicit the power of literary works to infiltrate and function within the liminal spaces that exist between languages, identities, or layers of history. Moscona’s dynamic and future-oriented creative work-composed in a language whose vernacularity exists only in the past-utilizes the tool of postvernacularity and en­ters into the discourse of feminist mobilization. Her works show how the active use of postvernacularity can open opportunities for her Spanish-speaking audiences to collective­ly engage in Ladino’s afterlife through acts of creative play.

Mujeres errantes: Cuerpo, género y política revolucionaria en el cine judío latinoamericano

This article focuses on the points of contact between Jewishness, gender, and revolutionary politics in Latin American films set in the 1960s and 1970s. The piece introduces the term “mujeres errantes” to explore how Latin American Jewish women filmmakers have crafted depictions of Jewish women who err from the norms with which they are expected to conform as they come into contact with pan-Latin American revolutionary political move­ments of the 1960s and 1970s. The study analyzes the specific representations of women- and Jewish-identified fictional protagonists in the films El amigo alemán and Novia que te vea. Through a discussion of how each film engages with the notion of “Mujeres errantes,” this article considers the place of revolutionary politics in film as cultural representations of Jewish Latin American women.