Los desarraigados (1956) by the Mexican playwright J. Humberto Robles is discussed in terms of five reparate linguistic codes that intersect in the theatrical domain as primes in the drama of bicultural conflict: l) contemporary cultivated Mexico City speech; 2) an archaic register of formal, mostly provincial, "poetic" or 'flowery" elegance; 3) lower-middle class colloquial Mexican Spanish, marked by English interference; 4) Pachuco Spanish: the slang of post-World War II urban Mexican American youths 5) aspiring middle-class radio/TV English of the early 1950s. The conflictual intersection of these registers of the linguistic manifestations of the sociohistorical conflict with which the drama deals is in the play a dominant theatrical sign of theater space as the battleground in which this conflict is represented.
Foster, D. W. (2017). Theatrical space and language: J. Humberto Robles’s los desarraigados. Lenguas Modernas, (20), 93–103. Retrieved from https://revistas.uchile.cl/index.php/LM/article/view/45766
