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

Abstract

Abstract 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.