Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

Our conversation in class about ASCO and Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s work was something I found to be quite stimulating in thinking about how I am going to do my project. While I have been filled with doubts over whether the vision I have for my final project is the right one for a class about multilinguist, translanguaging and autotranslative writing — terms I am still getting used to knowing about and utilizing — I keep reminding myself that everyone else is probably as confused and doubtful of themselves as I am.

I want to model some of my project based off of Gomez-Peña; the language in his written work and the assigned video performance switched between various vernaculars of English and Spanish, which was a detail from his work that I found reassuring for myself: as long as I focus on the bilingual aspect of my relationship with my deceased dog, I will be doing something right.

I am still working to build a solid foundation for my project and conjure a more concrete image of what I want this project to serve me, but I know for a fact I want to incorporate these ideas:

1. My relationship with my dog was bilingual. He and I grew up learning Spanish and English together! He was a very intelligent dog and I could easily switch between languages and he could still understand his favorite concepts.
2. My relationship with speaking Spanish: I find myself reverting to a childlike state when I speak it — perhaps this has something to do with it being my first language? When I found out about my dog’s passing, the only words that I could say while crying were in Spanish. I want to connect this to a loss of infancy and the tie I believe Spanish has to it. I think that my dog’s passing was symbolic, in a way, of my childhood ending — really ending — and the rest of my adult life beginning. After all, I had my dog for seventeen years and I truly believed he would never die!

Here are some pictures of my dog! I love him very much; he has been with me through every phase of my life! His ears were always perked up — as you can see in these pictures — because he was always listening to whatever we were saying in whichever language we talked in. He was a very smart dog.