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Never before our time [the period of worldwide modernization initiated by the industrial revolution] have so many people been uprooted. Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time. … All the modern historians from Spengler to Marx have identified the contemporary phenomenon of emigration. Why add more words? To whisper for that which has been lost. Not out of nostalgia, but because it is on the site of loss that hopes are born.
The beautiful melodious sounds of my languageare beautiful no more.Instead, I must harness my thoughtswith sounds alien to my mother tongue.
—Juana Canabal Antokeletz, 1982, quoted in “A Psychoanalytic View of Cross-Cultural Passages” (Am. J. Psychoanal., 53/1, March 1993)