Memoria Presente: The Common Spanish Legacy in Italian and Latin American Cultures

FAIN: HB-273184-21

Teresa Fiore
Montclair State University (Montclair, NJ 07043-1600)

A course revision project resulting in a digital repository of materials to facilitate cultural comparison in Italian language instruction for Spanish speakers and oral testimonies of Italian-Latino/a bicultural identity.

The project Memoria Presente (i.e., “present memory”, which translates into the same expression in both Spanish and Italian) proposes the expansion of an existing course, “Italian for Spanish Speakers,” to include advanced-level humanities content and a preliminary set of oral histories. The project leverages the cultural commonalities between Italy and Latin America as the result of shared colonial and migratory experiences which have affected numerous aspects of life. The goal is to organize materials from interdisciplinary sources that connect the linguistic and cultural experiences of Italy, Spain and Latin America and embed them in an advanced class so that Hispanic students can become further aware of trans-national affiliations rooted in a common past, and develop tri-lingualism and tri-culturalism through an accelerated path. A second goal is seeding a digital repository with resources that can be useful to other teachers for both existing classes and new extensions.

Associated Products

Memoria Presente: The Common Spanish Legacy in Italian and Latin American Cultures (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Memoria Presente: The Common Spanish Legacy in Italian and Latin American Cultures
Author: Teresa Fiore
Abstract: An ongoing interdisciplinary digital repository of texts and files (maps, photos, audio-video files and films) that link Italian and Spanish/Latin American cultures across time periods and locations.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: http://tinyurl.com/NEHMemoriaPresente
Primary URL Description: The repository includes various sections: Literature and Film; and Cuisine, as well as an annotated Bibliography. All texts are accompanied by a description and, when applicable, further resources. In some cases (see section on Plants), teaching activities for different levels are included as a model. The repository includes oral interviews with Hispanic people who live in the U.S. and have at some point emigrated to Italy. Their stories reflect experiences of pluri-lingualism and pluri-culturalism that are very relevant to the project and the teaching approach based on trans-languaging and inter-cultural comprehension. See also: https://tinyurl.com/SpanItalLatInterviews The digital repository includes an ongoing list of colleges and universities where courses of Italian for Spanish speakers are taught, as well as a list of recent positions offered in Italian for Spanish speakers, or high-school positions that require knowledge of Italian and Spanish: http://tinyurl.com/Ital4SpanUS
Access Model: Password-protected: NEH2021Fiore (it can easily become open access by removing the password). Please contact author at fiorete@montclair.edu

“A Familiar Foreign: Teaching Italian Language and Culture to Spanish Speakers in the U.S. through a Digital Interdisciplinary Archive” (Article)
Title: “A Familiar Foreign: Teaching Italian Language and Culture to Spanish Speakers in the U.S. through a Digital Interdisciplinary Archive”
Author: Teresa Fiore
Abstract: The article focuses on the open-access archive Memoria Presente: The Common Spanish Legacy in Italian and Latin American Cultures, an ongoing project that Fiore launched after teaching “Italian for Spanish Speakers” at Montclair State University for a few semesters, and that received the initial support of an NEH fellowship. The article illustrates how this archive complicates notions of border and foreignness by emphasizing colonial exchanges and movements at the time of the Spanish Empire. More specifically, Memoria Presente shows how their legacy has effectively redefined European and American cultural geographies in multiple ways. The project illustrates this re-definition by also analyzing post-imperial migratory flows from Italy to Latin America and postcolonial ones from Latin America to Italy, which reflect further mechanisms of transnational exchange ranging from language to literature, film, religion, music and food. The main goal of Memoria Presente has so far been that of creating a digital archive of interdisciplinary materials for the use of teachers and researchers. Besides describing the content of the archive in general terms, this article addresses the applicability of these materials for public events and scholarly collaborations, and their use in courses of Italian for Spanish speakers. Ideally poised to counteract the decreased investment on languages in the U.S. education field, these courses offer valuable forms of asset-focused accelerated learning based on transcultural and translanguaging approaches, in turn strengthening cultural biodiversity, inclusivity and global citizenry.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.7368/106431
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: InVerbis (2: July-Dec. 2022)
Publisher: Carocci

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