Traces of Language: Memory and Luso-descendant Identity across Two Worlds

Abstract

Anthony De Sa, Katherine Vaz, and Anthony Barcellos offer, in Luso–North American literature, narratives in which inherited Portuguese is rarely transmitted as a fully functioning language, persisting instead as traces that resist equivalence. In this sense, the heritage language ceases to function as a mere sign of origin and comes to operate as a practice of memory — that is, as a condition shaping what can be remembered, spoken, and recognized under the pressure of the dominant language. Starting from this premise, the present essay sets out to develop a comparative reading of scenes in which these linguistic remnants reactivate memory and participate in the (re)configuration of Luso-descendant characters’ identities, exposing generational fractures and the symbolic cost of linguistic assimilation, making interculturality not a theme added to the plot, but a structural regime of the very act of speech. By re-centering language as memory-in-action — rather than merely as an ethnic marker — this study contributes to a more refined approach to the Luso-descendant experience in the United States and Canada, where heritage is transmitted precisely through the survival of what remains in fragments.