La Spanglish Issue
The first issue of Hyphen Magazine, for U.S. multicultural identities, is on Spanglish. Hyphen is the concept of the magazine as it symbolizes the “in-between” connection between two or more co-existing cultures. The magazine’s form is also “in-between” a typical book and magazine size at 21cm by 18cm. The magazine’s body copy is set in the Arnhem typeface, but the issue’s display text is in the controversial, unreadable “hybrid” typeface Rotis.
In the issue, there are features that include articles and infographic spreads on general Spanglish facts, a linguistic analysis of Spanglish, migrant trends lending to the development of Spanglish, the use of Spanish in the U.S., and the use of language amongst Latinx across generations.
This cover story includes interviews with Spanglish speakers about their Spanglish usage and development, with photos they felt embodied their relationship with Spanglish. The interviewees are introduced in Spanish and English in a more traditionally designed way but the transparent
paper has Spanglish take over the parent languages and indicate a language switch to Spanglish.
The interviews were also mapped across several spreads. This data visualization is meant to demonstrate the categories of Spanglish and its variability amongst its speakers. The dark brown shows when the interviewee spoke in English. The colored lines indicate Spanglish according to four linguistic categories that are mentioned in the legend. The thicker the line, the longer they spoke in the corresponding category.
Extras included:
- a CD with Latinx songs in Spanglish. The CD form is a pie chart showing the percent of genres in the CD that the songs correspond to
- an excerpt from the award winning novel written in Spanglish by Junot Diaz
- a crossword puzzle to recall the information learned about Spanglish
Pre-production involved deciding what content to use and how it would be organized. The use of transparent paper made this particularly important for the signatures to function.
Production included book binding.
