D a m i á n  R o b l e s

Worldviews surround an individual in translation. As I immigrated from a small town in Oaxaca, Mexico, my conception about the world changed. I was born in Zacatepec, located in the coast of the state of Oaxaca. Zacatepec is a mixture of two cultures: mestizos, half Spaniards/indigenous, and Tacuates, a Mixtecan ethnic group. I was intertwined by languages from an early age, Spanish and Tacuate. I lived among two cultures that coexisted in peace and celebration. In Zacatepec, I became acquainted with people that shared different values and opinions about the the world at large. My dad, a naturalized immigrant to the United States of America, decided that my two elder brothers, along with my mother, and myself, would immigrate to El Norte ("The North"), as we called the U.S. in our town.

            Although I was accustomed to life in a hybrid society, I did not consider myself a hybrid. Nevertheless, this would change. I was fourteen years old when I arrived to New Jersey.  Suddenly, I struggled both to adapt to the new surroundings but also to learn the new language, English. Yet I welcomed and became acculturated to the U.S. way of life successfully. I strongly believed that learning a second language opens and liberates an individual. Learning English as second language opened a new "door" for me. Suddenly, I started to understand and comprehend the different ways of my new culture and society. For me, this was the beginning of my conscious self; the renaissance of myself.

            Indeed, my career path, Linguistics, was shaped by my family’s move to a different country, to a "Land of Opportunities." On one hand, this was influenced due to the linguistic struggle I encountered; and on the other hand, it was inspired to promote cultural understanding and the embracing of my own cultural of origin. Before coming to Texas A&M, I had the fortune of completing a Bachelor of Arts in three areas of concentration: Spanish, French Studies and Romance linguistics. I moved from New Jersey to Texas to further my dreams. I was admitted to the PhD program at the Department of Hispanic Studies, focusing on Hispanic Linguistics. Currently I am in my third year of the PhD program and I am in the process of taking my preliminary exams with the hope of acquiring candidacy. My research focus is Spanish/English pragmatics in the Early Modern period. Pragmatics is the analysis of linguistic use in a given context. I study historical pragmatics, as researchers have pointed out (cf. Jakobson 1941; Labov 1972; Culpeper and Kádár 2010, etc.), in the attempt to uncover linguistic universals. In doing so, by the end of my PhD, I would like to have further the research and develop a new method of analysis in historical and comparative pragmatics.

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