Spanish Accents and Dialects for Actors

Spanish Accents and Dialects for Actors: Volume 1 – North America and the Caribbean is an interactive roadmap to the accents and dialects of the Spanish-speaking world that uses trauma-informed approaches to navigate the reclamation of the Latino/a/e/x home sounds. Historically, performing Spanish-speaking characters has been done through oversimplification and has left actors with minimal resources for navigating the authentic portrayal of the Latine community on stage and on screen. Characters of the Spanish speaking diaspora are often reduced to overly simplistic caricatures of sensuality and aggressive temperaments, while Latine actors are asked to erase their cultural identity in order to fit into these media-perpetuated stereotypes. This book seeks to undo this erasure by serving as a compendium for actors wishing to navigate the authentic portrayal of Hispanic characters in the performance of English and Spanish language texts. Conscientiously researched and linguistically detailed analyses of the Spanish-speaking regions of North America and the Caribbean provide a long-overdue challenge to outdated stereotypes and generalizations. Spanish Accents and Dialects for Actors offers an accessible approach to diving into the cultural context, oral posture, pronunciation, and other key characteristics of these complex and layered accents and dialects. This book is written for actors, performers, directors, voice and speech educators, playwrights, and theatre students interested in an authentic representation of accents and dialects of the Spanish-speaking diaspora. A companion website, available at www.esaccents.com, provides additional resources to support content described in the book, including audio and video materials.