This article explores the motivation for the unusual language choice in Alejandro Morales’s Caras viejas y vino nuevo (a rare example of Chicano novel written in Spanish), which caused the initial rejection of the novel. The presence of heteroglossia from Spanish and its symbolic value are also looked at in the English translations published in 1981 and 1998. The conclusion is that, while the retranslation contains fewer (formal) bilingual strategies, it is comparatively less normalized and more consistent with the source text experimentalism and harshness. This is because it successfully harnesses the potential of heteroglossia in highlighting culturally and ideologically rich points in the text.
