Expanding upon existing studies of transculturation, Silvia Spitta 
shows how Latin American cultures radically transformed, 
displaced, and subverted Spanish and later European and U.S. 
cultural impositions. She theorizes transculturation as the complex 
process of adjustment and re-creation—cultural, literary, linguistic, 
and personal—that allows for new configurations to emerge from 
the clash of cultures and colonial and neocolonial appropriations.

    Spitta not only introduces the question of gender into the debate, 
but also brings together previously disconnected media: the 
chronicles of the New World, the writings of the extirpators of 
idolatries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the paintings 
of the Cuzco School, and contemporary U.S. Latino narratives. 
Between Two Waters brings English-language readers into the 
post-colonial debate at the heart of Latin American literary 
criticism.

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SILVIA SPITTA is an associate professor of Spanish and 
comparative literature at Dartmouth College.