Juan is a Linguistics major who is interested in phonetics, psycholinguistics, and pragmatics. He is also a Fine Arts minor concentrating in drawing and graphic design. He speaks English, Spanish, Italian, and recently Quechua and American Sign Language. As the Editor-in-Chief of La Vida Magazine, Penn's only Latinx-interest publication, he works to promote greater appreciation of people of color in the media and the talents of Penn's Latinx students. Juan plans to become a speech-language pathologist to help those with communication disorders. He currently works at La Casa Latina and the Annenberg Public Policy Center for the Culture of Health and Media Portrayal In Our Nation Program. His personal interests focus on people of color in the media and their portrayal, linguistically and culturally discriminated communities, the relation between image and viewer, videogaming, design, gossip (el chisme), and oral narratives.
Juan Cabrera
Penn Humanities Forum Undergraduate Fellow
2016—2017 Forum on Translation
Juan Cabrera
Linguistics
The Language of Reputation and Scandal: Translations of Lived Experiences in Spanish, English, and Spanglish Oral Narratives
The aim of this study is to understand a framework for the structure of oral narratives that operate in different languages, cultures, and topics as translations of lived experiences. Interviews were conducted in English, Spanish, and Spanglish in North and Latin America about gossip and scandal. Oral personal narratives are translations of lived experiences—coded information that negotiate, build, or destroy credibility, relationships, or the self; they manage reputations. This examination is framed under Labovian narrative analysis, and the pragmatic implications on the management of reputation in narratives about gossip and scandal are addressed.