‘From Austin, Texas to Santiago Atitlan, and back again’ explores theoretical dimensions of place, travel, language and translation, as a series of narrative reflections on hybridity in journeys across Central America, where mis-understandings and the places they occur in become central to construction of identity. The essay takes as I its starting point the same paragraph used to frame ‘Confessional Construction’, a short statement about the life of Isabelle Eberhardt, which maps the emotional as well as the physical terrain of a journey. Following Homi Bhabha, it ends by considering how the story teller’s tale can always be relocated, since the story will be told again somewhere else: ‘somewhere else she is told’.

This essay was first published as ‘From Austin, Texas to Santiago Atitlan, and back again, Felipe Herandez (ed.), Journal of Romance Studies, Special Issue: Architecture and Transculturation in Latin America, (2003) and republished in, Felipe Herandez, Mark Millington and Iain Borden (eds.), Architecture and Transculturation in Latin America (forthcoming 2005).