Hybridizing Billy the Kid: Transnational dialogism in Ramón J. Sender’s El bandido adolescente

This article examines El bandido adolescente (1965), Ramón J. Sender’s retelling of the Billy the Kid legend, through a transnational application of Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism. Traditionally depicted as a quintessentially ‘American’ outlaw, Billy the Kid is reframed by Sender as simultaneously Irish, Spanish and Mexican through varied speech, foregrounding the role of language in constructing national identity. Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, this study explores how Sender crafts an internally dialogic narrative through hybridization – merging multiple linguistic and national consciousnesses within a single utterance, a phenomenon I refer to as the nation-image . Because the novel both essentializes and destabilizes the category of the nation through an interplay of centripetal and centrifugal forces, it offers a valuable case study for the flexibility of transnational dialogism when applied to works that do not explicitly promote a transnational paradigm – an area where Bakhtin’s continued relevance is often underutilized.