Abstract
In this chapter, I discuss representations of “Mexican-Americanness” in the USA. I compare theories of mexicanidad and identity written during the Mexican Revolution with the Mexican-Americanness recreated by Chicana/o autobiographies. These works depict the Mexican-American experience as a space in between and across cultures, but they also place the struggle for culture (as an “unfamiliar” element) within the definition of family itself.
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- 1.
As Guillermo Hernández pointed out in his book Chicano Satire, much of the best Chicana/o literature of the early years of the movement uses the voice and perspective of a child.
- 2.
Octavio Paz analyzes this idea in El ogro filantrópico (1979), in the chapter “Vuelta a El laberinto de la soledad.”
- 3.
As James Craig Holte points out:
Others, like Piri Thomas, Malcolm X, and Black Elk, seeing themselves as outsiders, have used the autobiography, and often the conventions of the conversion narrative, as a way of pointing out the defects in Franklin’s vision (which has become the official standard vision of the nation), which assumed the absence of class, racial, or sexual discrimination, the essential good will of all men, the ameliorative effects of public education, and the continued abundance of natural resources. (6)
- 4.
In an interview with Francisco Jiménez on January 17, 1975, the author points out that “My greatest influence, however, has been English literature, specifically I acknowledge the influence of James Joyce, William Faulkner, and when I was young, Thomas Wolfe.”
- 5.
Leigh Gilmore finds a similar thread in “The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros's experiment in self representation, [which] calls into question the constructed line between autobiography and fiction … the text within this frame explores the limits of separating autobiography from fiction as distinct modes of self-representation” (Autobiographics 92).
- 6.
As mentioned by King, “this is a common struggle in the bildungsroman portrait that, in this case, will lead Richard toward the life of an intellectual and an artist” (67).
- 7.
From the beginning, his father is described as, “His once fair skin had been turned a ruddy color by the years of outdoor life” (Villarreal 1).
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Velasco, J. (2016). Culture as Resistance. In: Collective Identity and Cultural Resistance in Contemporary Chicana/o Autobiography. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59540-9_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59540-9_4
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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