Geographies of Girlhood in US Latina Writing

Decolonizing Spaces and Identities

Andrea Fernández-García

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030201067
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030201074
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is an in-depth study of Latina girls, portrayed in five coming-of-age narratives by using spaces and places as hermeneutical tools. The texts under study here are Julia Alvarez's Return to Sender (2009), Norma E. Cantú's Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (1995), Mary Helen Ponce's Hoyt Street: An Autobiography (1993), and Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican (1993) and Almost a Woman (1998). Unlike most representations of Latina girls, which are characterized by cultural inaccuracies, tropes of exoticism, and a tendency to associate the host society with modernity and their girls' cultures of origin with backwardness and oppression, these texts contribute to reimagining the social differently from what the dominant imagery offers. 

By illustrating the vexing phenomena the characters have to negotiate on a daily basis (such as racism, sexism, and displacement), these narratives open avenuesfor a critical exploration of the legacies of colonial modernity. This book, therefore, not only enables an analysis of how the girls' development is shaped by these structures of power, but also shows how such legacies are reversed as the characters negotiate their identities. It breaks with the longstanding characterization of young people, and especially Latina girls, as voiceless and deprived of agency, showing readers that this youth group also has say in controlling their lifeworlds.

© The Author(s) 2020

A. Fernández-GarcíaGeographies of Girlhood in US Latina WritingLiteratures of the Americashttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20107-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Andrea Fernández-García¹

(1)

University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain

Andrea Fernández-García

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

This study was born out of an interest in a segment of the US population that, despite its increasing demographic growth, remains understudied and marginalized in scholarly literature, popular culture, and in US society at large: Latina girls.¹ This study seeks to prove, however, that there is a discursive space where their daily lives and negotiations are given prominence. US Latina literature, and in particular the genre of the Bildungsroman or coming-of-age narrative, brings to the fore, more often than not, Latina girls on their way to adulthood. For this reason, the focus of this book is placed on a series of Bildungsromane that trace the development of four girls. The key texts chosen for this study are Julia Alvarez’s Return to Sender (2009), Norma E. Cantú’s Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (2015/1995), Mary Helen Ponce’s Hoyt Street: An Autobiography (1993), and Esmeralda Santiago’s first two memoirs When I Was Puerto Rican (2006/1993) and Almost a Woman (2012/1998). These novels have been selected for two main reasons: first, because they allow interrogation of the legacies of colonial modernity, and second because each is set in a different spatiotemporal context. In all five texts, the characters negotiate vexing phenomena that are rooted in colonial structures of power, such as undocumented immigration, displacement, and racial and gender discrimination, opening avenues for an exploration and critique of how colonial structures of power shape the girls’ experiences. On the other hand, the contexts in which the texts are set include rural Vermont in the 2000s, the Mexico-US border between the 1930s and 1960s, a Chicanx (or Mexican American) neighborhood in Los Angeles County during the first half of the twentieth century and New York in the 1960s.² The particularities of each context will enable a richer and more diverse analysis of girlhood experiences.

The aim of this study is, then, to analyze the psychological and physical growth of the characters portrayed in these narratives in an attempt to offer a variegated picture of girlhood experiences that can fill in the discursive gap created by sheer neglect. These different life stories will be read using spaces and places as hermeneutical tools. This methodological choice is predicated upon two main reasons. The first has to do with the bidirectional link that much geography scholarship establishes between subject formation and spatiality, which Latinx studies scholar Mary Pat Brady summarizes as follows: “Identity emerges in relation to spatiality, to the on-going production of places, to the buried and entangled relationship between time and space” (2006, 152). Thus, she argues, “making identities is integral to making places; places get made partially through identity-making activities” (2006, 152). Identities, therefore, evolve through the experiences involved as we encounter new spaces, which are in turn shaped by our performances and negotiations. The second reason is related to the little scholarly attention that has been given to children and spatiality, a gap in geography that created conditions for the emergence of the increasing but still discreet area of children’s geographies. This field, as geographers Sarah Holloway and Gill Valentine argue, deals mainly, but not exclusively, with how children’s identities and lives are reconstituted in and through everyday spaces such as the school, the home, and the city, showing also how their negotiations feedback onto those places (2000, 9). This book is, therefore, a multidisciplinary study where the aforementioned interests and identified gaps are addressed, engaging with and contributing to ongoing discussions in areas as varied as US Latina literature, girls’ studies, gender studies, or children’s geographies, among others.

Chapter 2, “Latina Girls: Questions of Identity and Representation,” which offers a conceptual and methodological framework for the subsequent analyses, opens with a section that presents the paradox surrounding the representation of Latina girls: How their discursive invisibilization is at odds with their increasing demographic growth and the growing popularity and ubiquity of female youth in and across a wide array of disciplines and cultural practices, which gave way to the field of girls’ studies. On the other hand, it offers a brief overview of the most common patterns for representing Latina girls in scholarly work, television, cinema, and in children’s and young adult literature by US Latina writers.

The second section gives an account of the patriarchal discourses that the characters discussed in this book have to negotiate: marianismo, machismo, and malinchismo. I will explain how they originated and describe the gender roles that they prescribe for women so as to gain a better grasp of the discourses that shape the characters’ growing-up experiences.

The third section begins by outlining the reasons why US Latina authors have relied mostly on the Bildungsroman to visibilize the daily lives and negotiations of Latina youth. In addition, I theorize the Bildungsroman by Latina writers as a discursive space that emerges from a dialogue between the colonial and the postcolonial, which in turn brings about the decolonization and redefinition of paradigms and concepts. This conceptualization is based on decolonial and border thinking, an epistemology and ethics that resists the homogenizing forces of the universal or globalized culture. In this sense, I will particularly draw on Emma Pérez’s concept of the “decolonial imagery” (1999) to elucidate the potential of this literary expression to rethink dominant paradigms in an attempt to claim neglected subjectivities and histories. This entails the decolonization of not only a patriarchal and Eurocentric literary tradition, but also the Western male-ordered notions of subjectivity and spatiality it conveys.

Chapter 2 closes with a more detailed account of decolonial and border thinking, the paradigm through which identities and spaces are interpreted and made sense of in this study. Born in Latinx and Latin American academic circles, this epistemology and ethics has as one of its main goals to foreground the continuity of the past colonial experience within present-day global racial hierarchies. In this sense, the main argument is that coloniality is still an intrinsic part of capitalist world power systems, as it is based on the imposition of a racial/ethnic hierarchy on populations, a structure with its origins in the “idea that [the] colonizer is ethnically and cognitively superior to the colonized” (Castro-Gómez in Gil Araújo 2010, 190). This section shows how this logic of power is manifested through different current phenomena that affect the lives of Latinxs in the United States, namely racialization, discrimination, exploitation, and, more recently, the signing of an executive order to build a physical wall between Mexico and the United States. In this respect, special attention will be directed to the exclusivist and rigid notions of identities and spaces underlying these exclusionary acts. On the other hand, and in line with decolonial and border thinking’s efforts to “foreground the force and creativity of knowledges subalternized during a long process of colonization of the planet” (Mignolo 2000, 13), this section provides an overview of the alternative views of identities and spaces upheld by decolonial thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Chela Sandoval, and Walter Mignolo. In this regard, attention will also be paid to some spatial concepts that, although not born within the paradigm of decoloniality, contribute to decolonizing and redefining dominant spatial narratives. Through an examination of concepts and tools such as “mestiza consciousness,” “differential consciousness,” “critical cosmopolitanism,” and “a progressive sense of place,” emphasis will be placed on a more ambiguous, dialectical, and inclusive view of subjectivities and places.³

The novels included in this book portray a plurality of spaces, such as the space of the nation, the Mexico-Texas transborder region, the Chicanx neighborhood, and the home-school binary. I will consider the texts in relation to these spaces and the prominence that they have in each of the novels. Thus, I shall org...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Latina Girlhood: Questions of Identity and Representation
• 3. Space of Flows vs. Space of Places: Negotiating the Paradoxes of a Global Age in Julia Alvarez’s Return to Sender
• 4. Life on the Mexico-US Border: Femininity, Transborderism, and the Reinscription of Boundaries in Norma E. Cantú’s Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera
• 5. The Barrio as a Hybrid Space: Growing Up Between Nationalism and Feminism in Mary Helen Ponce’s Hoyt Street: An Autobiography
• 6. Continuities and Discontinuities Between Home and School: Toward a Multi-layered Understanding of Social Spaces in Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican and Almost a Woman
• 7. Conclusions
• Back Matter