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LITERATURES OF THE AMERICAS

Geographies of
Girlhood in
US Latina Writing
Decolonizing Spaces and Identities
Andrea Fernández-García
Literatures of the Americas

Series Editor
Norma E. Cantú
Trinity University
San Antonio, TX, USA
This series seeks to bring forth contemporary critical interventions within
a hemispheric perspective, with an emphasis on perspectives from Latin
America. Books in the series highlight work that explores concerns in lit-
erature in different cultural contexts across historical and geographical
boundaries and also include work on the specific Latina/o realities in the
United States. Designed to explore key questions confronting contem-
porary issues of literary and cultural import, Literatures of the Americas is
rooted in traditional approaches to literary criticism but seeks to include
cutting-edge scholarship using theories from postcolonial, critical race,
and ecofeminist approaches.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14819
 Andrea Fernández-García

Geographies
of Girlhood in US
Latina Writing
Decolonizing Spaces and Identities
Andrea Fernández-García
University of Oviedo
Oviedo, Spain

Literatures of the Americas

ISBN 978-3-030-20106-7 ISBN 978-3-030-20107-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20107-4

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 Acknowledgements

As this study is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation completed

at the University of Oviedo, it could not have been made possible with-
out the insightful academic guidance and extraordinary generosity of
my supervisors, Dr. Esther Álvarez López and Dr. Emilia María Durán
Almarza. I am also profoundly grateful to Dr. Maria Herrera-Sobek
for devoting her precious time to reading and commenting on various
draft chapters. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their con-
structive comments on the initial manuscript. I am also grateful to the
University of Oviedo for providing scholarship funding to carry out this
study. I must also particularly acknowledge the funding provided by
the “Intersecciones: Literaturas, Culturas y Teorías Contemporáneas”
Research Group (FC-15-GRUPIN14-068) and must thank its coordi-
nator, Dr. Isabel Carrera Suárez, and the rest of its members for being
supportive and generous throughout. Some of the research for this
book also comes from the research project “MultipliCities. Encuentros
Incorporados y Conocimientos Alternativos: Habitar y Crear la Ciudad”
(FFI2013-45642), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and
Competitiveness, to which I am also grateful. I am similarly thankful to
the members of the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, where I conducted part of my
doctoral research thanks to a Fulbright scholarship, for all the encour-
agement and the stimulating conversations that helped me to sharpen my
insights. I extend my acknowledgements to Dr. Maria Cristina Pons and
Dr. Maria Esther Quintana Millamoto for their input and support of this

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

book. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the team at Palgrave Macmillan

for urging on the project and for their patience and help. I also wish to
acknowledge the generosity of Odisea: A Journal of English Studies and
Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies in granting permission to reprint
sections of Chaps. 3 and 5.
Additional thanks go to my friends, who have provided a constant
source of inspiration, support, and friendship. I would like to express
my warmest thanks to Irene, Juanjo, Eva, and Mónica for always being
there for me. Moreover, I am grateful to Abi, Jose, and Melissa for com-
ing into my life recently and shaking it up with their crazy laughter, joy,
and positiveness. I would also like to thank my colleagues and friends
at the University of Oviedo for their support and the nice moments we
have spent together. I am also thankful to Sal, Linda, and the rest of the
friends I met in California for being like a second family to me.
Finally, I wish to thank my parents, María Flor and Arturo, for their
love and belief in me. It is with love and gratitude that I dedicate this
book to them.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Works Cited 8

2 Latina Girlhood: Questions of Identity and

Representation 9
2.1 Latina Girls: A Growing Gap Between Population and
Representation 9
2.2 Cultural Scripts for Latina Girls: Good Girls vs. Bad Girls 14
2.3 The Latina Bildungsroman as a Decolonial Space:
Unearthing Unheard Voices, Decolonizing and
Reconstructing Paradigms and Concepts 18
2.4 Decolonizing Spaces and Identities 28
Works Cited 44

3 Space of Flows vs. Space of Places: Negotiating

the Paradoxes of a Global Age in Julia Alvarez’s
Return to Sender 53
3.1 Globalization and Its Contradictory Paths: Opening
and Closing Borders 53
3.2 Open Borders, Exclusion, and Cultural Confusion:
Dilemmas of Identity and Belonging 58
3.3 Reconceptualizing Identities: Toward a Critical
Cosmopolitan Perspective 67
Works Cited 80

vii
viii CONTENTS

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 87
4.1 Not Just a Trope: La Frontera as a Real-Life Space 87
4.2 Inscribing Femininity in La Frontera 97
4.3 Transcending and Reinscribing the Border’s Materiality 112
Works Cited 122

5 The Barrio as a Hybrid Space: Growing Up Between

Nationalism and Feminism in Mary Helen Ponce’s
Hoyt Street: An Autobiography 127
5.1 The Chicanx Barrio: A Space of Pain and Pleasure 127
5.2 Pacoima Talks Back: Contesting Established
Narratives of the Chicanx Barrio 132
5.3 How About Barrio Women?: A Critique of Gender
Asymmetries in the Community 141
Works Cited 151

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 155
6.1 Socializing New People in New Settings 155
6.2 Daily Migrations: Minding the Gap Between Home
and School 160
6.3 Destabilizing Demarcations Between Home and School:
Mingling Social Practices, Values, and Meanings 172
Works Cited 181

7 Conclusions 185
Works Cited 191

Index 193
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

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 soci-
ety 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 promi-
nence. US Latina literature, and in particular the genre of the Bildungsro-
man 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 Autobi-
ography (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 char-
acters 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 cri-
tique 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

© The Author(s) 2020 1

A. Fernández-García, Geographies of Girlhood in US
Latina Writing, Literatures of the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20107-4_1
2 A. FERNÁNDEZ-GARCÍA

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 phys-
ical 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 spatial-
ity, 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 par-
tially through identity-making activities” (2006, 152). Identities, there-
fore, evolve through the experiences involved as we encounter new spaces,
which are in turn shaped by our performances and negotiations. The sec-
ond 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 Valen-
tine argue, deals mainly, but not exclusively, with how children’s identi-
ties 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 multi-
disciplinary 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 subse-
quent analyses, opens with a section that presents the paradox surround-
ing 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 dis-
ciplines and cultural practices, which gave way to the field of girls’ studies.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

On the other hand, it offers a brief overview of the most common pat-
terns 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: marian-
ismo, 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 expe-
riences.
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 Bil-
dungsroman 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 uni-
versal 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 bor-
der thinking, the paradigm through which identities and spaces are inter-
preted and made sense of in this study. Born in Latinx and Latin Ameri-
can 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 popula-
tions, a structure with its origins in the “idea that [the] colonizer is eth-
nically and cognitively superior to the colonized” (Castro-Gómez in Gil
Araújo 2010, 190). This section shows how this logic of power is mani-
fested 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 physi-
cal wall between Mexico and the United States. In this respect, special
4 A. FERNÁNDEZ-GARCÍA

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 Wal-
ter 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 con-
sciousness,” “differential consciousness,” “critical cosmopolitanism,” and
“a progressive sense of place,” emphasis will be placed on a more ambigu-
ous, 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 Chi-
canx 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 organize the analysis of the texts following these
different spatial categories, going from the most general to the most spe-
cific; I consider the nation and the home-school binary to be located at
the extremes of this spectrum. I include the Mexico-Texas borderlands
and the barrio between these polarized categories.
Accordingly, in Chapter 3, entitled “Space of Flows vs. Space of Places:
Negotiating the Paradoxes of a Global Age in Julia Alvarez’s Return to
Sender,” I shall start my analysis with Alvarez’s novel. Here, I analyze
the way Mari and Tyler, an undocumented Mexican girl and an Anglo-
American boy, reconstitute their identities in and through the space of the
US nation and the state of Vermont. The first section, “Globalization and
Its Contradictory Paths: Opening and Closing Borders,” introduces the
complex and contradictory reality that characterizes the context in which
the protagonists negotiate their identities: How the continuous immi-
gration of undocumented Mexican workers to fill jobs in Vermont dairy
farms coexists with racism and extreme forms of patriotism that believe
in the “true” essence of places. In order to enable a better grasp of these
opposing dynamics, this section will take a close look at Manuel Castells’
spatial division between “space of flows” and “space of places” (1996),
focusing on the competing view of places it puts forward. Section 3.2,
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

“Open Borders, Exclusion, and Cultural Confusion: Dilemmas of Iden-

tity and Belonging,” deals with Mari’s feelings of exclusion and the dilem-
mas of identity and belonging encountered by both characters. In this
regard, I examine, on the one hand, how the nation’s nativism and the
continuous recruitment of undocumented Mexican immigrants impact on
Mari’s sense of place, emphasizing her difficulties at determining where
she belongs. On the other hand, I explore the way Tyler straddles between
his wish to keep his farm afloat with the help of undocumented workers
and the nativist discourses that deem the practice of hiring them as antipa-
triotic. Lastly, Sect. 3.3, which I entitled “Reconceptualizing Identities:
Towards a Critical Cosmopolitan Perspective,” examines how, in the pro-
cess of reconciling the conflicting positions referred to above, Mari and
Tyler embrace the paradigm of critical or decolonial cosmopolitanism,
reconceptualizing their identities and the spaces they inhabit.
Chapter 4, “Life on the Mexico-U.S. Border: Femininity, Trans-
borderism, and the Reinscription of Boundaries in Norma E. Cantú’s
Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera,” traces Nena’s com-
ing of age in the Mexico-Texas borderlands. The first section, “Not Just
a Trope: La Frontera as a Real Life Space,” brings attention to the fact
that, other than being a metaphor for hybrid and multiple identities, the
Mexican American borderlands is also a real place inhabited by real peo-
ple. Chicanx border literature in general and Canícula in particular are
presented as discursive spaces where this materiality is very well rendered.
Then, I move on to identify those aspects of this materiality that have
received less attention in the scholarship on Canícula: femininity and
the destabilization and reinscription of boundaries. The second section,
“Inscribing Femininity in La Frontera,” analyzes the various gendered
performances deployed in the texts. This will include a look at patriarchal
archetypes such as the solterona, the devoted and self-sacrificing mother,
the virgin, and the treacherous whore. In this regard, I will look into
the way Nena plays out a mestiza consciousness when negotiating these
different roles, focusing on how she alternatively embraces and contests
them. Finally, the section “Transcending and Reinscribing the Border’s
Materiality” examines those episodes in which the border’s significance is
challenged and those in which it is reinscribed. This will involve a consid-
eration, on the one hand, of instances when national and cultural demar-
cations are blurred and, on the other hand, moments when the geopolit-
ical efficacy of the border is made visible through deportations and other
acts of exclusion.
6 A. FERNÁNDEZ-GARCÍA

Chapter 5, “The Barrio as a Hybrid Space: Growing Up Between

Nationalism and Feminism in Mary Helen Ponce’s Hoyt Street: An Auto-
biography,” analyzes how Mary Helen negotiates her identity in and
through the barrio of Pacoima. Section 5.1, entitled “The Chicanx Bar-
rio: A Space of Pain and Pleasure,” provides an overview of the repre-
sentation of the barrio in Chicanx literature, with an emphasis on the
dialogue between positive and negative images that characterizes most
depictions of this urban space. Ponce’s novel is presented as an example
of this ambiguity, even if scholarship has concentrated on the feelings of
communal love, solidarity, and happiness that the author attributes to life
in Pacoima. Thus, this section emphasizes the largely dismissed gender
dimension of her novel, pointing toward a more complicated portrayal
in which Chicano cultural nationalism and Chicana feminism have left an
imprint. Section 5.2, “Pacoima Talks Back: Contesting Established Narra-
tives of the Chicanx Barrio,” draws on barriological discourse to analyze,
on the one hand, Ponce’s promotion of the cultural practices that stir up
community pride and a sense of belonging in the narrator and her neigh-
bors and, on the other hand, her critique of the structures of dominant
urbanism intended to wipe out the barrio. Section 5.3, “How About Bar-
rio Women? A Critique of Gender Asymmetries in the Community,” con-
centrates on the gender injustices prevalent in the community, and hence
it takes a close look at the way machismo and marianismo define roles and
relationships in Pacoima. This section closes with an analysis of Ponce’s
alternation between seemingly conflicting ideologies and sentiments by
resorting to Chela Sandoval’s “differential consciousness,” shedding light
on the complex identity that she acquires as she grows up in the barrio.
Finally, Chapter 6, “Continuities and Discontinuities Between Home
and School: Towards a Multi-layered Understanding of Social Spaces in
Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican and Almost a Woman,”
examines how Negi’s identity negotiations constitute and are reconsti-
tuted in the microspaces of the home and the school, with special atten-
tion to the complicated tensions and connections between both environ-
ments. The first section, “Socializing New People in New Settings,” pro-
vides, firstly, an overview of the literature on home-school relations when
it comes to ethnic minority children and, secondly, presents the novels
under study as examples of the way Latina boom writers include and chal-
lenge mainstream multicultural motifs in their texts. This section places
the interest on the subversive dimension and on how this is manifested in
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

the spaces of the home and the school. The second section, “Daily Migra-
tions: Minding the Gap Between Home and School,” pays attention to
how the protagonist experiences and carefully negotiates a gap between
her home and the school, focusing on the different roles she takes up in
each setting. This involves a consideration of the power structures govern-
ing these places and how they mediate Negi’s performances. By contrast,
the third and last section, “Destabilizing Demarcations Between Home
and School: Mingling Social Practices, Values, and Meanings,” examines
the way these gaps are blurred as the protagonist incorporates a complex
amalgam of different value systems into her sense of identity, leading us to
consider the multiple (and often conflicting) elements that coalesce into
personal identities and social spaces.
This plurality of scenarios will offer a multidimensional picture of the
experiences of girls under study here and the different paths they take to
undo mainstream conceptions of places and identities. In negotiating their
daily lives across these multiple contexts, the girls that Alvarez, Cantú,
Ponce, and Santiago portray advance alternative ways of thinking about
subjectivites and spatialities, putting forward epistemologies and ethics
that challenge the contours and limits of coloniality. Thus, in line with
Michel Foucault’s claim that “where there is power, there is resistance”
(1978, 95), this book will show how the current logic of power makes
room for the destabilization of a Euro-American worldview on the part of
a youth group that is often rendered voiceless and denied the opportunity
to see themselves reflected in a world where girls are becoming more and
more visible.

Notes
1. The ethnic label “Latinx” is an umbrella term that covers diverse groups
of Latin American descent and thus erases substantial differences among
individual groups. However, it would be hard to use specific terms—such
as Chicanx, Puerto Rican, Dominican American, and Cuban American—
when referring to all the groups that are subsumed under this label. I use
it with no intention to disregard the specific socio-historical circumstances
of each group but for the purpose of a more practical and simple usage.
2. Unlike “Mexican American,” which is generally perceived as a neutral term,
“Chicanx” is a more politicized designation that signifies pride and ethnic
identity. However, to avoid unwieldy repetition, the terms “Mexican Amer-
ican” and “Chicanx” will be used interchangeably throughout this study
8 A. FERNÁNDEZ-GARCÍA

to refer to people of Mexican ancestry born and/or raised in the United

States.
3. In academic writing, foreign words are usually italicized. However, I will
only italicize those Spanish words that come up rarely. By contrast, terms
such as “barrio,” “marianismo,” “machismo,” “malinchismo/malinchista,”
“frontera,” “comadres/comadrazgo,” and “mestiza,” which keep recurring
throughout this study and are household names in the field of Latinx Stud-
ies, will be italicized only at their first occurrence.

Works Cited
Alvarez, Julia. 2009. Return to Sender. New York: Yearling.
Brady, Mary Pat. 2006. “Double-Crossing the Border.” In The Chicana/o Cul-
tural Studies Reader, edited by Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, 150–160. New
York and London: Routledge.
Cantú, Norma E. 2015/1995. Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera.
Updated ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Information Age: Economy Society and Culture, Vol-
ume 1: The Rise of a Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans-
lated by Robert Hurley. New York: Random House.
Gil Araújo, Sandra. 2010. “The Coloniality of Power and Ethnic Affinity in
Migration Policy: The Spanish Case.” In Decolonizing European Sociology:
Transdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez,
Manuela Boatcă, and Sérgio Costa, 179–194. Farnham and Burlington: Ash-
gate.
Holloway, Sarah L., and Gill Valentine. 2000. Children’s Geographies: Playing,
Living, Learning. London and New York: Routledge.
Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern
Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton and London: Princeton Univer-
sity Press.
Pérez, Emma. 1999. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Ponce, Mary Helen. 1993. Hoyt Street: An Autobiography. Albuquerque: Uni-
versity of New Mexico Press.
Santiago, Esmeralda. 2012/1998. Almost a Woman: A Memoir. New York: Da
Capo.
———. 2006/1993. When I Was a Puerto Rican: A Memoir. New York: Da
Capo.
 CHAPTER 2

Latina Girlhood: Questions of Identity

and Representation

2.1 Latina Girls: A Growing Gap Between

Population and Representation
In addition to being the second fastest-growing US minority group after
Asians, Latinxs are a remarkably young population, with 60% between
the ages of 18 and 33 or younger (Patten 2016). Latina girls in particular
make up more than one in five girls aged 5–17, and their numbers are
expected to increase in the coming decades (Girl Scout Research Institute
2013). However, despite this increasing demographic growth, the level of
inclusion of Latina girls in academic scholarship and in traditional media
remains stunningly low.
This discursive invisibilization is also at odds with the growing popu-
larity and ubiquity of female youth in and across a wide array of disciplines
and cultural practices. This increasing presence has coalesced into the field
of girls’ studies, which considers the experience of girls in contexts as var-
ied as schooling, family life, and popular culture, moving from discourses
constraining who and how girls can be toward notions of what they can
do (Harris 2004; Kearney 2009).1 Although born in the 1970s in reac-
tion against the sexist orientation of much research on youth, this boom-
ing area of critical inquiry did not gain wide notoriety until the 1990s
with the rise to prominence of decolonizing and de-universalizing per-
spectives such as US Third World feminism and poststructuralism. Up to

© The Author(s) 2020 9

A. Fernández-García, Geographies of Girlhood in US
Latina Writing, Literatures of the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20107-4_2
10 A. FERNÁNDEZ-GARCÍA

that moment, feminist scholarship on youth was focused on understand-

ing women more than girls. This means that female youth were rarely
discussed in their own terms, but instead, they were analyzed in relation
to their future role as women. The redirection of feminist attention to
intersectional and fragmented identities brought the variables of age and
generation to the fore, preparing the ground for the phenomenal growth
that girls’ studies have experienced since the early 1990s. But this is not
the only triggering factor to be taken into account. The girl-centered
commercial frenzy that started two decades ago has a lot to do with the
concurrent rise in research on girlhood.
Thus, female youth are now the object of inquiry in articles published
in a wide range of peer-reviewed journals, particularly those centered on
youth, such as Youth & Society, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, and
Journal of Youth Studies. Even eminent feminist academic journals, such
as Gender & Society and Journal of Gender Studies, have made room for
girls in some of their issues. More importantly, this growing interest in
female youth has resulted in the publication of encyclopedias, books, and
edited collections entirely dedicated to girlhood issues. Published for the
first time in 2008, Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal was the
first journal to offer a space for the discussion of girl-centered aspects
in a variety of contexts, such as schooling, sexuality, and popular culture.
Similar issues are at the center of the edited volumes Girlhood in America:
An Encyclopaedia (Forman-Brunell 2001) and Girlhood: A Global History
(Helgren and Vasconcellos 2010).
However, not all girls attract the same attention in the field. Even if the
cultural landscapes and racial geographies of America are becoming ever
more diverse, the majority of this literature treats the Anglo middle-class
girl as a universal figure, without critical attention to her racial/ethnic and
class location (Ward and Benjamin 2004; Mazzarella and Pecora 2007;
Kearney 2009). Latina girls are therefore underrepresented in scholarship
on girlhood, and, when present, they are often imbued with a patholo-
gizing discourse that focuses on what they lack materially, intellectually,
or psychologically (Denner and Guzmán 2006). Teen pregnancies, drug
abuse, dysfunctional families, poor academic performance, gang activity,
and psychological disorders are commonly associated with these girls,
even if most of them are “fully engaged” in their environment and well-
being (Pittman et al. in Denner and Guzmán 2006, 1). From this follows
that there is a tendency to objectify Latina girls as victims in scholarly
work, to portray them as perpetually troubled, a controlling image that
 2 LATINA GIRLHOOD: QUESTIONS OF IDENTITY AND REPRESENTATION 11

seeks to legitimize the subordination of this youth group. Interestingly,

however, this tendency is being challenged by an increasing body of schol-
arship that revolves around the capacity of these girls to confront life chal-
lenges (see Hyams 2003; Denner and Guzmán 2006; Camarotta 2008).
This line of research has been mostly taken up by Latinx scholars, who
wish to offer a more heterogeneous view of this youth group.
As occurs throughout scholarship on girlhood, the variables of race,
ethnicity, and class are frequently excluded from the ever-growing girls’
culture (Kearney 2009, 18), which includes cultural artifacts (TV shows,
movies, books, or magazines) targeted at an audience of girls, regardless
of whether they are manufactured by adults or by female youth them-
selves. It can then be argued that the “girlification” of consumer culture
is mainly for and about a white girl, which leaves Latinas out of the ques-
tion. This foregrounds a paradoxical situation, whereby the growing con-
sumer power of Latinxs is out of step with the rate of incorporation of
Latina female youth in girls’ culture.
There are however a few noteworthy examples that conceal the real
scarcity of Latina female youth in popular culture. The preschool ani-
mated TV series Dora the Explorer (2000–) is the most obvious one.
The global reach of this show and its cross-merchandising have made
its seven-year-old Latina protagonist highly visible.2 Yet, this visibility has
been accompanied by controversy. In this sense, many scholars have cast
a critical eye on the show’s floating cultural signifiers and mishmash of
Latinx-themed elements, as they portray a homogenizing view of Latinx
cultures that runs counter to the multicultural bent that motivated the
creation of the show (see Valdivia 2011; de Casanova 2013). Conversely,
others have praised this TV series for featuring a Latina girl with the abil-
ity and strength to save characters in distress and solve other problematic
situations, which has the effect of empowering other Latinas into believ-
ing that they can be also strong and proactive (see Ryan 2010).
The Wizards of Waverly Place (2007–2012) is another hit TV series fea-
turing a Latina girl who, unlike Dora, has a clear cultural affiliation: She
is part Mexican. However, the Mexican signifiers are so scarce (they are
limited to random comments about the protagonist’s heritage) that it is
easy for the teen audience to forget about the ethnicity of the protagonist
(Valdivia 2011, 102). This subtle characterization, which also involves a
light-skinned complexion, is not a rare occurrence in mainstream televi-
sion and cinema, but is present in several other shows, such as the teen
TV movies The Cheetah Girls (Valdivia 2011, 100). As specialist in media
12 A. FERNÁNDEZ-GARCÍA

studies Angharad N. Valdivia argues, these light-brown, ambiguous ver-

sions of Latinidad are intended to appeal to a broad range of global
ethnicities from white to black (2011, 96). However, although these rep-
resentations enrich the ethnic landscape within girls’ culture, we cannot
disregard the fact that they marginalize blackness from the mainstream,
a displacement that reflects the anxieties motivated by the threat of dif-
ference and political power of Afro-Latinxs (2011, 106).3 On the other
hand, there is also a tendency within mainstream media to sexualize and
exoticize Latina girls, “a tradition that serves to position Latinas as con-
tinual foreigners and a cultural threat” (Guzman and Valdivia 2004, 217).
Santana, one of the central characters of the teen musical comedy-drama
television series Glee (2009–2015), is a remarkable example. Presented as
a hot-headed and hypersexualized Latina, this character is subjected to
the sexual spectacularization that often accompanies the representation of
Latinas (especially adults), mirroring anxieties about the increasing immi-
gration and reproduction of Latinas.
Contrary to the aforementioned superficial and stereotypical represen-
tations, there are independent Latinx-made movies that offer more com-
plex and ethnically marked portrayals of Latina girls, such as Selena (Nava
1997), Girlfight (Kusama 2000), and Real Women Have Curves (Car-
doso 2002). Although not as popular as the shows referred to above and
appealing to both teenagers and adults, several Latinx studies scholars
value these films for offering more nuanced depictions of Latina youth
that challenge mainstream tropes of exoticism (see Baez 2007; Rosales
Herrera 2013). In this sense, they picture girls negotiating their identities
in a bicultural world that poses obstacles as varied as racial discrimination,
male chauvinism, and the need to take up family responsibilities that go
against one’s interests. However, in their attempt to make these stories
palatable to dominant society, these movies end up portraying a generic
story of success and assimilation that involves the rejection of the cul-
tures of origin, which are rendered as backward, patriarchal, and oppres-
sive (Rodríguez y Gibson 2009; Rosales Herrera 2013). The association
of Latinx cultures with backwardness and the host society with modernity
and prosperity is in fact the price that many Latinx creators very frequently
have to pay to cross over to the mainstream market (Rodríguez y Gibson
2009).
Research studies looking at the image of Latinx youth in children’s and
young adult literature published from the 1930s through 2005 also indi-
cate a history of perpetual cultural inaccuracies and stereotypes (Naidoo
 2 LATINA GIRLHOOD: QUESTIONS OF IDENTITY AND REPRESENTATION 13

2011, 59). Yet, I contend that this representational trend is reversed in

children’s and young adult texts by Latina writers, where girls are gen-
erally portrayed in more complex and culturally accurate ways, although
themes vary depending on whether the targeted audience is children or
young adults. In this sense, literary critic Mary Pat Brady argues that Lat-
inx young adult literature provides greater opportunity to discuss difficult
and challenging experiences that impact on the development of many
Latinx youngsters, as opposed to Latinx children’s texts, which tend to
“emphasize extended, heteronormative, happy families, and the broad-
spirited facility of Spanglish –which is to say quotidian pleasures rather
than equally quotidian dangers” (2013, 380).4 The avoidance of issues
such as migration, alienation, identity confusion, sexism, or racism in chil-
dren’s literature can be traced to writers’ patronizing sense that young
children should not read about dangers (even though they must navigate
them) (2013, 380); similarly, it can be linked to an effort that Arlene
Dávila has highlighted on the part of corporate media at large—to cre-
ate a flaccid, easily consumable sense of Latinidad, with colorful, cheer-
ful, cooperative families, where English and Spanish flicker past (2008,
25–45). The conflation of non-threatening themes and a cheery visual
matrix does little to reimagine the social differently from what the domi-
nant imagery offers and to interrogate the legacies of colonial modernity.
Young adult literature, on the other hand, tangles with vexing issues such
as immigration rights, displacement, and discrimination, opening avenues
for an exploration and critique of the colonial structures of power that
shape the characters’ experiences.
Latina writers such as Julia Alvarez, Esmeralda Santiago, Judith Ortiz
Cofer, Nicholasa Mohr, and Sandra Cisneros have authored important
young adult texts that have made their way into the Latinx canon. How
the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (Alvarez 1991), When I Was Puerto
Rican (Santiago 2006/1993), Almost a Woman (Santiago 2012/1998),
and The House on Mango Street (Cisneros 2009/1984) are some remark-
able examples. They explore how their female protagonists deal with
issues such as loss, alienation, cultural hybridity, and exclusion as they
navigate the US society, offering illuminating insights into what it is like
to grow up Latina in the United States. There are other important texts
that, although not classified as young adult fiction by publishers, also pro-
vide interesting and complex portrayals of Latina girlhood, taking readers
on an exploration of the challenges that the girls have to face on their
path to adulthood. Some of them are two of the novels discussed in this
14 A. FERNÁNDEZ-GARCÍA

book—Norma E. Cantú’s Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Fron-

tera (2015/1995) and Mary Helen Ponce’s Hoyt Street: An Autobiog-
raphy (1993). As a matter of fact, these texts include many of the char-
acteristics that much literary scholarship attributes to young adult fiction
(see Herz and Gallo 2005; Hill 2014). In addition to presenting a Latina
girl as the protagonist and focalizer of the action, these novels contain
issues to which other Latina teenagers may relate (discrimination, gener-
ational differences, (un)belonging, or sexism) and an uncomplicated but
never simplistic plot and language. For these reasons, these texts may also
appeal to younger readers, contributing to enlarging a literary genre that
is concerned with giving visibility to the experiences of young adults.

2.2 Cultural Scripts for Latina Girls:

Good Girls vs. Bad Girls
Although Latina identities are fluid and heterogeneous, growing up
Latina in the United States often means negotiating a set of patriarchal
discourses that dictate gender roles and expectations for behavior. The
discourses of marianismo, machismo, and malinchismo are very important
in this regard. The first and the second have been widely cited in US social
literature to describe prototypical gender roles among Latinxs, which pre-
scribe women’s unequal position in relation to men (see Gil and Vazquez
2002; Sequeira 2009). Malinchismo, on the other hand, is referred to
as a discourse intended at repressing and denigrating those women in
Mexican/Chicanx contexts who step out of the realm of patriarchal con-
trol, establishing clear differences between “appropriate” and “inappro-
priate” feminine behavior (see Hurtado 1996, 2003). Latina literature
focusing on girls’ growing-up experiences provides a space for the explo-
ration of these patriarchal discourses, for it frequently depicts socialization
processes influenced, to varying degrees, by these sets of meanings. The
novels under study here are a perfect example, as they portray girls that
adhere to and challenge these three notions, showing dynamic patterns
of female socialization. Thus, in order to gain a better grasp of the Latinx
patriarchal discourses that the characters have to negotiate as they grow
up, this section will offer a brief overview of marianismo, machismo, and
malinchismo.
Originating in Spain and introduced into Latin America by the con-
quest, marianismo and machismo are ideological constructions that serve
 2 LATINA GIRLHOOD: QUESTIONS OF IDENTITY AND REPRESENTATION 15

as a model for gender relations. They are two sides of the same coin: Nei-
ther of them can exist nor be understood without the other. The practice
of machismo implicitly relies on notions of “proper” womanhood, and
similarly, the definition of marianismo can only be understood in rela-
tion to a macho masculinity. In their most basic form, they are ideolog-
ical and cultural expressions for male domination and female subordina-
tion. As such, they both prescribe limited roles and experiences for men
and women, creating a binary and stereotypical understanding of the two
groups.
Marianismo refers to the expectation that women embrace the venera-
tion of the Virgin Mary. Thus, it involves premarital chastity, postnuptial
frigidity, subordination, suffering, selfless devotion to family and children,
and responsibility for all domestic chores (Lopez-Baez 1999; Sequeira
2009). Meanwhile, machismo is predominately linked to an exaggerated
masculinity and male chauvinism (Tarrant 2013/2008). From this per-
spective, the ideal image of a man is someone strong, virile, and in per-
sonal control of people and things. These social and cultural expecta-
tions frequently lead men to behave in domineering and oppressive ways
toward women, giving way to violent situations in which the latter are
coerced physically and morally (Gutmann 2006/1996). On the other
hand, as other Latinx studies scholars have argued, machismo can carry
other less destructive meanings; it also involves the view of a man who
is responsible and provides for his family economically and socially (see
Morales 1996; Mayo 1997). Yet, this should not lead us to disregard the
male superiority/female inferiority dichotomy that the gender notion of
machismo presupposes and the pernicious effects this hierarchy has on
many women and girls.
These patriarchal discourses translate into a series of gender role
demands that the characters under study here have to navigate. In this
sense, they are encouraged to be subservient to their male relatives, take
care of their siblings, and refrain from having sex before marriage, among
other things. As suggested earlier, these girls sometimes fulfill and some-
times challenge these gender expectations, complicating the virgin/whore
dichotomy that denies, silences, and contains female sexual subjectivity
within Latinx patriarchal contexts.
Mexican/Chicanx patriarchy constructs a view of feminine gender that
embodies the aforementioned marianismo and machismo expectations;
however, in this case the ultimate ideal of womanhood and the archetype
of the whore are iconographed by two female figures that are specific
16 A. FERNÁNDEZ-GARCÍA

to the Mexican/Chicanx tradition: the Virgin of Guadalupe, the indige-

nous Mexican counterpart of the Virgin Mary, and La Malinche, the sym-
bolic mother of Chicanxs and Mexicans. The second figure has given way
to the discourse of malinchismo or female treachery. This discourse has
been described most famously by Octavio Paz in his essay “Los Hijos
de la Malinche,” included in the collection El laberinto de la soledad
(1992/1950). He explains that malinchismo refers to the sense of an
unpatriotic betrayal of the nation to foreign interests (1992/1950, 35).
Therefore, to be called a malinchista is to be called a traitor or lover
of the foreign. Although according to this definition a malinchista does
not have to be a woman necessarily, Paz reveals a notion with misogy-
nistic undertones. He traces the origins of malinchismo to La Malinche,
the Indian mistress and go-between of Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés.
This female historical figure is seen by Paz as passively giving in to the ene-
my’s sexual advances. He further characterizes this alleged passivity as the
loss of name and identity, which he extends to all women: “[La Malinche]
es la atroz encarnación de la condición femenina” (Paz 1992/1950, 35).
By this logic, not only is this female figure condemned for having (being
forced to have) sexual intercourse with the conqueror, but she and all
women are held responsible for the violations done to her, themselves and
Mexico. No attention is therefore paid to men’s responsibilities in this
aggression—they are only criticized for being unable to relate to either
of their symbolic parents; their hate toward each of them makes them
orphans, wandering souls in the Labyrinth of solitude (1992/1950, 27–
36). Women, however, get the worst part, since their sexuality is severely
stigmatized (Moraga 1983; Gaspar de Alba 2005). Thus, in Paz’s view
malinchismo is strongly connected to the betrayal of the Mexican people
by the passiveness and penetrability of La Malinche.
This conception has played a significant part in Mexico since it pro-
claimed its independence from Spain, finally making its way into the Chi-
canx context.5 Such negative view was in fact upheld by the male lead-
ers of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s, who used the term “malin-
chista” to denounce those women who did not submit to the sexism of
the movement. Decrying these women as malinchistas suggested, there-
fore, that they would aid in the oppression of their people—they would
destroy Chicano culture just as La Malinche was accused of doing. These
patriarchal and misogynistic discourses contributed to the consolidation
of the gendered subject position of the “bad” woman in Chicano culture,
serving as a counterpoint to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Norma Alarcón
 2 LATINA GIRLHOOD: QUESTIONS OF IDENTITY AND REPRESENTATION 17

explains how Chicanas negotiate both archetypes in her well-known work

on La Malinche:

When our subjection is manifested through devotion we are saints and

escape direct insult. When we are disobedient, hence undevout, we are
equated with Malintzin; that is, the myth of male consciousness, not the
historical figure in all her dimensions doomed to live in chains (regard-
less of which patriarchy might have seemed the best option for survival).
(2002/1981, 208)

Thus, not following the marianismo ideals of purity, suffering, self-

sacrifice, and passive endurance puts Chicanas in line with the patriar-
chal fabrication of the treacherous Malinche, condemning them to social
ostracism and instilling in them a sense of shame for not behaving as
expected.
Lastly, it is paramount to take into account the role that mothers (and
also grandmothers and even aunts and comadres ) play in passing these
patriarchal norms and beliefs onto the main characters. As much scholar-
ship on the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and nationalism sustains,
women in patriarchal contexts are regarded as biological and cultural
reproducers of the nation (see Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989; Kandiy-
oti 1994; Yuval-Davis 1997). According to this view, women perform
this role in two ways. First, they are traditionally responsible for teach-
ing the next generation of citizens the cultural traditions and ideolo-
gies of the nation. Through their roles as mothers and caregivers, they
have the power to either reinscribe or transform national ideologies. Sec-
ond, women exist as symbolic boundary markers of the nation; they are
“privileged signifiers of national difference” (Kandiyoti 1994, 388). Such
markers (“proper” behavior, honor, purity, etc.) serve to distinguish the
community from others; hence, women embody and perform the col-
lective understanding of national gender identities (Yuval-Davis 1997,
46). Interpellated by these same patriarchal ideologies, the protagonists’
female relatives act as vehicles for expressing and enforcing these national
discourses, as we will see.
18 A. FERNÁNDEZ-GARCÍA

2.3 The Latina Bildungsroman as a Decolonial

Space: Unearthing Unheard Voices,
Decolonizing and Reconstructing Paradigms
and Concepts
The texts under study in this book belong in the tradition of the Bil-
dungsroman, a literary genre that Latina writers have often relied on
to construct a space in which the voices and growing-up experiences of
Latina girls are brought to the fore, contesting the discursive invisibiliza-
tion of this youth group. This recurrent reliance on the Bildungsroman
(also known as novel of development/self-realization or coming-of-age
narrative) is, in my view, grounded on the genre’s defining feature: the
focus on a character’s self-development or path to maturation. There are
of course Bildungsromane that center on the psychological and moral
growth of adults, but I contend that the genre’s attention to the inner
development of a character is best correlated by boys’ and girls’ transi-
tional status to adulthood. As British cultural anthropologist Victor W.
Turner argues in his studies on liminality and rites of passage (1977,
50), the in-between or liminal stage that girls and boys inhabit as they
come of age is characterized by continuous change, play, performance,
and ambiguity, a dynamism that, in my opinion, best fits the Bildungsro-
man’s chief feature. Significantly too, Turner’s understanding of liminal-
ity points toward the transformative potential engendered by the liminal
position of youth, apparent in their capacity for play and performance, or,
in other words, their power to try new ways of being, even if only tem-
porarily, which in turn enables the destabilization of hierarchies and social
conventions. This subversive action can be identified in many coming-of-
age narratives featuring Latina youth, showing the capacity of these girls
to construct and reconstruct their own lifeworlds.
In this section, I theorize the Bildungsroman by Latina writers as a
discursive space that emerges from a dialogue between the colonial and
the postcolonial, which brings about the decolonization and redefinition
of paradigms and concepts. My conceptualization is based on decolonial
and border thinking, an epistemology and an ethics that gained notoriety
in the 1990s thanks to the work of Latinx and Latin American schol-
ars, such as Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Chela
Sandoval, among others. This line of thought and action aims to ques-
tion and problematize the structures of power, control, and hegemony
 2 LATINA GIRLHOOD: QUESTIONS OF IDENTITY AND REPRESENTATION 19

that outlived colonialism and became integrated into today’s neocolo-

nial, global, patriarchal, capitalist social order, silencing, and subjugating
oppressed groups. These histories of power emerging from Europe are
known by the term “global coloniality” (Quijano 1993, 2000). The inter-
rogation of these structures goes hand in hand with the recognition and
implementation of subaltern reason, a means of eliminating the provincial
tendency to pretend that Western European modes of thinking are in fact
universal ones (Quijano 2000, 544).
In order to prepare the ground for my discussion, it is necessary to
first devote some lines to briefly account for the evolution of the Bil-
dungsroman as a genre, paying special attention to the prerogatives that
it initially presupposed and the way these have been challenged by women
writers. As a wide range of feminist literary scholarship has demonstrated,
the ideological configurations of the Bildungsroman are patriarchal and
Eurocentric (see Labovitz 1987; Felski 1989; Fraiman 1993). Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1982/1795)—which came to be known as
the first Bildungsroman and as the model for this genre in German litera-
ture—and other earliest examples of novels of development written during
the Golden Age of Western Narrative—e.g., Charles Dicken’s David Cop-
perfield (1994/1849) and Great Expectations (1996/1861)—trace the
development of a male character who makes his own way through the
world. He undertakes a physical as much as a symbolic journey in which
he finds himself at odds with society’s convictions, a conflict between
free self-making and social determination that demands “accommodation
to the modern world” to be resolved successfully (Buckley 1974, 17).
Social integration, however, does not threaten the protagonist’s auton-
omy or his perception of his own manhood. He in fact grows into a
mature, wiser, self-conscious man who is ready to exercise his agency in
a male-dominated society. Thus, the traditional Bildung (i.e., the process
of formation) carries with it bourgeois and humanist assumptions about
the shaping of the coherent self through social experience, the autonomy
and relative integrity of the individual, and a person’s upward movement
toward personal fulfillment. These notions have been turned upside down
in female Bildungsromane, leading to a redefinition of classical narratives
of Bildung .
Nineteenth-century writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë,
Frances Burney, or Kate Chopin demonstrate that the conditions for self-
development are vastly different for women. Unlike their male contempo-
raries, who provide models for “growing up,” these female writers show
20 A. FERNÁNDEZ-GARCÍA

that the female Bildung is more about “growing down,” meaning that
the heroine’s vitality and willingness to open herself up to a world of
possibilities are shattered by her ultimate integration into a society that
either confines them to domestic life or propels them toward the abyss
of madness or death, as feminist literary critic Annis Pratt points out in
Archetypal Patterns of Women’s Fiction (1981, 13–40).
These difficulties to achieve “authentic” selfhood reveal the patriarchal
bias of the genre, for it ultimately devises a society that caters to men
exclusively. That is, the hero’s journey prepares him to conform to soci-
etal expectations that allow him to cultivate and express his inner powers,
conquer the public sphere, and exercise some power over his own life-
worlds. However, we should take into account how the aforementioned
nineteenth-century women authors contribute to redefining a patriarchal
and bourgeois genre first by casting female heroines as the protagonists
and second by portraying a pattern of downward development that is far
from being linear or harmonious.
Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, and Sylvia Plath are examples of
more contemporary Bildungsroman writers who challenge dominant ideas
of Bildung by portraying female characters’ growth into plural, con-
flicted selves who generally enjoy greater independence and autonomy
than nineteenth-century heroines, although not without constant back-
lash. Their most well-known Bildungsromane were published around the
1960s, coinciding with the advent of the second-wave feminist move-
ment.
The Civil Rights Movement and the push for the postmodern decon-
struction of cultural and social hegemony were crucial for the prolifera-
tion of novels of development by so-called ethnic women writers. Other
factors pertaining only to the genre’s nature were also paramount for this
explosion. I am referring to the Bildungsroman’s suitability to give expres-
sion to marginalized voices, as follows from Bonnie Hoover Braendlin’s
definition of the ethnic female Bildungsroman in America:

These narratives portray the identity and adjustment problems of people

whose sex or color renders them unacceptable to the dominant society;
it expresses their struggle for individuation and a part in the American
dream, which society simultaneously profess and denies to them. This new
Bildungsroman asserts an identity defined by the outsiders themselves or by
their own cultures, not by the patriarchal Anglo-American power structure;
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