Geographies of Girlhood in US Latina Writing

Geographies of Girlhood in US Latina Writing PDF Author: Andrea Fernández-García
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030201074
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
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 avenues for 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.

Geographies of Girlhood in US Latina Writing

Geographies of Girlhood in US Latina Writing PDF Author: Andrea Fernández-García
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030201074
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 avenues for 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.

Cosmopolitan Strangers in US Latinx Literature and Culture

Cosmopolitan Strangers in US Latinx Literature and Culture PDF Author: Esther Álvarez-López
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100083705X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
This book presents a study of the figure of the stranger in US Latinx literary and cultural forms, ranging from contemporary novels through essays to film and transborder art activism. The focus on this abject figure is twofold: first, to explore its potential to expose the processes of othering to which Latinxs are subjected; and, second, to foreground its epistemic response to neocolonial structures and beliefs. Thus, this book draws on relevant sociological literature on the stranger to unveil the political and social processes behind the recognition of Latinxs as ‘out of place.’ On the other hand, and most importantly, this volume follows the path of neo-cosmopolitan approaches to bring to the fore processes of interrelatedness, interaction, and conviviality that run counter to criminalizing discourses around Latinxs. Through an engagement with these theoretical tenets, the goal of this book is to showcase the role of the Latinx stranger as a cosmopolitan mediator that transforms walls into bridges.

Welcome to Oxnard

Welcome to Oxnard PDF Author: Cristina Herrera
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 082299142X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Michele Serros (1966–2015) is widely known for her groundbreaking book Chicana Falsa and Other Stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard. Despite her status as a major figure in Chicanx literature, no scholar has written a book-length examination of her body of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—until now. Cristina Herrera, also from Oxnard, weaves in history, autoethnography, and literary analysis to explore Chicana adolescence and young womanhood with a focus on place-making. Factoring in location, region, and landscape, Herrera asks what it means to grow up Chicana in settings that carry centuries of colonial violence, segregation, and everyday racism against Mexican American communities. She contends that Serros used her hometown to broaden understandings of who and what constitutes Chicanx communities and identities. By reading Serros’s work in tandem with her lived experience in the same setting, Herrera uncovers moments of adolescent subjectivity that could only be vocalized and constructed within this particular locale. Herrera pushes against the tendency to separate the author from the text and argues for a spatial understanding of Chicana adolescence, race, class, and young womanhood.

Reading U.S. Latina Writers

Reading U.S. Latina Writers PDF Author: A. Quintana
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403982252
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
This essential teaching guide focuses on an emerging body of literature by U.S. Latina and Latin American Women writers. It will assist non-specialist educators in syllabus revision, new course design and classroom presentation. The inclusive focus of the book - that is, combining both US Latina and Latin American women writers - is significant because it introduces a more global and transnational way of approaching the literature. The introduction outlines the major historical experiences that inform the literature, the important genres, periods, movements and authors in its evolution; the traditions and influences that shape the works; and key critical issues of which teachers should be aware. The collection seeks to provide readers with a variety of Latina texts that will guarantee its long-term usefulness to teachers and students of pan-American literature. Because it is no longer possible to understand U.S. Latina literature without taking into consideration the histories and cultures of Latin America, the volume will, through its organization, argue for a more globalized type of analysis which considers the similarities as well as the differences in U.S. and Latin American women's cultural productions. In this context, the term Latina evokes a diasporic, transnational condition in order to address some of the pedagogical issues posed by the bicultural nature which is inherent in pan-American women's literature.

(In)Hospitable Encounters in Chicanx and Latinx Literature, Culture, and Thought

(In)Hospitable Encounters in Chicanx and Latinx Literature, Culture, and Thought PDF Author: Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040134521
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
This volume addresses the notion of (in)hospitality in the culture, literature, and thought of Chicanx and Latinx in the United States. It underscores those “stranger others” against whom nativist fear and state violence are directed: undocumented migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Critical analyses focus on the topics of immigration and state violence, hospitality in written and visual narratives, and the role of hospitality in the translation of academic and literary works. All essays explore the conditional character of hospitality towards Chicanx and Latinx and its attending myths and discourses. Dwelling on the predicament that individuals and groups face as strangers, unwelcome guests, and unwilling hosts, the essays also explore the ways in which Chicanx and Latinx writers, artists, and filmmakers may or may not challenge the guest-host relationship. The ethical concern that runs through the volume considers material history and the institutional, disciplinary regulation of the uncertainty of hospitality acts as factors determining the narratives about foreign others.

Canícula

Canícula PDF Author: Norma E. Cantú
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 9780826318282
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
In this fictionalized memoir of Laredo, Texas, canícula represents a time between childhood and a yet unknown adulthood.

Cabañuelas

Cabañuelas PDF Author: Norma Elia Cantú
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826360629
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Nena leaves Laredo, Texas, and moves to Madrid, Spain, to research the historical roots of traditional fiestas in Laredo. Immersing herself in post-Franco Spain and its rich history, its food, music, and fiestas, Nena finds herself falling for Paco, a Spaniard who works in publishing. Nena’s research and experiences teach her about who she is, where she comes from, and what is important to her, but as her work comes to a close, Nena must decide where she can best be true to her entire self: in Spain with Paco or in Laredo, her home, where her job and family await her return.

Chicana Sexuality and Gender

Chicana Sexuality and Gender PDF Author: Debra J. Blake
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822381222
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Since the 1980s Chicana writers including Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Alma Luz Villanueva have reworked iconic Mexican cultural symbols such as mother earth goddesses and La Llorona (the Wailing Woman of Mexican folklore), re-imagining them as powerful female figures. After reading the works of Chicana writers who created bold, powerful, and openly sexual female characters, Debra J. Blake wondered how everyday Mexican American women would characterize their own lives in relation to the writers’ radical reconfigurations of female sexuality and gender roles. To find out, Blake gathered oral histories from working-class and semiprofessional U.S. Mexicanas. In Chicana Sexuality and Gender, she compares the self-representations of these women with fictional and artistic representations by academic-affiliated, professional intellectual Chicana writers and visual artists, including Alma M. López and Yolanda López. Blake looks at how the Chicana professional intellectuals and the U.S. Mexicana women refigure confining and demeaning constructions of female gender roles and racial, ethnic, and sexual identities. She organizes her analysis around re-imaginings of La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Llorona, indigenous Mexica goddesses, and La Malinche, the indigenous interpreter for Hernán Cortés during the Spanish conquest. In doing so, Blake reveals how the professional intellectuals and the working-class and semiprofessional women rework or invoke the female icons to confront the repression of female sexuality, limiting gender roles, inequality in male and female relationships, and violence against women. While the representational strategies of the two groups of women are significantly different and the U.S. Mexicanas would not necessarily call themselves feminists, Blake nonetheless illuminates a continuum of Chicana feminist thinking, showing how both groups of women expand lifestyle choices and promote the health and well-being of women of Mexican origin or descent.

Broken Souths

Broken Souths PDF Author: Michael Dowdy
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816599572
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Broken Souths offers the first in-depth study of the diverse field of contemporary Latina/o poetry. Its innovative angle of approach puts Latina/o and Latin American poets into sustained conversation in original and rewarding ways. In addition, author Michael Dowdy presents ecocritical readings that foreground the environmental dimensions of current Latina/o poetics. Dowdy argues that a transnational Latina/o imaginary has emerged in response to neoliberalism—the free-market philosophy that underpins what many in the northern hemisphere refer to as “globalization.” His work examines how poets represent the places that have been “broken” by globalization’s political, economic, and environmental upheavals. Broken Souths locates the roots of the new imaginary in 1968, when the Mexican student movement crested and the Chicano and Nuyorican movements emerged in the United States. It theorizes that Latina/o poetics negotiates tensions between the late 1960s’ oppositional, collective identities and the present day’s radical individualisms and discourses of assimilation, including the “post-colonial,” “post-national,” and “post-revolutionary.” Dowdy is particularly interested in how Latina/o poetics reframes debates in cultural studies and critical geography on the relation between place, space, and nature. Broken Souths features discussions of Latina/o writers such as Victor Hernández Cruz, Martín Espada, Juan Felipe Herrera, Guillermo Verdecchia, Marcos McPeek Villatoro, Maurice Kilwein Guevara, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Jack Agüeros, Marjorie Agosín, Valerie Martínez, and Ariel Dorfman, alongside discussions of influential Latin American writers, including Roberto Bolaño, Ernesto Cardenal, David Huerta, José Emilio Pacheco, and Raúl Zurita.

Bright Dead Things

Bright Dead Things PDF Author: Ada Limón
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1472154576
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
'Bright Dead Things buoyed me in this dismal year. I'm thankful for this collection, for its wisdom and generosity, for its insistence on holding tight to beauty even as we face disintegration and destruction.' Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You A book of bravado and introspection, of feminist swagger and harrowing loss, Bright Dead Things considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact - tracing in intimate detail the ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth and falls in love. In these extraordinary poems Ada Limón's heart becomes a 'huge beating genius machine' striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. 'I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,' the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds and Mark Doty, Limón's work is consistently generous, accessible, and 'effortlessly lyrical' (New York Times) - though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt and lived.