IDENTITY and EMIGRATION in the WORKS of JULIA ALVAREZ, CRISTINA Garcia, ESMERALDA SANTIAGO and MARIA AMPARO ESCANDON MARTA VIZCA
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IDENTITY AND EMIGRATION IN THE WORKS OF JULIA ALVAREZ, CRISTINA GARCiA, ESMERALDA SANTIAGO AND MARIA AMPARO ESCANDON MARTA VIZCAYA ECHANO PHD THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE JUNE 2004 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgments vi Abstract vii INTRODUCTION 1 PART I Auto/biography, Fiction and Social Concerns 22 CHAPTER 1 Life-Writing and Social Commitment 23 i Problematising Authorial Social 24 Commitment ii Different Possibilities of Life-Writing 30 iii Representing Individual and Collective 43 Identities CHAPTER 2 Questions of Genre 51 i Butterflies: Testimonial Novel And 53 Historiographic Metafiction ii Under the Shadow of Magical Realism: 64 Garcia and Escand6n PART II History, Culture and Immigration 74 CHAPTER 3 Garcia's DC and TAS: 'Is Mercy More 78 Important than Truth?' i Cultural Presences in Cuban 80 Identity ii National and Family Histories 82 iii Gender Struggles and Historical 85 (Re)Constructions iv Physical and Psychological Exiles 91 i DC: 'What Unknown Covenants 93 11 Led Ultimately to This Hour And This Solitude?' ii TAS: 'Everyone's Vision's Splintered' 97 v Garcia and the Cuban American 103 Novel CHAPTER 4 History in Alvarez's Auto/Biographical Fictions 107 i Revising Dominican History 109 i The Conquest 110 ii Trujillo's Era 112 iii After the Dictatorship 116 iv Relations With Cuba 118 vi U.S.-Dominican Relations and 120 Immigration vii "Was It for This, The Sacrifice of the 123 Butterflies?" ii Questions of Gender, Race, and Class 129 i Class Structures and Social Mobility 129 ii (De)Constructing Race 136 iii Gender Roles and Feminist 138 Consciousness iv Gender Struggles and Political 143 Activism in Butterflies iii Conclusion 145 CHAPTER 5 WIWPR and AW: Individual Identity, Socio- 150 Cultural Allegiances and Upward Mobility i The Puerto Rican Years: 1948-1961 153 ii Americanisation and Adolescence 159 iii The Civil Rights Era 165 iv Authorial Representativity and 169 111 Commodification of "Ethnic Life-Writing" CHAPTER 6 EBS: Happy Stories, Absent Histories 179 i Esperanza' s Mexico 182 i Filling the Historical Gaps 183 ii The Crises of the 1980s and 1990s 184 ii Border-Crossing: Tijuana and L.A. 186 iii Cultural and Literary Contexts 191 iv Bad Girls, Good Girls and Esperanza 195 v Conclusion 202 PART III Language and Translation 204 CHAPTER 7 Roles and Connotations of English, Spanish 208 and Other Languages i Spanish vs. English in Garcia's DC and TAS 212 ii Spanish vs. English in Alvarez's GG, iYo! 217 and Butterflies iii Spanish vs. English in Santiago's WIWPR 225 and AW iv Spanglish and Other Languages 228 i Spanglish 228 ii Other Languages 232 iii Hispanicised English, Anglicised 238 Spanish v Conclusion 249 CHAPTER 8 Semantic Fields and Translation of Spanish Entries 252 i Terms of Address 257 ii Culinary Terms 269 iv iii The Body 279 iv Physical and Social Spaces 280 v Flora, Fauna and Weather Terms 283 vi Terms of High Emotional Intensity 287 vii Religion and Magic 288 viii Collective Identities 293 ix Art and Culture 299 x Long Entries 306 xi Conclusion 314 CONCLUSION 317 BIBLIOGRAPHY 329 V ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Stephen Minta for all his help and his advice throughout this project. I am also very grateful to Dr. Elizabeth Tyler, who has been very generous with me. Niels Seaton met me when I first arrived in Great Britain, and his warmth and pep talks have meant a lot ever since. My time in York would not have been the same without Dr. Megan Crane, to whom I owe too much to list here. Tambien le agradezco a Noelia Diaz Vicedo su amistad durante el dia a dia de compartir casa. Mandy Kenyon, Patricia Ruddle and Margot Blanchard have also given me endless support, making me laugh and letting me rant when I needed it. Thanks to the three of you. Gracias tambien a Brigitte Brinquez Anzano, por toda su ayuda. Pero gracias sobre todo a mi familia y en particular a mis padres, Karmele de Echano y Juan Maria Vizcaya, por estar ahi siempre y creer en mi. Esto os lo debo a vosotros. Finally, thanks also to Jonathan Hay, whose help and company throughout these years have been priceless. The research for and writing of this thesis has been undertaken thanks to a Basque Government research grant. vi ABSTRACT This thesis examines selected works by four Latina writers of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and Dominican descent who have moved to the United States: Maria Amparo EscandOn's novel Esperanza's Box of Saints, Esmeralda Santiago's memoirs When I Was Puerto Rican and Almost a Woman, Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban and The Agiiero Sisters, and Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, and in! Intimately linked with their own backgrounds, these writers' literary creations show a deep authorial concern about self- and collective representations, especially regarding the portrayal of those communities with which the authors identify themselves. They also explore different instances of acculturation, re- appropriation of cultural referents and reconfiguration of hybrid subjectivities. As they do so, they make readers confront their perceptions of Latin American, U.S. Latina and mainstream North American cultures. The narratives of Santiago, EscandOn, Garcia and Alvarez bring to the fore how membership of various national or ethnic collectives -Puerto Rican, Mexican, Cuban and Dominican, respectively, as well as U.S. Latina and American- is conceived differently by different individuals, also drawing the reader's attention to the frictions resulting from this divergence. As they can claim simultaneous membership of several of these communities, the authors' and characters' identities can be considered "hybrid". However, when contrasting the works it immediately becomes clear that "hybrid" is not a neutral term. Who applies that word to themselves or to others engages with complex questions of power differentials between certain socio-cultural and racial groups as well as with oppressed sectors' strategies of resistance and empowerment. The first part of the thesis, Auto/Biography, Fiction and Social Concerns, studies the representation of individual and collective identities in the narratives of Garcia, Alvarez, Santiago and EscandOn. Chapter 1, Life-Writing and Social Commitment, links the authors' backgrounds with their narrative materials, their representations of personal and ethnic identities, and their views on their role as writers. Chapter 2, Questions of Genre, deals with these themes at the level of genre, examining the connections of Alvarez's Butterflies with Latin American testimonial writing and analysing Garcia's novels and Escand6n's EBS under the light of magic realism. Part II, History, Culture and Immigration, develops further the questions of identity and its representation in literary works contrasting the different treatments of Latin American and U.S. history and culture in the four authors' works, dedicating a chapter to each. Finally, Part III connects the topics introduced in the previous chapters with questions of language and translation. Chapter 7 examines the presence, roles and connotations of Spanish and other languages in these Latina narratives written in English, while Chapter 8 focuses specifically on the nature and translation of Spanish entries. vii INTRODUCTION This thesis examines selected works by four Latina writers of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and Dominican descent who have moved to the United States: Maria Amparo EscandOn's novel Esperanza's Box of Saints, Esmeralda Santiago's memoirs When I Was Puerto Rican and Almost a Woman, Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban and The Agiiero Sisters, and Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, and iYo! Intimately linked with their own backgrounds, these writers' literary creations show a deep authorial concern about self- and collective representations, especially regarding the portrayal of those communities with which the authors identify themselves. They also explore different instances of acculturation, re- appropriation of cultural referents and reconfiguration of hybrid subjectivities. As they do so, they make readers confront their perceptions of Latin American, U.S. Latina and mainstream U.S. cultures. National, ethnic and other socio-cultural groups are, using Benedict Anderson's coinage, "imagined communities". These authors' works explore who is imagining certain communities, and in what terms. The self-perception of a collective is shaped by the prominence that certain referents such as language, land, history, culture, race and/or nationality bear on its members' sense of self. However, the group-membership of certain individuals or sectors can be a point of contention, as different people set varying criteria defining who belongs to the community and judge differently whether someone's connection with such referents enables them to qualify as part of the community. As Anderson points 1 out, all communities are limited by definition: they have 'finite, if elastic, boundaries' as none imagines itself as 'coterminous with mankind", and they are constructed according to various patterns of exclusions and inclusions. The narratives of Santiago, EscandOn, Garcia and Alvarez bring to the fore how membership of various national or ethnic collectives -Puerto Rican, Mexican, Cuban and Dominican, respectively, as well as U.S. Latina and American- is conceived differently by different individuals, also drawing the reader's attention to the frictions resulting from this divergence. As they can claim simultaneous membership of several of these communities, the authors' and characters' identities can be considered "hybrid". However, when contrasting the works it immediately becomes clear that "hybrid" is not a neutral term. Who applies that word to themselves or to others engages with complex questions of power differentials between certain socio- cultural and racial groups as well as with oppressed sectors' strategies of resistance and empowerment.