Representation Of Identity Formation

Pentecost (2014) compares The Distance Between Us: A memoir with Rudolfo Anaya and Tomas Rivera’s major work as an attempt to capture the cultural identity of Mexican Americans concluding that the main protagonist of these works had to set outside their cultural boundaries to find their cultural identity. Ruf (2009) unlike Pentecost (2014) emphases the uniqueness of Grande’s work as she highlights that even though Across a Hundred Mountains is a fiction work it is based on Grade’s real experiences and fears. Unlike most immigration novels that are usually narrated from a male perspective, Grande’s narrative of a young girl denounces attention to gender inequalities and intersectionalities among immigrants (Bürkner, 2012) (Ruf, 2009). In addition, critics see Reyna Grande as an honest writer that uses her personal experiences for the development of an immigrant narrative and whose novel is underscored with personal truths (Olivas, 2006) (Coca, 2009). While this literature explore Grande’s work they do not pay attention to the representation of her personal and/or her fictional character Juana’s identity formation, when it is a fundamental characteristic of her

In the boiling pot of America most people have been asked “what are you?” when referring to one’s race or nationality. In the short story “Borders” by Thomas King he explores one of the many difficulties of living in a world that was stripped from his race. In a country that is as diverse as North America, culture and self-identity are hard to maintain. King’s short story “Borders” deals with a conflict that I have come to know well of. The mother in “Borders” is just in preserving her race and the background of her people. The mother manages to maintain her identity that many people lose from environmental pressure.

Cristina Henriquez’, The Book of Unknown Americans, folows the story of a family of immigants adjusting to their new life in the United States of America. The Rivera family finds themselves living within a comunity of other immigrants from all over South America also hoping to find a better life in a new country. This book explores the hardships and injustices each character faces while in their home country as well as withina foreign one, the United States. Themes of community, identity, globalization, and migration are prevalent throughout the book, but one that stood out most was belonging. In each chacters viewpoint, Henriquez explores their feelings of the yearning they have to belong in a community so different than the one that they are used to.

Gloria Anzaldua is among the many feminist theorists that has moved into the realm of addressing post-modern identities. In Gloria Anzaldua’s articulation of the new mestiza consciousness, she makes the argument of identities as multiple, hybrid, and more specifically created as a result of the Borderlands. However, according to Anzaldua, and despite the difficulties engendered by her very existence, the mestiza is also a figure of enormous potential, as her multiplicity allows a new kind of consciousness to emerge. This mestiza consciousness moves beyond the binary relationships and dichotomies that characterize traditional modes of thought, and seeks to build bridges between all minority communities to achieve social and political change.

Whenever I am asked to describe where I grew up, I always find this difficult for me to answer. Simply because, I have lived in five different locations, spanning three different continents, all before the age of seventeen. As a result of growing up in a military-oriented lifestyle, the concept of constantly moving around was nothing new to me. Rather than view it as a shortcoming, I grew fond of the idea of moving to somewhere new—to a location where I have yet to explore and integrate myself into. Thus, due to my exposure to a multitude of cultures and individuals from all walks of life, this has affected how I move through the world’s space. In this paper, I will be discussing how the following concepts of my subject position: my ethnicity, culture, and identity as child of a retired U.S. Airman reflect Gloria Anzaldúa’s discussion of la mestiza.

In George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, his character, Tyrion says, “Never forgot what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness” (Identity). This quote is crucial towards accepting one’s identity and allowing that acceptance to strengthen that person. In Cisneros’s “Bien Pretty” from Woman Hollering Creek, the main character, Lupe tries to focus solely on one part of her dual identity, allowing her to be bothered and insecure about her place in Mexican heritage as well as in American culture. She has to deal with not only her desire to belong to one singular culture, but also trying to find belonging in the identity that she exists in, the “borderland” identity. The “borderland” identity is a concept that Gloria Anzaldua discusses in her book. Gloria Anzaldua discusses in her book, the concept of the “borderland” identity; the identity that exists for people are a part of both Mexican and American heritage who are too much of either to belong to any one specific group. In “Bien Pretty,” Cisneros shows the struggle of identifying and connecting to the “borderland” identity through the character, Lupe, especially in relation to Lupe’s connection to her Mexican heritage and her relationship with Flavio.

Joao Biehl and Patricia Zavella both address heartbreaking topics in their books. Biehl’s ethnography concerns “zones of social abandonment” in Brazil, while Zavella’s work focuses on Mexican individuals being “betwixt and between” after migrating to America. In more precise terms, “zones of social abandonment” expresses locations where no one tends to care about an individual’s physical or mental well-being, or what their future holds. Zavella’s “betwixt and between” concerns the feeling of not being accepted by the dominant society one has migrated too, comparing this feeling to the likes of W.E.B Du Bois “double consciousness” (Zavella, Patricia 2011 p. 10).

Speaking of Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border, the first thing appears in many people’s mind is a horizontal line with US on the upper side and Mexico on the lower, as depicted in maps. However, in reality, a border serves more than just to separate states. In many occasions, it witnesses and bridges social networks that stretch across border. These two functions seem to contradict each other but in fact they exactly reflect the complex nature of borders, or, more realistically, borderlands, a term coined to uproot in people the misleading image of a line. In her book Borderlands, the author Gloria Anzaldua, as a descendent of Indians and Mexicans living close to the America-Mexico border in Southern Texas, defies such dualistic and simplistic thinking about the border/double-sided or multi-sided dilemma, suggesting a new “mestiza consciousness”, a tolerance of ambiguity and a way of creating new personal culture from her accounting with all three cultures, as opposed to adopting only one of them without independent thinking and confronting against the rest. This new way of thinking stems from the reality of borderlands but instead of stopping there the author expands its application to establishing both cultural and sexual identities.

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldua is full of personal narratives detailing the visible and invisible “ borderlands “ that exist within a race, gender, sexuality, and spirituality. Her essays and poems are based on her own personal experiences as a Chicana and lesbian activist. Through her writing, she challenges the true definition of the borderlands as more than a simple line that divides different cultures. It calls for those who are oppressors to change their attitudes and show support to those of the borderlands. By writing in both English and Spanish she expresses how one language would not be enough to describe her Chicana literature.

In his work about nested identities, David Knight proposed understanding the concept of identity from a territorial perspective, in terms of the relationship with the geography and space in which people acquire specific attributes in distinction to others. Territory, he said, is what solidifies identity as opposed to memory or feelings (Knight, 1999, p. 317). In this fashion, people produced in Tijuana, with the practice of cross-border consumption, a binational territory where the border did not exist, which nested a local identity with both strong nationalistic and hybrid components, very distinctive

These transnational linkages that transcend national borders can be placed in the light of a bigger phenomenon called globalization. Globalization makes the world figuratively smaller and more compressed in terms of time and space. According to Inda and Rosaldo (2008), globalization creates interconnection and relations between places and people that go beyond the territorial borders of a nation state. This transnational and global element makes migrants people “Who inhabit imagined communities of belonging that cut across and encompass multiple national terrains” (p. 23). Transnational linkages and feelings of multiple belonging can be developed in several

As our world becomes that much more globalized with each passing day, the way we chose to interpret and define ourselves and others also becomes much more elaborate, as well. During this week’s readings we focus on defining who is who within the contexts of refugees, internally displaced people (IDP), stateless persons, asylum seekers and diasporas. In Rogers Brubaker’s “The ‘diaspora’ diaspora,” we focus specifically on how the meaning and categorization of persons as diaspora has in itself changed.

"As a theoretical construct about immigrant life and identity, transnationalism aptly suits the study of population movements in a world where improved modes of transport, as well as the images that are transmitted by means of modern telecommunications have shortened the social distance between sending and receiving countries."

In previous semesters, I have grasped my Latinx identity through Latin American-related courses and through the exploration of its complex and vast history and culture. My immigrant identity has developed through my own experience, my awareness-work in the subject, investigating more about it in classes, through my work in journalism, and my travels. There are so many different parts of me that I am constructing one by one. It is as if each brick counts as one particle of my whole me.

When moving away from your home country you can lose a sense of identity; this was the case for myself, and an issue which was at the heart of two incredibly different, yet fascinating writings by Dinaw Mengustu, in ‘Home at Last’ and Manuel Munoz, in ‘Leave your name at the border’. Although these stories are based around contrasting settings, characters and ideas; they are both essentially centred on the concepts of ‘Culture’ and ‘Transition’.