Creative Memories: Genre, Gender and Language in Latina Autobiographies

Abstract

Autobiography has become a popular genre among Latina writers. In fact, the most successful Latina texts published during the last two decades such as Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street (1984), Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1992) and Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican (1993), explore identity politics within the autobiographical form. These works are coming- of-age stories which narrate the writers’ experiences as Latinas living and writing in the United States. The aim of this study is to elucidate the literary and geographical boundaries of the self as manifested in women’s works in which national identity and ethnicity impinge on women’s subjectivity. It addresses specifically the intersection between gender, ethnicity and language in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood and Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican. These works blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction, lived experience and creative expression and engage in a series of boundary crossings: generic, linguistic and national which mirror the writers’ experiences as diasporic female subjects.