Identity and Gender in the Mexican American Testimonio

Abstract

Abstract Recent Chicana and Latina texts rewrite the traditional Latina narrative by focusing on women as subjects, as historical agents, and by imagining a new future for women. Their subjects in different ways challenge the traditional Latino model for women’s proper sphere. Rather than accepting what Shari Benstock terms the ‘private self as representing the world of women, the new Latina writers project themselves and their subjects into the public world as well. While the private may not always be political, it is certainly not divorced from women’s public roles and their public aspirations. In effect, as Carolyn Heilbrun suggests about other transgressive writers, who dare to cross previously closed borders concerning identity and self-representation, these Latina writers reject womanhood-at least as defined in traditional patriarchal terms-and instead rewrite the definition of being a woman. They dare, to use Heilbrun’s term, to be ‘ambiguous women’.