Strategic Autoethnography and American Ethnicity Debates: The Metrics of Authenticity in When I Was Puerto Rican

Abstract

In taking up the vexed example of Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican, I want to do two things: read it as in part a model of autoethnography organised by what Sidonie Smith and I have developed as ‘the metrics of authenticity’; and consider how such a narrative, read as strategic autoethnography, can be understood as a feminist project of—partially successful—self-representation to demystify patriarchal institutions. Although Santiago sets up a detailed autoethnographic narrative of Fifties Puerto Rico, when she turns to the immigrant teenager's encounter with Brooklyn Puerto Ricans, it is overwhelmed by the powerful model of the ‘up by the bootstraps’ story of immigrant assimilation to the American dream. Reading these two models of storytelling as competing and incompatible suggests that much women's life writing by ‘hybrid’ subjects in the Americas tells a story of incomplete ‘self-transculturation’ about the incommensurability of different languages and cultures.