Travel, Autoethnography and “Cultural Schizophrenia” in Stephanie Elizondo Griest's Mexican Enough

Abstract

Abstract My discussion of this travelogue focuses on the ways it is the occasion for the narrative voice to become self-introspective and self-inquiring on the nature of ethnic identity and the politization of racial difference. By distinguishing between the speaking subject of Elizondo Griest the journalist and the autoethnographic subject of Stephanie, and through the critical concepts of “cultural schizophrenia” (Gaspar de Alba), nepantla (Anzaldúa), “hermeneutics of the self” (Alarcón), I suggest that in this book the authoethnographic self presents a Chicana consciousness-in-the-making through travel. As a Mexican American for whom ethnicity and cultural identification have long been an issue, Stephanie approaches the Others she visits in a way that differs from the general “authoritative” or “superior” position of other “comopolitan” travel writers. She relates to them through the experience of living in a “third space” or, as she has it, “between the borderlines,” which, in her case, means to be mestiza, bicultural, and biracial. Besides contributing to a better knowledge of contemporary Mexico and its dependence on the United States, Mexican Enough is also the author's inner journey toward understanding her distance from Mexico and toward a political awareness of her bicultural identity in the United States.