산드라 시스네로스의 『까라메로』와 크리스티나 가르시아의 『쿠바어로 꿈꾸기』에서 그려지는 라틴계 미국여성 되기

Abstract

This study is based on historicized, analytical, and discursive readings of the coming of age stories by American women writers, geographically, historically, culturally, and politically grounded. I delve into the developmental processes of daughter-narrators to become American Latinas in Mexican American writer Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo (2002) and Cuban American writer Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban (1992). In terms of becoming an American Latina, as "border women" or "subaltern women," the daughter-narrators, Mexican daughter Celaya and Cuban daughter Pilar, come to realize the internally and institutionally marginalized self and undergo an ongoing transformation. The process of becoming an American Latina is cultural, subversive, ongoing, and transformative. In other words, a sense of Latina-self in American society is not fundamentally secured but critically transformative in relation to (grand)mothers and in historical, political, and cultural shifts. First of all, I discuss a brief history of Mexico and Cuba in relation to the United States in order to more fully understand Latino/a sensibility and position in American society. Even though I do not attempt to provide a comprehensive history, given the complexity and scoop of such an endeavor, my attempt to present a brief history should be considered provisional. By rewriting the stories of diaspora family histories and raising the questions of identity, memory, and home, the daughter-narrators challenge the racial and sexual stereotypes produced by dominated historical and cultural account in a white-centered society. Their becoming processes are not limited by cultural and historical boundaries; their ongoing journeys revolve around the fact that home is a symbolic, representative, imaginative, and material metaphor. In the end, throughout this study, drawing on the developmental narratives in dynamic contexts of cultural shifts and political economic changes, I strive to point up the ongoing transformations and the creative articulations of American Latinas in struggling and resisting the politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality that limit their opportunities for self-development to be active speaking subjects in a feminist sense.