Too often critics fixate on multicultural literature’s identity awareness. They become disproportionately preoccupied with the cultural discomfort immigrants face as they reconcile contradictory aspects of selfhood into a stable, multicultural identity. It’s all the rage to dissect literature through the frame of identity politics, the study of the shared injustices suffered by specific social groups. [...]
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Regrettably, I’m reading faster than I can write. Although I am behind and never intend to catch up, I keep returning to Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican. As the first novel of an autobiographical trilogy, WPR depicts Santiago’s childhood, one marked by upheaval. Migrancy is much more than an eventful journey for this PR [...]
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Today is Víspera de Reyes, the eve of Three King’s Day. If you are placing a shoebox full of cabbage beneath your bed tonight, chances are strong that you’re Puerto Rican (or Boricua).
Few celebrate the Christmas holidays as extensively as the Boricuas, whose traditions closely intertwine with those of the Catholic Church. Boricua Christmas [...]
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For all the controversy that surrounds it, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza remains a seminal work. Anzaldúa sifts through the dualistic and hegemonic aspects of cultural identity with beauty and passion. Her work exhibits a pluralistic self-identity in the Chicana mestiza (her description of border consciousness).
Borderlands/La Frontera has always had an ironic reception. Typically, [...]
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