Hybridity In Esmeralda Santiago S When I Was Puerto Rican

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Kassel, language: English, abstract: This research is going to deal with the factors that have influenced Santiago’s hybrid transformation. In order to facilitate this, the main focus of this paper will be put on her progression concerning national identity, cultural identity and gender identity. Our goal is to find out to what extent Santiago’s hybrid transformation becomes visible when further analysing her identity development.

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Kassel, language: English, abstract: This research is going to deal with the factors that have influenced Santiago's hybrid transformation. In order to facilitate this, the main focus of this paper will be put on her progression concerning national identity, cultural identity and gender identity. Our goal is to find out to what extent Santiago's hybrid transformation becomes visible when further analysing her identity development.

Magic, sexual tension, high comedy, and intense drama move through an enchanted yet harsh autobiography, in the story of a young girl who leaves rural Puerto Rico for New York's tenements and a chance for success.

Esmeralda Santiago's story begins in rural Puerto Rico, where her childhood was full of both tenderness and domestic strife, tropical sounds and sights as well as poverty. Growing up, she learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs in the mango groves at night, the taste of the delectable sausage called morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby's soul to heaven. As she enters school we see the clash, both hilarious and fierce, of Puerto Rican and Yankee culture. When her mother, Mami, a force of nature, takes off to New York with her seven, soon to be eleven children, Esmeralda, the oldest, must learn new rules, a new language, and eventually take on a new identity. In this first volume of her much-praised, bestselling trilogy, Santiago brilliantly recreates the idyllic landscape and tumultuous family life of her earliest years and her tremendous journey from the barrio to Brooklyn, from translating for her mother at the welfare office to high honors at Harvard.

Following the enchanting story recounted in When I Was Puerto Rican of the author’s emergence from the barrios of Brooklyn to the prestigious Performing Arts High School in Manhattan, Esmeralda Santiago delivers the tale of her young adulthood, where she continually strives to find a balance between becoming American and staying Puerto Rican. While translating for her mother Mami at the welfare office in the morning, starring as Cleopatra at New York’s prestigious Performing Arts High School in the afternoons, and dancing salsa all night, she begins to defy her mother’s protective rules, only to find that independence brings new dangers and dilemmas.

One-third of the population of Puerto Rico moved to New York City during the mid-twentieth century. Since this massive migration, Puerto Rican literature and culture have grappled with an essential change in self-perception. Mainland Passage examines the history of that transformation, the political struggle over its representation, and the ways it has been imagined in Puerto Rico and in the work of Latina/o fiction writers. Ramón E. Soto-Crespo argues that the most significant consequence of this migration is the creation of a cultural and political borderland state. He intervenes in the Puerto Rico status debate to show that the two most discussed options--Puerto Rico's becoming either a fully federated state of the United States or an independent nation--represent false alternatives, and he forcefully reasons that Puerto Rico should be recognized as an anomalous political entity that does not conform to categories of political belonging. Investigating a fundamental shift in the way Puerto Rican writers, politicians, and scholars have imagined their cultural identity, Mainland Passage demonstrates that Puerto Rico's commonwealth status exemplifies a counterhegemonic logic and introduces a vital new approach to understanding Puerto Rican culture and history. "An extraordinarily effective and persuasive synthesis of political theory, historical exposition, and cultural analysis that does real justice to a topic of daunting complexity. Ramón Soto-Crespo's readings strike me as some of the best work being done now in US Latino literary criticism." --Ricardo L. Ortíz, Georgetown University "Mainland Passage is a provocative intervention into some of the most intractable problems in Puerto Rican studies." --The Americas

Presents a reference on Hispanic American literature providing profiles of Hispanic American writers and their works.

This book examines novels by women from the anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean that focus on marginalized female characters who migrate to metropolitan centers. The novels studied require cultural, historical, sociological, anthropological, and geographic readings to fully explore the complexity of the characters as they confront the varied and changing challenges, hardships, and pleasures of the diaspora. The critical approach focuses on the characters' attempts to hold on to acceptable realities by assuming the appropriate interpersonal, social, and cultural masks that allow them to find a sense of significance in their interior, domestic, and community lives.