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Home CCSU Theses & Dissertations Wearing Costumes and Crossing Borders: Search for Self in Chicano/a Literature

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Identifier	Thesis 1995
Author	Albrizio, Eileen M.
Title	Wearing Costumes and Crossing Borders: Search for Self in Chicano/a Literature
Publisher	Central Connecticut State University
Date	2008
Resource Type	Master's Thesis
Notes	The purpose of this thesis is to explore the complexities surrounding the acceptance of personal and cultural identity for protagonists in Chicano/a literature. By way of close reading analysis and methodological comparison, I delve into three literary texts written by Chicano/a authors to understand the inimitable factors that contribute to the protagonists' struggle with identity. Moving through Jos Antonio Villarreal's Pocho, John Rechy's City of Night, and Gloria Anzalda's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, I examine how the three protagonists' search for self is unique to other literary characters of mixed culture due on some level to their ethnicity and being raised in the proximity of the Mexican border. Each protagonist is an American of Mexican decent. Each is brought up in a United States town that borders Mexico. These homes all rest along that long strip of geography that separates two nations, the border that Anzalda states, "created a shock culture, a border culture, a third country, a closed country" (Anzalda 33). It is a living thing, made of people of confused cultures. It is constantly changing, insecure, like the people who live on its edge, a people who are neither here nor there, but in between. They are a people in conflict with themselves, in search of an identity. The protagonists in these novels are inheritors of that personal insecurity. Villarreal's Richard Rubio, Rechy's nameless narrator, and Anzaldua's Gloria, are all instilled with a need to strip away the self that places them on the border and find a new identity, a self that is neither Mexican nor American, one that is not formed by the ideology of their parents or ancestors, but an identity that is distinctly their own. Richard, the first of the Rubio family to be born in the United States, never experienced Mexico first-hand and cannot connect with his family's cultural attitudes. Because he has no point of reference for understanding, he comes to dislike his Mexican identity. However, the color of his skin, his dialect and his parentage make him an outcast amongst white Americans. Richard is both alienated from his family and from society. Because of this extreme alienation, he metaphorically strips himself naked in an attempt to become a completely autonomous person. Rechy's narrator, a young man, who, sexually abused by his father and emotionally tormented by his mother, works hard to deny the emotional trauma of his youth by escaping his El Paso home. Relying on his beautiful body, he enters into the seedy cities of night, hustling men for sex, sleeping in hovels, and existing on the edge. Hustling is a way to take control of the abuses inflicted on him by his father as well as a means to hide or deny his homosexuality. He wears his body like a mask, covering the intense need for love and compassionate companionship that lies beneath. Richard and Rechy's narrator wish to abandon their old identity completely, then don a new skin, one that is separate and unique from the child they once were. The problem is that the new skin is merely a costume, a mask that serves to hide or protect the emotional self from the outside world. Anzalda's narrator seeks to create a new self, a new mestiza, not by throwing her identity away, as did Richard and Rechy's narrator, but by remolding the centuries-old cultural icons that have come to define women of Mexican descent. She redirects the focus of the historical events that led to the rise of these icons and shifts the power to favor women instead of men. She takes all the multitudinous facets that have come to shape her and pulls them apart at the seams. She then sews them back together, but in a different fashion in order to create a new identity that fits, for herself and for all women of mixed culture. Jos Antonio Villarreal, John Rechy, and Gloria Anzalda have written stories about the struggles of individuals living in a border culture, existing on the edge of convention, and straddling a fence of conflicting ideologies. They have developed characters with seemingly detrimental multifaceted selves, who ultimately become models of hope for people of mixed culture, who, in the modern world, are an ever-growing population. Whether advertent or not on the part of the authors, that will to be something other than what they are told to be makes these protagonists unique and cogent models not only for Mexicans, Americans, Chicano/as and mestizo/as, but for all people who struggle with identity.
Subject	American literature -- Mexican American authors -- History and criticism Mexican Americans -- Ethnic identity -- In literature
Department	Department of English
Advisor	Sugg, Katherine
Type	Text
Digital Format	application/pdf
Language	eng
OCLC number	713734366
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