Culture as Transition: Becoming a Woman in Bi-Ethnic Space

Abstract

Issues created by post-national, multicultural societies involve not only questions about peaceful coexistence of different groups but also the variety of cultural influences to which members of these societies are exposed. What this means, in turn, is that culture can no longer be regarded as a static entity but must be viewed instead as something dynamic - travelling cultures, as James Clifford titles one of his discussions of the topic. In the case of North American societies, this need to regard culture as an on-going process may be seen especially in the emergence of studies concerned with the border between the United States and Mexico, such as those by Juan Flores and Nestor Garcia-Canclini which focus on the cross-cultural indeterminacy of this meeting ground rather than on either of the two cultures in isolation. This general perception of culture as a permeable has its more intimate extension in the personal experience of those exposed to cross-cultural currents; if culture at the communal level involves the constant interaction of diverse elements, the same holds true of the microscopic mind-scape. An individual in a multicultural society is also a site in which various cultures are rooted and transformed. Needless to say, a human psyche can also be a site of cultural conflict, as well as the place where individual mental space is invaded by incompatible cultural models and contradictory value systems. For the individual, moreover, the notion of culture-as-transition often includes actual movement from one location to another, just as for the person writing about such experiences there is also frequently the problem of choosing amongst various discursive modes, plus of course the decision concerning the language in which to express oneself. My overall concern in the following essay is to explore how the concept of culture-in-transition is played out in the autobiographical narratives of three women of Hispanic descent: When I was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and Loving in the War Years by Cherrie Moraga. Although all three women have been integrated into U.S. urban culture, they respectively represent first, second, and third generation immigrants and thus three stages of removal from their origins - i.e., full immersion in a Spanish-speaking community. My specific concern, therefore, is with how progressive removal from the heritage of a minority culture affects the degree of conformity with dominant cultural standards, and how this relationship is reflected internally in terms of both content and narrative technique including the use of ethnic expressions and bilingual dialogue - and externally in terms of the re-publication of these texts in the language of the author's origins. Although Santiago, Cisneros, and Moraga are all equally established writers, the reception of their autobiographical texts has been quite different. When I was Puerto Rican, Santiago's first book (her work had previously appeared in periodicals) was published in 1993 by Addison-Wesley and reprinted a year later in paperback by Vintage Books. A Spanish translation, by the author, also published by Vintage Books, appeared in October 1994. Cisneros's The House on Mango Street first appeared in 1984, thanks to a federal publication grant, and had six reprints by 1989. Its Spanish translation, by Elena Poniatowska, was published in 1994 by Vintage Books. Unlike Santiago and Cisneros, Moraga chose to remain on the margins as a radical feminist and a lesbian writer. Her Loving in the War Years was published in 1983, by South End Press, a small publisher targeting a niche market, and reached only selected audiences although the language of the original was English. The varying degrees of commercial success of those texts seem to coincide with the degree to which the authors have complied with the majority culture's literary standards, as well as ideology and lifestyle. …

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