“FEROCIOUS ROOTS”. Hospitality, Identity, and Exclusion in Recent American Latina Literature
“FEROCIOUS ROOTS”. Hospitality, Identity, and Exclusion in Recent American Latina Literature

Summary/Abstract: “No, this isn’t my house … I don’t belong. I don’t ever want to come from here.” With words of cold fury, Sandra Cisneros’s heroine Esperanza Cordero rejects the place in Chicago that her family has attempted to embrace as its new home. The embrace is prickly and problematic, as young Esperanza struggles to find an identity, to cope with sexual harassment, and to resist being defined by her parents’ crumbling, one-bedroom house on Mango Street. This essay seeks to understand the problems of community and its threatened loss as they are addressed by three essential works by three Latina American writers: Julia Alvarez, Quiara Alegrría Hudes, and Sandra Cisneros. It also references the groundbreaking sociological work of Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone, which examines in more general terms the loss of cohesion and trust in American society Turning to Alvarez’s novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, the essay pursues the problem of young women whose ethnicity becomes a focus of sexual curiosity and is overtly associated with a presumption of promiscuity. Alvarez’s novel is presented as an exemplar of a nostalgic text, wherein episodes are narrated in reverse chronological order, mimetically evoking a wistful desire to return to a lost heritage, now accessible only through the act of writing. In its treatment of Hudes’s play Water by the Spoonful, the essay observes the transvaluation of community that has taken place in the age of social media. The literal open doors of hospitable houses give way to internet chat rooms, in which contact takes place across thousands of miles, but at the palpable expense of true empathy and fellow feeling. In its discussion of Cisneros’s novel The House on Mango Street, this essay examines the phenomenon of the hospitable text: a work that an author creates with a conscious desire to create a congenial, comfortable space for the reader, even as the novel’s characters contend with their emotional homelessness in a new land—a condition that persists even when one has a literal roof over one’s head. The essay also observes how the isolation of a sexually tormented girl is made worse by unfamiliar, unwelcoming surroundings.

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