Four Books, One Latino Life E-Book

Ignacio F. Rodeño Iturriaga

• Herausgeber: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Biblioteca Javier Coy d'Estudis Nord-Americans
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 407

Beschreibung

Acclaimed by many as one of the most gifted essayists and stylists in American letters these last few decades, Richard Rodriguez has left an indelible imprint on the tradition of autobiographical writing of the nation. Rodeño's study of the four installments of Rodriguez's self-writing offers an insightful and perspicacious analysis of the evolution and the most controversial elements in this Chicano writer's production so far. Delving deeply into issues of racial and ethnic identity, sexual orientation, religious background, various types of hybridity, and different forms of socio-cultural adaptation, this book presents all kinds of incisive observations about the contested space(s) that "minority" self-writers are often pushed to occupy in the American tradition of the genre.

Leseprobe

FOUR BOOKS, ONE LATINO LIFE

READING RICHARD RODRIGUEZ

BIBLIOTECA JAVIER COY D’ESTUDIS NORD-AMERICANS

http://puv.uv.es/biblioteca-javier-coy-destudis-nord-americans.html

http://bibliotecajaviercoy.com

DIRECTORA

Carme Manuel(Universitat de València)

FOUR BOOKS, ONE LATINO LIFE

READING RICHARD RODRIGUEZ

Ignacio F. Rodeño Iturriaga

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americansUniversitat de València

Four Books, One Latino Life:

Reading Richard Rodriguez

© Ignacio F. Rodeño Iturriaga

1ª edición de 2021

Reservados todos los derechos

Prohibida su reproducción total o parcial

ISBN: 978-84-9134-757-6

Imagen de la cubierta: Sophia de Vera Höltz

Diseño de la cubierta: Celso Hernández de la Figuera

Publicacions de la Universitat de València

http://puv.uv.es

[email protected]

Edición digital

To my mother, Irene

Acknowledgments

Autobiographies are life narratives. Narratives anchor identity. But, like identity, life narratives do not happen in a void. Every narrative, including those of the self, are also the product of the interaction with others. This book is no exception. Over the time it took to complete it, I have benefited from the help, time, comments, support and encouragement of many people. It is difficult to name all because memory is tricky, but the help of some individuals was particularly indulgent. Such is the case of Aitor Ibarrola Armendáriz, whose comments were instrumental throughout the development of this book. Thanks are also due to David Río Raigadas, Amaia Ibarrarán Bigalondo, María Luz Suárez Castiñeira and María Jesús Pando Canteli, who made insightful comments to an earlier version of the manuscript. This book would not be what it is without their discerning observations.

The list of friends who encouraged me throughout the writing process is as relevant as the long list of scholars who have helped me to better read the works of Richard Rodriguez. Some of these friends happen to be also scholars and critics the field.

Efraín Barradas has undoubtedly provided me with both sharp comments and unwavering support. He has heard and read most of this book with acute sensitivity and suggested many changes. I am more grateful than I can say for his insurmountable generosity, patience, and camaraderie. His affection enriches my life immeasurably. Susan Homar, Nina Scott, and José Ornelas read parts of this study in its incipient form and her comments have unquestionably improved the final version. Luis Aponte-Parés and Alberto Sandoval Sánchez took an interest in the project and guided me to valuable documents that facilitated my analysis on some of Rodriguez’s texts.

The Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida, and its Director, Philip Williams, offered me a visiting scholar position that allowed me the needed respite from teaching duties in order to write the bulk of the manuscript. Being based at the Center also allowed me the possibility of accessing the superb George A. Smathers Libraries at UF, and more specifically the Latin American Collection. Thanks are due to Paul Losch for assisting me at the Collection.

To say that one learns from his students is a major understatement. Whether at lectures, seminars, independent studies, or one-on-one conversations, discussing on autobiography and US Latina/o literatures with them at The University of Alabama has been both stimulating and beneficial for this project simply because they made me reflect on it while reading and commenting their work. I am also indebted to The Department of Modern Languages and Classics and the College of Arts and Sciences at The University of Alabama for supporting me in many ways to carry out my research.

I continue to learn much from stimulating exchanges with colleagues, both at conferences and in private. In some of those venues I have presented part of this work, and their comments have, undoubtedly, improved my project. I am also grateful to the Latino community, for allowing me to approach them and for challenging me to deepen my understanding about them.

This book owes a lot to my family, but its author is even more indebted. My father, Francisco Rodeño, has been an example of how to lead a vital existence. My mother, Irene Iturriaga, made innumerable contributions, especially in the intense final months of writing. Together they have been responsible for instilling in me a passion for knowledge while providing me with a nurturing and encouraging environment. Both my parent’s character have shaped me and by extension my project.

The rest of my family –specially my cousins, who have taken the role of siblings– has offered much needed humor and empathy. I have been fortified by their example, reassured by their encouragement, and relieved by their support. I also thank Efraín Barradas Mejías and Juanita Feliciano, or Miguel and Miguelina, whose example, affection and warmth enhance my life enormously.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1Writing on Language, Education, and Class: The Distinctive Memory of Richard Rodriguez

CHAPTER 2Journey to the Origin, Travel to the Destination

CHAPTER 3Browning the Argument, Shifting the Paradigm

CHAPTER 4Darling Contemplations

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

Autobiography has great appeal for any mainstream culture, since it tends to reproduce the myth of the success story. Western culture employs autobiography to culturally redistribute to consumers the mythic formulas of success in society, of reaching celebrity, and acquiring a certain standing in society. Autobiography places the reader in the experience and thought of another person and, consequently, sets the reader off in a process of self-reflection that produces a contemplation of humanity. Narratives of the self are uniquely poised to affect the reader precisely because they relate an experience that is at the same time both unique and universal. There is a constant reminder of the shared experience that is involved in our existence as human beings. The cultural value of autobiography resides in being subjective and internal –the truths it portrays are not necessarily verifiable factually– as well as objective and external –the historical and social issues it exposes refer us to certifiable, exterior realities. Hence, autobiography becomes a matter of the spirit and of the mind. While aware of the complex nature of the concept ‘narratives of the self,’ which might encompass other life writings beyond autobiographies, such as testimonials, diaries, epistles and private correspondence, etc., this study considers the terms ‘life writing,’ ‘narrative of the self,’ and ‘autobiography’ as synonyms.

The present project looks at the four autobiographies by Rodriguez as individual, yet interconnected works. Stemming from a preoccupation with issues regarding identity, the approach has been to consider the major topics of each autobiography: bilingual education and affirmative action; the impact of the culture of origin with regards to the diasporic subject; race and ethnicity as constituents of identity; the integration of two diverse issues such as religion and sexuality in the identitarian makeup of the autobiographer. While the different chapters that deal with the literary works appear to treat detached, unconnected themes, there is a pervasive look that considers Rodriguez’s oeuvre as a whole. In fact the same themes appear in all the autobiographic installments, and it has been duly noted as such. The chapter that analyzes with Rodriguez’s sexuality is a clear example of this. Also, following the author’s lead, his third book has been also studied from the premise that it is a coda of his earlier narratives.

In order to situate the four books in their context, the project looks at the emergence and development of autobiography as a genre, and its relation to literary theory. It was deemed essential, as well, to place Richard Rodriguez in the specific literary context of Chicano autobiography, especially given his controversial standing within the field. Richard Rodriguez is a particularly appropriate author to study when it comes to consider issues of identity because of the contradictory positions he adopts in approaching his own. Representation is a key factor in ascribing to an identity, but being recognized with such markers –in other words, being identified– is equally crucial. Rodriguez seems to be at a crux here. Autobiography is an ideal literary genre to reflect on issues of identity, owing to its nature.

Autobiography as literary genre

Autobiography has been approached from different theoretical perspectives, and as a consequence of it, the analysis of the autobiographical genre has benefited from an array of literary theories and schools of criticism. Understanding what elements contribute to classifying narratives of the self and autobiographies as a genre is not merely an issue of defining the term, and yet a working definition seems indispensable. For the majority of readers, an autobiography would be the narration of a person’s life told by that same person; in a sense, it would be the biography of a person written by the subject of it. However, this basic definition falls short for a more inquisitive reader, since the notion of autobiography involves questions of identity and, thus, becomes a complex issue. In order to clearly establish the concept of autobiography, one must consider the emergence of the term itself and its development, as well as how literary theory and criticism have approached the field and, in turn, shaped it.

Coining the term

When it comes to autobiography, scholars have suggested several dates ranging from the 18th to the 19th centuries that may mark the emergence of the term itself. However, before this name appeared as such, texts that reflected on the life of the self had been called confessions and self-biographies, whether hyphenated or not. It was Isaac D’Israeli who, in 1796, coined the English neologism self-biography to designate the narrative of the self in his Miscellanies or Literary Recreations. Later on, D’Israeli used the hyphenated term auto-biography when describing a series of paintings as “an auto-biography in a series of remarkable scenes painted under the eye of the describer of them” (Curiosities 141), and afterward, in the essay titled “Sentimental Biography,” the author differentiated between biography and auto-biography (414).

German literature is at the core when it comes to the formation of autobiography as a literary genre. Already in the Stuttgart of 1791, the publication by the Mäntler brothers of Christian F.D. Schubart’s Leben und Gesinnungen Von Ihm Selbst, in Kerker Aufgesetzt sees a switch from biographers. In the realm of English letters, Felicity Nussbaum proffers this German ancestry of the genre in her 1989 book The Autobiographical Subject. However, Robert Folkenflik challenges the historical account of the term that Nussbaum posits and claims that autobiography appears in print for the first time in 1786, thus predating any German usage of the term. The text in question that Folkenflik cites is the preface to the fourth edition of Ann Yearsley’s Poems, On Several Occasions, which describes the work as autobiographical narrative. However, upon examination of the preface in question, there is no evidence of the word autobiographical, although there are several appearances of the word narrative, and the text is itself autobiographical in nature. Both Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in their second edition of Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2010) note that “[a]lthough Ann Yearsley’s preface to the fourth edition … is an extended autobiographical refutation of the charge of ingratitude to her patron, Hannah More, the autobiographical does not appear in its title (“Mrs. Yearsley’s Narrative”),” (297) and they mention private correspondence with Robert Folkenflik acknowledging his error. This brings us back to D’Israeli’s text as the first evidence in print of the term autobiography in the English language. Nonetheless, Folkenflik refers to self-biography and autobiography as synonyms, and remarks that until the 20th century the word memoir also serves as a synonym.

With regards to the appearance of the word autobiography in an English title, Folkenflik credits a series that first came out in 1826 under the title Autobiography: A Collection of the Most Instructive and Amusing Lives Ever Published, Written by the Parties Themselves. And, while Felicity Nussbaum and Jacques Voisine mention W.P. Scargill’s The Autobiography of a Dissenting Minister (1834) as the first work to carry the term in its title, Folkenflik affirms that several other texts appeared before then: William Brown’s The Autobiography, or Narrative of a Soldier (1829), Matthew Carey’s Autobiographical Sketches: in a Series of Letters Addressed to a Friend (1829) among others. John Galt published two works under the titles The Member: An Autobiography and The Radical: An Autobiography; Galt went on to bring out The Autobiography of John Galt in 1833. It seems that by 1834 the term autobiography was widely accepted. For instance, in addition to Scargill’s text, Sir Egerton Brydges published The Autobiography, Times, Opinions, and Contemporaries of Sir Egerton Brydges, and women writers were also producing titles, such as Elizabeth Wright Macauley’s Autobiographical Memoirs. By the 1840s, the frequency of the term in titles had increased, and perhaps one of the most widely-known titles today is that of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847).

Establishing a canon

Narratives of the self and autobiographies existed before the term was minted, as George May suggests with his expression “autobiography avant la lettre.” Many of these texts stand as classics in world literature, let alone in their respective national literary canons: Socrates’s Apology (399 BC), published by Plato, where the Stoic philosopher delves inward; Saint Augustine and Rousseau; Marcus Aurelius Antoninus’s attempt to understand the impact of the universal on an individual’s life in the year 180; Saint Augustine’s Confessions (ca. 400), a text where confession as a form of autobiography underscores issues of intellectual, moral, and spiritual nature by means of the author’s exposing his mind and soul, thus spurring ‘confessional autobiography’ as a model until the Renaissance. Dante Alighieri penned a sequence of poetry and prose, an account of his love for Beatrice as well as his apology for romantic poetry, under the title of La Vita Nuova (1294). The year 1436 marks the completion of The Book of Margery Kempe, which details her travels and her alleged mystic experiences of divine revelation. While the book is written in third person and she refers to herself as “this creature,” many scholars consider it the first autobiography in the English language, while others differ, based on the fact that Kempe was illiterate and she dictated the book to two scribes, and refer to it as a “confession of faith.” Spanish Christian mystic Teresa de Ávila completes The Life of Teresa of Jesus in 1565. Later in that century, in 1580, Michel de Montaigne publishes his Essays for the first time, which he had started writing in 1572. He would continue to enlarge the text in subsequent years, and published major expanded editions in 1582 and 1588. In 1637, René Descartes publishes his autobiographical and philosophical treatise entitled Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences. English Puritan John Bunyan published Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners in 1666. Around 1740 American Puritan Jonathan Edwards pens Personal Narrative. Between 1766 and 1770 Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes his Confessions, a confessional autobiography published in two parts in 1782 and 1789, respectively. A projected third part was never completed. While published posthumously in 1791 and in French, Benjamin Franklin wrote the unfinished record of his own life from 1771 to 1790: what is now known as The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. British historian and M.P. Edward Gibbon starts composing his Memoirs of My Life and Writings in 1788, which constitute a series of six fragmentary autobiographical accounts that were compiled and published in 1796, after Gibbon’s death.

As seen, most of the narratives of the self written before the 19th century can be classified in three categories, corresponding to their principal intentions: confession, apology, and memoir. The confession has to do with issues independent of the social determining factors of the writer: the author bares his or her self in order to reveal intrinsic truths about the self. The apology articulates the autobiographer’s coherent and mature position as a comeback to a critical opposition. The memoir is a literary device by which the writer documents the historical event(s) in which she or he had an involvement. The start of the 19th century marks a distinct approach to life writings: relating the account of one’s life is worthy of attention because the individual merits intrinsically the attention. Autobiography becomes a literary record of human evolution in individuality.

William Wordsworth started an autobiographical poem in 1798, which he intended as an appendix to a work under the title The Recluse. In 1804 he expands this “poem to Coleridge,” as he called it, and decides to make it a prologue instead of an appendix to the bigger piece. He finished the thirteen-volume opus in 1805 but refused to publish it. In 1850, his widow posthumously published the autobiography (or “the poem on the growth of my own mind,” as he called it) under the title The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind; An Autobiographical Poem. By this time Robert Southey, another of the Lake Poets, had already used the word autobiography in the Quarterly Review.

The year 1845 is when Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself was published, and within four months of this publication, five thousand copies were sold. Having received many positive reviews, by 1860 almost 30,000 copies were sold. Ten years after the first publication of the first autobiography by the abolitionist leader, in 1854, Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden, or Life in the Woods. A year later, in 1855, Frederick Douglass publishes his second autobiography: My Bondage and My Freedom; and P.T. Barnum put together his first autobiography Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself, which he published massively in order to promote himself and, in turn, his business. Barnum’s other autobiography, which had the same purpose, is Struggles and Triumphs, or Forty Years’ Recollections of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself (1869).

The first autobiography by a female slave, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, was published in 1861 by Harriet Jacobs under the pseudonym Linda Brent. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, published in 1881 and revised in 1892, is Douglass’ third autobiography. In it, the abolitionist gave more details about his life as a slave and his escape from slavery than he could in his two previous autobiographies, because of the emancipation of slaves in the US. It is also the only one of his autobiographies that deals with his life during and after the Civil War. By 1897, Oscar Wilde writes Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, which is published bowdlerized in 1905 as De Profundis. After a turbulent history of editions, the full, corrected text saw the light in 1962 in Rupert Hart-Davis’s The Letters of Oscar Wilde.

Danish émigré to the United States, Jacob Riis, published his autobiography The Making of an American in 1901. Six year later, in 1907, The Education of Henry Adams is printed privately and distributed by its author. Its commercial publication did not happen until 1918, after Henry Adams’ death, to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize a year later. Bicontinental writer Henry James wrote three autobiographies in the 1910s: A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and the incomplete, posthumous The Middle Years (1917). Lithuanian immigrant to the U.S. and anarchist feminist Emma Goldman penned Living My Life in 1931. In 1932, John G. Neihardt transcribes the autobiography of Lakota medicine man Black Elk, under the title Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. This book has caused quite a controversy, due to issues of authorship: Native Americans and scholars have questioned whether Neihardt’s account is accurate and fully represents the views or words of Black Elk. H.G. Wells published Experiment on Autobiography in September of 1934. By now, the boundaries between autobiography and other genres start to blur. Hence, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934) is seen as both a novel as well as an autobiography. In 1937, Gertrude Stein published Everybody’s Autobiography, which was devised as the continuation of her 1933 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. In 1945 Richard Wright published Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, putting off until 1977 the publication of the second part of his autobiography: American Hunger. French-American mystic Thomas Merton issued his spiritual autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain in 1948. The decade of the 1960s sees the following autobiographies penned by American figures: Man Ray’s Self-Portrait (1963), Malcolm X and Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night (1968), which seeks to muddle the limits among history, fiction, and narrative of the self.

As one can see by the 1960s, the peak of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, the so-called ‘ethnic’ writers have found a literary tradition within the autobiographical genre. There were already texts in circulation written by authors whose identity was “hyphenated” –i.e. Danish-American, Lithuanian-American, African-American, Mexican-American, etc.– but the late 1960s saw an increase in these texts. In a sense, autobiography as a genre has helped in its history to democratize literature. This is particularly relevant in the context of the United States, where autobiography provided forms of cultural enfranchisement to the non-mainstream communities, whether they be ‘ethnic,’ non-heteronormative, and/or feminist. This increase in life narratives by women, the working class, the poor, the minorities has brought to national attention their social conditions, and has helped depict the actual composite of the nation, whether social, cultural, or otherwise.

While African-American literature might come quickly to mind when speaking of life narratives by minorities (from the autobiographies of Douglass to those of Booker T. Washington, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Sidney Poitier, Maya Angelou, to President Obama –to name a few), other groups have also produced narratives of the self. Among the Asian-American autobiographies one should mention Chiang Yee’s The Silent Traveller (1937), Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946), Monlin Chiang’s Tides From the West: A Chinese Autobiography (1947), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dicteé (1980), Akira Kurosawa’s Something Like an Autobiography (1982), Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai (1986), Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines (1992), and Amy Tan’s The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings (2003).

US Latino authors have not been extraneous to this, and have often resorted to the narratives of the self to build and cement a group conscience in the community. Autobiographical writing has not been profuse in Hispanic letters –whether Latin American or Spanish– but these authors do take advantage of the richer tradition in English letters. The following canon does not intend to be exhaustive.

Among the narratives of the self-penned by Puerto Ricans in the continental US, one must mention Pachín Marín’s “Nueva York por dentro,” which appeared in 1892 in the New York newspaper La gaceta del pueblo. Las memorias de Bernardo Vega, published posthumously in 1977, is another seminal life narrative that describes the life of Puerto Ricans in New York at the beginning of the 20th century, and the importance of tobacco workers in the political and social life of both the homeland and the US. Similarly, Jesús Colón collected a series of personal short narratives in A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches (1961), which garnered greater attention after critic Juan Flores published a new edition in 1982. William Carlos Williams explores the ambivalence of his ancestry -–his father was British while his mother was Puerto Rican, and he himself grew up in the West Indies– in his Autobiography (1951). Perhaps one of the most popular autobiographies by a Nuyorican is Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967) a Bildungsroman about a life amidst racism, marginality, and displacement. He followed this text with two other personal narratives Saviour, Saviour, Hold My Hand (1972) and Seven Long Times (1974). Tato Laviera’s AmeRícan (1985), Miguel Piñero’s La Bodega Sold Dreams (1980), and Sandra María Esteves’ Yerba Buena: Dibujos y poemas (1980) are central autobiographical texts by writers of the Nuyorican Poets Café. Martín Espada’s poetry often combines autobiography with struggle and resistance; among his autobiographical poems “Revolutionary Spanish Lessons,” “Niggerlips” from Rebellion is the Circle in a Lover’s Hands (1990), and “My Name is Espada” from A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000) can be listed. Essential to autobiographical poetry is the popular “Ending Poem” included in Getting Home Alive (1986) written by both Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins Morales, mother and daughter, where they explore their Latina identity. Among other life narratives by women writers, mention must be made of Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing (1990), Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican (1994), Nicholasa Mohr’s Growing Up inside the Sanctuary of My Imagination (1994).

Among the Cuban-American authors, the following life writings must be acknowledged: Pablo Medina’s Pork Rind and Cuban Songs (1975) and Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood (1990), Achy Obejas’ collection of stories We Came All The Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (1994) in which the writer blends memoir with essay, Virgil Suarez’s Spared Angola: Memories from a Cuban-American Childhood (1997) that combines poetry, fiction, and essays in a remembrance of childhood, violence, and loss. Richard Blanco’s first collection of poetry, under the title City of a Hundred Fires (1998), draws on this Madrid-born Cuban-American’s upbringing in Miami and describes the tensions growing up as a Latino immigrant, a child of working-class exiles. He is better known for another autobiographical poem, “One Today” which he read at the 2013 Obama Presidential Inauguration, being the first Latino writer to be invited to read at a U.S. Presidential Inauguration ceremony. Most recently, he has published his prose autobiography: The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood (2014).

Playwright María Irene Fornés explored her Cuban heritage in her play Letters from Cuba (2000), based on the more than two hundred letters she received from her elder brother, who remained in the island. This divide is also explored in My Father Sings, To My Embarrassment (2002) by Sandra M. Castillo, who writes of her childhood memories in Cuba and the shared anguish of those who left and those who stayed.

Also in 2002, Ruth Behar explores issues of identity in her autobiographical documentary for television Adio Kerida: Goodbye My Dear Love. Behar has created in her literature a voice that represents herself and her subject: a woman who has been culturally translated. As a Cuban Jew, Behar has continued to explore what she calls ‘Jubanidad’ in her book An Island Called Home: Returning to a Jewish Cuba (2007), an autobiographical text that incorporates photography, continuing in the contemporary trend of blurring borders between autobiography and other genres. In 2013, Behar penned Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in between Journeys, where displacement is the motif that allows the writer to relate her memories of Cuba, Spain, Poland, … Another writer who has explored his Jewish Cuban roots is José Kozer in Una huella destartalada: diarios (2003).

An example of how autobiography in the 21st century is blurring the once clear distinction between literary genres is Carlos M. Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (2003). While the author conceived the text as a novel, the publisher released it as a memoir, eventually winning the 2003 National Book Award in the nonfiction category. Cuban-Americans continue to publish narratives of the self in our decade: Enrique del Risco issued Siempre nos quedará Madrid (2012), his personal account about leaving Cuba for Spain, and his subsequent arrival in the United States. The works of Richard Blanco have already been pointed out.

Among the Dominican American writers, one should highlight Julia Álvarez’s Something To Declare (1998), a text that, again, blurs the limits between autobiography and essay. These literary canons are by no means exhaustive, but they aim to be a brief representation of how life writing is an important part of the literary traditions of the most relevant communities in U.S. Latino letters.

The writings of the self have served Latinos, and Mexican-Americans and Chicanos specifically, to establish an identity within the U.S. and to build a sense of community during much of the 19th and 20th centuries. This group-conscience building might have been more apparent during the Civil Rights Movement, but it does extend back to the times of the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty and stretches up to our times.

Mapping the genre

Undoubtedly autobiography exists and, subsequently, one must wonder what constitutes the genre, formally speaking. As Virginia Woolf states in a 1935 letter to her nephew Julian Bell: “… all we can do is to herd books into groups…and thus we get English literature into A B C; one, two, three; and lose all sense of what it’s about.” (Bell 173n) In our impulse to classify into groups, define and categorize, sometimes a definition that obscures the defined is constructed, thus becoming moot.

As it has been observed, autobiography is a textual expression that has been solidly established for several centuries already, although recognition as a literary genre did not occur until the twentieth century. In part, this lack of recognition as literature –and hence, as a literary genre– stems from it not being granted aesthetic value. Elizabeth Bruss puts forward that the only effective definition would be one that reflects a literary category that can be experienced as something that constrains or directs the acts of reading and writing and allows both reader and writer an interpretation of their actions (1).

In order to become a genre, a literary text must comprise recognizable features, and the roles and purposes that make up said text must be relatively stable within a community of readers and writers. In this way, a genre is similar to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of institution: “those events in experience which endow it with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will acquire meaning, will form an intelligible series or a history.” (40) In this sense, a literary genre –in our case autobiography as a genre– depends on the organizing nature of human beings.

However, recognizing the autobiography as an established genre does not imply there have been no changes. Russian formalist Tynjanov already pointed out the variable nature of genres when he stated in “On Literary Evolution”: “The novel, which seems to be an integral genre that has developed in and of itself over the centuries, turns out to be not an integral whole but a variable. Its material changes from one literary system to another […] we cannot […] define the genre of a work if it is isolated from the system. For example, what was called an ode in the 1820s or by Fet was so labeled on the basis of features different from those used to define an ode in Lomonosov’s time.” (70)

Bruss cleverly points out that in spite of the existence of elements within a given text that “help us recognize what generic force it should have, we cannot state a priori what these features will be […] Outside the social and literary conventions that create and maintain it, autobiography has no features –has in fact no being at all.” (6) When it comes to consider autobiography as a literary genre, we need to combine change with continuity in autobiographical writing, and build our justification in a way that it will not misrepresent individual autobiographies. So as to achieve this, one needs to look at the form of a text, as well as at the function assigned to that text.

Although autobiography has been around in literature for centuries, and the subject referred to specifically with that name has existed for a bit more than two hundred years, as it was illustrated in the previous sections, critical interest in the field is more recent. German philosopher Georg Misch (1878-1965) wrote Geschichte der Autobiographie, a monumental history of autobiography in several volumes, the first of which was published in 1907. However, the first English edition would not come out until 1950 by Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. Misch’s publication set off an increasing interest in studying the area from a critical and theoretical perspective. While the philosopher’s focus was from a historical perspective, it signaled some shift from previous interest in the field. In the past, both readers and critics expressed a concern for the self. Those who were attracted to a particular author’s work found in the writer’s life an answer that allowed them to better understand his or her texts and at the same time it was a motivator for reading. According to this deterministic outlook, one could understand a text through the analysis of its source, thus establishing a causal relation between the author and his/her work. By providing a more historical approach, Misch opened the door for other critics who dealt with the study of autobiography based on the notion of a preexisting ontological self. Misch defined autobiography as “the description (graphia) of an individual human life (bios) by the individual himself (autos)” (5) and affirms that it is intrinsically linked to its time and period: “autobiographies are bound always to be representative of their period, within a range that will vary with the intensity of the author’s participation in contemporary life and with the sphere in which they moved.” (12) Thus, only individuals who have led lives in the public arena, or who have had crucial participation in historical events, and/or are famous, are the appropriate agents of an autobiography. This responds to the strict divide between high and low culture, proper of that time. This historical perspective, and consequently this division between high culture and low culture, will be challenged much later with the interest in micro-history by the marginalized minorities. In a sense they try to overcome Misch’s restrictive notion of autobiography; a notion that is also prescriptive, in the vogue of his time. By separating high and low culture, many forms of recording private life –letters, journals, diaries, etc.– were excluded from the genre, and from scholar attention.

New Criticism considered autobiography a lesser form of literature, and the critical study of the genre became dormant. Thus, the next seminal study on the genre, Georges Gusdorf’s “Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie,” published in 1956, became a milestone by claiming that autobiography is something specific to culture: “[t]he author of an autobiography gives a sort of relief to his image by reference to the environment with its independent existence.”(29) Gusdorf, who launched what later would be called the classic theory of autobiography, asserted that autobiography was a firmly established genre whose history could be easily established through the masterpieces of Western literature. For him, autobiography is limited in time and space: it is a late occurrence in Western culture, beginning with the embedding of Christian contributions –especially the idea of confession– into Western traditions. Gusdorf goes on further to affirm that non-Western narratives of the self, such as Gandhi’s, use Western means –the autobiographical genre– to uphold the East. Thus, he surmises that the concern of the self by Western man has been a useful tool in intellectually colonizing the other and a means to systematically conquer the world (28-29). Moreover, for Gusdorf, it is peculiar to western man the idea of narrating one’s own life in order to elongate such life even beyond death, again recalling Christian concepts and, therefore, obliterating Eastern notions of life writing. In a sense, and according to Gusdorf’s ideas, the autobiographer delights in being looked at and believes her/his achievements should not be forgotten, thus disappear, with her/his passing. Thus, autobiography develops in a cultural system where consciousness of self is central, which will point towards issues of identity. Gusdorf points out that while in biography the historian –who is aware of carrying out a task similar to that of an artist– is removed from his subject of study by the passage of time and/or a social distance, in autobiography artist and model coincide, and the historian regards himself as object of study. Thus, the interest, indicates Gusdorf, is turned from public to private history. As the theoretician explains, the image depicted in autobiography “is another “myself,” a double of my being […] invested with a sacred character that makes it at once fascinating and frightening.”(32) The critic brings in the psychological theories of Jacques Lacan about the mirror stage in the formation of the self. For Gusdorf, autobiography and the mirror reinforce the ritual of self-examination encouraged by Christianity: the self presents her/his accounts according to some rhetorical tenets. Renaissance and Reformation remove penitence from the self-examination, since Western man starts to disregard the tarnish of the transcendent, and sees himself a man of nature. This is the self that Montaigne brings forth in his Essays, where there is no adherence to any doctrine, thus becoming secularized, and man starts to reveal facets of his individuality. This new freedom of the individual allows him to believe that everything is at his reach. This praise of the individual self, heightened in Romanticism, brought new interest in autobiography. Individuality as a virtue is related to the concept of sincerity: the value of telling all, which Rousseau advocated. The emphasis now is on the complexity of man, and his contradictions as a human being. Therefore, autobiography is veering away from the model of Christian confession and into a form bolstered by the principles of the psychological.

We can argue, then, that Georges Gusdorf noticed the Western man’s common interest in the consciousness of the singularity of individual life, even if that life reflects a cultural and historical totality. With the studies in historiography by Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Misch, Gusdorf assumed that the artistic and literary purpose of autobiography was secondary to its anthropological function, an assumption which, on the one hand, was a departure from the tenets of the New Criticism and, on the other, established the basis to believe in autobiography as a genre committed to convey truth.

According to this understanding of the genre, the limits to which Gusdorf refers in the title to his seminal article are those of time and space, as they are applied to contemporary Western culture. As a result of the ideas owing to both anthropology and history, man positions autobiography in its cultural moment. Context, then, becomes an integral part of the discourse. Not only does the author consider her/his life worthy of special interest, but s/he gives witness of her/his self and rebuilds her/his own history reorganizing the events in a comprehensive outline that is aimed to allow the author to safeguard her/his legacy which in the views of the autobiographer must not wane. It is important to underline the efforts on the part of the author to compose a narrative in retracing a part of her/his life, and not just put together a series of life events side by side. To this purpose, the author distances from her/his self so that s/he can re-create her/his self in the focal point of the text both within a given cultural moment and across time. In other words, the autobiographer has the benefit of finding out and uncovering her/his self from the other side of the mirror and the advantage of doing justice to herself/himself better that anyone else. Through autobiography, Gusdorf posits, the author restores an incomplete or deformed truth, the text being devoted then to the defense and/or exaltation of the author’s life. It is, then, a task of personal salvation. However, the narrative of a life is not the mimetic double of such life. The past is gone and one is in front of a re-creation of the past where conscious discourses blend with unconscious motivations in the narrating of a life. According to Gusdorf, “the narrative is conscious, and since the narrator’s consciousness directs the narrative, it seems to him incontestable that it has also directed his life.” (41). However, memory brings back details in a particular light, which is an unconscious process. When it comes to narrate a life, the narrative itself bestows a given significance to the event depicted, which might be different to the one it had when it originally occurred, or just one significance out of many, or even an importance it never had to begin with. This brings us back to the idea of truth that was key in the confessional autobiographies of the earlier times. Because the narrating of a life is a re-presentation, it cannot be a mere “record of existence, an account book or a logbook,” (Gusdorf 42) but a recounting of events with a given meaning, a meaning that is subordinated to the truth of the author, subjected to both: his unconscious view of the events, and his conscious effort to construct the narrative. Autobiographical truth is, hence, subjective truth. An element that takes part of that subjective truth is the effort of the author to re-construct herself/himself in her/his own resemblance at a given time. The narrative of self is a historical document about a life. In this sense, the early theorists of autobiography followed the ideas of Dilthey: man is a historical being. And according to the German positivist philosopher, we understand everything (whether outside or inside of us) in relation to what we are: history is linked to our autobiography.

Gusdorf, however, notices that there is a literary element in autobiography, which is “of greater importance than the historic and objective function,” (43) but the French scholar is reluctant to give it a central role, for he claims that the literary is less important than the anthropological (43-44). Gusdorf views re-presentation as a problem: the rhetorical relationship between what autobiography is and what it represents. Given that autobiography cannot be a faithful account of life but just an account, Gusdorf views it as a symbol or “the parable of a consciousness in quest of its own truth.” (44) As the individual is always in progress, autobiography is never a fixed, unchanging, image of such life but the fixing of a creation of such existence at a given time. It fixes a retrospective look but not a finished life. In sum, Gusdorf underlines that autobiography does not reveal the objective events or periods of a life but the attempts of a writer to provide with meaning the myth of his/her re-created life.

Following Gusdorf’s theories, Roy Pascal wrote Design and Truth in Autobiography (1960), where he revealed his interest in the individuality of self. By asserting that autobiography is a product of Western civilization subsequent to the Roman times, Pascal laid emphasis on defining the subject as a sieve through which the outside world is filtered, and in the fact that the selectivity with which certain experiences are accumulated creates a bigger truth than the objective account of an era by a historian or biographer.

After Gusdorf and Pascal, this historic treatment of the self ended in a series of criticism about autobiography that received the label of transcendentalist or existentialist, in reference to the notion of a pre-existing, autonomous self from which autobiography would derive. This branch of criticism was interested in the authorial subject, whether just in the self or as provider of insight into the writer’s work.

It was unavoidable that the historic perspective of autobiography as a culturally determined phenomenon, dependent on certain notions of individualism, took some theoreticians to specifically relate the origin of the genre with Romanticism and its enthusiasm with subjectivity; more so when it was the Romantics the ones who saw the work as the clear materialization of the author’s creative genius. They used the “I” in its more personal dimension, even existentialist one may say, to the point of opening the possibility to assert that all of the Romantic works can be interpreted from the standpoint of autobiography, regardless of their genre.

James Olney’s Metaphors of Self (1972) opens the genre to a higher theoretical plateau, allowing for the concept of subjectivity to become part of the analysis. This led to the challenging of that prescriptive and restrictive notion of autobiography that earlier theoreticians had conceived. In turn, the ways of self-narrating, and of approaching autobiography expanded.

William Boelhower puts the emphasis on the fragmentation and de-centering of identity. For him, autobiography in the mid-1900s displayed a rupture from modernism in reflecting the fluidity of identity. By bringing de-centered identities into the discussion, Boelhower opens a new direction of analysis.

This de-centering of the self leads Michel Leiris to parallel the examination of the self with the analysis of others. This triggers the concept that autobiography is an apostrophe, an address to the other, which presents the writer’s ideas to others in a communicative circuit. This is particularly evident in the case of serial autobiographies; that is, successive autobiographies by a writer that appear with a given cadence. This is the case of the writer in this study: Richard Rodriguez has published a new autobiography every ten years approximately. By addressing the others in an apostrophic manner, autobiography shatters the limits of the genre to particularized lives. Leiris, who is an ethnologist and ethnographer by training, helps understand how the “I,” by being subjected to the presence of the others, becomes the self of a community. Thus, personal autobiography can become the autobiography of a community, something that is of particular interest to underrepresented groups within the genre, namely the so-called “ethnic” communities. This brings about a particular problem; that of being both the subject and the object of the autobiographical discourse, which Roland Barthes explores in his autobiography. Other writers will explore issues of language and representation in their inquiry on the self, calling autobiography into question and attempting to demonstrate the impossibility of conceiving the genre in a traditional way.

Postcolonial and multicultural critics also propose alternatives to the traditional notion of self. This becomes germane to the analysis of autobiographies by non-mainstream authors. Calling Western norms of identity and experience into question, these autobiographers bring their status as the West’s “others” and their demand to be taken into account within the cultural discourse into the limelight. For these authors and critics, contemporary autobiographies are invested with a redemptive quality that is essential to the genre. These autobiographical acts construct subject positions through which to contest displacement and marginality, and posit a new subjectivity, based on its hybrid, transcultural, diasporic, and/or nomadic nature. These narratives of the self move the “I” towards the collective and challenge traditional boundaries of identification. Derridean deconstruction, Barthesian semiotics, and Foucaultian discursive notion of power are significant theoretical foundations.

Karl Weintraub in The Value of the Individual (1978) saw in autobiography the genre that emerged as corollary of the valuation of Western culture. Weintraub focused on the history of individuality from Saint Augustine to Goethe, and he noticed a clear escalation in individualism once the 19th century began. This rapid development has its explanation in the fact that it is not until then that the point of view of the individual and the self-consciousness of the author were articulated with considerable prominence. Then, autobiography starts to be judged by its truth-value, which is no other than the subjective truth of the author’s opinion on his or her life. Because author and subject are considered the same entity, there is the need of certain consistency between style and subject: autobiography.

When it comes to establish a theory of the autobiographical genre, scholars have explored many more variations of autobiography as an individual or social dimension of the intellectual or moral character, depending on the times. However, the most outstanding intellectual when it comes to formulate a formal generic definition of autobiography is Philippe Lejeune. He is the first theoretician to devote a considerable effort to establish categorical differences between autobiography and the novel, even though the former employs resources that one normally associates to the latter, let alone the fusion of autobiography and fiction by some writers. Lejeune tried to define autobiography in L’Autobiographie en France (1971) but he realized that such definition needed to be further clarified and refined, in part because the theoretical discussion surrounded the same triangle: fiction, biography and autobiography and the relationships between the latter and the former two terms. In order to shed light on the nature of the genre, Lejeune published in 1975 his fundamental essay Le Pacte autobiographique. For Lejeune, autobiography consists of a “[r]etrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality.” (4) This definition requires that the text is narrative and in prose; its subject is the life of an individual and/or the story of a personality; the author and narrator are one and the same; the narrator and the protagonist coincide, and the narrator takes a retrospective viewpoint. Thus, Lejeune isolates autobiography from memoirs (these are not the account of an individual life); from biography (the narrator is not the same as the protagonist); from personal novels (where author and narrator are not one); from diaries and journals (where the narration is not retrospective); from the autobiographical poem (since the text would not be in prose); and from the essay (which Lejeune does not regard as having a retrospective point of view nor a narrative form).