Becoming Latina in the United States: Navigating a New Racial Order

• In Event: Critical Narrative Methodologies as Sites for Challenging, Negotiating, and Reclaiming Bicultural Identities

Abstract

In this self-narrative/analytic autoethnography (Anderson, 2006) I aimed at understanding my identity as a Latin American woman currently living in the United States. I defined the concept of my identity as the ways in which I conceived of myself in a country with a very different racial/ethnic order than that of my own –Uruguay–. In particular, I endeavored to understand how I have had to negotiate what I call my white Latin American identity –that is, my European heritage and my Latin American upbringing– in a country that racializes Latinos as a homogenous mass of non-Caucasian phenotypes. In this sense, I explored the process of my becoming Latina in the United States by analyzing how my self-identity has changed –and continues to change– during my first and second migrations to the United States: the former, from 2008 to 2009, when I was an exchange student at a small College, and the latter, from 2013 to date, during my Master’s and Doctoral studies at a New York large University.

Using Critical Race Theory and Latino/a Critical Theory as theoretical frameworks, I embrace the Radical Progressive/Critical research tradition, with a data collection process anchored in a written journal of personal reflections about past and present occurrences and interactions with others over a semester. I engaged in thematic and content analysis methodology according to the Holistic-Content perspective proposed by Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach and Zilber (1998), which considers the overall context to illuminate any part of the text.

I also appealed to Jackson and Mazzei’s (2011; 2013) thinking with theory approach by using Foucault’s concept of power and subject as the principal constructs that guided the analysis. In this sense, the constant negotiation of my white Latin American identity in this country is a prime illustration of how I have, simultaneously, exercised my power to define myself truthfully and resisted the power of others to ascribe a certain identity upon me, and how my self as a subject is contingently constructed in consequence. Such negotiation of my identity is part of my own “ongoing process of ‘becoming’–rather than merely ‘being’– in the world” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2011, p. 53), my becoming Latina.

Author

• Lucía Caumont Stipanicic, Teachers College, Columbia University