Growing Old/Growing Up Gringa: Madres e Hijas Negotiate Puertorriqueñismo and Americanism in the Heartland

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

Abstract

This narrative study focuses on both my mother’s and my national, ethnic and linguistic identities as Puerto Rican Latina Spanish-English bilinguals living most of their lives in the United States. Guiding this inquiry are three curiosities: How do mother-daughter Puerto Rican migrants to the United States experience and negotiate identity? How have they experienced integration into American culture and negotiated their Puerto Rican and emerging American selves? What are the parallels, divergences, and/or tensions that arise in addressing these curiosities? Understanding Latino/as’ (particularly women) relationships with their mothers, their lives, their stories, their consejos (Espino, 2016) is crucial to understanding how Latinas negotiate their various identities in any given space.

In analyzing my mother’s and my narratives, I draw on Anzaldúa’s concepts of borderlands and thirdness (Anzaldúa, 1999) or nepantla, as utilized by Prieto and Villenas (2012), Zavala Martínez’s (1994) entremundos, and Darder's (2011) biculturalism framework. I also consult various theories and findings regarding migration, assimilation and acculturation. I collected data through three bilingual interviews with my mother. I also kept an online journal for a semester tracing some of the important moments and experiences of my life and identity formation. I used coding to identify salient themes throughout the interviews, as well as connections or contradictions with my own reflections and journal entries. Later, I employed Riessman’s (2008) thematic and dialogic/performative data analysis methods. I highlight three prominent themes in my mother’s narrative, injected with my own perspectives: sacrifice, community, and a section on the things we tell ourselves to cope with struggle and change.

My mother often speaks of loss, particularly cultural, linguistic and familial dissolution. We both grapple with the tension between assimilation and cultural preservation: migration begets sacrifice, the forfeiture or atrophy of a part of yourself. My mother focuses on the benefits to be derived from those sacrifices; I tend to focus on the deprivation. My conversations with my mother also revealed differences on how our sense of community is tied to identity, and what we look for in a community. Community is a way for my mother to practice cultural traditions, but for her, uniting on the basis of identity reinforces minoritization. For me, community necessarily exists on the streets, in the schools and the caseríos, in the chinchorros and the alcaldía. I yearn for a sense of collectivity that I have never known. As I listened to her, I realized that our perspectives on issues of race, ethnicity, and the immigrant experience also varied greatly, largely due to the period of time where our lives were most dissimilar: our childhoods.

From an educational perspective, robust insight into students’ closest relationships and critical reflection of their own life experiences is important for any teacher or educator who wishes to cultivate a transformative classroom experience. There is no archetypal Puerto Rican migration experience, let alone a Latina/o one. Latinidad, puertorriqueñismo, is a kaleidoscope of happenings and decisions, sentiments and philosophies; I claim no expertise over anything but my own experience.

Author

• Maried Rivera Nieves, Bank Street College of Education