The Pitfalls of Transcultural Ascension in Veronica Chamber’s "Mama’s Girl"

• In Event: This is America: Re-creating Afro-Diasporic Contemporary Literary and Cultural Discourses

Abstract

In her bildung memoir Mama’s Girl, Veronica Chambers uses ascension metaphors to articulate the continuities and ruptures between symbolic geography, upward social mobility, and pan-African identity formation. Chambers, an Afro-Latina writer of Panamanian and Dominican ancestry, chronicles her ethnoracial apprenticeship in African American history, culture, and ways of being. The exodus and immersion narratives that literally and figuratively structure Mama’s Girl are deeply informed by African American cultural nationalism. Surprisingly, Chambers uses the motives and successes of the Civil Rights movement to sanction a personal politics of individualism and materialism in the post-segregation era. The abundance and function of African American cultural tropes in Mama’s Girl complicates what it means to be and become Afro-Latina in the U.S.

Author

• Trent Masiki, Boston University