In the 1980s there was a proliferation of poetry collections, short stories, and novels published by women of Latin American descent in the United States. By the end of the decade, another genre of U.S. Latina writing, the autobiography, also came into prominence with the publication of three notable autobiographical collections: Loving by Aurora Levins Morales and Rosario Morales; and Borderlands/La Frontera, by Gloria Anzaldúa.
These collections are innovative at many levels. They confront traditional linguistic boundaries by using a mix of English and Spanish, and they each address the politics of multiple cultural identities by exploring the interrelationships among such factors as ethnicity, gender, and language. This effort manifests itself in the generically mixed structure of the most part, giving preference to any of these modes of presentation.
In Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa presents her personal history and the history of the Mexican American community to which she belongs by juxtaposing narrative sequences and poetry. Moraga’s Loving in the War Years is likewise characterized by a mixture of genres, and, as she states in her introduction, the events in her life employ multigeneric and multivocal forms to express the complexities inherent in the formation of their identities.
Rather than forcing their personal histories to conform to existing generic parameters, these writers have revolutionized the genre of autobiography, redrawing the boundaries of this literary form to make it more amenable to the expression of their own experiences. In doing so, they have shown a strong determination to has for too long taken their silence for granted.
What this question is testing
Topic
The author is celebrating how a wave of Latina writers in the 1980s broke open the autobiography genre.
Framework
Highlight Noteworthy.
Main Point
The simpler version: traditional autobiography says "one person, one voice, one genre, one chronology." Latina writers in the 1980s — Moraga, Anzaldúa, the Morales mother/daughter team — broke all of that. They mixed Spanish and English, mixed essays and poems and stories and journal entries, reordered events by political growth instead of by date, and even brought multiple authors into one book. The author thinks they expanded what autobiography can be — to fit their complicated lives.
P1: The flourishing
In the 1980s a wave of Latina writing in many genres appeared, capped off by three landmark autobiographical collections.
P2: What was new
Bilingual writing. Mixing essays, sketches, stories, poems, journal entries — without ranking any of them. Exploring how ethnicity, gender, and language interact.
P3: Concrete examples — and the wildest one
Anzaldúa: weaves narrative and poetry. Moraga: reorders by political development, not date. Getting Home Alive: two authors (mother and daughter), woven together, sometimes commenting on each other. May seem chaotic but is deliberate.
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