From having a house of my own to forgetting the room of one's own: A Reflection on Michele Serros's How to Be a Chicana Role Model and Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street

Abstract

[EN] Chicanas have historically been made aware of their difference not only because of their Mexican cultural heritage but also for their gender. Despite their current protection under the US Constitution and the many advances achieved by the Chicana Feminist Movement, Chicanas remain to be marginalized. Thus, their literary contribution of the 20th and 21st centuries has been closely connected to the production of Bildungsroman a subgenre within fiction which centres on the protagonist’s rite of passage, i.e., in the creation of the identity of young Chicanas. Both novels this paper attempts to contrastively analyse belong to this subgenre, these are Michele Serros’s How to Be a Chicana Role Model (2000) and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1980). In this essay, I examine the portrayal of the female characters of both narratives and argue that whilst Cisneros set the standard for Chicana writers, Serros’s work revisits the canon and introduces the notion of “role models” to deconstruct it. However, How to Be a Chicana Role Model follows a similar approach to Cisneros’s work, as it reaffirms the idea of Chicana women as exoticized and otherized by both Anglos and Chicana/os due to the overlapping oppression of class, gender, and race; Serros contributes to this debate by problematizing the homogenization and emphasizing the difference among several generations of Chicanas/os owing to the disconnection from their Mexican roots. Hence, Serros illustrates that the oppression is obscured but latent. Besides, by analysing the employment of two aspiring writers as protagonists, the essay draws on the role of writing for escaping their reality and identity construction. Then, both novels reflect that Chicanas remain pertaining to in-between spaces, against the generalized belief of amelioration of oppression. Thus, this paper lays bare how even if there is an evolution in the portrayal of Chicanas due to globalization and acculturation, Chicanas have not been emancipated.