Transcultural Women of Late Twentieth-Century American Literature:

First-Generation Immigrants from Islands and Peninsulas

Pauline T. Newton, Doctoral Student, English, Holly A. Laird, Gordon O. Taylor, James Watson

First-generation twentieth-century American immigrant women including Puerto Rican American Judith Ortiz Cofer, Dominican American Julia Alvarez,[1] Antiguan American Jamaica Kincaid, Malaysian American Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and Vietnamese American Lan Cao struggle to become multicultural representations of diverse cultures. Upon leaving their islands or peninsular regions, often already cross-hatched societies in which cultural differences later manifest themselves to the writers and their characters, these women and their characters first create their own makeshift “islands” in America, and then begin to investigate and to mingle with the mainland’s culture. One might call these islands-on-the-mainland barrios or borderlands, but unlike some border areas where crossings occur or where commingled regions exist, these self-created isles allow immigrants to sequester themselves from within the American territory. As these immigrants establish their “island” havens in the United States, they react particularly to relationships with their mothers and with other female family role models such as grandmothers, sisters, or aunts. All of these maternal figures maintain strong ties to the writers’ root cultures. In contrast, the authors’ analyses of connections to fathers demonstrate an open reaction to or rebellion against old patriarchal homeland ways. Usually, these family ties paradoxically bind the writers and their narrators to native customs that they cannot escape, yet eventually cannot heed. When the writers and their characters leave their makeshift “islands,” they explore the mainland, its culture, and its language more boldly. During this transition period, they straddle multiple cultures, shifting between, testing, challenging, and discarding cultural, gender, social, and even racial barriers that arise among family members from their islands or peninsular regions and among surrogate family members and friends from the American mainland. As these immigrant women writers and their characters begin to pull away from their families’ root cultures and traditions, they investigate the mainland’s non-family-related, Americanized traditions and relationships. In order to build their relationships with other American women, these young women must blend in physically. They arrive at this realization when they become conscious of their racial identity by comparing their skin tones, hair, and clothing to that of American women. Often, light-haired and -eyed dolls or Hollywood stars, such as Barbie or Shirley Temple, attract the young immigrants and compel them to transform their looks so that they can cross the boundaries that stand between them and Anglo-Americans. However, the immigrant women cannot go so far as to bleach their skin or to alter the texture of their dark hair, so they slip into multiple identities at work, at school, at home, and on the streets, where they are not American, yet not full members of their native cultures. Nor are they “hyphenated” Americans, because they cannot perfectly homogenize their old and new worlds. Instead, they struggle to become transcultural representations of different societies. My presentation, based on my dissertation, will give an overview of the above characteristics as portrayed in Cao’s Monkey Bridge.