Publisher's Synopsis
This book is an in-depth study of Latina girls, portrayed in five coming-of-age narratives by using spaces and places as hermeneutical tools. The texts under study here are Julia Alvarez's Return to Sender (2009), Norma E. Cantú's Canìcula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (1995), Mary Helen Ponce's Hoyt Street: An Autobiography (1993), and Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican (1993) and Almost a Woman (1998). Unlike most representations of Latina girls, which are characterized by cultural inaccuracies, tropes of exoticism, and a tendency to associate the host society with modernity and their girls' cultures of origin with backwardness and oppression, these texts contribute to reimagining the social differently from what the dominant imagery offers.
