A Chicana’s Journey Back to the Source in Erlinda Gonzales-Berry’s Paletitas de guayaba
Presentation
Overview
Overview
Description
Paletitas de guayaba (1991), Erlinda Gonzales-Berry’s only novel in Spanish is an important text of Chicana feminism of the 1980s era. This paper looks at the travel motif, literally illustrated by the train journey the 23-year-old Marina takes from the US border to Mexico City. Using multiple narratorial voices and techniques, Gonzales-Berry presents the initiation of a Chicana feminine voice that is not solely based on the mythology of the Chicano cultural nationalism, rather constructed from the protagonist’s Mexican and New Mexican identities of the past and the present.