On Becoming Chicana in the Calumet Region

Download or read book On Becoming Chicana in the Calumet Region written by Adrienne Viramontes and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is a phenomenological exploration and description of Mexican American identity. I focus on the conditions that made possible my muted ethnic identity, in which although I was a third generation Mexican American, who was predominantly raised by first generation immigrants, I came to understand myself as white. I also focus on the process of decolonization that is particular to my experience in Northwest Indiana, a location to which thousands of Mexicans (and many other immigrants) migrated to work in the steel industry in the 1920's. By examining my own identity constitution through the intersections of race, class, gender, and industry in the Calumet Region, I argue that those intersections in that locale shaped an experience that is related to, but significantly different from, the far more thoroughly researched comparable experience in the Southwest, and one that shaped my identity as an industrial, insurgent Chicana. My lived experience, and that of my family, is the focus of my study. My grandparents came from Mexico to Northwest Indiana to work in the steel mills. They were working-class laborers who, for years before unionization, endured poor working conditions, discrimination, and low pay. Much has changed since then. Unlike my grandparents, I was raised with middle-class economic privilege; I proudly identified as Caucasian and my family jokingly referred to me as the Oreo, someone brown on the outside and white on the inside. For most of my life I was unfamiliar with Mexican American political history in America and the general living and working conditions of Mexican Americans in this country. In the dissertation I consider this experience in relation to a variety of Chicana/o identity scholarship (e.g., Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands: La Frontera , Armando Rendón's Chicano Manifesto , and Jaqueline Martinez's Phenomenology of Chicana Experience and Identity ). I conclude that my lack of Chicano awareness was linked to particular conditions of race, class, gender, and industry in Northwest Indiana. Through phenomenological description and analysis, I explore these conditions that made possible my lack of Chicano awareness of self in relation to living in this region. I argue that these particular conditions make possible a cultural identity that is heavily influenced by whiteness, and reduce Mexican ways of being to an afterthought. Each chapter is a mixture of personal narrative and conventional scholarship that sets that experience into a broader context. In each chapter I employ post-colonial, feminist, Chicano, and philosophy of communication theories to analyze a particular intersection (race, class, gender, and industry). Along with data collected from interviews with my family members, these sources enable me to give voice to my family's and my own understanding of Mexican American identity.