Major and Classification
English and Minor in French and Management Consulting
Faculty Mentor
Richard Berg, Ph.D.
Department
Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Marshall School of Business
McNair Project
“The Difference in the Identification Process and its Execution within the Female Homosocial Sphere in Chicana and Mexican Literature Post 1960s”
Project Abstract
Between the United States and Mexico, there is a borderland culture that thrives and struggles to form an identity, constantly torn between the values of the Mexican culture and American ideals. For Mexicans on the other side of the border, there is also a constant struggle of identity due to their proximity to the US border. For the most part, this struggle has been influential in Chicano and Mexican literature. Yet, in recent years the critical analysis of literature written after The Chicano Movement of the 1960s, a movement that dealt with the negative stereotypes that were portrayed, has predominately focused on the individual and not the collective identity that men and women on both sides of the border struggle with. Few critical essays, though, have dealt with the role of individual female identity in the female homosocial sphere; with the homosocial sphere consisting of the non-romantic, non-sexual relationship women have with one another. Women, both Chicano and Mexican, similarly identify through the various stories that are told. Despite this similarity, Chicana and Mexicana authors have written different female protagonists that position themselves in relation to other women, a relationship that has the potential of being a form of identification.