Aida’s Reviews > Home Girls: Chicana Literary Voices > Status Update

"This kind of alienation occurs when an individual feels compelled to constantly "translate" herself; it arises when a racialized individual, through socialization in the dominant U.S. ideology, "learns" to be self-conscious rather than self-assured and adaptable in terms of a culture or language that varies from the mainstream."

"The only way to write for la comunidad is to write so completely from your heart what is your own personal truth. That is what touches people."

"Mexican cultural practices maintain a system that classifies women according to their marital status; one is viewed either as a senorita (virgin) or as a senora (sexually active wife), a polarity that constantly forces women to define themselves as accessories to men."

"Adrienne Rich calls this kind of writing "Revision - the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction." It is, Rich says, "for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves." "

"This kind of authorized control undermines exchange and fails to recognize that the social positioning of Chicana writers often compels them to respond to both European- and Mexican-influenced value systems."

"...a poet hustling hot verbs, a teacher selling brainwaves in the S.D. red light school district..." Poem by Gina Valdes reprinted here.

"Imagine throwing a pair of dice and always expecting them to fall in the same combination. This ludicrous expectation resembles the problematic reasoning that occurs whenever we speak of a universal minority experience."