The Making of Hispanic-American Identity: an Issue in Julia Alvarez and Rodolfo Alfonso Anaya’s Fiction

Abstract

The making of the identity of colored people is a controversial subject matter in American literary fiction. This is because the concept of identity itself is open-ended, always evolving, and growing. It is forged among ongoing struggles between people—notably the Hispanics or Latinos and the Whites— a thing that can never take shape or coalesce into a reified proposition or discourse. Yet in this article, the researchers attempt to examine the formation of identity at the individual level in Alvarez and Anaya’s fictional texts. Focus is to be put on how their characters engage in the problematic process of constructing their identity within mainstream North American cultures. The article also attempts to draw the reader’s attention to the frictions resulting from this cultural divergence.