| abstract |
This work presents a collection of poetry, memoirs, and essays of cross-generational Hispanics and Latinas, highlighting their voices, memories, and experiences. The first three chapters showcase the lives and struggles of three generations of Puerto Rican women on my maternal ancestral line. Beginning in Morovis, Puerto Rico, then migrating to New York City's Loisaida and ending in upstate New York, we journey through over eighty years of family history and recollections in search of recreating the worlds of my ancestors to help me understand my present and future identities. The fourth chapter contains the voices and stories of five Hispanic writers: Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1986); Julia Alvarez's The Woman I Kept to myself (2004); Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street (1983); Judith Ortiz Cofer's Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990); and Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban (1992). These writers use their characters and personas to explore and disseminate their countries and people's struggles. More importantly, they use their writing to understand, accept, and siphon their individual and community experiences and identities. Each woman in this collection is emblematic of the social, political, and economic plights that have plagued Latin American countries for centuries. Their lives and shared experiences symbolize women's struggles for over a millennium, including immigration, death, grief, sexism, racism, reproductive rights and injustice, mental health, colorism, and education disenfranchisement. Therefore, this dissertation (re)creates a tapestry of collected reminiscences that aid in discovering, confronting, and reformatting the maternalistic voice of an often-suppressed population in Latin America and the world at large.
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