Being Mexican: Identity, Location, and Rosa Nissán (II)

Résumé 0

Being Mexican is the first book-length attempt to understand the narrative of the Mexican writer Rosa Nissán. Its focus are her first two novels, Novia que te vea and Hisho que te nazca, which are coming-of-age narratives in which the protagonist, Oshinica, attempts to understand her family and community as she grows up during the prosperious years of the Mexican Miracle and the changing society found in Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s. After setting down the groundwork for this study in the first installment, these next two -included in this edition of Amerika- focus on different aspects of male and female identity. While Oshinica forges her identity she does so in several spaces, both public and private. These next two sections analize the public: education and work as well as the private spaces: the home and the sacred, with the purpose of identifying the forces that work to create an identity for the protagonist. The analysis reveals the tensions created as the protagonist tries to resolve the conflict between self and famiily, between the mainstream and the marginal, and between the traditional and the modern; asking important questions regarding how identity is formed and how the spaces one inhabits exercise control over their identity.