From “Jibara” to “Chiquita”: Confessions of Dis-Belonging in Esmeralda Santiago’s Memoirs

Abstract

This paper by focusing on the intersection of race, gender and identity as reflected in the three memoirs of the Puerto-Rican American writer Esmeralda Santiago, When I was Puerto Rican (1993), Almost a Woman (1998) and The Turkish Lover (2004), attempts to read into the complex dynamics of the Puerto-Rican migrant female experience. Esmeralda Santiago's memoirs that intertwine the problem of transculturation with that of male dominance and cultural patriarchy rest on her desire to find and sustain a stable point of reference in a world marked by mobility, transitivity, discontinuity and fragmentation. The feelings of vulnerability and invisibility that she constantly experiences within her Puerto-Rican culture and later with her Turkish lover lead her to resist rather than accept a gendered and racialized self. However it also leads her to forge an identity "distinct from" and "in conflict with" the significant Others around her. In When I was Puerto Rican, she is the black jibara "Negi" highly critical and at odds with her Puerto/AmeRican island heritage; in Almost A Woman, she is the lost young female Esmeralda trying to rise above her mother, family and Nuyorican community; and in the The Turkish Lover she is the Esmeralda Santiago who learns to judge her own self and others through the social and racial categories and cultural standards of American society. This paper asserts that unlike many women autobiographical writers, Esmeralda Santiago can achieve to create a sense of belonging in her life only through an assertion of difference and later through the contestation of her Puerto-Rican female identity.