ABSTRACT

The portrayal of the Mendez and Rosario families here was influenced by scholars who have argued for the complex humility of the people like those with whom I worked in Carpinteria. The context is one of an unwelcoming American society where fear of immigrants abound. In this text, I show ways that Ramon and Chela Mendez and Maria Rosario assert their accounts of identity reinforcing the position that belonging and connectedness is never beyond power. In this light, the stories of these individuals reject any idealization of family or community because they shift between discourses restating a major position in this book that no action has a single effect. Our cultural history provides a broad canvas on which we construct the self — meaning that — the self is never separable from context. 1 Here I posit that identities on the individual level resist closure and reveal complicated, shifting, multiple facets.