ABSTRACT

Chicana/o literature relates textual essence to personal and/or collective rites to self-cognizance, and reinforces the ongoing relationship between telling a story, decoding obscure messages and reconfiguring oneself. Tierra ingeniously embraces multiple aspects of Chicana/o culture and presents the reader with snapshots of experience in marginal locales of the United States. In "Narrative identity", Paul Ricoeur destabilizes fossilized or even canonized notions of selfhood, and puts forward the proposition that identity formation is delivered through purposeful accounts of being. Chicana/o literary writings have been largely construed through the historical resonance of the civil rights movement, when political engagement and/or activism gave a laudable impetus to the troubled voices of the grassroots across the United States. Finally, the Chicana/o writers refute prescribed social roles and/or codes of conduct, juggle with the antithetical notions of collectivization and individuation, and define self-differentiation as the democratic right to explore the infinite dimensions of selfhood.