ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the author’s and her mother’s national, ethnic, and linguistic identities as Puerto Rican Latinx Spanish-English bilinguals living most of their lives in the midwestern United States. The author examines how mother and daughter Puerto Rican migrants to the United States experience and negotiate identity, as well as how they experienced integration into American culture and negotiated their Puerto Rican and emerging American selves. Anzaldúa’s concepts of borderlands and nepantla, as utilized by Prieto and Villenas, Zavala Martínez’s entremundos, and Antonia Darder’s biculturalism framework ground the analysis, as well as various theories and findings regarding migration, assimilation, and acculturation. Data were collected through bilingual interviews and an online journal. The author used thematic and dialogic/performative data analysis models and kept connections or contradictions between mother and daughter narratives at the forefront. Two prominent themes are discussed in the chapter: sacrificio, and a section on the things people tell themselves to cope with struggle and change. Emphasized in this chapter are the implications their experiences have for education, particularly teacher and school preparation, curriculum design, and family/community engagement strategies.
