ABSTRACT
The narratives of Ana Menéndez share with Meena Alexander and many ethnic writers the need to belong, to create a "durable past" in the American literary scene. These new hyphenated Americans have "multiple anchorages". They inhabit an ambivalent space where they are haunted by the past and maintain connections in their ancestral lands as well as in the United States. They portray the arrival of the immigrants, their travails and their vicissitudes. In doing so, they must recognize two cultural systems that may be at odds with each other, and the eventual transformation or Americanization. This route to her roots is in fact the one taken by the author herself, thus perpetuating an endless cycle of departures and returns that has distinguished the Cuban nation over time. More precisely, the common language is the immigrant autobiographic microtext, the single story. Its narrative logic is the logic of the collective experience of the immigrants isomorphically translated into autobiographical code.
