Saddling La Gringa, Vol. 183

Because of their ethnic identity, Latinas sometimes face discrimination in the United States. Latinas are additionally oppressed because of their gender—because they are women, they hold a subordinate position in patriarchal Latino culture. The oppression of Latinas is maintained through various cultural mechanisms, which sustain power relations based on gender. This book gives special attention to the role of female cultural gatekeepers in novels by contemporary Latina writers.

These gatekeepers enforce and perpetuate patriarchal cultural constraints onto future generations of Latinas. They construct and police female identity, including their own, through the use of idiomatic expressions, epithets, jokes, morality tales, and myths. The volume begins by examining Judith Ortiz Cofer's Silent Dancing, a work that clearly illustrates the role of gatekeepers in perpetuating gendered power relations. It then turns to the writings of Christina García, Julia Alvarez, Rosario Ferre, and Magali Garcia Ramis. Through their highly critical yet loving characterizations of female gatekeepers, these Latina writers suggest a different way of life for Latinas, a feminist way.

Studies contemporary Latina writers' depiction of female "gatekeepers" who enforce and perpetuate patriarchal cultural constraints onto future generations of Latinas.

Booknews

Kafka (English and women's studies, Kean U.) explores selected contemporary Latina writers from the Caribbean and Latin America, highlighting the three-fold alienation their works reveal. That alienation is the traumatic cultural displacement that occurs after enforced immigration into the second culture of the US, which leaves the women seeing themselves as tourists and displaced outsiders when they would rather be home. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

PHILLIPA KAFKA is Professor Emerita of English and Former Director of Women's Studies at Kean University.