latin american essays maclas

to authentic personal experience. The novel ends when Gina returns to her
California home, and resolves to review all of the videos, recordings, and
computer files she made of her family, reaching an emotional catharsis that
enables her to go forward in life, as her father would wish, but without leaving
the past behind. Rather, she begins a new life with a brand new memory of her
own.
Memory and Technology
Elías Miguel Muñoz artfully works the question of memory, and its role in
the formation of identity, through the thematic and narrative use of technology.
Throughout the novel, the reader is constantly being exposed to shifting
representations/recordings of reality, always being reminded that what he or she
is reading is, in one way or another, mediated through a medium. This has the
effect of foregrounding the sensation of indirect reality, a performance of life. In
this respect, Muñoz is a writer who refuses to essentialize Latino/a identity. The
instability of perspective he creates is instrumental in his de-essentializing
agenda. Fourteen-year-old Gina Domingo cannot be reduced to the simple label
of Cuban-American teenager. She was born and raised in the United States, to
parents that refuse to discuss their Cuban past. Her mother even refuses to cook
Cuban food. Gina’s identity is therefore a question mark, a quest rather than a
label.
Karen Christian, in her book Show & Tell: Identity as Performance in U.S.
Latina/o Fiction, dedicates her work to questioning the rigid constructs of the
various U.S. Latino identities. She views each identity “. . . as an ongoing process
of invention involving cultural heritage, gender roles, and dynamic interaction
with American dominant culture” (23-24). Moreover, Christian (9) sees that the
younger generation of writers born in Cuba (Elías Miguel Muñoz, Achy Obejas,
Cristina García), “raise issues of social class and cultural identity and operate as
counternarratives to conservative U.S. Cuban discourse. Gay and lesbian voices
further problematize exclusionary views of U.S. Cuban and Latino/a identity by
challenging culturally coded gender constructs.” Within the theoretical framework
of socially constructed identities, Brand New Memory is an excellent example of
the fluid and multi-layered process of identity formation. Muñoz and his
contemporaries come forward with a deliberate ambiguity about what it means
to be a Cuban-American, or to have any other form of identity. They infuse their
characters with a complexity that allows issues to be seen from various angles, in
various contexts, always in a dynamic, rather than fixed, context. Characters are
often caught in a web of contested memories, unable to see clearly the truth of
their family’s history, and along with it, the core of their own identity. 7
Gina is full of questions about “the Truth” regarding Cuba, her family, and
the U.S. society in which she lives. Her biggest question, of course, is herself.
Who is she, and what is her relationship to her world How does her present life
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