A escrita das mulheres chicanas como ato transformativo: uma análise comparativa das ficções autobiográficas e autobiografias contemporâneas

Abstract

The transformations in the history of literature and the development of the Cultural Studies, with a new view on the silenced histories have led to different orientations from those traditionally attributed to this field, providing the inclusion of woman in the literary, historical studies and in the several areas of knowledge in the contemporaneity. The Chicana Culture, a recent phenomenon in world scenery, flourished with “El Movimiento”, in the decade of 1960, representing the Chicanos` fighting for their self-affirmation in the dominant American society. Chicano literature, in its turn, can be considered a reflection of this fight initiated in the 1960s, once it is based on the right of a self-cultural expression. From the 1980 decade on, there was an eclosion of Chicana women literature, expressing the Chicanas problems in their specific contexts, independently of the masculine Chicano canons or of the American feminism. The present work aimed to investigate and confirm the construction of the female representation in an expressive way, from the perspective of the act of writing behaving as a facilitator of the chicana characters’ voices through four works, “The House on Mango Street” (1984), by Sandra Cisneros, “The Last of the Menu Girls” (1986), by Denise Chávez, “Confessions of a Book Burner” (2014), by Lucha Corpi, and “A Dream Called Home” (2018), by Reyna Grande, besides establishing a comparative analysis of the two first works marked as autobiographical fictions written in the XX century, “The House on Mango Street” (1984) and “The Last of the Menu Girls” (1986), with the two other autobiographical works, “Confessions of a Book Burner” (2014) and “A Dream Called Home” (2018), productions of the XXI century. After the proposed analysis, it was verified the existence of similarities in the proposals of the writings of these more contemporary authors in relation to the authors of the XX century, in regard to the identity search, the self-affirmation and the characteristics of the writing of these Chicana writers. It can be then affirmed that these autobiographical writings of the XXI ratify the proposals of the autobiographical fictions of the past century related to the conception of identity, gender, class, race/ethnicity and that these writing strategies have presented the possibility of serving as a transformative act, that is, the writing of the chicana writers have contributed to the recognition, revalorization and consequent reaffirmation of the Mexican-American/chicanas and their group in the global scenery