The Caribbean mother's role in her Latina daughter's process of identity negotiation
Description
This dissertation focuses on the impact of Caribbean mothers on the identity negotiation of daughters in works by three Latina writers: Julia Alvarez from the Dominican Republic, Cristina Garcia from Cuba, and Esmeralda Santiago from Puerto Rico. In order to show the power of mothers to influence daughters' evolving sense of self, object-relations theory (a reformulation of Freudian psychoanalytic theory) is utilized. This school of thought is particularly relevant in the context of this study because of the emphasis that it places upon interpersonal relationships and socialization practices in the psychological development of individuals. Object-relations theorists suggest that the mother's role as the primary caretaker of children is of pivotal importance to children's identity formation, in part because mothers raise children in a manner that contributes to the perpetuation of specific cultural codes. In this way maternal authority is inextricably linked to national authority because the preservation of a national narrative is traditionally understood as the mother's responsibility In the novels studied in this investigation, however, the authority of the mother, and consequently of the nation, is placed in jeopardy by a new nation and culture. Both the authors and protagonists of these works are immigrants from the Caribbean living in the United States. They are also daughters that find themselves the targets of two different sources of authority, the mother (who represents the Caribbean motherland) and the new homeland (the U.S.). This investigation is a careful analysis of how these Latina writers and their protagonists negotiate national and cultural binary systems (including gender, racial, social, and idiomatic binaries) in an effort to create a space of cultural coexistence. In their search for this space, Alvarez, Garcia and Santiago reject a standard of mutual exclusivity and negotiate a hybrid identity