MEXICAN AMERICAN CULTURE
Final Research Project: Auto/Bio/Ethnographic Essay: WRITING SELF & SOCIETY
Autoethnographies are the portrayals of a collective self that is written or composed by a member of the group (e.g., “society,” “culture,” “community,” “race,” “gender,” “class”) and whose descriptive/analytical power or “punch” is based on an engagement with modes, styles, and strategies of representation that are identified with a different, usually dominant, hegemonic or superordinate group. Chicano literature and forms of oral poetry, for example, have always been and are autoethnographies even before the term was coined. Your task is to write an autoethnographic essay of one of the many communities to which you belong. But, you are to do so through the method, plot, and genre of autobiography. Thus, the assignment is best understood as “auto/bio-ethnographic writing.” This means a narrative about the individual and collective Self that is overtly or implicitly concerned with the engagement of a hegemonic or privileged other that is usually unmarked as the norm, normal, standard Self of identity.
Regardless of an individual student’s racial/ethnic or cultural identities, the assignment remains absolutely the same. For those who are Chicana/o, Latina/o, Hispanic/Hispano, Mexican, Guatemalan, or other national American, your projects will no doubt deal with such Latina/o communities and identities. If you are not “of” this “heritage/belonging” then it probably will not; you will write about who you are in relation to the communities to which you “belong” or do not belong to the degree that you understand that these impinge upon (that is significantly shape) your life and identity. Students are given free reign to be creative in their self-expression, yet there are certain guidelines, structures and issues that will give shape to that expression.
Class readings and lectures elaborate several modes of autobiographical writing, some are explicitly autobiographic, and others are “concealed” biographies. The assignment requires you to understand what these are and to choose from among these so as to model your own “life.” Most will find these models to be necessary for you to structure your life; some students may find that these structures are too constraining and may want to explore ways that expand, reject, or re/combine such autobiographic plots, forms, styles with genre forms from ethnographic writing/representation.
For the sake of organization, this assignment can be thought of as comprised of two parts, which place in motion the two facets of culture and identity: stability (cultural unity) and change (conflict and adaptation). Together these two facets will shed light on the relationship between self and society. In terms of length, students will write an autoethnographic essay of 8-10 pages, double space, not including references.
Guidelines: However you choose to organize your writing, you must first determine whether you will write in prose or poetry or both. Then you must determine whether you will foreground the individual Self or the collective Self (the Self/ves of communities to which you belong/do not belong). In ALL cases, you will somehow (explicitly or implicitly) make yourself Other to yourself by the shear fact of self-reflection. Thus, your task is to tell a story that shows or explains how you are that other AS WELL AS THE SELF of identity/reference. Keep in mind the following structures that organize and shape identity—gender, class, and culture/ethnicity.
Plot examples: (NOT an exhaustive listing) We will discuss and elaborate on these and other styles/genres of writing that may be of use for you. Remember, I am not demanding anything in particular, but trying to offer ideas to stimulate your own creative ingenuity.
1. The “life history:” where the “real time” or the linear time of history is used to provide the framework on which the events of one’s own life events are described. The story of the life is told from “beginning” to “end” where these endpoints are defined by physically manifest events. Critical here is how the author decides to relate (separate, integrate, or intertwine) the time trajectories of the individual and of the collectivity.
2. “Philosophic reflection”: where the time of history, of social events, or “real life” gets suspended in favor of a narrative voice that is devoted to critically reflecting upon issues of belonging, identity, not belonging, values, etc. The story that is narrated here is the revelation of an understanding about one’s Self, collective and individual: The plot is about how one “comes” to a specific consciousness of identity and is usually told in a dialectic between the events that the body experiences and the thoughts that the mind elaborates. Time here is that of the mind’s reflections, which may or may not correlate to the physical time of the body.
3. “The exemplary event” where history or the historical sequencing of events is virtually eliminated in favor of a detailed description of a specific event that is constructed in such a way as to reveal “everything” about the collective/individual Self. The writer here “explains” or “illustrates” how such an event has had a profound and pervasive effect on the constitution of Self-identities. This event, of course, could be anything, but this plot might not be appropriate for anyone… This exemplary event might be anything from a very unique moment or most mundane of quotidian experience; it might be massively public or an extremely private event this all depends on the author/self.
4. “Ethnography” where the narrator describes in prose or poetry a cultural “object” such that it functions as a mirror that reflects in a clear, obscure, or convoluted way, the Self. The difference between #3 and #4 might be that whereas the event being described in #3 above would have directly involved the participation of the narrator, the cultural entity being described in #4 is more distanced, separated from the life of the author. Here that which is being described must necessarily be a public, social configuration of activities: the emphasis here MUST be on the description of the socio cultural community whereas in #3, the emphasis is more towards the individualized meaning of an event for the authorial self.
ISSUES TO DEAL WITH:
For the most part, the best guidelines on what to include or what to discuss are to be found in the readings and in the lectures. The following can only be understood to be an impoverished cross section of themes. IN NO WA Y SHOULD YOU TAKE THIS TO BE A LIST OF REQUIRED TOPICS TO COMMENT ON!
The following are simply questions to ask yourself as a way to begin thinking critically, reflexively and in some sense anthropologically about your life.
A. Think about the boundaries and borders of the Self. How have you learned to put up the boundaries of where you begin and end as an individual?
B. What are the borders and boundaries of your community or communities? How many communities do you belong to and what is the relationship between these communities?
C. What is your experience of racial prejudice? Who was it that imposed their racial prejudices on you? Have you done it to yourself? Have you seen anyone try to conceal racial prejudices under the disguise of “individual choice/preferences?” Have you yourself ever done this?
D. Think about language. Why and when do you use Spanish (if you are a speaker of it)? Do you feel you should? Can you speak it perfectly? Have you ever been told that you don’t? What emotional experience do you have in different contexts of speaking Spanish? Do you wish you could but do not speak it? Do you wish you did not speak/understand it, but wish you did not?
E. What kinds of clothes do you wear? What kinds of clothes do your friends wear? What do you think of people wear other types of clothing? What difference does it make?
F. Is there a difference between the values of your parents and you (and/or your siblings)? Is this difference a generation difference? Is it a cultural difference? Is it a class difference? What is the importance of “Family” and your own family in the constitution of your identity? Try to think about this in “profound” philosophical terms not just the obvious aspects, or, make the obvious into philosophically profound revelations.
G. What about class? What is your socio economic class? Do you buy into middle class consumerism and materialism? Do you reject it on political or economic grounds? Do you believe that you can have friends of different class backgrounds? Have you ever really had an intimate personal or social relationship with someone of a different class? (Or racial identity?)
H. Where do you live? Who else lives there? Why do these people and not others live there?
I. What experiences have you had that have profoundly shaped your identity? What is your identity? Consider sexual orientation, gender, class, racial grouping, community, and culture… How have your identities in these terms been forged?
J. What is your politics? How can you justify having those beliefs? What obligations do you feel you have towards your community? Do you feel that you are a part of a community? What should that community do for you?
