Newly arrived from Cuba, Angelica, Dora, Marina, and Damaris attempted to negotiate new surroundings and immigrant identities, building a sense of home for themselves and their families. Data from qualitative interviews, classroom observations, and focus group conversations revealed hopes that by acquiring English language skills, they would improve their quality of life in their new country. Struggles included personal factors situated in their pasts in Cuba and their new surrounds in the Miami Cuban exile enclave, contexts that were further complicated by uncertain expectations of new lives in Miami and the overwhelming task of learning a new language at a local adult education center.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
229 p, Incorporating postcolonial theory, West Indian literature, feminist theory, and African American literary criticism, Making Men carves out a particular relationship between the Caribbean canon--as represented by C. L. R. James and V. S. Naipaul, among others--and contemporary Caribbean women writers such as Jean Rhys, and Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, and Michelle Cliff, who now live in the United States.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
208 p., Examines the representation of violence in the work of contemporary writers and artists of the Hispanic Caribbean and its diaspora in the United States.
