Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American
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Authors: Maria Mazziotti Gillan,Jennifer Gillan
Tags: #Historical, #Anthologies
P
ENGUIN
B
OOKS
GROWING UP ETHNIC IN AMERICA
Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the founder and director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey, and editor of the
Paterson Literary Review.
With her daughter Jennifer Gillan, she coedited the acclaimed 1994 anthology
Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry
and
Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Leaning to Be American
, published by Penguin in 1999. She is also the author of seven books of poetry, including
Where I Come From: Selected and New Poems
(Guernica),
The Weather of Old Seasons
(Cross Cultural Communications), and
Winter Light
, an American Literary Translator’s Award winner. She has had several poems published in
The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor
, and
Poetry Ireland
, as well as in numerous other journals. Awards for her work include the 1998 May Sarton Award, two New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowships, and a Chester H. Jones Foundation Award. In addition, she was a finalist in the PEN Syndicated Fiction competition. She has appeared on National Public Radio’s
All Things Considered
, Leonard Lopate’s
Books and Co.
, and Garrison Keillor’s
Writer’s Almanac.
Her latest book,
Things My Mother Told Me
, was published by Guernica in 1999. Currently, she is at work on a memoir entitled
My Mother’s Stoop.
Jennifer Gillan is an assistant professor in American literature and culture at Bentley College in the Boston area. With Maria Mazziotti Gillan, she coedited the acclaimed anthology
Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry
and
Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning to Be American.
She has authored several articles that have appeared in journals including
American Literature, American Book Review, Arizona Quarterly
, and the Modern Language Association’s
Approaches to Teaching
series. She is currently at work on a book,
Ambivalent Ancestries: Critical Perspectives on Chivalry, Rescue, and the Wild West
, a study of the ways in which the concept of chivalric rescue is constructed and contested in narratives of national and literary history.
ROWING
U
P
E
THNIC
IN
A
MERICA
Contemporary Fiction
About Learning to Be American
EDITED BY MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN
AND JENNIFER GILLAN
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in Penguin Books 1999
20
Copyright © Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan, 1999
All rights reserved
Pages 377–379 constitute an extension of this copyright page.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Growing up ethnic in America : contemporary fiction about learning to be American / edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-64020-3
1. American fiction—Minority authors. 2. Minority youth—United
States Fiction. 3. Ethnic groups—United States Fiction.
4. Acculturation—United States Fiction. 5. Immigrants—United
States Fiction. 6. Minorities—United States Fiction. 7. American
fiction—20th century. I. Gillan, Maria M. II. Gillan, Jennifer.
PS647.E85G76 1999
813’.54080920693—dc21 99–25762
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Granjon
Designed by Betty Lew
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
In Loving Memory
Arturo Mazziotti
1906–1998
E. L. Doctorow •
The Writer in the Family
Bebe Moore Campbell •
The Best Deal in America
Nash Candelaria •
The Day the Cisco Kid Shot John Wayne
Darryl Pinckney •
The New Negro
Tiffany Midge •
A Half-Breed’s Dream Vacation
Frank Chin •
Railroad Standard Time
Judith Ortiz Cofer •
American History
Louise Erdrich •
The Red Convertible
Toni Morrison • from
The Bluest Eye
Lynne Sharon Schwartz •
Killing the Bees
Daniel Asa Rose •
The Cossacks of Connecticut
Bruce A. Jacobs •
Dinner with Father
Diane Glancy •
Portrait of the Lone Survivor
Maria Mazziotti Gillan •
Carlton Fredericks and My Mother
Afaa Michael Weaver •
Honey Boy
Sherman Alexie •
This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona
Veronica Chambers • from
Mama’s Girl
Diane di Prima • from
Recollections of My Life as a Woman
Naomi Shihab Nye •
Red Velvet Dress
Fred L. Gardaphé •
Grandpa’s “Chicaudies
”
Roshni Rustomji •
Thanksgiving in a Monsoonless Land
Simon J. Ortiz •
To Change in a Good Way
Helena María Viramontes •
The Moths
Sylvia A. Watanabe •
Talking to the Dead
Growing up on the Spokane reservation, Sherman Alexie learned to measure himself by the boundaries of a thirteen-inch television screen, proclaiming himself to be a “
Brady Bunch
Indian”; for Sandra Cisneros it was a three-foot Barbie doll that loomed menacingly behind her in every mirror, the doll’s hourglass figure and shimmering whiteness helping to shape Cisneros’s own brown face into an unacceptable distortion; for Gary Soto it was TV’s Cleaver family with their two-story house and finely manicured lawn that haunted his daydreams and reminded him of just how unusual it was in the 1960s to eat burritos for dinner. What Alexie, Cisneros, and Soto have in common is the dislocation and distortion that can accompany growing up ethnic in America. What they also share is a determination to write stories that challenge those images so that the next generation of children can grow up secure in the knowledge that there are many shades and shapes of American faces, many ways to be American.