HYBRIDITY IN ALVAREZ’S AND SANTIAGO’S LITERATURE AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-IDENTIFICATION

Abstract

This article elaborates on how hybridity is experienced and narrated under the conditions of exile through a critical engagement with Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican (1993). The research rationale derives from the fact that although hybridity has often been theorised in postcolonial studies as a space of cultural negotiation and creative possibility, it has mostly been treated in abstract or celebratory terms that tend to ignore its lived, embodied, and gendered dimensions. Hence, the problem addressed is the tension between the theoretical representations of hybridity, as fluid and empowering, and its literary representation as a condition marked by loss, alienation, and vulnerability. In this regard, the aim is to re-conceptualise hybridity as a contradictory and painful process defined by linguistic displacement, memory struggles, gendered hierarchies, and colonial imbalances. Drawing on postcolonial theory and feminist critique, attention is paid to how the main characters in both novels live in in-between spaces where their identities are continuously negotiated between their homelands and hostlands, past and present, belonging and exclusion. Based on this framework of analysis, the research questions posed are the following: i) how is hybridity represented as a lived experience of exile in Alvarez’s and Santiago’s narratives?; ii) in what ways do language, memory, gender shape the formation of hybrid identities in these texts?; iii) how does hybridity function both as a resource for survival and a source of vulnerability within diasporic contexts? The argument made is that hybridity in these novels constitutes an embodied struggle characterised by ambivalence, fragmentation and a sense of loss as the characters seek to create a stable sense of being through unequal power relations. Overall, the contribution of this article is that it reframes hybridity as a lived condition of tension and resilience, thus challenging theoretical approaches that reduce it to an abstract or purely emancipatory concept, therefore ignoring its contested nature.