Familial and Cultural Conflicts as Related to Identity: the 1.5 and Second Generation's Imperfect Records

Abstract

The bicultural struggles of the 1.5 and second generation characters in Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban, Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, and David Wong Louie's The Barbarians Are Coming are heavily based on their American cultural upbringings and fluency in English; some of their struggles with personal and cultural identities are aimed at understanding or resolving conflicts with their first generation parents. Their accounts of their cultural origins and familial backgrounds are sometimes altered and fragmented because they have spent most of their lives within American culture. At the same time, these characters also struggle with belonging in the U.S. As a result, their struggles with their bicultural backgrounds are based on their feelings of disconnectedness to both their parents' countries and languages as well as to the U.S. These characters' stories are motivationally tailored to give themselves what they need in order to feel a sense of belonging somewhere. As such, they are imperfect memory holders and storytellers of their non-American family histories, but they are uniquely able to establish mediated identities between their bicultural backgrounds. These particular works present in-depth explorations of how 1.5 and second generation individuals of Latino and Asian descent share the struggle to establish an identity that accommodates, embraces, and understands their bicultural backgrounds, while attempting to resolve conflicts with their first generation parents and narrow the distance between them.