American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood [Hardcover]

Marie Arana (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 8, 2001

From her father's genteel Peruvian family, Marie Arana was taught to be a proper lady, yet from her mother's American family she learned to shoot a gun, break a horse, and snap a chicken's neck for dinner.

Arana shuttled easily between these deeply separate cultures for years. But only when she immigrated with her family to the United States did she come to understand that she was a hybrid American, an individual whose cultural identity was split in half. Coming to terms with this split is at the heart of this graceful, beautifully realized portrait of a child who "was a north-south collision, a New World fusion. An American chica."

Through Arana's eyes the reader will discover not only the diverse, earthquake-prone terrain of Peru, charged with ghosts of history and mythology, but also the vast prairie lands of Wyoming, "grave-slab flat," and hemmed by mountains.

In these landscapes resides a fierce and colorful cast of family members who bring her historia vividly to life, among them Arana's proud paternal grandfather, Victor Manuel Arana Sobrevilla, who one day simply stopped coming down the stairs; her dazzling maternal grandmother, Rosa Cisneros y Cisneros, "clicking through the house as if she were making her way onstage"; Grandpa Doc, her maternal grandfather, who, by example, taught her about the constancy of love.

But most important are Arana's parents, Jorge and Marie. He a brilliant engineer, she a talented musician. For more than half a century these two passionate, strong-willed people struggled to overcome the bicultural tensions in their marriage and, finally, to prevail.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Though this memoir of growing up in America and Peru centers on Arana's parents' turbulent marriage, her real focus is the way cultures define, limit and enrich us. At one point, Arana, whose mother is American and father is Peruvian, recalls her first lesson in the color politics of Latin America. She was living in a gated house, in a factory town high in the Andes, and wanted to invite the daughter of the family cook to her birthday party. Of course she can come, said Arana's mother, but if she does, none of the mothers of the other little girls will allow them to attend; an Indian girl is not accepted at a party of aristocratic schoolchildren. "I am reminded of my political innocence," Arana writes, "when I go to Latino conferences in [the U.S.]. When I see the children of Spanish-blooded oligarchs line up alongside migrant workers for a piece of affirmative action." It is this willingness to slice through convenient classifications, to see the rifts in every group, that distinguishes Arana's account of how she learned to navigate between a culture that encouraged family loyalty and another that fostered independence. She writes beautifully, whether describing hunting for ghosts in Peru's highlands, chewing tobacco in Wyoming, attending an American school in Lima or finding friends in New Jersey. Arana, the editor of the Washington Post Book World, blends a journalist's dedication to research with a style that sings with humor. Her memoir is an outstanding contribution to the growing shelf of Latina literature. Agent, Amanda Urban.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Arana, editor of the Washington Post Book World, recently described this memoir as a love story. It is fraught with the tension of two worlds colliding: her North American mother's independent, free-spirited individualism crashes into her South American father's traditional, family-based orientation. Their children formed the bicultural bridge between them. In rich, lyrical prose, the author details her privileged, Peruvian childhood, watched by amas, and schooled at home. She writes of her grandfather who lived like a hermit in his own house, and further back the ancestors who played a horrifying role on Peru's rubber plantations. She describes the scent of sugar, "raw, rough, Cartavio brown" from her father's factory; the sounds of "El Gringo," the crazy blind man on his daily rounds; and the surreal world of los pishtacos, the ghosts, so mystifying, but terrifyingly real to Arana. She also writes of her mother and her former marriages, and finally of her life in America. Here Arana is an American Chica, where she leads not a double life, sometimes in her "American skin" at other times she is a Latina, but a triple life in which she makes up a "whole new person." While this book, filled with humor and insight, will be of special interest to Hispanic teens, it is a sparkling addition to the story of America's "salad bowl" and will appeal to young people of all heritages.

Jane S. Drabkin, Chinn Park Regional Library, Prince William, VA

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: The Dial Press (May 8, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385319622
• ISBN-13: 978-0385319621
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,939,535 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

www.mariearana.net
Marie Arana was born in Lima, Peru, the daughter of a Peruvian father and an American mother. She is the author of an acclaimed memoir "American Chica," which described her bicultural childhood between North and South Americas. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN-Memoir Award, and winner of the Books for a Better Life Award. Her novels, "Cellophane" and "Lima Nights," are dramatically different works, the first being a rich, lush satire of the Amazon jungle, the second being a stark, urban love story set in contemporary Latin America. Her book "The Writing Life," is a collection from her well-known column for The Washington Post, which explores the way writers think and work. You can find more information about Marie at www.mariearana.net.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More than just a memoir, September 7, 2001

By 

Esther R. Nelson (Richmond, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood (Hardcover)

Marie Arana's story is so much more than her account of growing up between two continents--North and South America. She contextualizes herself within a particular historical time--both in Peru and in the United States, showing how the "goings on" in the wider culture of both continents affected her own particular development. How she navigates both worlds is what American Chica is all about.

Particularly enlightening to me was Arana's discovery of a theory at the British University of Hong Kong "claiming that bilingualism can hurt you...The bicultural person seems so thoroughly one way in one language, so thoroughly different in another. Only an impostor would hide that other half so well." Since I also grew up "bilingual," Arana's discovery at the British University resonated with my own experience. Just exactly who am I and where is it that I belong? Language is so much more than a vehicle to transmit information. With language we create the "self" and name our environment. That "self" and that environment will look different depending on what language I use. Sometimes the footing is as unsteady as walking the earth after one of those Peruvian earthquakes.

Great job!

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Haunting Memoir of Peru..., August 13, 2001

By 

Frances Marie Scura - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood (Hardcover)

American Chica is an adventure story, a love story, and ultimately a learning to find peace with yourself story. Marie Arana's authorial voice has an authentic, radiant and haunting passion for Peru. Her connection to its almost mystical soil is so palpable it shimmers. She writes about her love for a homeland half-a-world away, and half-a-lifetime away, with descriptions so vivid the reader can feel the hacienda's sand beneath the feet and smell the sugar cane in fields as far as the eye can see. But Ms. Arana draws her readers into her story not on the strength of an exotic locale alone. She writes with penetrating insights into the minds and soul of an extraordinarily gifted family, the strengths and weaknesses of their characters, their humanity. Ms. Arana is able to present the various points of view of her parents' clash of backgrounds without taking sides. Her family members are sympathetic and drawn with depth, as her passionate father makes over-arching efforts to make a good life for his family in Peru and her mother passionately dedicates herself to the education and protection of her children and her North American way of life. Ms. Arana captures our sympathy most of all, as the child caught in the middle, who as she grows up, has to work harder and harder to succeed because being different is a liability in both hemispheres. But it is Peru whose presence in the story is the real protagonist, a member and an outcast of the family, whose terrible and beautiful history loses and gains its soul over and over, but always yearns for a future of redemption and respect. It is now a place reinventing itself for new generations, but the tug of its terrible and entrenched class system holds fast. Ms. Arana has done her research well in this regard and I admire her for presenting unpleasant evidence of institutional racism, corporate greed and rape of the land, and overall rampant exploitation of the under classes. Her eyewitness reports are more than you will ever hear about in school where Spanish teachers are either too pained or too fearful to discuss these issues openly. However, in spite of all the social difficulties, Ms. Arana met a cast of interesting and lovable characters from all walks of life, and for the fleeting years of her childhood, it was a sacred place that filled her young spirit with the fire of imagination and blessed her with a challenging but larger, richer life.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lyrical Indeed, December 26, 2005

By 

Lisa Pozzi "Mama, Wife, Biz Owner" (Carlsbad, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood (Paperback)

I looked forward every night to reading Arana's way with words. Not only was the subject matter a great story -- duality on many levels, and she explored all the layers -- but she told her story with excellent prose.

Having studied Latin America for years I've always been envious of my follow classmates & friends who have multiple identities...this book opened my eyes to the deeper challenges of multicultural identity, beyond the obvious racism/segregation to the more internal challenges; Arana's description of how she developed not just her gringa identity, or her Peruvian identity but her "faking it" identity fascinated me.

I hope to see more of her work.