American Chica is a memoir of a Peruvian/American girl who grew up in the 50’s.  Her parents met in college in the US, then  moved to Peru just before their first child was born. The majority of this book takes place in Peru where Arana recalls her early childhood.  For the better part of 14 years the family lived in Peru surrounded by her fathers family, his country’s cultural and political beliefs, and a Catholic Latin world view.  After 14 years, the family moves back the United States where the life style and world view are quite different. Arana’s  writing style is very easy to read and kept me reading the book at every opportunity.    While there were some things I could certainly relate to, perhaps because of the time period during which it takes place, the experience might be a bit removed for the younger reader.  I think that perhaps a reader of my parents’ generation  would be able to connect with her experience a little more closely.

What initially drew me to this book was that like me Arana has a Latino father and an Anglo American mother.  One major aspect of her story that I found very interesting was how it seemed that Arana was affected by the experience of watching one parent navigating through a culture that is totally different from their own.  For the first 9 years of her life, her mother was the outsider, but then the family moved to the states where her mother now became the person in her native culture and her father was now the foreigner.   This interested me greatly because it made me think about my own parents.  My mother was living abroad when she met my father and I was born in a country that was not hers. What was it like for my mother who was still learning the language as she was meeting my father’s family?  What was it like for her being in a different country and having her first child? Was it similar at all to Arana’s mothers experience?  Likewise what was it like for my father to be married to a foreigner?  What was it like for him meeting my mothers family for the first time and not speaking the language? What did he experience when we moved to the states? What was her experience?  Having moved to the states so young, I have only ever remembered my father as the foreigner.  What would it have been like for me if we had gone and lived in Guatemala for that year or two when I was in high school?  Would I have seen my parents differently now that I was old enough to witness the one becoming foreign again and the other becoming native again? What would that have done to my understanding of my parents in this bicultural relationship they had going?

Other questions that were brought up in my mind that I would love to find out more about relate to Maria’s transition to another culture.  I would have been very interested to hear more about her high school years, her coming of age and college  years. How, if at all, did her Peruvian-ness affect her American-ness?  Did she feel she “lost” part of one while taking in the other?  Is her story an example of an older generation of mixed heritage person where they decide to be one or the other or is it more like younger mixed heritage folks?   Did she feel she could shift between the two depending on the situation, or was there a place in between in between where she resided?

During my journey to find myself and what it means to be a biracial/bicultural person I have often thought only of what MY experience has been, or what my parents thought of ME as a biracaial/bicultural person.  I have not often taken the time to think about what it was like for them as they worked to live in cultures that was not theirs to begin with.  This book has certainly made me want to talk to my parents more about their experiences living with each other and how, as Arana puts it, they built a bridge between two cultures.

Year: 2001

This is a great book on the subject of mixed heritage students of the high school and college ages. I would strongly recommend this book to counseling and student development professionals. Parents and families could get some insights from this book as well, but the focus of this book is really more on introducing patterns of identity development that are different from those currently in use in the fields of counseling and student development.Wallace began the book with a brief summery of demographic trends for mixed heritage individuals. She continued by giving an overview of the design and methodology of this study, which included a snapshot of each of the individuals interviewed. The second chapter of this book, called ‘Surveying the US Racial Ecology’, did a great job of giving the reader an up to date (up to 2001) overview of the state of race and ethnicity in America. This included a concise overview of the one drop rule, which is something that has impacted the way generations of mixed heritage people in America have been treated. Wallace then moved on to give the reader a brief yet well described explanation of race and ethnicity and the differences between them which I felt this was important because too often in discussions of mixed heritage issues the terms are used interchangeably when in fact they are two very different things. She concludes this section by briefly touching on the deficiencies of prior research on mixed heritage people as well as briefly discussing new directions in research which gives the reader a taste of the study to come.

The majority of the book then covered how students understood and experienced many of the environmental and societal factors that have been shown to impact the ethnic identity development of mixed heritage individuals. The influences she explored were things like: What kinds of interactions did students have with their different heritage communities? Did their families participate in community activities associated with their different heritages? What is the role of faith or religion in the household and, was participation in a faith or religious tradition important in the heritage communities? If parents spoke a language other than English, had they taught it to their children? Was one language used more than another, and if so did a students fluency in a particular language (or lack there of) have implications for their participation in the heritage community with which it was associated? In addition, Wallace looked at how the parents themselves lived their heritages (as reported by the students) and how they did or did not pass it down to their children. What information did students get about being mixed from their parents and families? Was the emphasis on one heritage over the other in the home, and if so was there an explicit reasoning for it? A very important portion of this study had to do with the peer aspects of community. The role of peers in an adolescent’s development is very important. In this context, how did peer messages about a students mixed status influence the way they expressed themselves ethnically? In addition, Wallace was interested in how students expressed their identities to others in light of all the different messages they received from the people they interacted with. What words students use to express their ethnicities? Did they identify more with one heritage than another, and if so how did they express that? Was that identification stable over time or did it change? If it changed, what influenced it to change?

Over all I thought this book was pretty good. Because the book was focused on the results of one particular study, aside from the first couple chapters, there was not a lot of referencing of outside materials. However I didn’t find this to be detrimental to the book. One critique that I might have, that has been a critique of mixed heritage research before, was the small number of participants. Wallace interviewed 15 high school and college students in the San Francisco area. The students were found through a sort of snowball method where the solicitation for participation in the study was aimed at mixed heritage students, and then students interested in participating were asked to refer any others who might be interested. Of the 15 students who participated 13 were “first generation majority/minority (i.e. white or of color) biracial heritage” (p9). One of the remaining students was of Asian/Latina heritage and the other was Asian/Afro Caribbean heritage (both of which were female). One of the things I would like to see more of would be research including greater numbers of students with two parents of non-white racial heritage. This sample is far from being “representative” so it is hard to generalize the outcomes of this particular study to the mixed heritage population. This being said, I don’t think it should take away from the contribution to the conversation that this piece does make. What we can see from this small number of students is the beginning of a snap shot of a population (one grouped around the fact that they are all different) that we can use as the basis for future research.

What Wallace does with this work is give the reader a realistic view of some of the ways these students interacted with their environments as well as the ways that the students environments (including social, physical, and historical aspects) acted upon them and influenced the ways they expressed themselves. This is one of the first books or articles I have read (aside from the work of Maria Root) that began to really lay out a frame work for the idea that, for mixed heritage people, ethnic identity can be situationally dependent, and that any shifting that might take place in the expression of ethnicity for a mixed heritage person is not problematic.