Abstract
This chapter analyzes how Mary Helen, the protagonist of Mary Helen Ponce’s Hoyt Street, negotiates her identity in and through the barrio of Pacoima. It starts by providing an overview of the representation of the barrio in Chicanx literature, with an emphasis on the dialogue between positive and negative images that characterizes most depictions of this urban space. Hoyt Street is presented as an example of this ambiguity, even if scholarly work has concentrated on its more positive dimension, which is informed by cultural nationalism. This chapter demonstrates that this text also provides powerful insights on gender violence and discrimination against women. Thus, drawing on Chela Sandoval’s “differential consciousness,” this chapter examines how Mary Helen moves between nationalism and feminism as she comes of age in Pacoima.
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Fernández-García, A. (2020). The Barrio as a Hybrid Space: Growing Up Between Nationalism and Feminism in Mary Helen Ponce’s Hoyt Street: An Autobiography. In: Geographies of Girlhood in US Latina Writing. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20107-4_5
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