Abstract
For those of us accustomed to navigating the fluid borders dividing our "Cuban" and "American" cultural identities, the condition of being both and neither at the same time is indeed not comfortable but home. We are, in Gustavo Perez Firmat's catchy phrase, "born in Cuba . . . made in the U.S.A." 2 We are members of that group referred to as the "one-and-a-half" generation, a designation that, like "Generation X" or "Baby Boomer," reduces complex social phenomena to an accessible and familiar sound bite. Like all such terms, "one-and-a-half" attempts to classify some aspect of human experience, to name (and thus tame) its many intricate and elusive strands. The phrase captures the "in-between" status of cubanos/as who immigrated to the United States as children or adolescents and have lived, as Firmat calls it, "on the hyphen." 3 As LatCrit scholars, our analyses proceed from the assumption that Latinos are multifaceted and multidimensional; that identity is socially constructed and intertextual; and that all of us are continuously shaped and reshaped by variable influences, experiences, and mediations. Our position as bicultural and bilingual individuals only complicates and highlights the fact that identity is not a snugly tailored, creaseless suit. It is a wardrobe teeming with creative possibilities--a colorful silk scarf, a couple of hats, a sequined gown, an austere wool suit--each expressing an aspect but not the whole of us. We understand that how we see ourselves and how others classify us fluctuates according to context and ...