“Food Becomes a Measured Thing”: Family, Food, and Violence in Latina Memoir

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Notes

Cristina Herrera earned her PhD in English from Claremont Graduate University and is Professor and Chair of Chicano and Latin American Studies at California State University, Fresno.

1. See Cisneros’s A House of my Own, Castillo’s Black Dove, Daisy Hernández’s A Cup of Water Under my Bed; Marie Arana’s American Chica.

2. Memoirs and life writings hold many similarities, namely the use of memory to recall important life events. Life writings, however, can take different forms, such as creative essays. See works by; Padilla (205), Torres (278), and Vásquez (8), for example, for a more thorough discussion of these genres. Full citations are listed in the works cited.

3. See important scholarship on the testimonio genre by John Beverley and Kimberly Nance, for example.

4. Castro does not name her mother and stepfather, only her adoptive father, Libano Castro.