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Abstract
Rosalina Rosay’s Journey of Hope (2007) to date constitutes one of only two published memoirs by a woman who entered the United States as an undocumented migrant from Mexico; it is the only one which acknowledges this status openly. This article suggests that Rosay manipulates the life writing genre in order to inform her white American audience about undocumented migrants’ humanity and to call them to social and political action. Rosay writes in the form of the testimonio—traditionally connected with collective activism—but markets her book as a memoir appealing to American individualism. As a trickster text—a narrative that plays with genre boundaries to humanise undocumented migrants—Journey of Hope pushes readers to see undocumented immigrants as economic refugees who should not be excluded based on stereotypes but granted basic human rights. I explore specifically the rhetorical tools Rosay employs to speak to her privileged readers’ values and to alleviate their concerns about undocumented migrants as a social and cultural threat. In reviving the testimonio as a trickster text with new purpose for Latina immigrant writers, Rosay’s work shows how migration patterns are gendered and underscores immigrant women’s fight against oppression.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
[1] Rose Castillo Guilbault’s Farmworker's Daughter (2005) is the only other memoir published by an undocumented female immigrant. Guilbault describes in a much more literary way her departure from Mexico at the age of five with her divorced mother and their life on farms in the Salinas valley. She never speaks of herself as an undocumented immigrant but calls her family ‘immigrants’ or ‘polite guests’ (115). Guilbault also considers education a privilege and priority, but stops her narrative before going off to college, leaving Journey of Hope as our only means of insight into the college years of an undocumented female immigrant from Mexico.
[2] Examples of writings that fit this category are Ernesto Galarza’s Barrio Boy (1971) and Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (Citation1981).
[3] Rosay’s emphasis on her education poses a timely comment on current negotiations about The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act and President Obama’s 2012 executive order granting two-year work permits to undocumented immigrants under 30 years of age who entered the United States before the age of 16.
[4] At the time of publication of her memoir, Rosay was already a naturalised citizen but during the entire time her memoir captures she was considered an undocumented immigrant. The fact that Rosay’s citizenship status turned her writing into a lower-threat project does in my opinion not discredit her objectives.
[5] Essential works on the specific characteristics of female life writing are Estelle Jelinek’s The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present (1986), Domna Stanton’s The Female Autograph (1984) and Sidonie Smith’s A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (1987).
[6] Menchú did not write down her story herself, but told her story to anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray in a series of interviews, who then published the book. As mentioned earlier, this is a traditional characteristic of testimonios, which makes this genre problematic as issues with transcribing and translating may occur.
[7] Rosay became a legal resident in 1986 with the Amnesty Act and a naturalised citizen in 1996.
[8] I have analysed 12 reviews on Journey of Hope’s Amazon.com page, which provides the only available reader comments on the book.