Farmworker’s Daughter: Growing Up Mexican in America by Rose Castillo Guilbault (review)

B o o k R e v ie w s defined by the self-conscious sense in an inevitable but uncertain and shifting relation between being and physical context. With a chapter dedicated to the ethics and politics of environmental criticism , Buell tracks how theoreticians have changed approaches from “first” to “second wave” ecocriticism, where theoreticians are concerned with the ques­ tion of understanding how nature matters for readers, critics, teachers, and stu­ dents with an environmental concern, but also for those who don’t find nature writing, nature poetry, and wilderness narrative the most compelling forms of environmental imagination. Drawing upon the open-endedness of the disci­ pline, one of our leading scholars proposes an expansion of critical horizons to prevent a potential fissure between science and the humanities. Farmworker’s Daughter: Qrowing Up Mexican in America. By Rose Castillo Guilbault. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2005. 164 pages, $20.00. Reviewed by Melissa Bowles Utah State University, Logan Growing up Mexican in America, for Rose Castillo Guilbault, entailed absorb­ ing a secondary cultural discourse and learning to blend it with her primary one. She moved from Nogales, Mexico, to King City, California, at the age of five with her newly divorced mother. When Rosela (her family nickname) started first grade she “lived in a world of confusion” where “the language, the kids, the culture spun around [her] like a vortex” (47). Hoping to fit in, Rosela took a baby doll to school when a girl in her class said that all the girls should bring their dolls to play with at recess. When the other girlspulled out their dolls, Rosela was amazed and confused to see that they were all exactly the same: “What was a Barbie? I wondered. And why was my doll looked down on?” (49). Learning cultural mores— as, for instance, what toys were acceptable— was more difficult than learning the English language, and “cultural gaffes were far more difficult to overcome than language gaps” (50). The greatest cultural gaffe of all was when Rosela’s mother made cupcakes for her class— misshapen things that looked nothing like the cupcakes brought by her classmates’ mothers— and Rosela resolved that she would never ask her mother to make anything for the class again: “It was the beginning of a subcon­ scious effort to keep my private life and school life separate. If the other kids didn’t know about my home life, they would assume I was like them. I could be American at school just like everybody else” (52). Guilbault’s straightforward, chronological memoir traces her life as the daughter of a farm laborer from immigration to her eventual “escape” to col­ lege. The memoir details her numerous struggles to blend two competing cul­ tures— the Mexican culture of her home and family and the American culture of her school and friends. W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S p r in g 2 0 0 7 Like much Chicana literature, this memoir deals with identity crises and the blurring of a variety of borders. Gloria Anzaldua defines the multiply interpolated identity of Mexican Americans in Borderlands/LaFrontera (1987): “Having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision” (100). These cultural colli­ sions, for Guilbault, involve the national border between the United States and Mexico, linguistic borders, class borders, racial borders, gendered borders, and the generational border between the girl and her parents. The story ends with the last summer that Guilbault spent sorting tomatoes on a conveyor belt. She had just finished junior college and was leaving for the university. Her coworkers, the “conveyor belt ladies,” as she called them, were migrant workers, mostly Mexican, most recently from Texas. At the end of her last day on the line, the conveyor belt ladies shook her hand, “and gave [her] a blessing or a big hug. ‘Don’t come back. Make us proud, hija’” (155). As they banished her from the community, they also wished...