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Learning to Live between Two Worlds Early on during the beginnings of my academic career in the United States, about twelve years ago, I became interested in Anzaldúa’s work, as I was struck by her original thinking, her compassionate understanding of Latinas’ struggles, and her work toward proposing bridges between our different political and personal “selves.” My arrival to U.S. soil in the mid-1990s brought exciting discoveries and unexpected misperceptions about my individual persona. A single Argentine woman in my late twenties, I suddenly found myself living in the “most exciting” city in the world, secretly believing that unseen opportunities would be waiting for me just around the corner. I had entered the United States as a graduate student of the then-called New School for Social Research, thanks to a student visa and a generous fellowship , which assured my adscription to a deserving international “intelligentsia.” In the fall of 1994, I decided to take an anthropology course on feminist theory and practice that was brilliantly taught by Kamala Visweswaran. Selecting the seminar on this topic was not fortuitous . With a long-term background of research in medical sociology and extensive publications on reproductive health and women’s struggles in Argentina, I had assumed that the class’s readings would be easy for me to master. I was also coming of age as a mature woman in need of redefining myself, from internal to external boundaries, in a country that could not have been more different from my former protective environment. A descendant of northern Italians and Spaniards from Catalonia, I had mostly grown up in Argentina under an ethnocentric middle-class spell CHAPTER 3 Deconstructing the Immigrant Self: The Day I Discovered I Am a Latina anahí viladrich 34 The New Mestizas that considered me the genuine stem, both phenotypically and culturally , of a well-represented European heritage. My parents and grandparents belonged to the lineage of those who had arrived at Latin America’s Southern Cone by the end of the nineteenth century to populate a modern nation created under the motto of a civilizatory national project, which, as in the case of the United States, had relegated native indigenous groups to both physical and symbolic internal borderlands. Traveling alone to study in a new country pushed my own frontiers to discover new selves within myself, now deprived of their protective shield. In the months that followed my arrival in New York City, I learned much more than about women’s struggles toward building up coalitions in this country. Slowly, I began to feel lonely and vulnerable to a new language, English, which exposed my new identity as the other. As I had a light complexion, fair skin, long dark hair, and big brown eyes, along with a heavy Spanish accent and expressive manners, I was early on identified as an exotic Latina. While moving from the safe place as a white, privileged woman in Argentina to my new ethnic adscription in the United States, all the Pandora’s boxes of my inner personas began to emerge in confusion and rebellion against the novel, unshaped forms of a shifting ego. Reading Gloria Anzaldúa’s work during that time became a gateway to new inner representations that continued unfolding for years. As Anzaldúa suggests in “(Un)natural bridges,” I had to leave my home in order to find a self that differed from the comforting one that had been imposed upon me based on racial and class privilege. No longer a member of the mainstream white majority, I was now confronted with my sudden belonging to an ethnic minority about which I knew little. Soon I felt like an excluída—excluded from a white majority, befuddled about who I was, and unsure about how I should fit in. Away from home, my feelings of inadequacy, uncertainty, and insecurity were all on the surface . For the first time in my life, I could not find a place where I could camouflage as one of them, the “others” in academia, and soon felt like an impostor or an intellectual hoax who, sooner or later, would be exposed . Who was I, a seemingly “white” Latina struggling to speak broken English while painfully trying to achieve a successful academic path? Was I an immigrant deprived of public representations? Would I be able to find others like myself, part-time nationals of a foreign land, performing as unwilling members of a diasporic ethnic community...

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