In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

noTeS inTroduCTion 1. Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little and died El-Hajj Malik E-Shabazz. Throughout this book, I refer to him as Malcolm X (or Malcolm, for some small variety, with no intent of sounding too familiar or disrespectful) because this is the name by which he is most commonly known and the name used in the title of his autobiography. The X designation for Nation of Islam followers was supposed to signify an unknowable ancestry that would be cleared up on Judgment Day. Three other effects of the use of the X include the following: First, the surname X makes everyone in the Nation seem the same (shades of Ralph Ellison’s invisible man); second, the X gestures toward the x variable from mathematics, suggesting not only the unknown factor that Elijah Muhammad wanted to emphasize, but the arbitrariness of the unknown; and third, X represents the Christian cross, surely another unintended irony. 2. I use the term “Chicano” here because Acosta specifically identified himself as Chicano, with its associations with Mexican American political activism (Autobiography 199). However, I avoid the term in reference to Richard Rodriguez because he disavowed this identification (see “A View from the Melting Pot”). I use the term “Mexican American” to apply to both Acosta and Rodriguez because both are Americans of Mexican ancestry, and I also occasionally use “Latino” and “Latina” to describe Americans of Latin American or Spanish origin. 3. There are, of course, exceptions to this expected movement. Two that come to mind are Church of Christ converts, who, according to Lewis Rambo, are expected to experience a “coming to brokenness” when they convert, “which involves incorporating a keen sense of personal sinfulness and corruption , an individual acknowledgement of responsibility for sin, and an awareness that sin caused the death of Jesus on the cross” (Understanding 71–72). American Puritan conversion was also a movement fraught with negative emotion. It brought converts to a state of prolonged uncertainty (hardly a comfortable position) because to be too certain of salvation was evidence that they were not actually saved. Converts eventually come to a state of “assurance ,” but that was followed by an “Evangelicall sorrow” or “a grief for sin, because it is sin” (Morgan, Visible 69). 4. Conversion scholars such as Rambo, Lofland and Skonovd, and Karl 1 2 3 4 168 noTeS Morrison have documented a wide range of conversion experiences besides this popularized and “superficial view” of conversion as sudden and asocial. Lofland and Skonovd, for example, use the term “mystical” conversion (377) to describe the iconic or “Damascus Road” variety of conversion. 5. My choice of four early African American autobiographers to the exclusion of early Mexican American autobiographers may seem to unbalance my study, but there are no analogous early Mexican American examples. Genero Padilla’s research shows that early Mexican American autobiography has been viewed in the context of social history rather than as the autobiographical products of individuals. The reasons for this are complex and many, but three differences between African American and Mexican American literary history are salient. First, Mexican American literary history is truncated (dating from the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo) compared with African American literary history (the earliest published slave narratives date from the late eighteenth century). Second, Mexican American autobiographical narratives have often gone unpublished, unlike slave narratives, which were frequently published to advocate for the abolition of slavery. Finally, autobiography has come to be considered a primary genre for African Americans, partly because of its long history and its importance in establishing African American identity and literature. Individual conversion experiences recorded in autobiographical texts are thus more frequent in African American narratives, in part because of the greater numbers of narratives, and are correspondingly rare or absent in early Mexican American texts. 6. These words are reminiscent of similar comments made by an earlier ethnic American autobiographer, Mary Antin (1881–1949), in The Promised Land (1912). Antin describes how she was left to her own devices as a Russian Jewish immigrant teenager in Boston while her parents struggled to support their large family. She frequently attended entertainment shows put on at the local Protestant church, which were mounted with the ultimate goal of proselytizing and converting attendees. Antin had discarded the strict Jewish laws and religious beliefs of her family as part of her assimilation to American life (which, by the way, is contrary to Will Herberg’s assessment of religion being the one aspect of culture not...

Share