American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood by Marie Arana, Marie Arana (Commentaries by)

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This richly evocative memoir is a beautifully realized portrait of a girl growing to adulthood and awakening to her reality as the product of two vastly different and often contrary cultures. The youngest child of an aristocratic Peruvian father and an American mother from the dusty wilds of Wyoming, Marie Arana spent her early childhood in Peru, learning from a colorful assortment of extended family and servants how "good Latinas ought to behave." But it was only when she immigrated to the U.S. as an adolescent that she came to see herself the way those around her did: as a hybrid Hispanic-American, an individual whose cultural identity was split into two seemingly irreconcilable halves. Settling into her New Jersey home, Arana became a clever schoolgirl, observing her classmates and watching her passionate parents struggle to repair the fissures in their marriage. In penning her affecting memoir, Marie Arana shows us how to cherish our families and cultural histories as we make our own way in the world. (Summer 2001 Selection)

From the Publisher

In her father’s Peruvian family, Marie Arana was taught to be a proper lady, yet in her mother’s American family she learned to shoot a gun, break a horse, and snap a chicken’s neck for dinner. Arana shuttled easily between these deeply separate cultures for years. But only when she immigrated with her family to the United States did she come to understand that she was a hybrid American whose cultural identity was split in half. Coming to terms with this split is at the heart of this graceful, beautifully realized portrait of a child who “was a north-south collision, a New World fusion. An American Chica.”

Here are two vastly different landscapes: Peru—earthquake-prone, charged with ghosts of history and mythology—and the sprawling prairie lands of Wyoming. In these rich terrains resides a colorful cast of family members who bring Arana’s historia to life...her proud grandfather who one day simply stopped coming down the stairs; her dazzling grandmother, “clicking through the house as if she were making her way onstage.” But most important are Arana’s parents: he a brilliant engineer, she a gifted musician. For more than half a century these two passionate, strong-willed people struggled to overcome the bicultural tensions in their marriage and, finally, to prevail.

New York Times Book Review - Wendy Gimbel

[In] Arana's passionate account of her childhood, cross-fertilization is a source of strength . . . One of the many reasons the reader can't put this memoir down is the author's impressive command of her craft.

Washington Post

American Chica is a fascinating blend of autobiography and soap opera, memoir and meditation. ... full of larger-than-life characters and stranger-than-fiction situations. ... delightful.

USA Today

Lush, mystical ... a memoir that blends family historia and the puzzling deadly politics of Peru.

New York Times Book Review

Part history, part family memoir ... American Chica reads like a collaboration between John Cheever and Isabel Allende.... One of the many reasons the reader can't put this memoir down is the author's impressive command of her craft.... Arana has left her own imprint on her material, while at the same time displaying virtuosity in the storyteller's traditional gifts: spareness, clarity, and a passion for allegory.

Publishers Weekly

Though this memoir of growing up in America and Peru centers on Arana's parents' turbulent marriage, her real focus is the way cultures define, limit and enrich us. At one point, Arana, whose mother is American and father is Peruvian, recalls her first lesson in the color politics of Latin America. She was living in a gated house, in a factory town high in the Andes, and wanted to invite the daughter of the family cook to her birthday party. Of course she can come, said Arana's mother, but if she does, none of the mothers of the other little girls will allow them to attend; an Indian girl is not accepted at a party of aristocratic schoolchildren. "I am reminded of my political innocence," Arana writes, "when I go to Latino conferences in [the U.S.]. When I see the children of Spanish-blooded oligarchs line up alongside migrant workers for a piece of affirmative action." It is this willingness to slice through convenient classifications, to see the rifts in every group, that distinguishes Arana's account of how she learned to navigate between a culture that encouraged family loyalty and another that fostered independence. She writes beautifully, whether describing hunting for ghosts in Peru's highlands, chewing tobacco in Wyoming, attending an American school in Lima or finding friends in New Jersey. Arana, the editor of the Washington Post Book World, blends a journalist's dedication to research with a style that sings with humor. Her memoir is an outstanding contribution to the growing shelf of Latina literature. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Those who have lived life trying to bridge two different worlds will find that Arana's intimate and intelligent memoir captures exactly the pulse of a changing America. In the mid-1940s, Arana's Peruvian father, an upper-class, MIT-educated engineer, married a free-spirited Wyoming musician and brought her back to his homeland to raise their three children. Told from the perspective of a precocious young Arana, who is learning that she has to navigate constantly between her inner two selves the "wild American" and the "lady-like Latina" the first chapters recount an idyllic childhood in Peru. But eventually, circumstance leads her to trace her lineage back to the infamous Julio Cesar Arana, who turned a profitable rubber business at the edge of the Amazon into a virtual human slaughterhouse, and Arana reveals the legacy of shame surrounding her surname. Arana expertly juggles the good vs. evil elements essential to any coming-of-age story and forays effortlessly into mystical moments. Toward the end, her themes begin to feel repetitive, but her story still manages to grip you. Finally able to connect the pieces of her family's history, she likens Peru's earthquakes to her parents' love, in which "two force fields meet and you have confrontation." With her first book, Arana, who is editor of the Washington Post Book World, clearly demonstrates her ability to write crystalline prose and make erudite cultural observations. Recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/01.] Adriana Lopez, "Cr ticas" Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Arana, editor of the Washington Post Book World, recently described this memoir as a love story. It is fraught with the tension of two worlds colliding: her North American mother's independent, free-spirited individualism crashes into her South American father's traditional, family-based orientation. Their children formed the bicultural bridge between them. In rich, lyrical prose, the author details her privileged, Peruvian childhood, watched by amas, and schooled at home. She writes of her grandfather who lived like a hermit in his own house, and further back the ancestors who played a horrifying role on Peru's rubber plantations. She describes the scent of sugar, "raw, rough, Cartavio brown" from her father's factory; the sounds of "El Gringo," the crazy blind man on his daily rounds; and the surreal world of los pishtacos, the ghosts, so mystifying, but terrifyingly real to Arana. She also writes of her mother and her former marriages, and finally of her life in America. Here Arana is an American Chica, where she leads not a double life, sometimes in her "American skin" at other times she is a Latina, but a triple life in which she makes up a "whole new person." While this book, filled with humor and insight, will be of special interest to Hispanic teens, it is a sparkling addition to the story of America's "salad bowl" and will appeal to young people of all heritages.-Jane S. Drabkin, Chinn Park Regional Library, Prince William, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Expressive memoirs of a Peruvian-American girlhood, by the editor of the Washington Post Book World. Arana, daughter of a Peruvian father and an American mother, sees herself as a hybrid, a fusion of Latina and Anglo, embodying both cultures but an outsider in each. Growing up in Cartavio, a W.R. Grace company town on the coast of Peru (where her father was an engineer) in the 1950s, the author was surrounded by native servants who filled the observant and impressionable child with magical legends and tales of fearsome spirits. At the same time, she was being schooled at home by her no-nonsense mother with textbooks ordered from the US. In 1956, when her American grandmother was dying, the family spent three months in Wyoming. There Arana, not yet seven, met her all-American relatives, learned to shoot, chew tobacco, and spit, and encountered racial segregation for the first time. Back in Peru (this time in Lima) and once again a member of the upper class, she fooled the administrator of the American school there into assigning her to the Spanish-speaking classes (where she made fun of the Anglos), but out of school she played American street games with her older brother. In 1959, the family moved to New Jersey, and the author describes herself slipping in and out of her cultural identities there, choosing when to be Peruvian and when to be American. Within this winning portrait of a bicultural childhood are a host of notable characters-the mysterious Peruvian grandfather who stayed in his upstairs room for 20 years, the tradition-bound Peruvian grandmother who ruled the family, the young gardener who taught Arana about her soul, and (most of all) her parents, whose difficult but enduring marriage is at the very center of her story. A rich and compelling personal narrative.

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There is laughter. There is the sharp report of a slamming door and the staccato of high heels crossing the ceramic tiles of the atrium garden. There is the reveille shout to the servants' quarters, the slap of sandals making their way to the animal pens, the skrawk of chickens as they are pulled from their cages, one by one, into the ink of night. It is three o'clock, before the light of day.

I rub the sleep from my eyes, swing my legs over the side of my bed until my toes touch the llama rug, and then sniff the air of a morning (like all my mornings) redolent of ripe bananas, raw sugar, rum -- and the sharp, ferric odor of freshly drawn blood.

I cross the room, hoist myself onto the window ledge, pull back the heavy wrought iron, and lean out into the dark. The second-floor vantage offers me a rich display of the courtyard below. My mother is floating into view, her green dress billowing like a gossamer wing; her long, gold hair throwing light like a tungsten filament; her all-American, Hollywood face alive with expectation. At her side is my Peruvian father -- black-haired, handsome, smiling and shouting Spanish over his shoulder, waving a bottle in his fist as if he were a carnival barker on opening day. His friends spill in behind them. Through the kitchen window I see the cook, yawning and plucking feathers from a chicken, letting the blood ooze from its neck into the frying pan for an early-morning sangrecito. I do not read omens in that. I do not yet know about signs.

My parents are young. It is their moment. Every marriage has one. When love seems infinite, the road feels free, and nights trip festively into day.

I was only four, but life had already had upheavals. The year I came into the world, five major earthquakes shook Peru. By the time I stood at that window, I'd lived through eighteen. I cannot recollect any one of them. Off in a geologist's lab, a needle was dancing, wild, registering one disaster after another.

Three days before I dangled my head into that courtyard, a quake ripped through the Peruvian seaboard, registering almost eight points on the Richter scale. It started shortly after five in the afternoon. The men were at work, the women in kitchens, their children at play. Where was I? The entire population of our hacienda must have heard the rumble beneath, felt the waggle in the stomach, seen concrete slabs wrench loose and skitter across ground. Across, then up, in fragments -- belching gray dust. Walls usually rip before a mind can factor it, roofs fall, babies hurl through air.

I know it happened only because the World Data Center for Seismology tells me so. Earthquake, December 12, 1953, South America: Latitude 4 degrees, Longitude 80 degrees. Magnitude, 7.8. Displacements: thousands. Deaths: severe.

Shaky days. Yet all I can recall of them is a predawn tableau, my mother and father bursting into our garden with joy.

As I grew older and learned to register the ground beneath my feet, I saw that my parents' marriage was shot through with fissures. Something like earthquakes would come -- geologic upheavals, when the foundations that underlay their union would rattle with dislocation and longing -- but now, just now, in the eighth year of marriage, with three children upstairs and my father's engineering career in ascendance -- in that quick freeze frame before dawn -- the gulf between them did not matter much. They were full. They were one. And I, hovering above their world, was seamless and faultless and whole.

A South American man, a North American woman -- hoping against hope, throwing a frail span over the divide, trying to bolt beams into sand. There was one large lesson they had yet to learn as they strode into the garden with friends, hungry for rum and fried blood: There is a fundamental rift between North and South America, a flaw so deep it is tectonic. The plates don't fit. The earth is loose. A fault runs through. Earthquakes happen. Walls are likely to fall.

As I looked down at their fleeting radiance, I had no idea I would spend the rest of my life puzzling over them: They were so different from each other, so obverse in every way. I did not know that however resolutely they built their bridge, I would only wander its middle, never quite reaching either side. These were things I was slow to understand.

I see such childhood moments in sharp relief now. The past comes slamming up like rock through earth, brought there by sights and sounds, sheer happenstance. Aftershocks, they are. One shivered through not long ago, on a winter afternoon as I lazed in the company of a friend.

She was a rain-forest woman. She'd never seen cleared land until the year before I knew her, when she stepped from the jungle onto a patch of dirt where a helicopter sat waiting to lift her out. She had never seen a road, a roof, a wheel, a knife. She was an Amazon nomad, a Yanomama, one of "the fierce people." Spikes pierced her face. She was not used to possessions. There had been little reason to carry things -- a string of beads, a sharpened rock, at most. No need for clothes. No need for walls to house them. Bed was a hammock of vines. But there came a day when an anthropologist from Philadelphia pushed through the undergrowth to tell her he had come to study her language and ways. Before her sixteenth birthday, he had made her his wife, given her three children, taken her out in that helicopter, back to his New Jersey home.

One January afternoon, as I sat with her on the floor of their Hackensack living room, watching an endless succession of her husband's research videos, my eyes happened to fall on their five-year-old daughter. The child was not looking at the screen. She had seen that particular film countless times: In it, a distinctly wobbly Yanomama headman puts a thick bamboo to his nose and gestures for someone to blow a little bomb of ayahuasca -- a powerful hallucinogen -- up the reed into his brain. The girl was not looking at that. She glanced from her mother, stretched out on the mauve wall-to-wall carpet, to her father in the other room. Back and forth she looked, then back again. The mother was fingering the spike holes in her face, staring raptly at the image of her headman in the electric box. The father was perched over a dining room table strewn with paper, scratching his professorial beard, scribbling into a book.

I suppose I could have thought of a million things at the sight of that girl, twisting about in her lime-green T-shirt, swiveling a pretty head from left to right. But what struck me was the look in her eyes. How anxious she seemed. How delicate a bridge she was between the northern man and southern woman.

What I thought of was me.

Excerpted from American Chica by Marie Arana. Copyright 2001 by Marie Arana. Excerpted by permission of Dial Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.