The Hyphenated American Experience: Voices of Americans Who Look Like "The Other"

As we continue in our fourth week of Crossing Cultural Borders, we move from the stories of children immigrating to stories of immigrants' children, or their children's children, or their children's children's children, etc. Finally we reach what I consider to be the heart of American multicultural literature. Since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and the airing of the miniseries Roots in the 1970s, Americans have been on a journey to unearth their cultural heritages and reclaim them and rename them as uniquely American experiences. America is no longer only a melting pot, where all cultures merged into the mainstream-ness of white American culture. Like Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston said, America is now more like a mosaic, where pockets of various cultures are perfectly (often imperfectly) preserved and live side by side (sometimes integrating) to celebrate our differences.

This week we will be delving into the Hyphenated American Experience, or voices of Americans who look like (but often do not sound like) "The Other." From picture books to YA novels, these unique American stories are often the easiest to tell for the majority of multicultural authors born in America. We have lived our research every day of our lives. From wanting to have blue/green/hazel violet eyes instead of brown, coloring our hair to be more blonde/red/light brown and less black, "relaxing" our too curly black hair or perming our too straight black hair, those of us who are ethnic Americans often fight our own bodies to match the predominantly Caucasian features we see in magazines, books, movies and TV. This is especially relevant to many, many American kids today. As a child, I was constantly searching for stories where the protagonist looked like me and found very, very few. Now there are many, many more stories about Americans who look like "The Other," and many more to be published in the future.

I've already blogged a little about my personal experience writing a contemporary Asian-American protagonist, and I am extremely interested in exploring more ethnic American stories. Please feel free to comment about your reading and real life experiences.