SOURCE: Eysturoy, Annie O. “Trini: A Chicana Quest Myth.” In Daughters of Self-Creation: The Contemporary Chicana Novel, pp. 57-84. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Eysturoy views Trini as a Chicana bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story.

Female, a Quixote is no Quixote at all; told about a woman, the tale of being caught in a fantasy becomes the story of everyday life.

—Rachel Brownstein

Trini (1986), by Estela Portillo Trambley, is perhaps the most conventional of the Chicana Bildungsromane under consideration in this study. Its narrative pattern is essentially chronological, showing a continuous development from childhood to maturity, much in keeping with the linear structural paradigm of the traditional male Bildungsroman. The story of the protagonist, Trini, is told in third person by an omniscient narrator and conforms to the convention of tracing the development through different stages of the heroic quest for identity, but with...