SOURCE: Fachinger, Petra. “Lost in Nostalgia: The Autobiographies of Eva Hoffman and Richard Rodriguez.” MELUS 26, no. 2 (summer 2001): 111–27.

In the following essay, Fachinger discusses the differences in autobiographies written by authors from distinct ethnic and racial backgrounds, using the memoirs of Eva Hoffman and Richard Rodriguez as her examples.

In “The Plural Self: The Politicization of Memory and Form in Three American Ethnic Autobiographies,” in which she compares N. Scott Momaday's The Names, Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera, and Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez concludes,

Ethnic autobiography gives “new meanings” and new possibilities to the term autobiography. Using “retrospection to gain a vision for the future,” … ethnic autobiographers create a hybridized, double-voiced form of autobiography in which collective ethnic memory and individual memory are linked in a dialogue.

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Although Browdy de Hernandez's argument is convincing with respect to the three...