SLOT-MACHINE GENES: ESSAYS ON MIXED IDENTITY

Abstract

Slot-Machine Genes: Essays on Mixed Identity is a memoir-in-essays that attempts to reckon with the sense of fragmentation inherent in my racial and familial identity as the daughter of a white mother and a Mexican-American father, who profoundly disidentifies with his heritage and assiduously pursues assimilation into the American nation through his military service. Braiding memory with research with personal experience, the essays in this collection pursue questions about identity formation in contemporary America, interrogating notions of belonging, ethnicity, authenticity, place, and family. Slot-Machine Genes attempts to explore the ways that mixture, fragmentation, and erasure are central not just to my own racial identity, but also central to Mexican identity as a whole and, as Suzanne Bost suggests in Mulattas and Mestizas, “to the definition of race for all of America’s history.” To be Mexican is to inhabit an identity necessarily created by settler-colonialism and the interpolation—often through violence—of black, brown and indigenous populations.