Generation Five: A Chicana's Journey From Being to Becoming in the Biracial Kitchen
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Abstract
Cultural rhetoricians work to decolonize research practices to make space for all
possible realities, placing a particular emphasis on story as theory. As such, this thesis
utilizes an auto-ethnographic approach to demonstrates how KC Chan-Brose struggled to
construct her biracial identity as a white-passing Chicana and how she used food and
cooking as a tool for reading and writing cultures.
Chan-Brose argues that cultural identity is made, or constructed, by people. With
this argument, the oppressive notion of either/or, which implies that biracials must choose
one culture and align themselves with that culture, loses power. This loss of power also
challenges the notion of authenticity within cultures, positing the notion of authenticity as
exclusionary, rather than inclusive. She examines her claim to color by storying her
experience of coming to understand herself as biracial. She concludes that biracial
identity is constructed from the mundane everyday experiences of our lives, and of both
sides of our cultures.
Chan-Brose posits that we must acknowledge the ways our culture is constructed
by the ways we speak, relate to one another, and understand ourselves, and then garner
the authority over our own identities to influence our culture’s construction. To model
this, Chan-Brose proposes constructing cultural identity through the lens of fusion food
and uses Gloria Anzaldua’s mestizaje and Malea Powell’s metis to demonstrate both/and
identities as viewed from biracials who have claimed their biracialness as their power.