American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood

American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood is a 2001 memoir by Peruvian-American author Marie Arana. Based in her experiences emigrating from Peru to America as a young girl, the memoir traces her struggle to find a national identity. As she gets older, Arana comes to realize that it is possible to stick to her Peruvian roots while forming equally strong and valid attachments to American culture. The novel documents Arana’s process of drawing from her most formative memories of Peru and America to forge a hybrid identity for herself.

The novel starts in Peru, where four-year-old Arana lives with her American mother and Peruvian father. Early one morning, she wakes to peals of laughter coming from outside her house. She sees her parents heading towards the house with their friends. During this period of childhood, she perceived her parents as being happy and in love. Looking back from middle age, she sees that her parents’ relationship was tenuous even at that time. She compares the cracks in their relationship to the fissures left by an earthquake, rated 7.8 on the Richter scale, a few days before this memory. She asks herself whether her parents fell apart over irreconcilable cultural differences.

The remainder of the book moves back and forth through time, mirroring Arana’s own claim that time moves in a circle rather than a straight line. She believes that each individual is haunted by memories that bind them to the past and partly predetermine their future. In Peru, Arana lived in Cartavio, a town she remembers through the “ghost” of the aroma of brown sugar from its mills. Her father, an engineer, helped run the mill. Arana’s personality is distinctly Peruvian in that Peruvians are acutely aware of their relationship to history and tradition. She grapples with this truth, for she has observed tradition blind Peruvians to new opportunities, and has seen Peruvian communities poison themselves with ignorance.



Frequently, Arana contrasts Peruvian sentiments about truth and memory with those she inherited from her mother and from American culture. Her mother does not believe in ghosts and is skeptical about the usefulness of memory: having grown up in remote Wyoming, she is moved by the rhetoric of the American frontier and individual self-determination. She refuses to speak about her own memories, even upon repeated requests from her daughter. Once she becomes an adult, Arana sympathizes with her mother’s silence, realizing that it is rooted in memories of financial hardship and isolation. Other parts of the novel follow Arana’s search for the truth about her family’s history. Just as her maternal grandmother passes away, Arana learns that her grandmother has a different last name than her mother. She discovers that her grandmother was married to three men before meeting her grandfather and that one perished in World War II. Her grandmother never fully came to terms with her deceased husband’s untimely death, and it caused friction in her marriage to Arana’s grandfather.

At the end of American Chica, Arana reflects on her parents’ marriage, drawing together all the lessons she has taken from her experiences in Peru and America and her improved understanding of her family’s history. She realizes that her parents’ marriage is held together by a love that transcends their cultural differences. She even suggests that their differences have made their love stronger and more real than typical Western notions of romantic love. Finally, she sees her own hybrid cultural identity in a more positive light, as a fusion of memories and cultures made possible through her parents’ seemingly impossible union. American Chica celebrates the ways that cultural difference can enrich and expand one’s identity.