How Not to be a Chicana Role Model
The title of the second collection of stories by Serros is ironically titled How to be a Chicano Role Model. Like all her other fiction it is a deep dive into the Hispanic-American culture because Serros doesn’t write genre fiction and—like every other non-genre author—she writes about the experience she knows. Eudora Welty also wrote non-genre stories about the experiences she knows, but she’s never classified as a Euro-American writer or a White-American writer or a Caucasian-American writer. Serros is part of a second wave of Latina writers bound by their Hispanic heritage and life experiences, but the dominating theme of that spans the entirety of her body of work is a full-scale rejection of the idea that writing about a vast array of just normal, everyday type of situations and people who happen to share a common a heritage by definition limits her to being part of a non-existent fake genre called Chicana lit.
What is Fiction and What is Fact?
“The Fiction of Michele Serros” is actually kind of an ironic title for this entry. It could have been described—as it is with other writers—as the “short stories” or the “short fiction” or after simply dedicated to a single novel or one of her collections of works. Describing this section as simply “the fiction” of this particular author is somewhat humorous because one of the pervasive themes to leap out at the reader of the author’s stories is they constantly raise a question for the reader: is this fiction or memoir? Perhaps it is merely a testament to the literary genius of Serros that a story like “Live Better, Work Union” reads like a non-fictional essay as much as it does a short story.
That particular example muddies the waters more than usual because the protagonist is named Michele and otherwise seems to be an autobiographical anecdote. The same bit of ambiguity is shared with a story from her first collection in which the title character of “The Day My Sister Was on Television” shares the same name as the author’s actual sister, Yvonne. Are both these stories “true” in the sense that the actually happened as described or actually happened but not exactly as described? Or are both stories complete works of fiction that never happened? In the end, it really doesn’t matter. Almost every story Serros writes carries the same level of truth and plausibility.
Pop Culture and Assimilation
As a representative of the second wave of Latina writers that followed the first wave which came to prominence in the early eighties, Serros brings a life experience of growing up within Hispanic culture that is more deeply steeped in the processes of assimilation. One of the most notable literary divergences between the first and second generation is the utilization of pop culture references. First and foremost is that the stories of Serros are far more abundant covering everything from the Brady Bunch to the New Mickey Mouse Club and from Harlequin romance novels to Schwinn bikes.
More importantly than the volume of pop culture that surfaces in her stories are the point and the point is that they don’t really have a specific point. Pop culture references written by authors who are members of a first or second generation of immigrants are often introduced specifically to point out the tension creating conflict within family dynamics over the issue of assimilating into American culture or holding fast to the native cultures of the country of origin. In the fiction of Serros, such references serve to make a point only as a result of the cumulative effect: these are stories about the generations for whom assimilation is not really a choice. They are the product of a choice which has already been made for them.
