The son of an Inca princess and a Spanish conquistador, a Peruvian who lived his entire adult life in Spain, el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was the 16th-century author of Comentarios Reales, an account of the Inca Empire and its conquest by the Spanish.

The daughter of a Mexican father and Mexican-American mother, a Chicana who grew up in Chicago, Sandra Cisneros was the 20th-century author of The House on Mango Street, an arguably autobiographical, if fictional, account of a young Chicana's struggle for identity.

Perhaps sensitized by her own multicultural background-she is the daughter of a Russian Jewish mother and an Irish Catholic father, an American girl who grew up in Puerto Rico--Bridget Kevane was struck by the similarities between these two authors and their works.

Although El Inca wrote history whereas Cisneros wrote fiction, both were clearly exploring the life situations of people with a dual identity. At the age of 20, with a legacy from his father, El Inca went to Spain, where he became a writer and lived out his life. His chronicles are laced with images that provide "a mental landscape of what it's like being mestizo," Kevane said.

Using his work, she hopes "to find a typology that might work for further study of Latino literature, how [the writers] put forth a bicultural, bilingual individual, how the autobiographical voice works when it's two people talking essentially."

Although it is separated by 400 years and a genre from El Inca's writings, Cisneros' work includes many of the same features. There is oral testimony, from neighborhood women, a recovery of the past through their stories, and perhaps most interesting, a testimonial quality, what Kevane calls "an urgent need to communicate the self to the European- or American-dominant culture, to include the self in history."

By analyzing the works of El Inca, Cisneros, and other bi- or multicultural authors, Kevane hopes her dissertation will yield new theoretical constructs of two fundamental terms: ethnicity and the autobiographical voice.

Unlike other academic work involving multicultural authors, Kevane's dissertation will focus on the writing itself rather than on reconstruction, postmodernism, or "the literary criticism of the moment," she said.

She is already interviewing for jobs in academia, looking to return to the East Coast or perhaps even to Puerto Rico. She hopes to complete her dissertation this spring. "I have a lot written," she said, "It's the fear of looking at what you've written that keeps me from editing." 

Published in Winter 1996, Graduate Quarterly