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by Melissa Hart

Melissa_Hart Regional_U.S. English
  • ISBN: 1580052940
  • Category: Biographies
  • Author: Melissa Hart
  • Subcategory: Regional U.S.
  • Other formats: lit rtf txt lrf
  • Language: English
  • Publisher: Seal Press (September 22, 2009)
  • Pages: 276 pages
  • FB2 size: 1852 kb
  • EPUB size: 1191 kb
  • Rating: 4.2
  • Votes: 768
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Melissa Hart's Gringa: A Contradictory Childhoodalso centers on food as a way to enter into a culture, but her memoir is unusual in that it involves a young and very white girl who is transplanted from a Los Angeles suburb into the predominantly Mexican-American farming community of Oxnard.

Melissa Hart's Gringa: A Contradictory Childhoodalso centers on food as a way to enter into a culture, but her memoir is unusual in that it involves a young and very white girl who is transplanted from a Los Angeles suburb into the predominantly Mexican-American farming community of Oxnard.

The secondary theme of Gringa is Melissa's deep desire to join the warm, Chicano community to which her mother seems to belong-a desire that is frustrated by her own middle-class Anglo background. She can't speak fluent Spanish and she has trouble making Hispanic friends. Her first serious boyfriend drinks, does drugs, and is uneducated.

Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood

Torn between the high socioeconomic status of her father and the bohemian lifestyle of her mother, Melissa Hart tells a compelling story of contradiction in this coming-of-age memoir.

Gringa : a contradictory girlhood. by. Hart, Melissa, 1970-. urn:acs6:hart:epub:9a3-6e8ad2da6a5f urn:acs6:hart:pdf:852-d9046c594254. ark:/13960/t8jf2wf6p. Books for People with Print Disabilities. Internet Archive Books. Uploaded by station16. cebu on October 29, 2019. Torn between the high socioeconomic status of her father and the bohemian lifestyle of her mother, Melissa Hart tells a compelling story of contradiction in this coming-of-age memoir. Set in 1970s Southern California, "Gringa" is the story of a young girl conflicted by two extremes. On the one hand there's life with her mother, who leaves her father to begin a lesbian relationship, taking Hart and her two siblings along.

Melissa Hart is the author of the middle-grade novel, Avenging the Owl, and two adult memoirs-Wild Within and . Four more days to enter the Gringa recipe contest. Feel free to tag a few more people and ask them to enter, too?

Melissa Hart is the author of the middle-grade novel, Avenging the Owl, and two adult memoirs-Wild Within and Gringa. Feel free to tag a few more people and ask them to enter, too? Annie's Special Chili.

Melissa Hart, author of GRINGA-A Contradictory Girlhood. A parent comes out of the closet memoir!

Melissa Hart, author of GRINGA-A Contradictory Girlhood. A parent comes out of the closet memoir! by From My Mama's Kitchen® Talk R. 1:01:15.

Melissa Hart Melissa Hart is the author of the middle-grade novel, Avenging the Owl, and two memoirs-Wild Within & Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood. Melissa Hart is the author of the middle-grade novel, Avenging the Owl, and two memoirs-Wild Within & Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood. Melissa Hart's best boards.

Torn between the high socioeconomic status of her father and the bohemian lifestyle of her mother, Melissa Hart tells a compelling story of contradiction in this coming-of-age memoir. Set in 1970s Southern California, Gringa is the story of a young girl conflicted by two extremes. On the one hand there’s life with her mother, who leaves her father to begin a lesbian relationship, taking Hart and her two siblings along. Hart tells of her mom’s new life in a Hispanic neighborhood of Oxnard, California, and how these new surroundings begin to positively shape Hart herself. At the opposite extreme is her father’s white-bread well-to-do security, which is predictable and stable and boring. Hart is made all the more fraught with frustration when a judge rules that being raised by two women is “unnatural” and grants her father primary custody.Hart weaves a powerful story of fleeting moments with her mother, of her unfolding adoration of Oxnard’s Latino culture, and of the ways in which she’s molded by the polarity of her parents’ worldviews. Hart is faced with opposing ideals, caught between what she is “supposed” to want and what she actually desires. Gringa offers a touching, reflective look at one girl’s struggle with the dichotomies of class, culture, and sexuality.
Reviews about Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood (7):
Coiwield
Good read was required for a course I'm taking but I enjoyed the book!
Landaron
Terrific memoir, excellently written! A coming of age story both unique and compelling.
Samut
An authentic treatment of growing up in two different cultures in California. Tender, hilarious and heartfelt. Includes recipes for insight into the Spanish and Anglo cultures of Southern California. Excellent read.
Kefym
A very intriguing real life story...an inspiration
Pipet
interesting
Grarana
In Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood, Melissa Hart finds her 1970s life in a Los Angeles suburb disrupted when her mother takes her three children and leaves the family's gated community to live in Oxnard, 60 miles away, with her Hispanic lesbian lover. For Melissa, her new life in the poor Latino neighborhood where they settle seems joyous and free. But it is interrupted again when her father appears with a court order for Melissa's custody saying, "You can't grow up parented by two women. It's unnatural."

And so the contradictions and conflicts begin. Melissa's longing to live with her counter-culture mother, rather than with her "normal" father and her stepmother, is maintained as a long thread throughout this memoir of a young girl's rebellion. She is conscious enough to appreciate her stepmother's efforts to be a good mother, but also knows that her father cannot understand her. She portrays her mother as a delightful, independent woman, but one who sometimes wonders how she produced her driven daughter. It takes fine writing and courage to give oneself the contrary, often unsympathetic, image seen in these pages--a young woman struggling to find her own path within very different and contradictory cultural and family expectations.

The secondary theme of Gringa is Melissa's deep desire to join the warm, Chicano community to which her mother seems to belong--a desire that is frustrated by her own middle-class Anglo background. She can't speak fluent Spanish and she has trouble making Hispanic friends. Her first serious boyfriend drinks, does drugs, and is uneducated. His Mexican family disapproves of her because she will not stay in the kitchen with the other women. She begins to see that it's difficult to fit the model of a woman in a large, loving, loud Hispanic family if she doesn't also fit the family's model of a domestic woman. Her insistence on being her individual self alienates her.

This coming-of-age memoir will appeal to women who have had the audacity to be a rebellious teen while at the same time longing for a stable, understanding family. Gringa is well written with hilarious, but real, recipes relating to each chapter. Recommended for young women in high school, as well as older readers.

by Judith Helburn
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
LiTTLe_NiGGa_in_THE_СribE
I bought my copy of this memoir after attending a writer's conference in Southern Oregon featuring the author giving workshops. She was warm and approachable and so very funny and I found her writing to be very much the same. I also found myself addicted to some of the recipes that she included in this novelized autobiography. I adore the way she presents her childhood with honesty and humor and makes even the things that were very different from mine, feel connected by the human experience and I will never go long without making Spanish Hot chocolate while meditating on dead dictators. You should read this, and I see that she has other books, I'm going to order them as soon as my tax refund gets in.
I love this book! Buy it; read it, I'm sure you will love it too. If I haven't convinced you yet, keep reading...

First they were a normal family in the 1970's, living happily in Southern California. And then they become fractured and multiplied and Melissa Hart has to flip flop herself between her father's lavish lifestyle with his new wife, her stepmother, and her mother's bohemian lifestyle in a Hispanic neighborhood. These influences shape her as she grows, but during that shaping and molding there is a push and pull within her to learn and determine where she fits in the world. And isn't that always largely based on how you were raised and your cultural influences.
During her parents divorce a judge determines that her lesbian mother and her lover are not good influences on Melissa and her siblings and therefore Melissa, to her chagrin, ends up living with her father and wishing desperately she was with her mother, who she can closer relate to throughout the years.

Melissa's frank language, honest re-telling, and innate comical mind make this book so much more than the above two paragraphs can parlay. I picked this book up and did not put it down. I devoured it in one sitting, staying up into the wee morning hours doing so. I cheered Melissa on, and frowned at the judge's determination and remembered fondly things from my own childhood. Melissa's penchant for recall of time and place and her ability to put you there made this book a trip to a different time and place. This memoir reads like fiction, not because the authenticity is not there, but rather because Melissa's retelling is not a factual list you must read but rather a story you become a part of.

This book was enchanting, engrossing and more so happily entertaining. There are lessons to be garnered here as Melissa finds her way, but the real joy in this story is the value of family, the realization that we all belong...somewhere. In this memoir there exists a strong confident female voice. This would be an especially fantastic gift to give a college aged girl to read as she navigates through her newly found freedom and realizes she has many choices in life.

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