Film and Media Studies Commons^™

The memoir is a creative space of reflection that superimposes personal memory upon historical and national remembering. It is a literary genre that forces us to meditate on the function of amnesia and remembrance in the way we construct the narratives of our lives. An increasing number of Latino/a memoirs call our attention to the growing and vastly diverse Latin American communities in the United States. In particular, two recent memoirs by Latino writers, John Phillip Santos and Ilan Stavans, reveal how culture, religion, and society shape memory. Santos's Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (1999) seeks memory through …