An Analysis of Cantús Canícula Snapshots of a Girlhood...

Norma Elia Cantu’s novel â€Å"Canà ­cula: Imà ¡genes de una Nià ±ez Fronteriza† (â€Å"Canà ­cula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera†), which chronicles of the forthcoming of age of a chicana on the U.S.- Mexico border in the town of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo in the 1940s-60s. Norma Elia Cantà º brings together narrative and the images from the family album to tell the story of her family. It blends authentic snapshots with recreated memoirs from 1880 to 1950 in the town between Monterrey, Mexico, and San Antonio, Texas. Narratives present ethnographic information concerning the nationally distributed mass media in the border region. Also they study controversial discourse that challenges the manner in which the border and its populations have been†¦show more content†¦Moreover, writing about memory which is the groundwork of the traditional autobiographical genre is a problematic endeavor, since it is a project of conflating memory, imaginatio n, and sometimes a conscious misrepresentation of the past. Likewise, it is a way to inscribe the discursive selves that they envision as â€Å"true† representations of their selfhoods. Turning to Canà ­cula, she writes: â€Å"The story is told through the photographs, and so what may appear to be autobiographical is not always so. On the other hand, many of the events are completely fictional, although they may be true in a historical context. For some of these events, there are photographs; for others, the image is a collage; and in all cases, the result is entirely of my doing. So although it may appear that these stories are my family’s, they are not precisely, and yet they are. (xi)† The photographs that are actually in the book seems to be genuine family snapshots, black and white images reproduced with creases, wrinkles, handwritten dates, scalloped edges, and mounting corners as if taken directly from the Cantà º family album. Although the photograph is as a matter of fact black and white, the reader is not only told to