Performing Acculturation: Rewriting the Latina/o Immigrant Self

This is an autoethnography that explores Latino immigration as a radical rewriting of the self and as a performance of acculturation. Given the significant changes to the social and cultural environment, the immigrant must engage in a reflexive process of transformation that can secure our integration and increase our changes of success. Fuelling this transformation is the realization that we are no longer subjects of ethical treatment and that in order to become so, we must learn to convey a new set of semiotic cues that the nonimmigrant population will understand as worthy of moral treatment. We must perform as if we were acculturated. I achieved this by carefully controlling my commodity self, friendships, and cultural consumption and in the process, I radically rewrote my self.