Bordering on Development: Redefining the Bildungsroman in Late-Twentieth-Century Women’s Transnational American Literature

ABSTRACT: Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy , Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican , and Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents entered the ethnic American canon in the late twentieth century, yet they remain undertheorized as transnational American bildungsromans. This paper reexamines these texts as a diverse corpus of women’s life writing that challenges dominant conceptions of the bildungsroman, which are drawn from conflicting European, western feminist revisionist, and postcolonial frameworks but converge in their reliance on assimilation as a marker of maturation. Employing a transnational feminist lens, this study highlights recurring motifs—fragmented identities, porous embodiments, and non-linear temporalities—to demonstrate how pluralistic identities emerge as constitutive of development across borders, in alignment with Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of mestiza consciousness. These narratives redefine the bildungsroman by integrating elements often theorized as features of the anti-bildungsroman, reflecting the protagonists’ struggles with patriarchal, neocolonial, and neoliberal structures within a transnational United States context. This generic revision parallels the ways that these authors navigate—and narratively stage—their simultaneous appropriation of and resistance to dominant discourses of femininity and assimilation. Ultimately, the essay underscores the ways that these texts reshape generic conventions to embrace contradiction and offer recursive models of identity formation that exceed familiar narratives of immigration and hybridity.