“My little sister had a disaster, she had a baby”: Gendered performance, relational identities, and dialogic voicing

This paper discursively analyzes an extended personal narrative from a life history interview with a Mexican woman immigrant in California, in which the teller details the varying reactions of family and community members to her younger sister’s unmarried pregnancy in a Mexican village at a time of increasing emigration. In analyzing the narrator’s account of these events, the paper focuses on her orchestration of multiple discourses and social voices, arguing that through her juxtaposition of competing gender ideologies, the teller performs a traditional “good woman” identity, while at the same time creating discursive space for other girls and women to make different choices.