Making a Home away from Home: Traveling Diasporas in María Escandón’s Esperanza’s Box of Saints

This essay was originally published in Amerikastudien/American Studies 51, no. 4 (2006): 581–93.Marc Priewe’s essay argues convincingly for a way of applying the term “diaspora” to Chicana/o cultural formations and consciousness by focusing on the transnational relations within the US that pervade Chicana/o life and are manifest in allegiances and nostalgias that transform ideas of ethnicity and place. Priewe’s analysis of Escandón’s text depicts how life in the “transnation” might be imagined. Echoing the language of Du Bois, Priewe examines the “zone of doubleness” and the “transnational gestalt” that characterize the experience of a living in or making a “home away from home.