Gringa Latina: A Woman of Two Worlds (Kodansha Globe) - Softcover

De Ferrari, Gabriella

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1568361459 ISBN 13: 9781568361451

Publisher: Kodansha Amer Inc, 1996

Synopsis

The author describes growing up in Peru in an Italian immigrant family, her Catholic education, her closeness to the women in her family, and her adulthood in America

About this title

From Library Journal

Clear blue skies, desert sands, spicy food, and an atmosphere of colonialism permeate this memoir. De Ferrari is a sensual writer, transporting the reader into the past on a visit to her Peruvian childhood. (Even recipes are found here.) Though scenes from her later life are included, the childhood years remain the focus. De Ferrari's parents were Italian immigrants to Peru but not your huddled masses. Her father was an affluent businessman, and her mother was the convent-raised daughter of a once-wealthy family. So Gabriella was raised in a house of plenty in the midst of poverty. This book is apparently intended to convey the feelings of disconnection experienced by an outsider in her homeland and another kind of outsider in her adopted homeland (the United States), but its strengths lie mainly in the evocation of distant places and societal mores, the descriptions of the mother who created an oasis of Italian beauty in the Peruvian desert, and the character studies of the people who molded De Ferrari's sensibilities. Recommended for leisure-reading collections.?Denise Johnson, Bradley Univ. Lib., Peoria, Ill.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly

Born in Peru of Italian immigrant parents, curator and novelist De Ferrari (A Cloud on Sand) here offers a memoir "saturated with powerful echoes and profound longings for a place I can never leave behind." The author writes elegantly about a local culture she first learned through black-clad neighbors and Indian maids. She recalls her dignified, decent father, her mother's passage from an Italian convent to become a wife in Peru and her parents' roles as unofficial Italian ambassadors in the town of Tacna. She recounts grade school alienation and the enthusiastic college roommate who taught her Americanisms. Though De Ferrari tells little of her adulthood, in some chapters she contrasts past and present: Tacna has become a city and, like so much of Peru, is now a place of drugs and fear. And De Ferrari observes that she has gained an American openness that differs markedly from the behavior of cousins she meets in Italy. A neat postscript to this sensitive trek across boundaries includes some of her mother's Peruvian-Italian recipes. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Kodansha Amer Inc
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1568361459
• ISBN 13: 9781568361451
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 176