In her essay Arts of the Contact Zone, Mary Louise Pratt describes what she calls an autoethnographic text: “Guaman Poma’s New Chronicle is an instance of what I have proposed to call an autoethnographic text, by which I mean a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations that others have made of them.”
Consider Anzaldúa’s essay as a contemporary instance of the same kind of thing. Reread it with “Arts of the Contact Zone” in mind.
Write a 4-page essay that presents “Entering the Serpent” as an example of autoethnography, or as a “freak” text (in some ways the same thing).
Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, 9th ed. Bartholomae & Petrosky, ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s: New York, 2011.