How to Be a Chicana Role Model
Reviewed by Belinda Acosta, Fri., Sept. 29, 2000
How to Be a Chicana Role Model
by Michele Serros
Riverhead Books, 222 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Spoken word artist Michele Serros became a celebrity among Latino readers with the publication of her first book, Chicana Falsa. In her second book, How to Be a Chicana Role Model, she refines her wicked humor and observations of being Chicana in the U.S. Billed as a book of fiction, Serros is clearly at the center of the 13 pieces in Role Model, identified by name in many of them. This hybridization of the personal essay and fiction will befuddle some readers. But the casual reader will ignore the labeling, and relish Serros' observations from a perspective steeped in the culture of her Mexican family, while saturated in the popular culture that both invites and alienates. How she traverses these two worlds is often the source of Serros' humor. "'So how long is his hair?'" her Auntie Alma asks in "The Big Deal," in which the author prepares her Mexican aunt to meet her non-Mexican boyfriend. "I tried to envision a picture she would understand ... Jesus? Too heavy. Che Guevara? Too commercial. I needed something within our cultural grasp." "Okay, you know Cher, right? ..." Navigating across these cultural waters, Serros is a quick-witted guide.
