Final Project Proposal

My final project is going to explore and examine how my Mom came to construct her racial, class, and gender identity through her unique experiences and background having grown up as a white girl in poverty within diverse settings. My Mom would spend her childhood constantly on the move around the country, in Arkansas, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Colorado amongst other places, alongside her unstable and mentally ill mother, before she would finally settle in California. She would spend the majority of her youth growing up in South Central Los Angeles, predominantly in Watts. After emancipating herself as minor, and being intermittently homeless, she would talk her white female middle-class high school biology teacher into letting her live with her. Despite her upbringing, my Mom would go on to work as a paralegal in one of the largest law firms in Los Angeles, among other notable achievements, before settling down and marrying a Chinese man from an immigrant family, and having three biracial children. Before my Mom passed, she began working on a book that would be her autobiography detailing her unique and tragic, yet powerful journey.

For my final project I am going to attempt to complete the autobiography my Mom was robbed of the opportunity to complete, creatively reconstructing her life through the parables, stories, brief writings, and of course my personal experiences with her. I will be utilizing works as Gerald Horne’s “Fire this Time” and Joshua Sides’ “L.A. City Limits” to help me to conceptualize the settings and time period encapsulating the stories my Mom told and left behind.

Primary Sources:

- Stories/personal experiences/etc. from my Mom
- A collection of writings that she left behind

Secondary Sources:

·         Toni Morrison, “On the Backs of Blacks,” Time, December 2, 1993

·         Joshua Sides “L.A. City Limits”

·         Gerald Horne “Fire this Time”

·         James Baldwin “No Name in the Street”