Locating Chicanx Futurity and Afuturity in Erika Sánchez's I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter

Abstract: To further explorations of Chicana futurity in coming-of-age realistic fiction of the twenty-first century, I analyze Erika L. Sánchez’s popular novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (2018) and ask: What Chicana futures are modeled in the text? What avenues for Chicanx futurity are suggested and which are formulated as foreclosed? I argue the text propels its fifteen-year-old college-bound protagonist Julia as the expression of Chicana futurity rooted in limited visions of a future. By centering the protagonist as speaking subject and her journey of development, not unusual traits of the bildungsroman, Julia’s future-charged trajectory, embedded in logics of linear progress and social mobility, stands in juxtaposition with her undocumented parents’ and deceased sister’s articulated impossibilities. This juxtaposition brings into sharp relief the text’s proposition of Julia as the encoded agent of Chicana futurity, while it relegates her family to what I refer to as a realm of afuturity , the foreclosing of future desire, imagination, temporality, or possibility and not being able to exist or project beyond the past or present. Unlike her parents, whose healing and future outcomes are curtailed, Julia is centered as the agent of her life and future who can work through intergenerational trauma. Encoded in Mexican Daughter are strains of both Chicana afuturity and futurity that work together to promote a single narrative of individual success and healing available to the college-bound children of immigrant parents at the expense of imagining Chicanx futurity as an intergenerational collective liberatory proposition.