‘Once you get the card you can do anything you want.’ Migrant Identities and Gender Transgression in Chicana Dramatic Literature

Issues of migration, frontiers and identity are recurrent in Chicano/a literature. In Real Women Have Curves the protagonists are conditioned by la migra as much as by race stereotyping and gender limits, living in a metaphoric frontera between clandestine existence and public acknowledgement; between curvy, dark-skinned beauty, and white, androgynous images of womanly perfection. The Hungry Woman is situated in a symbolic territory where Medea has been banished for being a lesbian. Both texts are constructed around ethnic and gender identities, and they both create worlds in which limits are broken