Abstract
During the 1980s and 90s, U.S. immigration narratives were frequently routed through trauma. Figuring immigration as the agonizing loss of a home culture, widely read writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Julia Alvarez, and Jhumpa Lahiri developed a lexicon of wounds and scars. In their works, painful memories of events in the home country mark the protagonists' past, while the stresses of social exclusion define the American present. Mourners, ghosts and zombies populate a limbo between two territorially defined national cultures. In these and other 80s era immigration narratives, personal traumas, rather than political crisis or a struggle for success in the public forum, take center stage.