Ethnic Literature Culture, origin, background, traditions, way of life, customs, intertwined these words define ethnicity. With shared beliefs and values, ethnic groups in the United States have little cultural differentiation. Readers look to literature for an understanding of ethnicity not because it is writable, but because ethnicity is readable. Ethnic writing is a choice, and results from the author’s own ethnic gaze inward, the reading of self as ethnic subject. Author Toni Morrison’s works explore race, and gender, author Sandra Cisneros brings together stories of cross-border bilingual culture. Morrison and Cisneros share views of the development of young women, the search for love, hate, and compulsion, in a world filled with loneliness, pain, and inexplicable violence. There is no feminine identity in a time of masculine dominance. The cultural content of ethnicity is largely interchangeable. Race and genetic makeup are not the defining category for ethnicity. Differences occur because of the map as it is drawn around them. In Sula by Toni Morrison, the community of “The Bottom” considers Sula evil and bad. Sula Peace is a main character shaped by two incidents in the beginning; a comment made by her mother, which was basically that she did not like her daughter, but she loved her, and in the death of Chicken little, a little boy whose character is introduced primarily for the creation of an incident. The first experience taught her that there was no other that you could count on; the second that there was no self to count on either. Sula has only friend, Nel Wright, who chooses to stay in the place of her birth, to marry, to raise a family, to become a pillar of the tightly knit black community. Sula rejects all that Nel has accepted. She escapes to college, submerges herself in city life, and when she returns to her roots, it is as a rebel, a mocker, a wanton sexual seductress. Both women must suffer the consequences of their choices. A lack of foundation, and structure affects Sula’s every thought and action. Because she is seen as evil, this evil causes reaction in the community. Conventionality and traditionalness of family and women is the normal of “The Bottom.” The Peace family, grandmother, mother, daughter, chart a working-class history of black women from the post-reconstruction era, from 1895 to 1940. Author Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek takes Cleofilas from her home in Mexico to the United States with her new husband, a likelier place for a woman to find liberation from oppressive masculinity. The town casts a distorted mirror image of the town from whence she came. One conclusion can be made that life in the United States is less liberating for the Mexican woman than life in Mexico. The United States town is steeped in masculinity to the exclusion of femininity is shown by the symbolism of the setting as well as by the characters. The primary person that takes an active part in Cleofila’s life, her husband, is masculine. There is no feminine identity for her to relate to in her neighborhood. She soon becomes the victim of abuse.