This study has examined how a centuries-old European genre, the bildungsroman, has been transformed by contemporary Afro-Latin American novelists to address key aspects of the diaspora. Postcolonialism provides a productive theoretical framework for analyzing this literature, especially because it explores the movement of populations domestically and internationally. According to Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffins, “A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with place and displacement. It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of identity comes into being” (8). The authors define displacement as involving enslavement, migration, and hybridity—three elements of the bildungsroman that are demonstrated throughout this study.

The study began with an examination of the effect of slavery on young characters growing up. In chapter 1, we saw Fela captured by slave traders, taken on the Middle Passage, and treated brutally on a plantation. The story of Ponciá's family depicts the lengths to which slaves and their descendants will go for freedom and to stand up against oppression. And, in City of God, the characters encounter slavery in a dreamlike state in which they have traveled back in time to witness the brutal treatment of enslaved people on a plantation that once stood on land occupied by the favelas in which the characters grew up. Interestingly, these Afro-Latin American writers use curses such as those of Oshun and the fukú to explain the Middle Passage in a postcolonial way. That is, by attributing the origins of the Middle Passage to African folkloric sources, they deprive the Europeans of the power to originate this saga.

Once in the New World, these Afro-Latin American stories focus on the creation of homes and families—some in family sagas that cross generations. Recall from chapter 1 how central the quest for home was for Fela's descendants and how her daughter Mati got her family's land back from the hacendados using curses and healing power. In Ponciá Vicencio, Ponciá dreams of a home in the city because there are few opportunities for young Afro-Brazilian females in the rural area. Creating a home is key to the formation of the identities of these young characters.

As a child, Ponciá, the title character of Ponciá Vicencio, worked with clay down by the river side by side with her mother, learning how to make figurines— especially those capturing the forms of family members. Years later, these objects would play a pivotal role communicating her whereabouts to her illiterate brother. She never could have guessed that the figurines she made—themselves the legacy of an ancient African craft—would ultimately help to reunite generations of their family that had been dispersed through migration.

The novels featured in this chapter demonstrate how the Afro-Latin American coming-of-age narratives depart from the traditional Western bildungsroman genre that focuses on a single character's journey toward adulthood. These novels include more than one generation of characters, though one young character's journey toward maturity is often foregrounded by her narration of the family story and voicing of its collective memory. However, that individual's journey is clearly intertwined with and shaped by the experiences of earlier generations as we come to understand those ancestors’ own journeys. As postcolonial literature, Daughters of the Stone and Ponciá Vicencio portray the displacement caused by slavery and the struggle of characters to find a home. The importance of home is a central theme in diasporic literature as it emphasizes how dispersed populations look for their own lasting home while they struggle to adapt to new surroundings. Melissa Schindler defines “the idea of home, which can refer variously to a physical place one inhabits (with or without kin) to a figurative national or transnational community.” Furthermore, Schindler adds that “Evaristo, [Mozambican writer Paulina] Chiziane, and [African American Toni] Morrison (re) create women and homeplaces in their writing—as rife with sexism, racism, and contradiction as those places may be.” As these generations struggle to find a home, they draw on African traditions passed on across the Atlantic in their journey toward maturity and communicate with their ancestors. Daughters of the Stone (2009), by Puerto Rican writer Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, describes how five generations of young women, beginning with Fela, an African woman brought over on the Middle Passage, search for a secure place to grow and prosper in Puerto Rico and later New York.

The early 1980s was a whirlwind. California Governor Ronald Reagan, a former actor who’d made his name playing opposite chimpanzees in movies, was president of the United States. PAC-MAN, an arcade game sans pinballs, was a digital rage. Americans began screaming, for the first time, that they wanted their MTV. And Thriller, Michael Jackson's follow-up to his solo Off the Wall album, forced the music industry to invent a new best-selling category: Diamond Platinum.

Underneath it all, and unseen under the hood of all things electronic, microprocessors were reshaping the present—and the future. Sony had people dancing in the streets with its burgeoning array of mobile sound systems. IBM brought computers home with its first personal computer, or PC. And computer systems began interacting via phone lines over something that would eventually be called the Internet.

Meanwhile, Mark and his merry men (and women) were forging ahead in the old ironworks shop in Cambridge. It wasn't glamorous. And a profit had yet to be made. But with a product shipping and mostly performing as advertised, that elusive glimmer of hope for success was growing brighter. Word was spreading about a little company that had indeed built a better timekeeping mousetrap. As had been the bottom-line objective when Larry Baxter and Mark had evaluated everything up to and including yo-yos with built in transistor radios, Kronos had been founded within a relatively small industry—time clocks and the keeping of workers’ time—where the technology was, putting it bluntly and pun intended, behind the times, as the basic time clock then used hadn't dramatically evolved in over 100 years.

By melding the emerging power of the microprocessor with the need for a more reliable and efficient way to collect time worked, all within plain sight of the gigantic companies that dominated the landscape at the time, they had set the time clock in sync with the rest of a rapidly evolving way of doing business. They had taken a first step in ultimately changing the way labor was managed.

The universality of music is hard to debate. Fans in a country that doesn't speak English sing the lyrics to “Satisfaction” loud and proud along with Mick Jagger as if they were also from England. Many people first learn how to speak foreign languages by singing songs. Singers lose their accents when performing. And, in some remarkable cases, those with pronounced stuttering problems can croon as smooth as silk when given a melody and a beat to follow.

An oft-cited metaphor stems from the riff … as good news is considered music to one's ears.

Such a harmonious vibe must certainly have filled the Rich household back when young Jack Rich, a top-of-the-class student with big aspirations, opened his college acceptance letter from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Not only had Jack been accepted into the world's preeminent engineering university, he had also been granted a scholarship to attend!

Following a well-tread path, Jack opted into the Electrical Engineering program at the end of his freshman year, and it would seem that he was clearly on the road to future success.

Then came a summer of discord … a cacophony of conflicting thoughts. Though Jack's extraordinary intelligence ensured he was doing well enough in school, he finished his second year, packed his bags, and began making plans for whatever he might opt to do next. Like a needle scratching across a pristinely pressed 33-rpm record, Jack had decided to leave MIT.

“It's true,” Jack would later confirm. “I had come to a point where I simply didn't care. Electrical engineering at that time was all about transistors. And I did not care how transistors worked. So, I was doing the work. But mentally I was dropping out.”

Come that summer, he was dropping out in a way far beyond mentally.

“So,” he continued, “I dropped out for the summer. But then, at the end of the summer, I didn't have a job as everyone else was going back to school. But I still had a scholarship. I decided to go back to MIT, but not to electrical engineering. So, I reregistered as a music major.”

The year 1979 brought calamity and change.

The burgeoning nuclear industry took a hit when a failed cooling mechanism at Three Mile Island caused a partial meltdown in Reactor #2. Young couples in China were told that as part of their government’s population planning policy that they would only be allowed one child. And sixty-six Americans were taken hostage in Iran.

It wasn't all bad news. Amid a backdrop of The Sugerhill Gang’s “Rapper's Delight” and Rod Stewart's “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Americans flocked to movie theaters to see Martin Sheen surface in “Apocalypse Now” and Mel Gibson quietly take on a collection of crazy post-apocalyptic hooligans in “Mad Max.” And going downhill became a good thing with the introduction of the snowboard.

It snowed in the Sahara Desert for a grand total of 30 minutes. A tsunami killed 23 people in France. And Great Britain elected Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister.

Along the way, two University of Connecticut basketball fans, unable to attend all their favorite team's games, licensed space on a new concept called cable television, giving rise to an organization called ESPN. Canadian board game Trivial Pursuit rewarded those with a command of inconsequential knowledge. And music got mobile as Sony introduced the first Walkman.

Meanwhile, at Kronos World Headquarters, things were not necessarily going well, but they were going. Finally emerging from their respective basements and garages, the dozen or so employees of the fledgling organization found themselves toiling for the first time under a singular roof. True, conditions were less than ideal. But the fact that they could interact, and test, and postulate the possibilities of actually creating a breakthrough product, put wind in their sails.

“Finally getting everyone under one roof really got us on track,” recalled Mark. “Thanks to Donald Levy we had connections and a partnership within the industry. And thanks to Larry Baxter, we were on our way to having an actual product.”

Mark knew the demand was there for a better, electronically based way to capture time data. His constant trips to both establish a prospect pipeline and seek input for the design phase proved that out time and again.

The year 1943 was dominated by an ongoing World War II. The United States ran its first test on what was called the Philadelphia Experiment. And a young PT boat commander named John F. Kennedy bravely held his crew together in the Solomon Islands after their boat had been torpedoed by a Japanese submarine.

The ballpoint pen was patented. Construction on the Pentagon was completed. And Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the first U.S. president to travel by airplane.

In New York, Rogers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma debuted on Broadway. The New York Yankees became the first team to win the World Series ten times and Yankees star Joe DiMaggio promptly enlisted in the U.S. Army.

As for beginnings, and against the musical backdrop of upstart crooner Frank Sinatra singing “All of Nothing at All” and Wizard of Oz alum Judy Garland warbling “Zing Went the Strings of My Heart” came the births of such future luminaries as Robert DeNiro, Jim Morrison, Billie Jean King, Geraldo Rivera, Joe Namath, and a couple of British blokes named Richards and Jagger.

Future household names arrive on the planet nearly every day, but if history proves anything with consistency, it's that most world changers do not necessarily become world renowned. And such was the case when, in the year 1943 in New York City, Pearl and Jacob “Jack” Ain welcomed the first of what would be their five children, Mark Stuart Ain, into the world.

To imply that young Mark had the potential to be successful would almost seem an understatement. Jack had earned an engineering degree from New York University in 1937. But it was Pearl who truly had achieved eye-popping academic credentials.

“My mother graduated high school when she was only fourteen, then college at just seventeen, and she finished Columbia Law School at twenty,” Mark reported with pride. “But she was too young to take the test! She had to wait until she turned twenty-one to take the bar exam!

“And so, she had a fabulous academic career. And then, she practiced law for a few years, I guess until I was born.”

During Mark Ain's search for the right product upon which to found his company, he sought an industry that had not yet reaped the benefits of incorporating the emerging technologies of the day. But though that was his principle criteria, it was perhaps a secondary ingredient to his game plan that ultimately allowed a fledgling company like Kronos to survive long enough to thrive.

The realm into which he would seek to make inroads should, he believed, be dominated by a behemoth: an engineering and manufacturing titan so enormous within its space that it would pay little heed to a tiny niche player attempting to reinvent how things were done.

The realm of timekeeping in the United States turned out to be just such a domain. Clocks were manual, and so was the laborious process of tabulating the time represented on time cards. At the top of the heap sat a giant—one blissfully unaware of Mark's aspirations to play David to its Goliath.

Ironically, the behemoth in question, the Simplex Time Recorder Company, had been born of a technology-based innovation of its own. Edward A. Watkins, who was in charge of the engineering department of a then-prominent furniture maker in nearby Gardner, Massachusetts, had invented and patented one of the first practical time clocks back in 1894. Watkins’ device was considered one of the earliest information technology devices ever deployed in a workplace. Almost a century later, and after a 1950 acquisition of a time clock division within IBM, Simplex was the gold standard in timekeeping in the U.S. And a third generation of the Watkins family was at the helm.

Mark didn't stand in front of Simplex as he loaded his sling with a stone. But he might as well have.

“Quite a few of the salespeople we hired had been selling for Simplex,” he recalled. “In fact, when we went to a new city, we’d purposely find Simplex salespeople and convince them that ours was the clock they should be selling.”

By 2005, Kronos was a worldwide leader in its field. And its founder and CEO Mark Ain was recognized in business circles as a bona fide visionary and success story. So, it was only natural that the University of Rochester should tap him as the commencement speaker that year at its MBA graduation ceremony. He had, after all, not only achieved success on his own terms—he had also been a member of the school's first-ever MBA graduation class.

His words that day were directed at an audience that was witnessing its own technological revolution. Very few people built their own computers from scratch because they were much easier to purchase, and at a price point where virtually everyone had one. The internet had already redefined almost all aspects of everyday life. And new visions—YouTube, for example, was launching its first video—were being realized at a pace that only a decade earlier would have been considered unimaginable, and even crazy.

Against that backdrop, Mark took the stage and looked out over a crowd of starry-eyed graduates and their proud family members and friends and entertained and challenged them in words that could be applied to graduates in virtually any year.

The following is the text of that speech:

Two letters and one numeral led the business news cycle in the two- to three-year stretch leading up to the ball dropping in Times Square to signal the beginning of the earth's third calendarial millennium … Y2K.

Predictions for horrific disasters of all scales ran rampant, based on the notion that all the technologically driven innovation of the previous decade would shut down based on a simple premise … computers and anything driven by them would be rendered unworkable because all these gadgets marked years with only two, not four, digits. Presumably, all these machines would read double zero on their internal clocks at the stroke of midnight and, “thinking” it was 1800 or 1900 and that they had not been invented, they would shut down.

Airplane guidance systems would fail, with planes crashing around the globe in sequence to respective time zones. Banks would crash as well, with no monetary tracking. And worse, Kronos time clocks would not tabulate hours worked!

The air of potential horror permeated everywhere as software experts around the globe sought to claim that their systems were Y2K-compliant.

Interestingly, and despite how ridiculous this sounds so many years later now knowing that these Nostradamus-esque forecasts bore no fruit, the calamity did cause a financial wrinkle in Kronos’ plans. Tech companies had been going gangbusters, driven by the dot-com boom and what was ultimately a Y2K version of “fake news.” Organizations the world over had ramped up tech spending to thwart the forecast of calamity. The ball dropped in Times Square and nothing popped but champagne corks, while the monies essentially borrowed from future budgets left many wells near dry entering the new millennium. Coupled with that drain came a downturn in the economy as dot-com after dot-com, buoyed initially by promises of great and wonderous things blossoming with the advent of the Internet, went belly-up.

It could have been life-sapping at the young Kronos but for what could be termed a paper-thin safety net … time cards!

Learning to drive can be stressful. Two tons of steel propelled by a powerful engine. The ever-present need to be aware not just of yourself but everything and everyone around you can be daunting, the potential to do damage or to be damaged overwhelming. The responsibility looms large enough that you have to take classes and pass, not one, but two tests, and then adhere to a series of early restrictions, before becoming a road warrior.

And so, it was with all of that hanging overhead that a teenaged Alice Ain received driving instruction from a brother older enough that when he graduated from the uber-prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, kindergarten-school-aged Alice told friends her brother had attended “some school called Mitt.”

That it was a bonding opportunity was self-evident. That it would establish a precedent for Mark serving as a mentor and later for Alice to turn the tables and teach Big Brother some valuable lessons would seem less obvious.

Mark hadn't been an absentee brother by design so much as it was chronological fate. Pearl and Jack Ain had taken a pause after having three sons in rapid succession. Aron came fourth in line and then a change … a baby girl … Alice! But with a span of roughly fifteen years between them, Mark was further down life's pipeline than most older siblings, receiving his MBA from Rochester as Alice finished phonics and the second grade.

Yet there was a strong bond, and a good deal of mutual admiration.

“I remember she was always effervescent,” recalled Mark. “Even at a young age, and more so later on, she always had a lot of friends.”

“I was always very proud of Mark,” said Alice. “He was away a lot of the time because he was so much older, so there were not a lot of household dynamics because he didn't live at home. He was always supportive. And I knew he was doing interesting things. But when he would come to visit it was always a big deal to me.”

A lot of interesting partnerships began in 1994. Samuel L. Jackson teamed up with John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. Michael Jackson wed Elvis Presley's daughter Lisa Marie. Jeff Gillooly, ex-husband of U.S. Olympian figure skater Tonya Harding, teamed up with bodyguard Shawn Eckardt to disable Harding's chief competitor, Nancy Kerrigan.

None of those couplings yielded the desired results.

But, in a coupling that would grow and prosper and stand the test of time, Cheryl Ferruccio, leading with a smile, interviewed for, and was subsequently hired, as an executive assistant at Kronos.

Mark Ain had an admin at the time. So, Cheryl's first assignment was assisting CFO Paul Lacy. But given both how much time Mark spent in Paul's office, and Kronos’ relatively small size at the time, Cheryl often had crossover duties that had her also working closely with the company's founder and CEO.

“Initially I worked for Paul,” detailed Cheryl. “But this was just shortly after Kronos had gone public, toward the end of 1992, so Mark and Paul, and also Mary Jane Conary, were always preparing to go on the road on trips to meet investors. So, I worked very closely with them. Plus, especially in those days, when Kronos had only about 400 employees, everybody absolutely knew everyone in the company.”

More than simply someone who took notes, Cheryl quickly became a cog in the core investor-relations team, compiling key data, and even had the responsibility, and honor, of calling in the quarterly numbers to the folks at Nasdaq.

“That was the beginning of a stretch where Kronos went up in earnings and profitability quarter over quarter and year over year at a pace that separated the company from most other companies,” said Mark. “In fact, after a while, the only software company with a longer streak of consecutive quarters of revenue and profitability growth was Microsoft. And Cheryl was a key player in terms of getting us ready to go out and leverage those numbers to attract more investment in the company.”

In 1899, a man named John Mast of Lititz, Pennsylvania, filed for a patent for the very mouse trap that immediately springs to mind virtually every time the phrase “a better mousetrap” is uttered. A heavy spring wire swings down when an unknowing rodent nibbles on a cheesy bait (or sometimes peanut butter), breaking the mouse's neck.

It was not the first invention designed to rid homeowners of the pesky critters. But for well over a hundred years, it has remained the gold standard, in spite of the fact that the United States has issued over 4,400 patents for “better mousetraps” in the ensuing years.

The question of whether any of those mousetraps were actually “better” is almost moot. Likely there were several iterations that were better at one aspect or another where it came to attracting, tricking, and dispatching of mice. But in those last nearly 120 years, only about 20 of those 4,400 ever made money. None displaced Mast's design or success.

In 1980, Kronos was not trying to rid companies of pests. Rather, where traditional time clock companies were concerned, Kronos was the pest because, at least metaphorically, the upstart company had built a proverbial better mousetrap with regard to the collection and output of employee time.

Not that Kronos was alone. The advent of the microprocessor, in a decade that would serve as a precursor to the dawning of the Internet era, was in the process of redefining processes and perceptions about the way people and companies performed. Mark Ain and his early compatriots had seen this transformation coming, and had defined an untapped niche within the realm of workforce management where they felt they could use technology to affect a paradigm shift—timekeeping.

With a version of the Kronos Timekeeper clock up and ready for deployment, Ain's young company still faced an uphill battle—one that likely felled many an aspiring mouse-catcher before them. A sizable chasm lay between building a better mousetrap and selling it into profitability.

It was December 31, 1976, and the crystal ball in New York City’s Times Square dropped slowly to a landing that signaled the conclusion of the bicentennial celebration of the birth of the United States. The sulfuric smell of fireworks had seemingly filled the air all Leap Year. Elton John's “Philadelphia Freedom” had commandeered the airwaves. And a couple of guys named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded a company named after a piece of produce. For some reason, they thought the name Apple would bear fruit.

1977 brought change. Star Wars had us dreaming of a future in a galaxy far, far away … the first Space Shuttle piggybacked its way skyward atop a Boeing 747 … and Elvis signaled the end of an era as the King of Rock and Roll passed away on the throne in his Graceland master bath just in advance of the screening of Saturday Night Fever and the dawning of Disco Mania.

In late 1976, Mark, together with Larry Baxter and thanks to a connection via Donald Levy, had encountered a New York-based family named Cohen that ran a time clock company called Interboro Systems. The father and sons behind that company had come up with a potentially game-changing concept: they would create an electronic version of a time clock designed to record worker hours. Luckily, at least for the budding entrepreneurs, the Cohen concept held merit, but their efforts had thus far been in vain.

“Their product was a kludge,” said Mark, using a term defined in the dictionary as a workaround or quick-and-dirty solution that is clumsy, inefficient, difficult to extend, and hard to maintain.

Mark's brash assessment was, of course, fairly accurate, as their version of the product in question simply did not work … at all.

“They were trying to take a mechanical clock and make it do what it couldn’t,” Mark opined. Still, Interboro had a concept that Mark, Larry, and Donald saw as an opportunity. Equally as important, Interboro had been successfully distributing mechanical clocks for several years, and therefore had a network of clients in and around the Northeast region of the United States. already using those manual clocks and services.

As the 1980s kicked into gear, the financial mood was upbeat as the economy was slowly turning around, essentially signaling what would come to be known as a decade of greed.

Madonna and something called rap were making waves in the music industry, while music videos were coercing people to “watch” their music as everyone wanted their MTV. And the first generation of personal computers, known simply as PCs, began appearing in residential homes.

In Boston, high technology was being advanced around the clock. But despite the presence of a bona fide revolution in the way workforces were being managed, what wasn't part of the everyday vernacular was the name Kronos.

True, Kronos was reinventing an industry. But the sales hill was a steep climb, not because the company's emerging technology wasn’t a game changer, but rather because the message was not necessarily formulated to engage and enthrall.

Enter yet another all-but-unlikely key Kronite, as employees would come to be called, named Mary Jane Conary.

“Mary Jane really put the company on the map in terms of positioning,” Mark Ain would later divulge. “What she did was define what Kronos could do in corporate terms.”

Kronos didn't necessarily need the brand-name recognition of Sony or the buzz that surrounded MTV's music television. Mark needn't displace Madonna or Mr. T as cultural icons. But the word did need to spread that the new time clock's harnessing of the emerging technology of the day was opening managerial windows into workforce management in a way that the 100-year-old technology that Kronos was both displacing and replacing could not.

Kronos had held its own during the economic slowdown, depending heavily on building an early reputation with a few key retail and hospitality arenas while focusing on gaining traction within a relatively recession-proof industry: nursing homes (because, no matter the financial climate, people still must age!). The nursing home experience had pushed the Kronos engineering team to further improve the product. And with the advent of the PC, it was time to embrace and popularize the concept that what Kronos was doing was about much more than placing a microchip in a time clock.

In the world of sports, the best teams are not necessarily the ones that contain the greatest number of star players. For every Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski, for every Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, there were many players whose blood, sweat, and tears made for championship efforts but who never became household names to those who were less than hardcore fans.

As a company, Kronos played that unheralded, backroom role for most of its history within the sport of business success. Customers who utilized the Kronos time clocks, and later the myriad of solutions that contributed to their running better, more cost-effective businesses with a healthy and rapid return on investment, knew the name. But the average consumer, upon hearing the name Kronos usually replied “Who?” unless they were Greek mythology buffs.

Likewise, within Kronos itself, there were marquee names, but there would have been no championship run without the guys who did the blocking and tackling or the boxing out and rebounding.

Mark understood this as clearly as he knew right from the start that he was not going to be the person who physically designed those initial time clocks. Mark had the idea and the business savvy. But without a Larry Baxter in the mix, the idea would have stayed where most earth-altering, life-changing ideas usually reside: in someone's head.

Now, with product shipping, a sales network comprised of both dealers and in-house staff selling and increasing revenue, and a burgeoning stable of engineers charged with perfecting and reimagining the clocks, Mark took on the tall task of finding someone to ensure that Kronos’ own accounting was taken care of properly.

The search had proved fruitless to the point where the ever-frugal Mark had opted to engage a search firm to assist in the quest. But that too, had not borne fruit. That is, until the day he looked up, both figuratively and literally, and laid eyes on a six-foot, seven-inch, former Farleigh Dickinson University basketball player named Glenn Bolduc.