Micol has a great post about authenticity and identity and multi-culturalism in fiction inspired by a questioning letter from a reader of her Emily Goldberg Learns to Salsa:
Growing up as a Puerto Rican Jew, identity sometimes proved a confusing issue with which to grapple. I’ve been told that I’m not "really" Hispanic, or that my mother, a convert, isn’t as Jewish as she should be. I majored in multi-culti studies in college and spent a heck of a lot of time defending my own experiences as defined by status of "not." And my reply to people who thought I had one foot in each world but was fully-grounded in neither was ultimately: yeah, and?
Read it all.