The story of La Fabulosa: a Texas Operetta is about an anonymous narrator who gossips about the romantic relationships of a woman named Carmen from Laredo, starting with a corporal named José and moving onto a Texas senator named Camilo Escamilla and finally King Kong Cardenas. The speaker of the story is an anonymous narrator from Laredo who gossips about Carmen. The narrator gives off a gossipy persona through what the narrator said about her. The narrator gives off this persona due to his or her exaggeration of the story such as the rumor of José and how he carved his initials onto Carmen’s chichis. In addition, the narrator decides to interrupt her story with unnecessary details about her love life such as the rumor of José rather than
You can see how Maria’s El Salvador is empty of people, full only of romantic ideas. Jose Luis’s image of El Salvador, in contrast, totally invokes manufactured weapons; violence. Maria’s “self-projection elides Jose Luis’s difference” and illustrates “how easy it is for the North American characters, including the big-hearted María, to consume a sensationalized, romanticized, or demonized version of the Salvadoran or Chicana in their midst” (Lomas 2006, 361). Marta Caminero-Santangelo writes: “The main thrust of the narrative of Mother Tongue ... continually ... destabilize[s] the grounds for ... a fantasy of connectedness by emphasizing the ways in which [Maria’s] experience as a Mexican American and José Luis’s experiences as a Salvadoran have created fundamentally different subjects” (Caminero-Santangelo 2001, 198). Similarly, Dalia Kandiyoti points out how Maria’s interactions with José Luis present her false assumptions concerning the supposed “seamlessness of the Latino-Latin American connection” (Kandiyoti 2004, 422). So the continual misinterpretations of José Luis and who he really is and has been through on Maria’s part really show how very far away her experiences as a middle-class, U.S.-born Chicana are from those of her Salvadoran lover. This tension and resistance continues throughout their relationship.
Sandra Cisneros’s short story “Never Marry a Mexican” deals heavily with the concept of myth in literature, more specifically the myth La Malinche, which focuses on women, and how their lives are spun in the shadows on men (Fitts). Myths help power some of the beliefs of entire cultures or civilizations. She gives the reader the mind of a Mexican-American woman who seems traitorous to her friends, family and people she is close to. This causes destruction in her path in the form of love, power, heartbreak, hatred, and an intent to do harm to another, which are themes of myth in literature. The unreliable narrator of this story was created in this story with the purpose to show her confusion and what coming from two completely different
Journalists and other nonfiction writers alike occasionally provide accounts of real life traditions and events that occur in various cultures. These important events are often emphasized by underlining them through sequential and descriptive structure, along with direct quotations from the participants of the event. In the news article, “Quinceanera Birthday Bash Preserves Tradition, Marks Passage to Womanhood”, author Natalie St. John uses the aforementioned to highlight and depict the details of a quinceañera and its significance in the Mexican culture and community.
2. what's found out approximately the man or woman of the narrator thru his distinctive description of his method as a journalist? what type of guy does he seem to be?
Within Valenzuela’s “The Censors,” the satirical theme of this story mocks Juan, his thoughtless actions and his letter are symbols for innocence and secrecy. Juan’s actions symbolize the innocence of childhood and those who haven’t experienced hardship, of those who are impressionable and naïve. Juan’s actions when he receives Mariana’s address and immediately “without thinking twice, he [… writes] her a letter” and sends it show his lack of
First and foremost, this novel is about Chicano people and the struggles they endured. While each small passage can be viewed as the progression of the unknown male protagonist, it also gives a multitude of other views as well. Middle-aged male
In “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria,” the incidents on the bus, in the hotel, and at the poetry involved prejudice and stereotypical misconceptions of Puerto Rican women. While Cofer was on a bus trip to Oxford University, a man “broke into an Irish tenor’s rendition of “Maria” from West Side Story” (Cofer 103). This implies that Latinas dealt with people who automatically assume that a Latina’s name is “Maria” or “Evita” based on a fictional movie. While at a hotel with a colleague, a middle-aged man called Cofer an “Evita” and he “began shout-sing a ditty to the tune of “La Bamba”---except the lyrics were about a girl named Maria” (Cofer 107). Then Cofer realized that “[she] was just an Evita or a Maria: merely a character in his cartoon-populated universe” (107). The men that sung stereotypical songs viewed Cofer as a sexual object and referred to her as an image displayed by the media.
Julia Alvarez also uses language to show how the four Garcia girls adjust to living in a new, and to them alien, culture. The protagonist in this novel is the family Garcia de la Torre, a wealthy, aristocratic family from the Santo Domingo, who can trace their genealogy back to the Spanish
The author shows similarities between the narrator and his more skeptical colleague in an attempt to highlight the narrator’s thoughts. His thoughts show that his caustic colleague is very critical in describing the immigrant mother as a “bugger” and the daughter as a “pimply-faced bitch”. (pg. 55) The story then ends with a sense of hope for the young girl as she returns to school.
Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue is divided into five sections and an epilogue. The first three parts of the text present Mary/ María’s, the narrator, recollection of the time when she was nineteen and met José Luis, a refuge from El Salvador, for the first time. The forth and fifth parts, chronologically, go back to her tragic experience when she was seven years old and then her trip to El Salvador with her son, the fruit of her romance with José Luis, twenty years after she met José Luis. And finally the epilogue consists a letter from José Luis to Mary/ María after her trip to El Salvador. The essay traces the development of Mother Tongue’s principal protagonists, María/ Mary. With a close reading of the text, I argue how the forth
Ms. Jimenez is the "sell-out" or white-washed Mexican-American. This is displayed just as the play begins when she introduces herself. Sancho hears her say her name as "Ji-mi-nez" and realizes she is a Chicana. Excitedly, he starts to speak Spanish to her and pronounces her name in Spanish, "Hee-me-nez," stressing the second syllable. She corrects him saying that the Spanish pronunciation is not how her name is pronounced. She quickly makes it apparent that she does not speak Spanish and does not even want to be know as a Chicana. She rejects her own ethnicity, which is one example of how she is a "sell-out." In any instance of such widespread oppression there has always been people who attempt to hide or reject their own identity so that they might succeed or better survive in the environment of their oppressors. Many times the oppressed people are taught to feel shameful of their heritage because the racism is so ingrained in everyday life and culture. In 1924 a Chicano assistant assessor to Reverend McLean in reporting on Colorado Mexicans, named J.B. Guerrero, reveals his own resentment towards people who share his own ancestry, "The Americans think we [Mexican-Americans] are no good; they class us with this trash that comes over from Mexico; we are greasers and nothing more. We have suffered much from these
The story describes the experiences of a young women named Cleofilas. She grew up with six brothers and had no mother. So therefore, she learned how to be a woman through watching telenovelas. She believes that to be a woman she only needs to find true love and have a “happily ever after”. Later she meets a man named Juan and they eventually fall in love and get married.
The author creates a mood of being irritating by her “…awful grandmother…” and brothers “…Alfredito and Enrique…” who are occupied playing outside as “… a B-Fifty-two bomber…” [paragraph 5] and her grandmother with a “… long, long list of relatives … names of the dead and the living into one long prayer…” [paragraph 10]. Including, the imagery provided in the short story described the character’s actions by watching her grandmother pray while she counts her grandmother’s mustache hairs. Later, an unknown lady and man start talking to her brother asking if she could take a picture, than judging by their looks, they assume they do not speak English but only
Stereotypes are dangerous weapons in our society. “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria” is a short essay in which the award winning poet and professor of English, Judith Ortiz Cofer, wishes to inform and persuade the audience that labels and stereotypes can be humiliating and hurtful. The author targets the general public, anyone that doesn’t understand that putting someone in a box because of a stereotype is wrong. Cofer starts out the essay by telling the reader a story with a drunk man who re-enacted “Maria” from the West Side Story, and how angry that made her feel. She continues by explaining how she grew up in the United States being a Puerto Rican girl trying to fit in, but always being labeled as an island girl. Cofer carries on by explaining why Latin people get dressed and act a certain way. Then she recalls some more stereotypical incidents.
Collectively, these literary images go to describe a young ethnic man, probably of Latin descent, who lives with his mother in a poverty stricken area. The careful recitation of instruction given to the younger man seems to demonstrate an intricate knowledge the narrators has accrued from both predecessors and experience. Singularly, this part of the story is very powerful in that it shows a young man having to hide who he is and where he comes from in an effort to seem appealing to women, and speaks volumes about the deception that both genders go through all in name of the chase.