Essay 3 In her essay, “A Hispanic Garden,” Diaz expresses the inner conflict she faces a foreigner between two lands. As a Cuban immigrant residing in the United States she is obligated to fight a continuous battle with herself and others to preserve her culture within the dominant culture. She explains her feelings when she visits her homeland Cuba. While she is there she is not considered Cuban enough in the same way that she is not considered American enough when she is in the States. Her essay further discusses the battle against injustices that Hispanic women suffer in America. Attempting to find liberation for Hispanic women from society’s oppression, she concludes that in order to reach true equality, power within feminist movement must be shared among all ethnicities. She notes how important it is for “Euro-American feminists to acknowledge their prejudice” (18) in order to “work together on deciding the priorities for the [feminist] movement and not only for the Euro-American …show more content…
She then states her mother’s difficulty to “criticize the sexist behavior she sees there” (25). In a way, Diaz understands her mother’s conflict as her mother was raised with different ideologies where women are expected to subjugate to their spouse. She believes that overcoming“the oppression of women in any domestic sphere” will contribute to the Mujerista movement. However, she also recognizes that “those of us as mujeristas criticize sexism in the Hispanic culture are often belittled and accused of selling out to the Euro-American women, but Euro-American feminists call into question our integrity and praxis as mujerista feminist when we are not willing to criticize” (26). With this in mind, we can see the constant fight a Hispanic women must face in the feminist
Vicki L. Ruiz is a Chicano/Latino studies and History professor from UC Davis whose research focused on Latina feminists from 1900-1930. She made it a point that many only focus on the chicana feminists of the 20th century or only focus on the Latino narratives revolving around U.S. history. Ruiz decided to base her research and this talk on two Latina feminists: Luisa Capetillo and Luisa Moreno. Luisa Capetillo was born on October 28, 1879 in Puerto Rico and was raised in a modest household.
Throughout history the inferiority of women has been prevalent for hundreds of years, and some countries tried to close the gap, one of them being cuba which ensued, following the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro now began to implement his vison for Cuba based off of his communist ideologies. Like Mao Zedong in China Castro looked towards women being one of the groups for support in Cuba. By 1990 many had felt that women’s lives had been changed for better, and now were able to partake in learning and jobs that weren’t available to them before the revolution; however others argued that more had to be done to remove the fragments of patriarchy that had still existed; Although it appeared the revolution had advanced the equality for women in
In “A Gringo in the Lettuce Fields,” author Gabriel Thompson presents a look into the life of a migrant worker in the lettuce fields in Yuma Arizona. First, Thompson gives a first look into the job by describing what the area of the fields look like. “I wake up staring into the bluest blue I’ve ever seen. ”(89) “To my left, in the distance, a border patrol helicopter is hovering.
According to a male Cuban revolutionary, he and most of the older generation were against women’s liberation because they expected a woman to do household work (Doc #3). He was strongly against women’s liberation because he was used to patriarchy, to women serving men and, thus, thought that a woman “owes herself to me [him] and the children”. There was most likely a strong opposition from men regarding women’s liberation that made equality harder to achieve. This opposition slowed down the country’s progress on feminism and women right’s because they still treated women as servants born to do housework. Because of a lack of participation from men, women still had the responsibility of doing household work plus the responsibility to work, resulting in an unfair double work shift (doc #10).
Sonia Sotomayor is an appointed US Supreme Court Justice and, at one time, an appeals court judge. She delivered a speech in 2001 to the University of California Berkeley School of Law, to convey her identity as a Latina living in America. Sotomayor uses a variety of rhetorical choices to share her story and family history, explaining what specifically defines a Latina or a Latino, ultimately, to convey the impacts of American social stereotypes of race and ethnic diversity, and explain how Latina or Latino men and women differ from this conflicting stereotype. Sotomayor shares what makes her culture, hers in the first section of this piece, describing how her family came to America, as well as what their life is like here. Sotomayor lists the typical foods her and her family eat describing how " I bet the Mexican-Americans in this room are
The article written by Yen Le Espiritu called “We Don 't Sleep Around Like White Girls Do”: Family, Culture, and Gender in Filipina American Lives is written from a feminist political economy approach. As I have learned through my sociological experience and from the class women, work and family a feminist political economy approach adds a gender lens to explore women’s access to resources in the public and private spheres. It looks at the inequalities of power and control. Looking through the lived experiences of women where gender inequality can be identified through patriarchy. Patriarchy connects with race and class to further oppress and marginalize racialized women.
In her essay “Voices Without Echo: The Global Gendered Apartheid,” Rosa Linda Fregoso contends that she has “grouped the interpretive discourses on feminicide into two master narratives: the moral discourse and the discourse of globalization.” The moral discourse, she says, draws a line between the murders of these women and a double life of factory work and prostitution in order to justify the sexual assault and death that takes place so often in Ciudad Juárez. This discourse is used by the state in order to deflect responsibility for the crimes that take place. The discourse of globalization takes some parts of the discourse of morality and presents the idea that hyperfemininity in factory settings as well as the hypersexual nightlife can
The Myth of The Latin Woman Analysis Latin American women face challenges every single day and moment of their lives. They are strongly discriminated against in all sectors of employment, in public places, and even while just walking down the street. In her essay, "The Myth of the Latin Woman," Judith Ortiz Cofer describes her own experiences using illuminating vignettes, negative connotation, and cultural allusion to exemplify how she used the struggles in her day to day life as a Latin woman to make herself stronger. Cofer uses illuminating vignettes to illustrate the different situations she encountered as a Latina while growing up and living in America.
In Mexican American society , women are deemed inferior to men, evident in traditional family roles, the male is the head of the family who provides for the family , while the woman stays at home to look after the children she is expected to provide for her husband . In the third vignette of ‘The House on Mango Street’ titled ‘Boys and Girls’ the reader is informed of the division between men and women when Esperanza refers to herself and her sister Nenny , and her brothers, “They’ve got plenty to say to me and Nenny inside the house. But outside they can’t be seen talking to girls”. The male dominance begins at a very young age.
She studies their background and circumstances, explaining how “whether living in a labor camp, a boxcar settlement, mining town, or urban barrio, Mexican women nurtured families, worked for wages, built fictive kin networks, and participated in formal and informal community associations” (p. 5). These are the ways, Ruiz found, that helped Mexican American women make them part of the American society. She also talks about the attempts made by groups like Protestants that tried to civilize or Americanize the immigrant women but were unsuccessful due to the religious and community groups as well as labor unions that were formed to give them
“Oranges,” “The Seventieth Year,” and “Avocado Lake,” showcase Soto’s ability to move a reader using an emotional story without the use of rhyme or rhythm. Through Soto’s poetry, he indicates the traits that define Mexican-American community
“The common denominator all Latinos have is that we want some respect. That 's what we 're all fighting for” - Cristina Saralegui. Judith Ortiz Cofer published the article, “The Myth of the Latin Woman,” where she expresses her anger towards stereotypes, inequality, and degradation of Latin Americans. Cofer explains the origins of these perceived views and proceeds to empower Latin American women to champion over them. Cofer establishes her credibility as a Latin American woman with personal anecdotes that emphasize her frustration of the unfair depiction of Latinos in society.
In One Holy Night, the author Sandra Cisneros suggests a difference in standards between men and women in the Latino community binds the female characters to stereotypes that are difficult to undo. Cisneros writes about a young girl who falls in love with a guy while she works at her family's pushcart. Eventually, they fall in love, and the young girl finds out she is pregnant. The young girl’s grandmother finds out she is pregnant and condemns her for it. Ultimately, she doesn’t blame her because “it’s Uncle Lalo’s fault because he’s the man of the family, and if he had come home on time like he was supposed to and worked the pushcart on the days he was told to and watched over his goddaughter, who is too foolish to look after herself” (Cisneros
Part I: Resistiendo la cultura que me empuja hacia lo liminal Between here and there, we embody the conflicting reality that we live in, in which patriarchal paradigms reign. In given world women are suppressed via culture. But it is the woman of color who carries most of the burden, for she is typically separated from her homeland and marginalized in Western society. Nevertheless, she is known for her resistance, not her captivity.
A Homage to Feminism Feminism revolves around the notion that men and women are equal, an idea that is seldom accepted or embraced at the end of the twentieth century in Latin America. In the autobiographical novel, The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende weaves a story about the lives of women through four generations during the revolution of 1970. The idea of male dominance is prominent throughout both the political and social arenas of Latino communities. However, Allende uses members of the Del Valle family to portray the theme of feminism evolving during this time. Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, highlights the intertwined lives of two Latin American women, Clara and Alba, to parallel the feminist attitudes that associate with