Analysis Of Diaz's Essay: A Hispanic Garden

Gary Soto brings the impoverished, crime filled streets of the Mexican-American communities where he grew up to life by “evoking the harsh forces that often shape the life for Chicanos” (“‘Gary Soto’: Poetry Foundation” p. 1). He combines an archetypal young love poem with the concept of poverty to create the powerful poem: “Oranges” (1985). Soto also works with the notion of old age and the importance of life in his somber poem: “The Seventieth Year” (1986). Finally, he portrays the result of a young death through the affected family’s mourning in the solemn poem: “Avocado Lake” (1975). Through the use of powerful imagery, precise descriptions, and free verse poetry, Gary Soto’s poems evoke a sense of sympathy for the underprivileged Mexican-American community where he grew up, while telling a beautiful story.

After a long fight with Trujillo, three sisters were murdered. “In the Time of the Butterflies” by Julia Alvarez is about the Mirabal sisters long and weary fight with the revolution against Trujillo. Trujillo was the dictator for the Dominican Republic from 1930-1961. This essay will address the how they got to joining the revolution , their heroism and fight with the revolution. The Mirabal sisters showed heroism in the face of the Dominican Republic because of their resistance against Trujillo’s regime.

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.

“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. Cofer addresses the cultural barriers and challenges that Latinos experience through emotional appeal, anecdotal imagery, parallelism and the use of effective periodic sentences.

Mexican immigrants are those who originate from Mexico and are living in the United States, whether they are here as documented citizens or not. There are plenty of immense differences between documented and undocumented Mexican immigrants as well as new sets of struggles for each, though they share many of the same plights. Some immigrants come to the United States for a better life and chance at the “American Dream” while others are brought here as children, some come to be with family, some are here as documented citizens and others are not. There is an estimated number of 6.2 million undocumented immigrants from Mexico residing in the United States (Yee, Davis, and Patel, 2017). Being an undocumented immigrant leads to many struggles, one

Cindy Cruz’s “Toward an epistemology of a brown body” addresses the absence of educational research regarding the “brown body” and sexual orientation of Latinx. Cruz discusses her experience as a lesbiana and not knowing there was a possibility that anyone else in her family shared her orientation. She reflects on her grandmother’s funeral and how she became aware of the “generations of queers” that surrounded her (Cruz 2001, 658). Knowledge of the brown body, Cruz claims, comes from mothers and grandmothers and from the actions of past women of color. Stories about the brown body experiences are often dismissed due to the fact that they are performed rather than explained, and the theoretical aspect of these accounts exists outside of our present reality (Cruz 2001, 659). There are many ways to view the world and the human experience, including those of the oppressed such as women of color, mestizas, and LGBTQA+. Cruz uses the writings of Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa as a base for her own analyses. From Anzaldúa’s notions, Cruz concludes that mestizaje, or the consciousness of metizas, can change the way society interprets contrasting ideas of rationalism and positivism in a way that allows the mind and body to be one. Cruz then moves onto explaining how Chicana education researchers could reclaim their history and experience: (a) through recognizing the points of views of communities that actively participate in government and (b) through commitment

Up until the 1960s Anglo social scientists wrote most of the literature about the people of Mexican- descent in the United States. Their analysis of Mexican American culture and history reflected the hegemonic beliefs, values, and perceptions of their society. As outsiders, Anglo scholars were led by their own biases and viewed Mexicans as inferior, savage, unworthy and different. Because Mexican scholars had not yet begun to write about their own experiences, these stereotypes were legitimized and reproduced in the literature. However, during the mid- 1960s scholars such as Octavio Ignacio Romano, Nick Vaca, Francisco Armando Rios, and Ralph Ricatelli began to reevaluate the literature written by their predecessors. In their work they analyze

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.

In the story, “The Myth of a Latin Woman” is about the author Judith Ortiz Cofer talking about her life and growing up as a Puerto Rican girl. She talks about the struggles she had to go through, like always being under heavy surveillance by her family. She would be under their watch because she was a girl and was expected to protect her family’s honor and to behave like in her family’s terms “proper senorita”.

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. The main argument as Espiritu (2014) argues “that gender is a key to immigrant identity and a vehicle for racialized immigrants to assert cultural superiority over the dominant group “(cited in Fox,

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.

In The New Latino Studies Reader: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective by Ramon A. Gutierrez and Tomas Almaguer, chapters “Gender Strategies, Settlement, and Transnational Lives” and “She’s Old School Like That” talk about the gender issues first and second generation Latinas faced. In the first generation, Robert Smith articulates how gender structures impact the lives of men in women. Whereas in the second generation, Lorena Garcia communicates how mother and daughter relationships worked during that time period and how sexual behavior played a big role in their relationships.

The transition the girls made from Dominican Republic to the United States was imbued with struggles – cultural, linguistic, and gender-related. In the 1960s American women were limited in various ways, including family roles and equality in the workplace. The way gender roles were set retained them from expanding their abilities in their homes and jobs. Women had one path to follow: marriage at their early 20s, and subsequent servitude to their husbands and/or children. A feminist movement in the 1960s to 1970s focused on breaking down the gender inequality. How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent is divided into three sections

In the poem “ Mexicans Begin Jogging” the author, Gary Soto, provides a very clear image of the struggle to find where he belongs. He talks both about being apart of both Hispanic and American culture. Although he is a legal citizen in the U.S he is treated like an illegal immigrant due to his outward appearance. In the poem Garry Soto does an excellent job expressing the feelings and situations throughout the poem using different literary devices. While he uses imagery to show the difficult conditions that he endured, “At the factory I worked in the fleck of the rubber, under the press of an oven yellow with flame”, however he is still an American citizen. His boss uses phrases like, “until the border patrol opened their vans” or “Over

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. In “Movimientos de rebeldía y culturas que traicionan,” Gloria Anzaldúa discusses; cultural tyranny, liminality, and resistance, all of which are highly relevant topics in both of Sandra Cisneros’ stories; “Woman Hollering Creek” and “Never Marry a Mexican.”