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A few weeks ago I went to the showing of a piece titled Braided Sorrow at the University of San Francisco Lone Mountain Theater. Braided Sorrow is a performance written by Marisela Orta, was directed by Roberto Varea and was presented by the USF Performing Arts Department. When I arrived to the performance the first thing that I noticed was the set up of the stage. It looked very different from usual. This past spring semester I was in a class taught by Professor Varea (The director of the play) and throughout the semester we were required to go to a number of performances.
In the altar’s center is “a plaster image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, quarter-life size, its brown Indian face staring down on the woman” (Paredes 23). The implication of the stare is of criticism as the Virgin, symbolic of an ideal Mexican womanhood, looks down on Marcela, whose Anglo features starkly contrast with the Virgin’s, and whose actions are in opposition to the values that she represents. This carefully constructed scene is meaningful. Marcela’s lifeless body lies between the bed and the altar, and opposite to the altar is Marcela’s shrine dedicated to Hollywood movie stars. These are the visual images of the opposing forces that characterize the Mexican-American struggle for resistance against American cultural hegemony.
In Reyna Grande’s compelling memoir, The Distance Between Us, she vividly recounts her life and journey from Mexico to the ‘El Otro Lado,’ the United States. Grande grew up in Iguala, Guerroro, a small town in the heart of Mexico. She and her family were brought up in extreme poverty and thus, her parents left for the United States in order to support them. Grande and her siblings were forced to live with their stern, disapproving grandmother and often faced difficulties because of their abusive and impoverished environment. Abandoned by both parent, the three siblings endure various hardships with the hope of a window of opportunity opening for their family.
Immigrants to America face possible danger and death, yet they are shunned. This is shown in the work of Barbara Kingsolver. The injustices the characters faced in the novel, which was set in the 80’s, are still prevalent today. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
The immigrants entering the United States throughout its history have always had a profound effect on American culture. However, the identity of immigrant groups has been fundamentally challenged and shaped as they attempt to integrate into U.S. society. The influx of Mexicans into the United States has become a controversial political issue that necessitates a comprehensive understanding of their cultural themes and sense of identity. The film Mi Familia (or My Family) covers the journey and experiences of one Mexican-American (or “Chicano”) family from Mexico as they start a new life in the United States. Throughout the course of the film, the same essential conflicts and themes that epitomize Chicano identity in other works of literature
She also puts a big emphasis in stating the further struggles they faced attempting to keep their freedom in Mexico. This article uses the timeline between the 1830’s which was when African Americans in the U.S first heard of the opportunity to gain freedom in Mexico, through about the late 1850s when white Americans in the U.S agreed they wanted African Americans out, and that the best way to achieve this was sending them to Mexico. Some of the important events that occurred between the 1830s-1850’s were Mexico’s refusal to extradite fugitive slaves in 1833, the U.S claiming there was a huge problem in the great amount of slaves who fled to Mexico in 1836, the U.S invasion in Mexico in 1846, the migration of African Americans away from the U.S.-Mexican border in 1852, and Mexico’s focus on class and accomplishments rather than race in the late
Viramontes integrates magic realism, a representation of reality and fantasy mixed together to blend her writing. The short story conveys the expected stereotypical role of women in a traditional Mexican-American family through the characters relationships and incorporating Magical
Many immigrants traveled under desperate situations to pursue the American dream. Many authors try to capture those experiences for native born Americans to understand. In the novel My Antonia by Willa Cather, Antonia, a Bohemian immigrant, has to work her way through the American life. Antonia and her family came to America with next to nothing. They didn’t know the language which left them more susceptible to lies.
In her novel Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldua explores the nuances and complications that come with being a member of the Mexican-American community. Her physical home is the border between Mexico and the United States, but she acknowledges that the “psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest” (Anzaldua 19). “In fact,” she continues, “the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other…”(Anzaldua 19). Such is the focus of her text, the frequently uncomfortable meeting space between mainstream white culture in the United States and the indigenous culture of Mexico. The clashing of these two civilizations is personified in the mestizas, people
As stated, the curtain is meant to separate the two lands and each side is a show that one can view from their point of view. The central theme to her poem is about crossing the border, the surroundings, and historical meanings that comes with it. Anzaldúa sets the tone of deliberation with repetition of words and changing languages to give more meaning to the person she is and what culture she emotionally connects with. Further analyzing her poem, one can connect the larger text of her book and the accounts she has gone through as being a mixture of Anglo and Mexican. Her background gives insight to both cultures and how her features are mostly noted as being Mexican rather than having Anglo blood.
In her ethnography account Women without Class, Julie Bettie explores the relationship that class along with race and gender work to shape the experiences of both Mexican American girls and white working class students. In her work, Bettie finds that class cannot only intersect to impact the school experiences of both working class and middle class girls, but also their transition to adulthood and their future outcomes. Thus, Bettie explores how working class girls are able to deal with their class differences by performing symbolic boundaries on their styles, rejecting the school peer hierarchy and by performing whiteness to be upwardly mobile. In women without class, Bettie describes the symbolic boundaries that both las chicas and the preps
The people that lived in the community were very racist towards the immigrants. Throughout The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle shows the signs of racism using coyotes, borders, and illegal Mexican immigrants. He connects these three topics together throughout the novel. They each play a role when speaking of the others.
The Challenges of Mexican Immigrants: A Thematic Analysis of Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt Jeanine Cummins’ novel American Dirt (2018) is a story that talks about the migration of Lydia and her 8-year-old son Luca as they travel from Acapulco to El Norte while facing numerous challenges such as the cartels. In Cummins’ novel, the term fear is a frequent motif that pushes the plot forward as the author involves the readers in a world marked by fear, unpredictability, and violence. In American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins uses Lydia’s characterization and tactile and kinesthetic imagery to illustrate that fear is the defining emotion for migrants immigrating illegally to the United States.
Julia Alvarez’s “Something to Declare” leaves all readers feeling a sense of familiarity with His-panic Americans, particularly Dominican Americans, and their struggles. While Julia Alvarez and her siblings were fortunate enough to make it into the United States, it is not a walk in the park for even them to assimilate into American society. Thus the question becomes is the United States Alvarez’s real home or is the Dominican Republic her real home? Whatever the real answer is, the technical answer is that the United States is her home. Also, Alvarez manages to make English her own, conveying the stories she wishes to in the world’s most popular language while never really improving upon her native tongue.
French theorists Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray have suggested, women must "speak" and "write" their own experiences, but the speaking must also be related to the context (Helland). In her life and work Kahlo espoused the ethic of Mexicanidad (Mexicanness), picturing herself as nourished by her Indian roots despite the fact that she was the daughter of an Hungarian Jew and a Mexican mother of Spanish and Indian descent (Herrera 1990). As she sought her own roots, Kahlo’s personal pain did not eclipse her commitment to Mexico and the Mexican people. She always also voiced concern for her country as it struggled for an independent cultural identity. Therefore, from looking at Self-Portrait on the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States it provides evidence of an insightful understanding of the fragmented Mexican identity.