I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter Sparknotes

The book I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sanchez shows an imbalance of power in many aspects, from the truth of living in a household where Julia, the main character, does not feel loved to feeling embarrassed about having immigrant parents and being poor. Having immigrant parents and them being immigrants and poor are the hardships that Julia Reyes has to endure. Olga, Julia’s sister, died, which made everything worse for her. Ama also never stopped comparing her "slob daughter," Julia, to the "perfect" Olga, even after Olga's death. In I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, the person or thing that holds the power is Ama because she controls Julia's emotions and, in a way, money. This imbalance makes Julia feel ashamed

Even when Julia says, "It’s not that I’m ashamed of where I’m from" (Sanchez, 188), it is evidently true because she does not like many things about her culture, like kissing all relatives when arriving and leaving their house. In parts of the book, we can really see that Julia is ashamed or embarrassed of where she is; for instance, when she’s with Connor, her boyfriend, and he asks to go visit her at her house, and she makes excuses and asks herself, "How do you explain to someone you’re poor?" (Sanchez, 188). They are two things that don’t go together. How are you going to say that you’re not ashamed of where you come from and where you live, but still ask yourself why things happen to you and why they are the way they are. Connor having more money and Julia feeling ashamed of being poor and her culture create an imbalance of power because Connor can buy and do whatever he wants without thinking about how much things cost, while Julia has to always think about how much things

Julia is quite the opposite from her; she is a free spirit, which her mom does not like because she is a hispanic mom who believes no child of hers should go out and be "in other people’s cocinas" (Sanchez, 56). Julia feels suffocated every time Ama compares her to Olga and says Olga did things better which shows imbalance of power in Olga having the power for being the favorite even if she’s dead because she always did what Ama told her and in Amas eyes she was perfect, while Julia was like the black sheep of the family because she never helped and was always getting in trouble. The only thing Julia wants is the love of her mother, but what she gets in return is the blame for her sister's death. That day Olga died, Julia had argued with a teacher, and Ama had to go talk to the principal instead of picking up Olga. Ama never blamed her directly until one day she said, "Maybe if you knew how to behave yourself... your sister would still be alive." (Sanchez, 162), maybe it was the heat of the moment because they were arguing, or maybe it was something that Ama had kept in her