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Judith Cofer's Essay 'The Myth Of The Latin Women'

625 Words3 Pages

A life burdened by rude comments and one-dimensional views is no easy life for a person trying to break the stereotypical mold set by years of media promotion by people who do not know of the cultural. In Judith Cofer's essay "The Myth of the Latin Women" she sets for the reader a theme of a women who for her whole life had to deal with people constantly trying to put her in the same pigeonhole. In Cofer's essay she takes the reader through her own life as a Latina women with her individual moments facing the adversity of being who she is. Cofer's essay is about her life from growing up in school and being out casted as the hopeless Latina. Then to her life as a young adult being harassed by college student boys who find it amusing to try and imitate the Spanish characters they see on TV. Though throughout her life she was faced with all the same type of people doubting her and expecting her to be the typical Latina women they see and hear about in the media she strives and succeeds in being an accomplished author and professor. Cofer's essay puts the reader on the journey of a Latina women in a world full of stereotypes using her personal experiences as her tool for doing so. Throughout this writing the author uses voice in a very consistent way making the reader see everything written in her story from her point of view with the perfect use of her own experiences. This style of having the put …show more content…

Her breakdown of the everyday struggles for women like her inform the audience of a life that would have never been able to identify with until now. Even for other Latina women or Latino men Cofer's stories resonate with them, and help represent for people who are also trying to shatter the cast set for them by society. She shows hope for all people Latin decent or not that the only thing that matters is that they know who they are and that no stereotype can define any

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In this story, Cofer is mainly targeting Latin women. However, this story can apply to anyone with a strong racial heritage that mainstream people may find odd or out of the norm. Her purpose in this text is to show that just because someone may act or dress different doesn’t mean that its ok to expect them to act a certain way or to pick on them for being different. However, some of these things are not intentional as Cofer explained by stating “as I walked in with my notebook in my hand. An older woman motioned me to her table.

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Throughout the story, she is confronted by men who act like she is the “Hot Tamale” (Cofer 105) hispanic woman, which she describes as “a one-dimensional view that the media have found easy to promote” (Cofer, 105), and according to Looking in the Popular Culture Mirror’s “Sexy, Sassy, Spicy: The Portrayal of Latina Women in American Television” by April Hernandez, it has been a trope going back to the 1920s. She describes how latina women in early films were stereotyped as “sexual bombshells” and it persisted into the 21st Century media. The stereotype profoundly affected Cofer by making non-hispanic men a little too eager to talk to her: the man on the British bus sang to her without being asked. Her date to her first formal dance kisses her extremely hard and says “I thought you Latin girls were supposed to mature early.” (Cofer, 106)

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Cofer addresses the cultural barriers and challenges that Latinos experience through emotional appeal, anecdotal imagery, parallelism and the use of effective periodic sentences. In her article, Cofer assesses the difficult cultural hurdles of Latin Americans with emotional appeal. She provides insight on her cultural barriers by first conveying the way she had to dress and her struggle, as it shows in this piece of text, “That morning I had organized… which to base my decision” (Cofer 5). This poignancy works to stress an agonizing feeling of uncertainty and restraint towards the author.

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Cofer utilizes moral and, enthusiastic interest to communicate as the need should arise to others that the generalizations of Hispanic ladies can have negative impacts. Cofer utilizes moral interest to depict her Hispanic childhood. Growing up as a young lady Cofer was instructed to dress a specific path on account of her Hispanic culture and now and again it was confounded, "... Puerto Rican moms likewise urged their little girls to act and look like woman...". Young ladies were raised to act and look more developed than they really were.

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The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named María is an essay by Judith Ortiz Cofer that addresses the impact of stereotyping on Latino women. Throughout the essay, Cofer relates her personal experiences with stereotypes to discuss how they have negatively affected her life and the lives of other Latinas. She also explains how these stereotypes originated and calls on her audience, the majority-white non-Latino population, to stop propagating the stereotypical portrayals of Latino women. In The Myth of the Latin Woman, Cofer speaks out about how stereotyping hinders the process of assimilating to a new culture by appealing to ethos through her personal experiences, using similes that show how stereotypes create isolation, and adopting

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The Rhetorical Analysis of “The Myth of the Latin Woman” There are many examples of incidents happened because of cultural differences. Some of them are short, single events, while other follow a person or social group for decades. Professor Judith Cortiz Cofer describes the second example in her essay The Myth of the Latin Woman that was originally published in Glamour in 1992. The author focused on the stereotypical view of Latin women from the perspective of the personal experience as a Puerto Rican girl and woman in the USA. Cofer based her essay on examples from her own life and observations of the problem in a broader sense.

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