No Name Woman And La Frontera Anzaldúa Analysis

According to Howard S. Becker, American Sociologist, culture is defined as the shared ways of a human social group that includes the ways of thinking, understanding, and feeling that have been gained through common experience and passed from generation to generation. Thus cultural understanding expects its people to have same beliefs, and brings people to act under cultural norms. However, when a person in a community has different beliefs than them, then culture oppresses that person’s life in order to make he/she live under cultural expectation or eliminate that person from its culture in the name of deviant. Culture can be a community with encouragement, comfort and peace but it also can be a cold isolated place for people with different beliefs. In both stories, “No Name Woman” and Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, describe isolated life of women under cultural oppression who deviated from

The author Anzaldúa highlights that the lifestyle of women depends on the expectation of culture; she states, “The culture expects women to show greater acceptance of, and commitment to, … men. The culture and the church insist that women are subservient to males” (17). Women before 21st century were seen as a person who must commit and obey to their husband during the marriage with maintaining silence. Such act of rebel was condemned in society and women had to live under the gender role given by their culture without freedom of speech. Moreover, Anzaldúa emphasizes that women’s future was chosen by their culture; there are three directions that they could turn into: “to the church as a nun, to the streets as a prostitute, or to the home as a mother” (17). There was no such future for women as working or educated women in her culture. Women were forced to be as what their culture wanted them to be without rights to