Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World is a memoir by Catalina de Erauso detailing her experiences during the early 1600’s in South America and Spain. She was born in 1585 into a well off Basque family and her parents were native-born residents of San Sebastian Spain. This book is one of the earliest known autobiographies by a woman and details the events that took places when Catalina escaped a Basque convent dressed as a man. During this time she served as soldier in the Spanish army, traveling to Peru and Chile, and even becoming a gambler. Being that my major falls under sociology, I will be looking at themes surrounding the constraints of females in Spanish society in the 1600’s and how this affects Catalina.
Riis alluded to many conditions that those who lived in tenements had to deal with on a daily basis, although his writing was often racist and stereotypical, generalizing many groups of people. However, Riis did do justice to the horrors that the “Other Half” experienced, informing those who did not live there or did not know much about the actual living
As cliché as it is, “get back on the horse that bucked you” is a crucial piece of advice to remember when struggling to surmount obstacles. These obstacles are personal barricades that we set up unconsciously based upon our fears. It may be easy to identify what we are afraid of and how to overcome it, but challenging our fears proves to be more difficult. Sometimes, we don’t even address these problems because we are subconsciously trying to avoid them such as in the beginning of The Georges and the Jewels by Jane Smiley. The main character unknowingly tricks herself into thinking that just because she continues to get thrown from her horse, it will always hurt.
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”. I agree that she was forced to mature fast just at her teenage years; a point that needs emphasizing since so many people believe Cofer could never act her age.
Identity in this novel comes in different ways and is an essential component that must be discussed to determine its impact to immigrants today. The first place where we encounter identity is when the main characters, Sara and her sisters, are subjected to what they perceive as harsh Jewish law. The family of Reb Smolinsky migrated from Poland to the United States of America, in which the family’s identity in the United States is shaped by Reb Smolinsky’s belief in their religion. His religion dictates that God has no time to listen to women and that women are not blessed with the capability to learn the word of God, yet the religion reduces them to be the servants of men “...women get into heaven …because they were the wives and daughters
In the short story, “Mericans”, written by Sandra Cisneros, there are many underlying conflicts that surface throughout the story. The conflicts, in short, evolve around two very distinguished cultures. Furthermore, the clashing views regarding the two cultures cause a great amount of problems for many individuals in a society. The cultural differences can tremendously affect a society, as the clashing views can lead to a wide array of issues such as ethnocentrism, gender discrimination, stereotypes, as well as the health of many personal relationships. Cisneros begins to develop this conflict when the story’s narrator, Michele, describes the altar to La Divina Providencia in which the “awful grandmother” worships.
The Story of the Vargas Family “Rosa Vargas’ kids are too many and too much. It’s not her fault, you know, except she is their mother and only one against so many” (Cisneros 29). In the novel The House on Mango Street, the author, Sandra Cisneros, touches on the many negative consequences of a single, impoverished mother raising an overwhelming amount of children. Poverty, discrimination, parental and neighborly responsibility, and respect are all issues and social forces that act upon the family; their presence or lack thereof cause several grisly occurrences to take place. Poverty was almost like a curse given to Rosa Vargas by her husband, who “left without even leaving a dollar for bologna or a note explaining how come” (29).
Lola takes advantage of her deteriorating mother whose illness represents the declining hold of the norms over Lola. Since her mom “will have trouble lifting her arms over her head for the rest of her life,” Lola is no longer afraid of the “hitting” and grabbing “by the throat” (415,419). As a child of a “Old World Dominican Mother” Lola must be surrounded by traditional values and beliefs that she does not want to claim, so “as soon as she became sick” Lola says, “I saw my chance and I’m not going to pretend or apologize; I saw my chance and I eventually took it” (416). When taking the opportunity to distinguish herself from the typical “Dominican daughter” or ‘Dominican slave,” she takes a cultural norm like long hair and decides to impulsively change it (416). Lola enjoyed the “feeling in [her] blood, the rattle” that she got when she told Karen to “cut my hair” (418).
In Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, the character of Mamacita has the strongest ties to her home she left, and perhaps the strongest desire to escape from Mango Street and return home. Mamacita is a woman with a husband and child, who moved to Chicago from a latin american country. She is somewhat overweight, doesn’t know much English, and stays mostly in her apartment for unknown reasons, singing songs from her native country and crying. Her husband fights with Mamacita, often over her desire to return, and her child is becoming assimilated into American society against her will. Because Mamacita has such strong ties to her heritage and origin, she clings to it tightly, resisting assimilation in any way possible, and highlights
The Myth of The Latin Woman Analysis 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. Cofer uses illuminating vignettes to illustrate the different situations she encountered as a Latina while growing up and living in America.
Esperanza is often humiliated not only by where she lives, but also by her physical appearance, hence causing a restriction in her climb to a higher social class. Esperanza is frequently ashamed of her family’s broken-down house in an urban, poor
Stacy Davis, self-proclaimed activist for feminism and womanism, is a “scholar trained in feminist theory and African American biblical hermeneutics” (Davis 23). In her article, The Invisible Woman: Numbers 30 and the Policies of Singleness in Africana Communities, Davis argues for a prominent place for single woman (specifically those who have never married) in biblical scholarship, and as leaders in the church, with questions of their sexuality left alone. Davis argues this viewpoint from the perspective as an unmarried black woman. Davis establishes the foundation for her argument in Numbers 30, a text that altogether omits reference to single woman, rather each group of women mentioned in the text about vows refers to them in relation to men (21). Thus, Davis establishes the omission of single women in the Hebrew Bible as the invisible women.
“The Chase” is about an adult chasing some kids, but Annie Dillard makes the story transition from throwing snowballs to “wanting the glory to last forever” and how the excitement of life at one moment can affect someone in the future to show that the excitement of life will always be there even when one is no longer a kid. The story starts with a group of friends, imagining how a game of football goes and continues with the encounter of a stranger. From throwing snowballs at his car to him chasing them till they couldn’t run anymore. The whole experience will change the way she looks at adults. “We all spread out banged together some regular snowballs, took aim, and, when the Buick drew near, fired.
The House on Mango Street, is a series of vignettes about a girl named Esperanza who is around the age of twelve at the beginning of the book it goes through Esperanza’s struggles with her identity, as she grows older and matures the struggles are focused on finding a connection with someone, and close to the end of the book Esperanza struggles with the idea of staying on Mango Street and live a life like other people in the community. Maturing into an adulthood, Esperanza accepts herself and has her own house just like how she wanted throughout the book. In the book she also talks about the house she lives in, her name, heritage, even detailed information about the neighborhood she lives in and the residents in the neighborhood. You learn and read how much Esperanza observed her community and how important to her the house she lived in and reaching the goal of living in a house on her own. Through my creative piece I wanted to emulate the figurative language Cisneros uses and also tries to write about a well-observed community that is out of the box.
In this novel the reader can see the inner turmoil within literature and its characters. There is a major shift present from supernatural and religious happiness, into individual driven happiness. Due to this newly valued individual independence, social boundaries in race and gender started to appear, thus causing the transition into the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that celebrated African American culture through artwork, literature, and music. Throughout this era elements of new identity, political challenging, and gender and racial improvements were all addressed and examined in the associated literature. The poem Legal Alien is a good example of the ideals encompassed in the era.
