Outdated stereotypes create forced expectations and affect people for the worst. This is a common theme between “Turkeys in the Kitchen” by Dave Barry and “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria” by Judith Ortiz Cofer. These works deal with stereotypes of gender and ethnicity, as well as how they are interpreted on the receiving end. Turkeys in the Kitchen deals with gender through anecdotes about cooking, and how the stereotypes of men and women in the kitchen persist post-women’s-liberation. “The Myth of the Latin Woman” deals with Puerto Rican stereotypes through anecdotes about how she is treated differently as a woman for her ethnicity, and how she is prematurely judged by her Puerto Rican behavior and ethnicity. These …show more content…
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) The stereotype did not make her think she had to act sexy, but made men come on to her in ways they “would not have been likely to regale a white woman with a dirty song in public.” (Cofer, 107) She was forced to endure public humiliations women of other ethnicities would not have endured, because the stereotype of the sexual Latina woman forced the men in her story to think she was a sexual object instead of a