Chicana Falsa

"Attention Shoppers" was a great story! And I want to once again pose my question, How does one represent a culture without stereotyping or generalizing the value of what the culture is and/or represents?
  In class I got some feed back that was helpful, that stereotype usually carries a negative connotation, and also that the word stereotype is not a bad thing. That stereotype is simply a way that our brain organizes information, but when it is used to call someone/something out that it is bad. To me, all of those things are true.
For years this question has been rumbling around my brain. Today while we were looking at the photos of the Mexican restaurants and we were talking about authenticity it made me wonder, when people go out to eat Mexican cuisine how do they know if it is authentic?  what is authentic Mexican cuisine anyways? I know back in my home town we have an amazingly delicious Mexican restaurant, Fiesta Jalisco, and the owner/ chef Pedro is a really nice guy. Most of the waiters and waitresses are Mexican or Mexican-American, as well as their other chefs. To me the cuisine tastes authentic, but what do I know. I've been to Mexico, I don't remember the cuisine though.  My point is what is authentic and how do we know?

Rivera and Rodriguez

After reading both And the Earth did not devour him, and Aria, I drew an immediate connection that both conveyed the idea of wanting to fit in. To fit in in a public manner, to be accepted. In Aria, the main theme was language and how it defines a person or culture. Parts of it made me really sad because Richard felt like he lost his family connection when he started speaking English at home. Instead of coming home to the warm Spanish he was used his mother and father decided that to help him and his siblings with school that they would also speak English. 

In And the Earth did not devour him, there were some stories where language was also brought up, where dsome were made fun of and rejected to society because of the way they spoke.  

My belief is that language is part of someone. I would love to be able to speak many languages, and maybe one day I will. Richard learned in the end that its okay to speak two languages. At first he was angry with English, then he was intimidated by Spanish. He was confused and angry and didn't know how to identify himself or how to fit in, just like many of the characters in And the Earth did not devour him.

Education is also a major theme in these works. The Chicanos search for a better life, one that is not grueling labor in hot fields, one that only sustains them for a short while. They want jobs like the gringos, jobs that make a living wage so they won't have to live in a hut or chicken coup, so they know that they can buy enough food for the family. In Rivera's novel there are several stories that show the importance of education(It's that is hurts, the anecdote after it, Hand in his pocket,  and the anecdote before Little Burnt Victims), and along with that, those who do go to school are told to speak English, to learn English. It is pushed and pushed in school to learn English, a  foreign tongue.  In Aria the same thing happens with Richard, he is pushed to learn English, to use it as his primary language so he can do better in school and in life, so he will be like the others.

Another interesting thing I noticed with the two texts is that they look back into the past, and and times are ashamed of who they are, and then realize that they know who they are. In Rivera's last story the boy under the house comes to terms and recognizes who he is, and a bit of what his place is in the world. He becomes content. In Rodriguez's, Richard learns who he is through language, he learns about the intimacy and that its not the language that makes it intimate, its the person who does. He realizes that people put on faces for being in public and have faces for at home and work. Things come together for him when he thinks back to his grandmothers open casket and looks at "her public face the mortician had designed with his dubious art".  I thought that was very powerful.

Both authors bring to light what is was like for Mexican-American's to grow up, to be made fun of, to be outcast, to understand acceptance, and to know who their individual self is.

My Question:  Is it still like these stories in today's culture, about the learning and feeling alone and trying to be accepted into society for who they are?

"Woman Hollering Creek"

"But what Cleofilas has been waiting for, has been whispering and sighing and giggling for, has been anticipating since she was old enough to lean against the window displays of gauze and butterflies and lace, is passion. Not the kind on the cover of the Alarma! magazines, mind you, where the lover is photographed with the bloody fork she used to salvage her good name.  But passion in its purest crystalline essence.  The kind the books and songs and telenovelas describe when one finds, finally, the great love of one's life, and does whatever one can, must do, at whatever cost".

   In Sandra Cisneros' short story, "Woman Hollering Creek", the main character Cleofilas goes through a transformation from a naive girl stuck on the idea of passion and a beautiful marriage, to the abandonment of a life filled with servitude to a husband and gaining the perspective of what a woman can do with self-liberation.
   This passage occurs before her arranged marriage and shows her expectations of what it will hold. The omniscient narrator conveys to the audience that Cleofilas, "has been whispering and sighing and giggling" about her marriage.  From that one can sense the anticipated and excited mood Cleofilas has toward her getting married, an almost child-like dream with all the "gauze and butterflies and lace". But with the gauze, lace, and butterflies Cleofilas believes that passion is in the mix, that passion will come with the marriage and that it will just happen. Cleofilas seems to be in love with the idea of love and passion that can be in a marriage, however the narrator mentions Cleofilas fascination with the passion that comes from the media, from books, songs, and the telenovelas. It implies that Cleofilas is oblivious of the fact that all she has read and heard and seen is not reality, but a manufactured kind of passion that the media has created, one that she dreams of.
   By having so much media mentioned in the passage it sets up a false hope for Cleofilas that is foreshadowed by the violent imagery of "the bloody fork she used to salvage her good name".  With such an intense phrase in the otherwise eager and good-natured  passage, it makes a statement that her passion is not all it's cracked up to be and may possibly aide in the deflation of her high spirited idea of "passion in its purest crystalline essence".  This pure passion is exactly that, an essence that will eventually fade away, and at that time Cleofilas will realize how harsh the married life has become, how it was not like the books she read or the songs she heard or the shows she watched, but instead like that bloody fork. It also foreshadows violence, because of the blood, and also because of the word "salvaged." It is as if Cleofilas will be able to get away from her preconceived ideas of marriage, but also of the marriage that might fail.
   Cleofilas is so caught up in dreams, and what might be, that she fails to recognize reality. That she does not really know the man she will wed or the town she will live in, but instead for her "passion"  and for her "great love of one's life" she will do "whatever one can, must do, at whatever the cost".  It is sad in a way that she does not recoginize things yet, and it's hard to read that she could be hurt or heartbroken later down the road.  It is so finalizing sounding when said, "whatever the cost".  A feeling of desperatness to make something work that should not really be is what insight one gets from that phrase.
   Overall this passage shows how a desire of something so bad can blind someone to reality, and later come back to bite them in the ass, as well as how media plays a role in aiding the feelings of false passion.

My Question:  Why is Cleofilas so okay with marrying a man she does not know? Is it because she is so blind by the idea of passion, or is it because of a culture thing where this is normal?