How It Feels To Be Colored Me Essay

Another important issue that Cisneros addresses in her story is gender roles in the Latino community. In Mexico, being born a male is of higher prestige and value

On the other hand, personal experiences of a Puerto Rican woman are shown and she explains how people around her judge her behavior, her actions, and even the way she dresses.

Common stereotypes about women in the Mexican-American culture include that women are uneducated, good housewives, and very fertile. Many parents still believe it’s the woman’s job to stay home and be the homemaker. The concept of gender, which is socially constructed, is reinforced since birth. (Sociology Lecture 08/24/2015) Ana was caught in the middle of gender politics. Her mother oppressed her daughter so she can become a grandmother. The film “Real Women Have Curves” deals with gender stereotypes and struggles of poor women living in East LA. Carmen was trying to have Ana chained to the notion of women being inferior to men. Carmen believed men to be superior, whereas Ana thought differently. However Ana strived to liberate herself from traditional cultural norms by pursuing her college education. Her mother’s negative influence only caused Ana to rebel.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. 2007. On Latinidad: U.S. Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.

Stereotypes are dangerous weapons in our society. “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria” is a short essay in which the award winning poet and professor of English, Judith Ortiz Cofer, wishes to inform and persuade the audience that labels and stereotypes can be humiliating and hurtful. The author targets the general public, anyone that doesn’t understand that putting someone in a box because of a stereotype is wrong. Cofer starts out the essay by telling the reader a story with a drunk man who re-enacted “Maria” from the West Side Story, and how angry that made her feel. She continues by explaining how she grew up in the United States being a Puerto Rican girl trying to fit in, but always being labeled as an island girl. Cofer carries on by explaining why Latin people get dressed and act a certain way. Then she recalls some more stereotypical incidents.

Paragraph: Published in during the 1900s, at a time when being colored was considered unbeneficial, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” depicts Hurston’s audacious (for the time) pride in being an African-American woman. In order to emphasize her thesis, she employs pathos and figurative

In Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “How It Feels To Be Colored Me”, her racial identity varies based on her location. Towards the beginning of her life when Zora was in her own community she could be a lighthearted, carefree spirit. However, when she was forced to leave her community, Zora’s identity became linked to her race. In this essay I will demonstrate how Zora’s blackness is both a sanctuary and completely worthless.

In the story, “The Myth of the Latin Woman,” Cofer develops the idea that indicates the point of hardships that Latin Woman have to go through, due to many stereotypes being portrayed by the media, through the rhetorical devices of allusion and imagery, as well as the rhetorical appeal of pathos(sense of emotion). To begin with, Cofer being a Latina made her the center of attention, since she realized that these labels or stereotypes can be very hurtful and upsetting. For this reason, she encounters harsh ethnic and racial prejudice that many Hispanic woman experienced as well. According to “The Myth of the Latin Woman/ Just Met a Girl Named Maria”, written by Judith Ortiz Cofer, demonstrates the use of allusion to emphasize the effect of stereotypes and the sense of emotion to express the frustration and conflicts she faced being a Hispanic Woman from Puerto Rico.

Throughout the essay, Lugo-Lugo uses personal experiences and builds bridges with her audience to further establish emotional appeals. Carmen Lugo-Lugo is a woman of color, specifically a Latina. Latinos have become so stereotyped, that people’s portrayals and descriptions of them have become so ingrained in their minds that

Two of the artifacts that I found most intriguing were Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Zora Neale Hurston’s “How it Feels to be Colored Me.” Not only do both pieces call upon individuals to think beyond their base instincts before action, but they also illustrate leadership by magnanimity and benevolent acknowledgment in trying situations. One of the virtues that Carnegie discusses in gaining influence is allowing the other man to save his face, or to maintain respect and avoid humiliation. In her piece, I believe Hurston, despite describing an emotionally charged situation, did an exceptional job allowing her opponents to save face. By doing so, she exhibited a rare and admirable ideal of leadership as described by Carnegie.

Cofer touches on the subject of how those outside of the Hispanic community view their woman. Words like “…“Sizzling” and “smoldering” (are used) as the adjectives of choice for describing not only the foods but also the women of Latin America” (Cofer 93). Later on is this essay, she recalls the first time she personally experienced this kind of particular objectification. The boy who took Cofer to her first formal dance as a girl forced a kiss on her. When she did not respond “passionately enough” he was irritated and stated that he thought “Latin girls were supposed to mature early”.

Alvarez is always rooting for the underdog. She despises hierarchies and always imagines a world of equity and unity. She says happily, “everybody is part of la familia” (Heredia page 5). She is not a mother. Alvarez felt her childless life was a disgrace to her identity as a Latina. She pondered and questioned, “what does it mean to be a childless woman?” (5). That question induced her to an introspective state of mind. Consequently, she answered the questions she was seeking in her groundbreaking essay, “Imagining Motherhood.” Conversely, she did not get married until she was much older. Similarly, to her characters, she always felt out of place. She never had an attachment to any place or thing. The only attachment she had was to her own

However, her character is quickly undermined by this stereotypical demonstration instilled in many of the qualities that have continued limiting and dehumanizing beliefs about Latina potentiality and morality. (Merskin D.,

She began publishing essays in 1963 for a weekly cultural supplement for several newspapers in Mexico City. According to Maureen Ahern, “Rosario Castellanos was the first Mexican writer to draw the essential connections among sex, class, and race as factors that define women in Mexico.” Castellanos explored this connection in her essays and tried to enlighten others about them as well. This is especially seen in the essay “The Nineteenth-Century Mexican Woman”. In the essay, Castellanos discusses the many stereotypes given to women- chaste, loyal, sacrificial, and stolid- and if a woman is not these things, she is compared to a prostitute by society. She goes on to ask the reader if these things are indeed the true characteristics of the Mexican Woman, or the characteristics society forces on women. Racial discrimination is another topic of Castellanos’s essays, although not as common as the topic of women in Mexico. In her essay “Discrimination in the United States and Chiapas”, Castellanos does a wonderful job of showing the similarities in the United States and in Chiapas when it comes to racial issues. She begins by discussing the horror of the Nazis and Klu Klux Klan and their violence toward other races and points out that there are similarities between the two groups and the situation in Mexico. However, she believes the situation is not as dire in Mexico and proposes that fate can be averted. She discusses that the natives need to be given education, the chance to assimilate, and the opportunity to fuse into Mexican society. If this is accomplished. Castellanos proposes that the natives and whites can live together harmoniously in Mexico. Castellanos does a beautiful job in all of her essays of discussing the issues with race and gender in Mexican society and calls the readers to action in order to accomplish

The focus of my paper will be critically looking at how mainstream liberal feminism actively forget about the Latinx community within their white feminist frame, combined with mainstream media forgetting and ignoring the multitude of issues that affect my community. I’ll be using the idea of the ‘White Racial Frame’ which was coined by Joe R. Feagin. The ‘White Racial Frame’ is “an overarching white worldview that encompasses a broad and persisting set of racial stereotypes, prejudices, ideologies, images, interpretations and narratives, emotions and reactions to language accents, as well as racialized inclinations to discriminate.” It’s the frame in which not only white people view