In his play, "Los Vendidos," Luis Valdez addresses, through humor and stereotypes, the issues faced by Mexicans in America throughout history. Although a "White Washed Mexican" woman is supposedly looking for a Mexican, what she is actually looking for is an American with darker skin. The key word here is American, as she is looking for someone who has denied his or her Mexican roots and become acculturated to the American way of life. This woman does not want a Mexican for any other reason than the fact that he is Mexican, and she has no respect for his heritage.
The scene opens as a woman who works for the government walks into a shop that sells "Mexicans." She is looking for a Mexican for their administration. In the prologue of the play, this woman is designated a "White Washed Mexican," as she denies her Mexican roots, and pretends to be an Anglo. When she enters the store, she introduces herself as Ms. Jiminez (pronounced Jimmy-Nez, rather than the actual pronunciation, Hime-nez). Through the way that she pronounces her name, it is clear that she denies her Mexican heritage.
One important aspect of the play is the adjectives that Ms. Jimenez uses to describe the Mexican that they would like to use as their prototype. Such adjectives are: "suave, debonair, dark (not too dark, but beige), sophisticated, respectable, someone with class." All of these adjectives could describe a Mexican male, but not one that has been affected by American society. As the Mexican male attempts to become a part of American society, he soon realizes that he is not welcome, which often causes him to rebel against the culture that will not accept him. An example is the Zoot Suit Riots that occurred in 1944. The Zoot Suit Riots were a reaction...
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...ty from racial prejudice, which affects all aspects of their life, from gaining equal access to education to gaining employment. It seems that Latinos are forced to choose whether they want to keep their heritage and remain proud or if they want to become American. The quote that best describes the balance between the two comes from Raul Morin when he describes the mix of heritages that made up the military services of World War II: "For this reason we have made the term 'Mexican-Anglo' our choice. We then imply that we are proud to be Anglos, and at the same time are not trying to deny our Mexican ancestry (Vargas 306)."
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cuello, Jose. "FOR COMMENT: Latinos and Hispanics: A Primer Technology." E-mail to Recipients of list H-LATAM. 17 Dec 1996.
Vargas, Zaragosa. Major Problems in Mexican American History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1999
The purpose of this paper is to analyze Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five; providing details that indicate both Vonnegut and his protagonist Billy Pilgrim suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The Latino community is a very varied community each with its own unique past and circumstances. In the book Harvest of Empire by Juan Gonzalez the readers can learn and appreciate some of the experiences and history that the different Latino groups had. This book does this with a special emphasis on immigration trends. These points of emphasis of the book are explained thoroughly in the identification of the key points, the explanation of the intersection of race, ethnicity, and class, in addition to the overall evaluation of the book.
Gonzalez, Juan. Harvest of Empire a History of Latinos in America. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc, 2000.
"Slaughterhouse-Five Book Notes Summary by Kurt Vonnegut: Major Characters Book Notes Summary." BookRags.com: Book Summaries, Study Guides. Bookrags Inc., 2000. Web. 06 Jan. 2010. .
Slaughterhouse Five is not a book that should be glanced over and discarded away like a dirty rag. Slaughterhouse Five is a book that should be carefully analyzed and be seen as an inspiration to further improve the well-being of mankind. Vonnegut makes it clear that an easy way to improve mankind is to see war not as a place where legends are born, but rather, an event to be avoided. Intelligent readers and critics alike should recognize Vonnegut’s work and see to it that they make an effort to understand the complexities behind the human condition that lead us to war.
The fundamental conflict that led to their arrest and unfair trial was a clash between Mexican-Americans and the dominant White American culture. Acting as a host, El Pachuco is the spirit of the ideal, defiant Pachuco and serves as Henry’s Reyna’s alter ego throughout the play, intermingling past Mexican culture with the current Zoot Suit culture. El Pachuco serves as a corrective to illustrate the heavy biases that the court and media displayed throughout the 1940s against Chicano people. Through his constant interjections during the courtroom scene, and his final confrontation with the reporter at the conclusion of the play, he points out the injustices that Mexican-Americans had to endure. El Pachuco highlights each point in which the court discriminates or treats the Zoot Suiters unfairly.
The struggle to find a place inside an un-welcoming America has forced the Latino to recreate one. The Latino feels out of place, torn from the womb inside of America's reality because she would rather use it than know it (Paz 226-227). In response, the Mexican women planted the seeds of home inside the corral*. These tended and potted plants became her burrow of solace and place of acceptance. In the comfort of the suns slices and underneath the orange scents, the women were free. Still the questions pounded in the rhythm of street side whispers. The outside stare thundered in pulses, you are different it said. Instead of listening she tried to instill within her children the pride of language, song, and culture. Her roots weave soul into the stubborn soil and strength grew with each blossom of the fig tree (Goldsmith).
Kanellos, Nicolás, Felix M- Padilla, and Claudio Esteva Fabregat, eds. Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Sociology. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1994. Print.
Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, uses the biblical allusion of Lot’s wife looking back on the destroyed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to parallel the story of Billy Pilgrim during the war and his experience after, when he returns to the United States. Although the reference is brief, it has profound implications to the portrayal of America during World War II, especially the bombing of Dresden. Although Lot’s wife’s action dooms her to turn into a pillar of salt, the narrator emphasizes her choice to indicate the importance of being compassionate and having hindsight. Ultimately, Slaughterhouse-Five critiques the American social attitude to disregard the unjust nature of its actions in World War II. Furthermore, Vonnegut’s novel explicates this by elucidating the horrors of war—especially in regard to the massacre of innocence, how it leaves the soldiers stagnant when they return home, and leaves them empty with an American Dream that cannot be fulfilled. In order to combat violence, the novel stresses that one must hold human life to a higher value and be compassionate towards others; America must acknowledge its mistakes so that the soldiers who fought and died for her so that the soldiers may move on.
In conclusion, we can see how the inflow of immigrant population has shaped America as a nation. This shows that the power to vote and the ability to stand for elections and seek seats in the congress has empowered the immigrants to make decisions about the future of America’s political scene. Nevertheless the Latinos are a dominant future workforce of the US economy. A lot of the Hispanics have joined the Military. Lastly, it is projected that the business community, military, political system, and the education institutions of the United States will be reliant on the Latinos in the near future.
As a journalist in 1920 for the New York Herald Tribune, Sophie Treadwell was assigned to go to Mexico to follow the situation after the Mexican Revolution. (Mexican Revolution 1910-1917) She covered many important aspects of the Mexican Revolution during this time, including relations between the U.S. and Mexico. She was even permitted an interview with Pancho Villa in August 1921 at his headquarters. This interview and other events that she experienced in Mexico are presumably what led her to write the play Gringo. In Gringo Treadwell tries to depict the stereotypical and prejudicial attitudes that Mexicans and Americans have about each other. There is a demonstration of how Mexican women are looked at in the Mexican culture and how they see themselves. The play also corresponds to similar events that occurred during the Mexican Revolution.
The Thought-experiments in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five or the Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance With Death
"In Slaughterhouse Five, -- Or the Children's Crusade, Vonnegut delivers a complete treatise on the World War II bombing of Dresden. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a very young infantry scout* who is captured in the Battle of the Bulge and quartered in a Dresden slaughterhouse where he and other prisoners are employed in the production of a vitamin supplement for pregnant women. During the February 13, 1945, firebombing by Allied aircraft, the prisoners take shelter in an underground meat locker. When they emerge, the city has been levelled and they are forced to dig corpses out of the rubble. The story of Billy Pilgrim is the story of Kurt Vonnegut who was captured and survived the firestorm in which 135,000 German civilians perished, more than the number of deaths in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Robert Scholes sums up the theme of Slaughterhouse Five in the New York Times Book Review, writing: 'Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them.' The reviewer concludes that 'Slaughterhouse Five is an extraordinary success. It is a book we need to read, and to reread.' "The popularity of Slaughterhouse Five is due, in part, to its timeliness; it deals with many issues that were vital to the late sixties: war, ecology, overpopulation, and consumerism. Klinkowitz, writing in Literary Subversions.New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism, sees larger reasons for the book's success: 'Kurt Vonnegut's fiction of the 1960s is the popular artifact which may be the fairest example of American cultural change. . . . Shunned as distastefully low-brow . . . and insufficiently commercial to suit the exploitative tastes of high-power publishers, Vonnegut's fiction limped along for years on the genuinely democratic basis of family magazine and pulp paperback circulation. Then in the late 1960s, as the culture as a whole exploded, Vonnegut was able to write and publish a novel, Slaughterhouse Five, which so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age. '"Writing in Critique, Wayne D. McGinnis comments that in Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut 'avoids framing his story in linear narration, choosing a circular structure.
Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five, provided a powerful first-hand account describing the horrific events of WWII. Vonnegut recounted the events and wrote about himself through the novels protagonists, Billy Pilgrim. He was pessimistic regarding the novel because he wrote, “It is so short and jumbled and jangled, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre” (Vonnegut 22). However, on the other spectrum critics considered it to be “one of the worlds greatest antiwar books”(Vonnegut Back cover). The controversial novel was published in 1969, which was over two decades after WWII. The time it took Vonnegut to write the novel is an indication of how difficult it was for him to write about the bombings. Vonnegut does not write the novel to portray the narrator as, “John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war loving, dirty old men” (Vonnegut 14). Instead, he writes about the true chaos’s the narrator endured during his time in Dresden. Vonnegut’s novel consisted of events that reflected major societal and political movements, such as civil rights movements, and antiwar movements, within the United States during the 1960s.
Later on in the movie she has her locks changed and the guy that changes them is a Spanish guy. She ends up accusing him of selling her spare keys to fellow gang members because he dressed similar and looked like the people who robbed her, she is stereotyping this man. Stereotyping is assuming that all members of a group are going to act and be the same. She fails to realize that his exterior does not reflect who he truly is. He is a hardworking father trying to make a living to keep his family safe in a world that is working against