When you think of a hero, you might think of a strong man with powers, but that's not all a hero can be. In the novel Summer of the Mariposas by Guadalupe Garca McCall, five sisters go on a journey from Texas to Mexico and back, growing their bond closer. Juanita, the second-oldest sister, has mental strength, which is her intelligence and stubborn mind, which help the girls throughout the story. Her smarts and stubbornness help multiple times in the story, and I'm going to show four examples of that in this essay. In the beginning of chapter one, the girls find a dead man in a river they frequently swim in. The girls go back and forth, bickering over how to deal with this situation. Juanita, the second-oldest girl, pulls his body out of the water to see how decomposed he is. Despite being told not to, “Juanita moved his arms up and down and side to side.” “He hasn’t been dead very long,” she hypothesized. “See, no rigamorphus”. Chapter 1, paragraph 65. Doing this leads …show more content…
One moment in the novel was in chapter seven when she noticed her older sister Odila’s ear pendant that was given to her by La Lolorona, and she was stubborn to know what they were. “What is going on?” Juanita leaned close to me to look at my whirling ear pendant. The rest of the girls did the same from around the table. Why is your Earring spinning? And what was that you said? ”She reached over to touch La Llorona’s magical gift.” (Chapter 7, paragraph 30) She wanted to know what was going on, and she got what she wanted, but doing this might have actually helped because it let her know what it was for, and it also would have allowed her to tell her sister when a good time to use it would be, or to just be there to back her up if anyone said something instead of not being aware and saying something she shouldn't have, so her benign stubbornness helped her in that