A careful look at these five readings finds identity or ethnicity divided into the following three categories, society’s preconceived impression of the identity or ethnicity, the division between the identity or ethnicity and main stream society, and the judgment of the identity or ethnicity by mainstream society. In each of the short stories that I read, the authors discussed a particular group of people, either grouped by their race, or chosen identity be it religion, personal beliefs or in the case of Understanding Comics (McCloud) a person’s chosen form of expression. Each author explored how mainstream society as a whole, often have a preconceived perceptions of what a person is like, based on the group that they have placed them in. For example in Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth, Gates opens up by explaining that blacks in current society can no longer be thought of as one mass of peoples, due to changes in society in the last decade that have brought about a greater divide in values between lower income and middle class income blacks, than there is between middle class blacks and whites (48). However society as a whole still insists on grouping people by their ethnicity – and perceiving them all as if they have the same needs, goals and background which simply is not the case. There was no better defining example of the division of main stream views and that of a particular ethnicity as in The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria. Ortiz Cofer provided me with a very clear and a very defining expression of how her Puerto Rican culture could easily be misinterpreted. When discussing the dressing habits of her Puerto Rican culture Ortiz Cofer stated “As young girls it was our mothers who influenced our dec... ... middle of paper ... ...form for expression for a very long time. These five stories have all touched in their various ways on how mainstream society has preconceived impressions of groups based solely on a common factor such as race or religion that aren’t always accurate, they judge them based on these misconceptions and how these misconceptions can cause a division between these judged groups and mainstream society – when there need not be any. I for one will walk away from this assignment with a more open mind and will be more apt to really think about a person’s background before comparing and judging them based mainstreams standards. Works Cited Cofer, Judith Ortiz. The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria. 1993. Print. Jr, Henry Louis Gates. "Forth Acres and a Gap in Wealth." New York Times (2007). Print. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. 1993. Print.
#1.The thesis in “A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood” by Judith Ortiz Cofer is that because of the stories her grandmother told every afternoon when she was a child, her writing was heavily influenced and she learned what it was like to be a ‘Puerto Rican woman’. The thesis of the selection is stated in the first and last sentence of the second paragraph: “It was on these rockers that my mother, her sisters, and my grandmother sat on these afternoons of my childhood to tell their stories, teaching each other, and my cousin and me, what it was like to be a woman, more specifically, a Puerto Rican woman . . . And they told cuentos, the morality and cautionary tales told by the women in our family for generations: stories that became
Cofer, Judith Ortiz. “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria.” The Blair Reader: Exploring Issues and Ideas. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2014. Print. Judith Ortiz Cofer is a poet, a novelist, and a professor at the University of Georgia. In her essay, Cofer discusses some of the stereotypes Latin women are commonly associated with. For example, Latinas are sexual objects, are uneducated, and are housemaids or waitresses. According to Cofer, these typical stereotypes are perpetuated by “mixed cultural signals” because the media portrays the women of Latin America with these stereotypes. However, this “myth” is not true for all Latin women. Cofer mentions she was once mistaken for a waitress at her first public poetry reading. Cofer also explains that Latinas are seen as sexual icons because of their choice of clothing, but their choice of clothing “is custom, not chromosomes” (310); their mothers, who grew up wearing skin-showing clothes to keep cool and look sexy, influenced their decisions about clothes. I plan ...
For example, Cofer recalls walking towards her room at a classy hotel with her friend when a high-status man sang offensive songs about Latinas with his daughter’s support, making “the lyrics… about a girl named María whose exploits all rhymed with her name and gonorrhea” (Cofer 107). Although Cofer was extremely irritated and “really wanted to push the jerk into the swimming pool”, she handled the situation in calmly, warning the man’s daughter to never ask what her father did in the army (Cofer 107). In other words, readers sympathize the author’s frustration towards the man and his daughter that denotes the rage that Latinas face from these harsh stereotypes about being dirty-minded and desiring to have sex often. Nevertheless, since hundreds of men in the army were extremely dirty and raped women during wartime, Cofer’s warning for the daughter indicates how it is unfair and aggravating for Latinas to be associated with these kinds of offensive cultural stereotypes when these beliefs can also be applied to any individual regardless of race and gender. Furthermore, on the day of Cofer’s public poetry reading debut, an elder woman assumed that Cofer was a waitress in a Miami restaurant and ordered coffee from her, believing that her poems were menus. Cofer’s
Torres, Hector Avalos. 2007. Conversations with Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Writers. U.S.: University of New Mexico press, 315-324.
Her strong feminine perspective in her work makes her the well-known writer she is. In her essay, “The Myth of the Latin Woman,” Ortiz Cofer goes through her experiences with stereotypes she has had to deal with in the past. She says “My personal goal in my public life is to try to replace the old pervasive stereotypes and myths about Latinas with a much more interesting set of realities” and that is what she strives to emphasize in her work (Ortiz Cofer 207). “The Myth of the Latin Woman” is an eye-opener to the exclusions not just Hispanics face but women as well. The difficulty with being a female writer, to Judith Ortiz Cofer was that she did not have the support from her peers as she wish she did. When one reads this essay they can feel the emotions that the author portrays through imagery and similes. In “The Myth of the Latin Woman,” the imagery was important because the speaker explains through descriptive words what it was like to be a Puerto Rican woman with words like “hopeless” and “vulgar” (Ortiz Cofer 204). This essay by Judith Ortiz Cofer revolves around prejudice and the belittling of females as people and their
For a first example of stereotypes, In “The Myth of the Latin Woman,” Judith Ortiz Cofer writes about the many stereotypes that she, as a Puerto Rican woman, has endured. She opens with a tale of how she had been publicly serenaded—on a London bus, of all places—by, as Cofer puts it, “a young man, obviously fresh from a pub” (187). Later on, she mentions a second random serenade of sorts, this time from a older man in a classy metropolitan hotel. The young man sang “Maria” from West Side Story, the older man first chose a song from Evita, then encored with a crudely-worded song to the tune of “La Bamba.” In both situations, whether it was their intention or not, their actions resulted in alienation of the author, singling her out and thrusting the stereotypes of her lineage in her face. The men may have meant well; they may have felt that what they were doing was good-hearted fun. They may have even been trying to...
Another misapplication of stereotyping lies within the character of Gloria, the energetic, vicious Latina wife of patriarch Jay, who is more than thirty years her senior. Gloria’s character represents a biased view of what it is to be a Latina-American. She had her first child at a very young age to an emotionally abusive father. In order to make ends meet, she worked at a beauty salon catering exclusively to Latina clientele. Until she met Jay, she struggled to get by and relied mostly on her good looks and flirty personality to advance herself within society. By marrying Jay, an older man with a successful business, she is considered by many to be a gold digger. The most hilarious part of her character is also the most insulting to Latin-Americans
In Judith Ortiz Cofer’s, The Myth of the Latin Woman, I believe she is reliable and that she is not fabricating or over-exaggerating her experiences in her memoir because she is writer, autobiographer, poet, and etc. This will give people the counter claim that because she is a writer she is going to fabricate a story, however, I do not agree with that. My first reason why I don’t agree with that is because everything she spoke happens to many races and women either people are to ignorant to realize that this happens to minorities in the US or have never experienced for themselves. Her story shines a vast light on the stereotypes Latin women and women in general have experienced.
Numerous Chicana feminist theorists convey interests in reclaiming the Mexican and Chicana’s influential stories that control gender roles. The stories frequently display the influences of colonization. The Chicanas/o’s have ben colonized by the Spanish in the sixteenth century and in 1848 by the United States when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was set forth. This consensus relinquished most of the Southwest to the United States with assurance that the Mexicans who were residing in these territories would be promised ...
This text is fuelled by Ortiz Cofer’s personal narratives. The use of her anecdotes provide a sympathetic view into her own personal experience. Despite the tragic nature of her stories, she does not have an emotional view when discussing it, but rather an objective view. She is not cold, but distant. This allows us to see the subjectivity through an almost impartial view, despite her own intimate experiences. This is displayed when she talks about seeing her mother from a photograph, describing her as “a stunning young woman by Latino standards: long, curly black hair, and round curves in a compact frame.” (Ortiz Cofer # emphasis Amador) By describing her mother from a photograph as opposed to Ortiz Cofer’s actual memories of her, she places distance between this Latino woman and herself. She is not necessarily involved in this narrative, occupying the space of a passive
Misconceptions are false ideas or beliefs that often root from pre-mature assumptions, or inherited point of views. These misconceptions exist, and will be eternally present. Misconceptions can be formed about topics such as race, gender, politics, and culture. The results of minor misconceptions could be harmless. However, misconceptions can be dangerous when they are major or widespread. After performing a subject analysis on A Lesson Before Dying, Persepolis, and “Exploring the Negative Consequences of Stereotyping”; I conclude that when an individual person or party is subjected to a misconception, they will react negatively.
Men are always stronger and smarter than women; all teenagers are rebels and rarely follow parents’ instructions; all Chinese are good at math—all of these statements are spread through the entire world although most people know they are not completely true. On the opposite viewpoint, when we evaluate those statements, it is controversial to judge and blame the individuals who spread these kinds of information out and keep saying them over and over again, because most of these things are partly true. This is that we call stereotypes, “which are types of generalizations, or assumptions, that people make about the characteristics of all members of a group, based on an image about what people in that group are like” (Burgess).Also, Chimamanda Adichie, the famous renowned writer, scholar, and the speaker of “The Danger of Single Story” in Ted Talks, once said, “stereotypes are created by single stories, the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but they are incomplete.” At this point, single stories are the pattern of the lack of understanding, uncorroborated assumptions, and some special cultural myths. Thus, at a certain level, stereotyping is an approach where people show their misunderstanding with each other based on their own personal, regional, and cultural perspectives, which is the consequence of the institutionalization and socialization of their environmental backgrounds.
Identity construction involves the establishment of a set of criteria for distinguishing between group members and nonmembers. These criteria might include skin colour, ancestry, place of origin, a cultural practice, or something else- or a lot of things at once. The point is not the specific criteria used as boundary markers, but the categorical boundary they signify-the line between “us” and “them. – Cornell (81)
North America is, and always has been, an ethnically diverse society. Yet this cultural diversity along religious, ethnic and national lines had been tolerated only in a limited degree, end even only on the dominant Anglo-Saxon elite?s terms.? (Eisen and Wiggins, 1994, p. xii). History books repeatedly show this in their pages. A person can not pick up a history book and read through the pages with out finding something on how a particular athlete or group of athletes were persecuted because of their race. Part of the American dream that is taught to our youth of is freedom, equality and the ability to move ahead in life if a person is motivated to do so. It is unfortunate that this isn?t the case; that is unless the person fits into the right sociological group.
Mankind’s foremost fallacy lies in its misconception of society. Mankind consistently treats “society” as an undeniable truth—a fixture of the species—and upholds the status quo. However, as Berger and Luckmann would agree, society has never been anything more than a man-made invention—a valiant attempt to establish stability within a chaotic world. Despite man’s initial beneficent intentions, society as an ideal has been tremendously bastardized due to humanity’s divisive socio-cultural influences—i.e., the B&L-ian notion of socio-cultural variability. In fact, some followers of Jung contend that the sociology of culture acts as any given individual’s first confrontation in the world. Additionally, such divisiveness propagates arbitrary projections resulting from the isolation of socio-cultural groups. Arguably, at least initially, man somewhat succeeded in creating stability in the face of chaos, only to continue on such a trajectory as to create a new form of chaos as a result of man’s self-interest and stupidity. As mankind sought to organize society in order to combat anarchic chaos, the decay of entropy crept in, dragging society back into the abyss. Hypothetically, society can transform and once again be made anew if the individuals within it collectively accept the chaos of reality and,