The novel Dreaming in Cuban, written by Cristina Garcia, is a novel following the lives of a Cuban family during La Revolución Cubana. Garcia develops her story in great detail, particularly through the struggles this family faces and how each of them attempts to find their own identity. Although the novel has many characters, Cristina Garcia primarily develops the story through the eyes of Pilar Puente. Even though she is one of the youngest characters, Pilar endures a plethora of struggles with her life and her identity. Her mother, Lourdes Puente, moved the family away to New York in order to shield Pilar from what Lourdes deemed to be an unfavorable past in Cuba. The main source of Pilar’s frustration is her internal conflict between her Cuban heritage and her American identity. This struggle stems from the relationship with her grandmother, Celia del Pino, contrasting with her life in America. Along with her struggle with her Cuban heritage, Pilar Puente has many experiences that shape her self-identity throughout the novel Dreaming in Cuban. The first circumstance that affects Pilar’s identity is her inability to fit in at any time in her life. …show more content…
The novel brings to life their struggles, triumphs, and search for self. None of these are more evident than in the character Pilar Puente. Pilar begins the story as simply a child longing for home, but evolves into so much more. From the beginning, Pilar shows to be a girl who simply wants to belong. This desire for belonging is only strengthened by her deep love for her distant grandmother and resentment for her mother. However, by the end of the novel, Pilar is able to find her true self. Through her long sought-after trip to Cuba, Pilar finally realizes her identity. Her entire life had been leading her to the truth; Pilar was an American, one who would never let go of her Cuban
In 1949, Dana Gioia reflected on the significance of Gabriel García Márquez’s narrative style when he accurately quoted, “[it] describes the matter-of-fact combination of the fantastic and everyday in Latin American literature” (Gioia). Today, García Márquez’s work is synonymous with magical realism. In “Un Señor Muy Viejo con Alas Enormes,” the tale begins with be dramatically bleak fairytale introduction:
Junot Diaz is a Dominican-American writer whose collection of short stories Drown tells the story of immigrant families in the urban community of New Jersey. His short story “Fiesta, 1980” focuses on Yunior, an adolescent boy from Dominican Republic and his relationship with his father. On the other hand, Piri Thomas was a great Latino writer from Puerto-Rico whose memoir Down These Mean Streets tells his life story as an adolescent residing in Harlem and the challenges he faces outside in the neighborhood and at home with his father. Both Diaz and Thomas in different ways explore the dynamics of father-son relationships in their work. Furthermore, both expose masculinity as a social construct.
The themes explored in the novel illustrate a life of a peasant in Mexico during the post-revolution, important themes in the story are: lack of a father’s role model, death and revenge. Additionally, the author Juan Rulfo became an orphan after he lost
Reyna Grande 's novel, Across a Hundred Mountains, focuses on the dynamic of the development and rethinking of the concept of a traditional Latino patriarchal family built up around male dominance. In low income and uneducated cultures, there are set of roles that throughout time have been passed by from generation to generation. These gender roles most often consist of the men being the breadwinner for the family. While the women stay home to cook, clean, and raise the children. Women are treated as possessions with limited rights and resources. Throughout the novel, Grandes challenges gender roles in the story of a young woman named Juana who, despite all adversity, fights stereotypes and is able to rewrite her own ending.
Rather, it criticizes this culture through its portrayal of women. The narrative is focused on a male and is told by a male, which reflects the male-centered society it is set in. However, when we compare how the narrator views these women to who they really are, the discrepancies act as a critique on the Dominican culture. Yunior, who represents the typical Dominican male, sees women as objects, conquests, when in fact their actions show their resistance to be categorized as such. Beli, whose childhood was filled with male domination by Trujillo and the family she worked for, attempts to gain power through sexuality, the avenue the culture pushes women toward. This backfires, creating a critique of the limited opportunities available for women. La Inca portrays a different side to this, working quietly but in ways that are not socially acceptable through self-employment. Society attempts to cage these women, but they continue to fight against it. Diaz, in an interview, quoted James Baldwin, stating, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced" (Fassler). He exhibits the misogyny in the system but does not support it, rather critiques it through strong female characters. By drawing attention to the problem, the novel advocates for change. Diaz writes, at the end of part 1, “Nothing more exhilarating… than saving yourself by the simple act of waking”
Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue is divided into five sections and an epilogue. The first three parts of the text present Mary/ María’s, the narrator, recollection of the time when she was nineteen and met José Luis, a refuge from El Salvador, for the first time. The forth and fifth parts, chronologically, go back to her tragic experience when she was seven years old and then her trip to El Salvador with her son, the fruit of her romance with José Luis, twenty years after she met José Luis. And finally the epilogue consists a letter from José Luis to Mary/ María after her trip to El Salvador. The essay traces the development of Mother Tongue’s principal protagonists, María/ Mary. With a close reading of the text, I argue how the forth chapter, namely the domestic abuse scene, functions as a pivotal point in the Mother Tongue as it helps her to define herself.
of the native tongue is lost , certain holidays may not be celebrated the same , and American born generations feel that they might have lost their identity , making it hard to fit in either cultures . Was is significant about this book is the fact it’s like telling a story to someone about something that happened when they were kid . Anyone can relate because we all have stories from when we were kids . Alvarez presents this method of writing by making it so that it doesn’t feel like it’s a story about Latin Americans , when
The American Dream, yes everybody has one, it can be from living in a large house and having a million dollars to just having the privilege to live in America and try to make something better for themselves in this new life or new start they are trying to grasp. There are many traditions and dreams of every American today while some dreams are practical and some are not and most of all their dreams are from the heart. The American dream is really simple--it consists of a house a job a car three kids and one dog but this is not always the case.
My cultural identity, is Haitian American. My parents come from a country of beautiful landscape and valleys of the hidden treasures of knowledge, diverse people, and rustic towns. My parents walked up steep plateaus for water, laid in grassy plains for peace, and dive into the sea for cooling in Haiti’s humid heat. Although, I come from a culture of deep history, the first country to gain independence in the result of a successful slave rebellion, my parents knew the plague of suffering Haiti’s battle with will not recover through the poverty, unemployment, and illiteracy. As Haiti fought through its demons, my parents fought to provide plentiful opportunity for their family and immigrated to the United States of America.
Rosario Ferre, a Puerto Rican writer whose mother came from the landowning elite and whose father, an industrialist, was a pro-statehood governor of the Commonwealth, is herself a supporter of independence for the island. Set in Puerto Rico in the era in which the old sugar cane aristocracy was giving way to the new industrial wealth, each class patriarchal in its own way, "The Youngest Doll" contains a shocking doctor-patient scene showing how social classes use their power and, in particular, how they use women as objects.
La autora Puertoriqueña Rosario Ferré sin duda pertence a ese grupo the escritores que critícan la sociedad en la que les tocó vivír en sus creaciónes literárias. Ferré nació en Ponce, Puerto Rico la ciudad mas grande y poderosa del sur de la isla. Su familia es una de las mas importante economicamente y politicamente poderosa. Su padre fue gobernador de la isla durante los años del 1968 al 1972. Como todas las mujeres en esa época se casó y comenzó una familia, destinada a una vida como dama elegante y ociosa. Pero se dió cuenta que su vida pertenecía a la literatura. Ella rompió un taboo y molde cultural, que convertía a las mujeres de clase media alta, en muñecas. Esa generación de mujeres exigiendo cambios en la sociedad se encontraban en el medio de la revolución femenina. Cualquier mujer que quisiera cambiar su vida o trabajar era considerada extraña o loca. Esta opreción se convirtió en su inspiración. Ferré nos comunica a travez de esta novela, la realidad de la mujer puertoriqueña a mediados de siglo. En La Bella Durmiente, Rosario Ferré muestra la mujer como sujeto y objeto. Esta obra es un manisfiesto de los derechos de la mujer y del inconformismo femenino que eventualmente lleva a la mujer a rechazar la realidad. Analizare y demonstrare por medio de este ensayo, los papeles que le toca jugar (a la mujer) en esta sociedad, la corrupcion moral y social que le rodea y su reacción ante todo esto resultando en un trágico final.
The characters of Miss Brill and Pi have a great deal in common. They both need to lie to themselves to adjust with their challenging times. When the rest of the world is going on without them, while they are deteriorating, and since neither of them can handle the truth and stay sane, they lie to themselves. But they get rude awakenings. Pi is not believed when questioned, so he makes his own truth. But the reader has a hard time knowing which story to believe. He knows what the real world wants to hear. Where as Miss Brill is content in her manners.
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).
In the autobiography, Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano’s Coming-of-Age in America, Cuban American Gustavo Perez Firmat takes advantage of the upraising of sexuality as a social norm in the 90’s to accord sexuality as a prominent place in his autobiography. Throughout the text Figures of women are constantly used to illustrate the difficulty of a bicultural identity. Firmat compares American and Cuban women, which emphasize his struggle to define his identity.
The linguistic and cultural clashes that children encounter, and how they negotiate between their ethnic and American “mainstream” cultures, and how these clashes and problems influence their relationship with their parents and their ethnic identities as a whole and how they were dealt with differently as we look at two stories dealing with two girls who are both coming of age in different society from where they originally came from. Jairy’s Jargon a story written by Carmen-Gloria Ballista, is a story that encounters the life of a young girl coming of age in Puerto Rico, except she’s originally from New York. Milly Cepeda’s story, Mari y Lissy, is a story about twin sisters who differ in personality and are often at odds with each other, but are both learning to live in a city that is very different from where they came from.