In chapter five of ¡Que Vivan Los Tamales!, the author Jeffrey M. Pilcher discusses how women wanted a mechanical mill for making and producing tortillas that were not so difficult to operate. In this chapter, there was a man named Luis de la Rosa who broke down how hard it was to operate tortilla machines. Many Mexican engineers began inventing corn mills and tortilla machines. Julian Gonzalez designed the first mechanical tortilla maker. Don Luis Romero Soto designed an improved model in 1899 and he created the first tortilla factory. This reminds me of my local tortilla shop in Baldwin Park named Ramirez Meat Market. I always see several women operating the machine and rolling the tortilla off the conveyor belt really fast. I also wondered
who invented the first tortilla machine. In this chapter, it was interesting to read that in 1975 tortillas were being processed at 500,000 tons. This is a lot of corn masa that was used. In this chapter, women grew accustomed to using new tortilla mills known as nixtamal and some went back to using the old school metate mill on special family occasions. My mother and grandmother always use to make tortillas by hand using the metate to produce tortillas. Today my mother only makes special tortillas for family occasions or birthdays to eat with tacos or other special dishes. In chapter six, Josefina Velazquez de Leon wrote a book called Platillos regionals de la Republica Mexicana in 1946. This cookbook was directed at the middle-class families and was based on religious and family traditions. In the 1940’s the Mexican economy was growing by 6 percent annually. This caused a higher demand for diverse cookbooks. Mexico started losing food cooking traditions and began opening up chains catered mostly to upper-class families. I feel that many Mexican elites started to follow many European styles of food and were less interested in eating native Mexico food. I remember in an earlier chapter many people from Mexico (especially the rich) after the conquest of Mexico did not eat native foods and ate mostly food that European. The elite saw Mexican food such as tortillas as being lower class and refused to eat. Many foreign recipes started dominating cookbooks. Overall, theses chapters in ¡Que Vivan Los Tamales! , were interesting to read and described how Mexican food has evolved and how it has become mainstream.
“The Charmer” by Budge Wilson is a short story about a Canadian family that finds misfortune and conflict within their lives. Conflict being the predominant theme which directly affects all the participants in the family. The story is written in third person and narrated from the young girl Winifred’s point of view. Budge Wilson uses Zack’s smothered childhood, charming personality and irresponsible behaviour to create emotional conflict between members of the family.
Mark Danner, an editor for the New York Times magazine, recounts in The Massacre at El Mozote a horrific crime against humanity committed by a branch of the Salvadorian army. He gives multiple points of views and cites numerous eye witnesses to try and piece together something that has been tucked away by the government at the time. In December, of 1981, news reports were leaked to major newspapers in the united states about an atrocity committed and a total massacre of a hamlet in El Salvador, known as El Mozote, or the Thicket. At first, the account was of over a thousand civilians, women men and children with no guerrilla affiliation were massacred. Danner pieces together the testimonies of the survivors, and interviews with officers in the Salvadorian army.
The author of Mexican Lives, Judith Adler Hellman, grapples with the United States’ economic relationship with their neighbors to the south, Mexico. It also considers, through many interviews, the affairs of one nation. It is a work held to high esteem by many critics, who view this work as an essential part in truly understanding and capturing Mexico’s history. In Mexican Lives, Hellman presents us with a cast from all walks of life. This enables a reader to get more than one perspective, which tends to be bias. It also gives a more inclusive view of the nation of Mexico as a whole. Dealing with rebel activity, free trade, assassinations and their transition into the modern age, it justly captures a Mexico in its true light.
Under what circumstances would you go through to better and provide for your family? Would you embark on these six deadly sins above to just get a simple loaf of bread on the table? There is no solid blame or black and white definite answer throughout this novel, The Devil’s Highway. The author Luis Alberto Urrea takes his readers to different perspectives and offers different points of view whether you appear to be a walker, coyote, or the border control on the topic of illegal immigration. Being that Urrea puts the reader in each person shoe’s and truly sees what immense, harsh, conditions for example these immigrants had to go through. Again there is no solid blame or black and white answers, both sides are at fault and in need of a solution to the problem.
Mexican agricultural workers had been granted temporary work visas allowing them to work in the United States' agricultural industries through a program called the Bracero Program until 1965 when this program was terminated. As a result of this termination, the unemployment rate had exceeded 70% in certain border cities. In May of 1965 the Border Industrialization Program was established as a replacement for the Bracero program. It was later renamed the Maquiladora Program. The program was established by the Mexican government to provide employment for Mexico's rapidly growing population along its border with the United States. This Program was utilized to keep Mexicans from entering the United States. The idea was that Mexican workers would be kept on the Mexican side of the border if they were given factory jobs on the Mexican side. The Maquiladora program also wanted to attract foreign manufacturing facilities, technology, and know-how by giving a permanent tax holiday to manufacturing companies that would set up "twin plants" on the Mexican side of the border.
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.
I chose the book, The Child Called “It” because one of my friends told me about the book. The whole story line caught my attention. I was amazed at what was going on in this boy’s life. This book, a true story, is very emotional. The title relates to the book because his mother calls the boy, David Pelzer, “It”. She does not call him by his real name. His mother treats him like he is nothing but an object. Also, I think the title fits well because it catches people’s attention and gives a clue what the book is about.
In the 1800's the construction of cotton mills brought about a new phenomenon in American labor. The owners needed a new source of labor to tend these water powered machines and looked to women. Since these jobs didn't need strength or special skills th...
Junot Diaz displays in his short story “Fiesta” how an abusive father can cause a family
Sandra Cisneros’s “Never Marry a Mexican” introduces readers to Clemencia. Cisneros eludes Clemencia as a woman who appears proud of her Mexican heritage, yet knows not how the slanderous phrase “Never marry a Mexican” uttered from her well-meaning mother’s trusty lips about Clemencia’s own Mexican father negatively foreshadows her seedy life and gloomy world perspective later down her destructive journey of adulthood.
The mills filled with girls from smaller towns who had good country morals and stayed away from the unpleasant urban conditions. These women workers were given the name mills girls. In 1836, Lowell boasted twenty mills with 6,000 workers: 85 percent of Lowell's labor force consisted of single women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine (Inventing America p.394).
To fully comprehend a work you cannot just read it. You must read it, analyze it, question it, and even then question what you are questioning. In Richard Rodriguez’s The Achievement of Desire we are presented with a young Richard Rodriguez and follow him from the start of his education until he is an adult finally having reached his goals. In reference to the way he reads for the majority of his education, it can be said he reads going with the grain, while he reads a large volume of books, the quality of his reading is lacking.
In 1910, the first social upheaval of the 20th century was unleashed in Mexico. Known as the Mexican Revolution, its historical importance and impact inspired an abundance of internationally renowned South American authors. Mariano Azuela is one of these, whose novel, "The Underdogs" is often described as a classic of modern Hispanic literature. Having served as a doctor under Pancho Villa, a revolutionary leader of the era, Azuela's experience in the Revolution provides The Underdogs with incomparable authenticity of the political and social tendencies of the era between 1910 and 1920. The Underdogs recounts the living conditions of the Mexican peasants, the corruption of the government troops, and the revolutionary zeal behind the inspiring causes of the revolution. In vivid detail and honest truth, Azuela reveals the actuality of the extent of turmoil that plagued Mexico and its people during the revolution. However, before one can acknowledge The Underdogs as a reflection of the Mexican Revolution one must have an understanding the political state of Mexico prior to the Revolution and the presidents who reigned during it.
Mexican Women began to work the jobs men did, such as jobs that required maintenance, miners, and defense plants. This era proved to be especially significant for Mexican American women, whose new wage-earning status created a sense of self-sufficiency and intensified issues of self-identity” (Quinones 245) These Mexican women were the “Susanas del SP” which was the Mexican version of “Rosie the Riveter.” After World War II, when women were forced to return their job to the men, their ideals of family and marriage change. They longer believe they needed a men to support them because they could be independent and support
Eva Hoffman’s memoir, Lost in Translation, is a timeline of events from her life in Cracow, Poland – Paradise – to her immigration to Vancouver, Canada – Exile – and into her college and literary life – The New World. Eva breaks up her journey into these three sections and gives her personal observations of her assimilation into a new world. The story is based on memory – Eva Hoffman gives us her first-hand perspective through flashbacks with introspective analysis of her life “lost in translation”. It is her memory that permeates through her writing and furthermore through her experiences. As the reader we are presented many examples of Eva’s memory as they appear through her interactions. All of these interactions evoke memory, ultimately through the quest of finding reality equal to that of her life in Poland. The comparison of Eva’s exile can never live up to her Paradise and therefore her memories of her past can never be replaced but instead only can be supplemented.