Los Vendidos Villains

An Examination of the Villain in Los Vendidos While female villains do not appear nearly as often as their male counterparts, when they do they are especially powerful. This is due, in part, to the fact that the role of villain goes against the nurturing, soft image of the female gender. After all, villains are evil; they are to be feared. However, the villain is an essential part of any story and serves many purposes. Villains personify what is wrong, or broken, in a society. Villains usually choose to take the easier path to get what they want, regardless of any moral implications, and in doing so they show an audience the difference between right and wrong. The best villains are sympathetic characters, which makes an audience question their

In his play, “Los Vendidos”, Luis Valdez deliberately casts the secretary, Miss Jiminez, in the role of villain, and not the Honest Sancho. He does this to show Mexican-Americans the danger in becoming acculturated to the Anglo-American society, while giving them a character with which they can empathize.

Although the play is entitled “Los Vendidos”, (The Sellouts), which many could argue is a reference to the male characters posing as machines in order to swindle people like the secretary out of money, Miss Jimenez is the one true sellout of Valdez’s dramatic work. She fits into the role of the villain by participating in the dehumanization of her fellow Mexican-Americans. The very setting of the play, a shop in which Mexicans are being displayed for the purpose of being sold, serves to equate an

In “Visions of the Other Mexico: Chicanos and Undocumented Workers in Mexican Cinema, 1954-1982,” David Maciel claims that, “For most Mexicans, Chicanos consciously and willingly denied their Mexican heritage and the Spanish language; it was also believed that Chicanos had a condescending attitude toward Mexico and Mexicanos,” (Maciel 72). Miss Jiminez must feel tremendous external pressure to assimilate into the American culture, especially considering she works for the Governor’s office. In an effort to fit in she decides to take what she sees as the easier path and simply reject her native culture. Instead of standing up for herself, and other Mexican-Americans by being proud of her ethnicity, she has succumbed to that pressure. In this sense, using a female character in the role of the villain works to gain sympathy from the audience in a way that would not happen with a male character. Miss Jiminez is a young female, working in a subservient role in which she has no real authority. One cannot help but take that into account when looking at her motivations for rejecting her own ethnic