Traumatized Children and their future
In this story, “Never Marry a Mexican”, written by Sandra Cisneros, a woman named Clemencia, who is also the narrator of the story, portrays her experiences about cultural, social, sexual and economic difference between her parents and shares her negative experience resulting in forming a real-life relationship. Clemencia goes through seeing different events in her parents’ life, which turned her to be different than others. Clemencia wants to be a normal lady, but her past leads her in the reverse direction. Clemencia’s mom, American born Mexican and father from Mexico and their family structure, which totally forces Clemencia to turn into disrespectful and cruel human being.
In the other story, “Optimists”
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written by Richard Ford, a man named Frank recalls his past when he was fifteen and realizes that the most important thing in life can change suddenly without notice and recovery. Frank the protagonist, who believes that his family is optimistic lost the admiration after the series of events that he encountered which makes him difficult to ignore resulting the changes of lives of him. Robert Fulghum once said, “Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.” Children are like clay. As we can make different forms of clay, we can shape the future of a person in their childhood. Children spend most of the time with their parents. So, childhood time is very precious to them as it can trigger how they handle when it comes to life and relationship. Children’s action is highly influenced by behavior and languages they see in their home. In the both story as well, Clemencia and Frank wants to enjoy their life as others and have a relationship however, having traumatized by their parents’ in childhood they cannot rely on others for anything that makes them fearful all the time unable to create any relationship. Through associations with parents children figure out how to trust others, control their feelings and collaborate with the world; they build up a world’s feelings as sheltered or risky, and come to comprehend their own worth as people.
Clemencia relationship with her mom and the way it builds keep the story moving. Clemencia’s mom view of saying “Never Marry a Mexican” and her relationship with Clemencia’s father bring her where she is now. Clemencia tells that her mother was unfaithful to his dad even when he was sick, which see can’t forgive her “ who she saw even while my father was sick” (182). She also tells that she didn’t get enough attention after her mom is married to the white guy. “ Not with that man she married. After Daddy died, it was like we didn’t matter.” “Like if I never had a mother” (182). Clemencia’s feeling of lack of love and affection from her childhood can be clearly stated in her writings. Clemencia thinks as if she has no home to accommodate her as she carries her painful memories of her childhood to her adulthood. Likewise, Frank was unable to tackle a part of his genuine freedom at an early age as a result of traumatic occasion he saw his father killing a man. The failure to control components of the traumatic occasion or the intrusive considerations that take after prompts an arrangement of unsurprising, mental and physiological reactions to children. As the traumatic events trigger again and again on children, they tend to re-experience pain, anxiety and fear. Parents need to play an important role and should distinguish between what to say and what not in front of children. Parents’ should not ignore children, as they are very sensitive to what they see, keep them through their
life. Children with trauma have the problems of thinking clearly, reasoning and problem solving. Clemencia’s view on all man being dishonest shows that she couldn’t start a functional relationship. She builds her stereotype on men as she learns from her mom. Clemencia expressed her mom turned her view about marriage, “ I’ll never marry. Not any man. I’ve known men too intimately. I’ve witnessed their infidelities, and I’ve helped them to it” (179). However, she fails to see her dad, who being a man was faithful to her mom throughout her life. She sleeps with multiple men in different occasions and especially with those men who is least likely to marry her. Clemencia believes that it is better not to marry that live a lie (179). She feels fun to kill other wives by having sex with their husband without knowing them (184). However, she goes beyond the social norms and traditions by having sex with the married man. Likewise, being a woman she uses her past experiences to hurt other wives, as they are also a woman. In the same way, Frank decision to join Army when he was sixteen was part of cognition problem. Similarly, Franks also don’t have any functional relationship as he is forty-three. Frank couldn’t plan his future ahead and act accordingly. I believe that conditions that Frank grew up forced him to use all his resources just for survival. Children being traumatized cannot think about their future leading them to be disassociated from the outer world. Similarly, they tend to misinterpret a current situation as dangerous associating it with the previous traumatic event. Children with a complex trauma history are likely to have a severe and long-lasting effect. They tend to react normally to abnormal events. Clemencia’s heartless behavior comes to actions when she takes revenge on her white married lover by luring his on into a lover’s role. She uses a coward approach of seducing the innocent son in hope to get back to his lover, Drew. “I sleep with this boy, their son. To make the boy love me the way I love his father. To make him want me, hunger twist in his sleep, as if he’d swallowed glass”(187). This shows that she is willing to create a relationship with Drew but unable to secure with her past experiences and troubles. After years, she stills remembers her lover Drew and tell that she haven’t stopped dreaming about him (184). Likewise, growing powerlessly, Clemencia wants to feel herself powerful that makes her happy as she tells she has the power in the boy (187). However, she could not get anything in her life that makes her happy. On the other side, even though Frank was not acting rudely, he couldn’t discover the goal of his life. Frank is just lost in his world hopeless, which then brings us back how he changed the value of the life of being optimistic to pessimistic. His father who used to be his hero once is a man, who could hurt people, ruins lives, risk their happiness (286). Both Clemencia and Frank are carrying out their trauma as a problem throughout their life. However, instead of running away, they should deal with it. And when they run away, they can’t deal with the problems, so they never become resolved. Cisneros and Ford presented the impact of parents’ wrong action on children. Although the way of presenting the story is different in both cases, the writers did a good job analyzing the childrens’ psychology. Children need to be taken with love, and they need to feel safe. Parents, being their first teacher, need to understand and support their children, which helps them to be a better citizen. Parents should listen to the story of their children and play with them to normalize their experience if they have been traumatized. If parents’ leave, these children doing nothing, then they are totally pushing them towards their dark future and ruining their chances to be an able citizen. As parents are the primary source of knowledge to their children, their role is the most crucial especially in childhood stage. Parents dealing with trauma may find dilemma in various physical and emotional reactions. However, there is no solid answer to think, feel or respond to trauma. So parents need to provide support, which is the only way to cope out of trauma. The more we can comprehend these children and the effect of traumatic encounters, the more sympathetic and knowledgeable we can be in our associations and our problem solving.
In the essay of Mr.Gary Soto, we learn about his experiences about falling in love with someone of a different race. Ever since he was young, he would be lectured that marrying a Mexican women would be the best option for his life. Gary’s grandmother would always proclaim: “... the virtues of marrying a Mexican girl: first, she could cook,second, she acted like a woman, not a man, in her husband’s home” (pp.219). Being conditioned into the notion that all Mexican woman have been trained to be proper women, Mr. Soto set out on finding his brown eyed girl; however, what love had quite a different plan. This paper will cover three different themes Gary’s essay: The tone, the mindset of the character’s mindsets, and the overall message of the
Cleofilas is a young lady excited to marry Juan Pedro. Cisneros uses Cleofilas to symbolize someone who can not separate reality from real life. She comes from a family with six siblings and no mother. Leaving her father as the head of the house hold. She uses the television shows to teach herself feminine responsibilities and life lessons. Cleofilas envisions her perfect life though the eyes of the television shows she watches conscientiously. The television shows are used to show Cleofilas how life could be, but she takes it to be her own .
Cleófilas’ father wanted her to marry Juan Pedro Martinez Sanchez, so what if she did not get married to her husband and moved to Seguin, Texas. Cleófilas would not be in a position of being a person’s possession and suffered the abuse of her husband. She would not be in an isolated world away from her family, or any real support that can help her through all the things she has to go through. Cleófilas explains that she did not “cry out” when her husband hits her for the first time, but she has always imagined she would after watching episodes of her favorite telenovelas. This was also the first time in the story that Cleofilas’ view of their happy marriage was
In “Enrique’s Journey”, by Sonia Nazario a young boy from Honduras, sets out to reunite with his mother, Lourdes, that abandoned him when he was just five years old. Lourdes leaves to the United States, in hopes to find a better job as an immigrant and to better provide for her family. After many years of suffering without his mom, he travels through Central America to the United States in order to finally reunite with her. He finds his mother beginning to move on as she has a little daughter, named Diana. They run into problems of resentment. Will they be able to finally be a family? Sonia develops this theme of family by using specific facts and characterization. Importance
The two short stories, “Never Marry a Mexican” by Sandra Cisneros and “Maria de Covina” by Dagoberto Gilb, read were attention-grabbing to say the least. There were several similarities within the two, such as their plot, theme, and actions of the main character. While there are all of those similarities, there are plenty of differences as well. Some examples of these differences include setting, literary elements, and thoughts of the main character.
Oftentimes, societal problems span across space and time. This is certainly evident in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents a novel in which women are treated peripherally in two starkly different societies. Contextually, both the Dominican Republic and the United States are very dissimilar countries in terms of culture, economic development, and governmental structure. These factors contribute to the manner in which each society treats women. The García girls’ movement between countries helps display these societal distinctions. Ultimately, women are marginalized in both Dominican and American societies. In the Dominican Republic, women are treated as inferior and have limited freedoms whereas in the United States, immigrant
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.
She thought she was going to be living a great life with Juan Pedro until she realized she was alone. There was nowhere she can go in walking distance. She didn’t have a car or any friends, she felt segregated. Sure, Cleofilas did not like the gossip in Mexico but America lacked the community Mexico has which adds to her misery. In Mexico she was able to go to social events but in America she felt that Mexican women were more dependent on their husbands because they did not know anything there.
Cleofilas grew up in a male dominant household of six brother and father, and without a mother, she no woman figure to guide her, give advice on life, or how to love a man. Cleofilas turned to telenovelas for a woman’s guidance on love and appearance, and she began to imagine her ideal life through the television series. Once Cleofilas was married she moved away into a home with her husband, were she pictured everything to be like the couples on the telenovelas, but she soon starts to realize life isn 't exactly like how they view it in the telenovelas. In the story Sandra make the statement ‘From what see can tell, from the times during her first year when still a newlywed she is invited and accompanies her husband, sits mute besides their conversations, waits and sips a beer until it grows warm, twists a paper napkin into a knot, then another into a fan, one into a rose, nods her head, smiles, yawns, politely grins, laughs at the appropriate moments, leans against her husband’s sleeve, tugs at his elbow, and finally becomes good at predicting where the talk will lead, from this Cleofilas
Intertwined in allusions to women of Mexican history and folklore, making it clear that women across the centuries have suffered the same alienation and victimization, Cisneros presents a woman who struggles to prevail over romantic notions of domestic bliss by leaving her husband. In the story Woman Hollering Creek, Sandra Cisneros discusses the issues of living life as a married woman through a character named Cleófilas; a character who is married to a man who abuses her physically and mentally. Cisneros reveals the way the culture puts a difference between a male and a female, men above women. In Woman Hollering Creek, we see a young Mexican woman, who suddenly moves across the border and gets married. The protagonist, Cleófilas’ character is based on a family of a six brothers and a dad and without a mom, and the story reveals around her inner feelings and secrets.
The contrast between the Mexican world versus the Anglo world has led Anzaldua to a new form of self and consciousness in which she calls the “New Mestiza” (one that recognizes and understands her duality of race). Anzaldua lives in a constant place of duality where she is on the opposite end of a border that is home to those that are considered “the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel and the mulato” (25). It is the inevitable and grueling clash of two very distinct cultures that produces the fear of the “unknown”; ultimately resulting in alienation and social hierarchy. Anzaldua, as an undocumented woman, is at the bottom of the hierarchy. Not only is she a woman that is openly queer, she is also carrying the burden of being “undocumented”. Women of the borderlands are forced to carry two degrading labels: their gender that makes them seem nothing more than a body and their “legal” status in this world. Many of these women only have two options due to their lack of English speaking abilities: either leave their homeland – or submit themselves to the constant objectification and oppression. According to Anzaldua, Mestizo culture was created by men because many of its traditions encourage women to become “subservient to males” (39). Although Coatlicue is a powerful Aztec figure, in a male-dominated society, she was still seen
Emotive language is used in text 1 to evoke the audience’s sympathy and pity towards Lourdes, the central female character, for what she has been through. Nazario’s portrayal of the affectionate relationship shared between Lourdes and his son, Enrique embodies motherly love, which audiences with a cultural context of a mother can easily relate and imagine the pain of being separated from their children. Without Lourdes, Enrique is “so shy it is crushing”. This appeals to the audience’s pathos as it explains her source of guilt and resentment to leave home. Additionally, Enrique seems to long for Lourdes’ attention. He “pursed his lips” to kiss her and clings “to her pant leg.” His attachment to Lourdes hi...
...ny psychological reasons, but it also makes her believe that all she has to offer in a relationship is her body. Due to her internalized racism, she believes she would never be as good as Megan, Drew’s wife. Clemencia understands her skin color to be the reason why Drew did not leave his wife. It is a deluded thought because a man of authority showed inappropriate interest to a young developing girl. Her parents’ relationship and her affair drastically altered the view of herself and the world around her. She had become so obsessed with Drew that she formed a relationship with his son. Cisneros’ story, although sad for the reader, is an example of how women are represented within society. She does not follow this atypical story of how a woman should act, yet is not any less of a woman. This is a woman’s experience that is so often forgotten, but is still a valid life.
Clemencia, named Malinche by her lover, is stuck with this whore persona that she fits in because of her similarities with La Malinche. Similarly Ixchel should, by her grandmother’s standards, feel shame for her actions but she knows nothing of shame because in her eyes, she has done nothing wrong. Clemencia and Ixchel share the pain of their sexuality, as they attempt to control themselves sexually and to embrace their sexuality as a positive, instead of the negative that their culture deems it. However, in “Women Hollering Creek,” identity and sexuality play a completely different role as Cleofilas must find herself through reexamining all of the maternal figures that her culture has supplied. Cleofilas is negatively impacted by her society through telenovelas and the romance novels that she reads as their replacement while living in Texas. These programs are created by the patriarchy and Cleofilas must realize the mistakes within them through her own life and then act out of the roles that society wants for her – not La Llorona as the maternal figure gone wrong or the Virgin of Guadalupe as the passive and gentle female, but as an individual. Cleoflias leaves her husband and her ideals behind in favor of saving herself and her children, and she does so while stepping out of the patriarchal and cultural guidelines that she has stood within for so
Maria Concepcion was originally written by Katherine Anne Porter in 1930. This story is about a young, strong woman who is trying to make her way in a man’s world. The reader can infer by the names of the characters and the town that this story takes place in a village in Mexico. The opening of this short story strongly suggests the expectations for the rest of the story by describing Maria Concepcion’s temperament and how it contrasted with what was socially acceptable in that time.