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A Place Where the Sea Remembers - Short Essay

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In A Place Where the Sea Remembers, Sandra Benitez invites us into a mesmerizing world filled with love, anger, tragedy and hope. This rich and bewitching story is a bittersweet portrait of the people in Santiago, a Mexican village by the sea. Each character faces a conflict that affects the course of his or her life. The characters in this conflict are Remedios, la curandera of the small town who listens to people’s stories and gives them advice, Marta, a 16 year old teenage girl, who was raped and became pregnant. Chayo is Marta’s big sister and Calendario is Chayo’s husband. Justo Flores, his conflict is person vs. self. One of the most important conflicts in this story is person vs. person, then person vs. supernatural followed by …show more content…

Chayo still thinks the curse is there after four years. Marta takes care of her own child, and learns how to deal with the fact he came from a rape but in the end there is a twist of fate. Remedios has seen Marta’s future. She knows that her child is going to die; she sees this when the boy was in his mother’s womb. The conflict of person vs. person begins with Don Justo Flores. Each day he goes to the beach where people beach pay him to see his birds perform tricks. Don Justo is a lonely man but he has a story. He had two wives and five children, including Justina, his first, and Ernestina, his fifth. Suddenly he receives a telegraph; he suspects it is bad news but he cannot read. He hopes the telegraph is from Justina saying all is forgiven. So as he walks on the beach as usual, he finds a girl named Rita and asks her to pick her fortune. Don Justo asks the guy next to her to read him the telegraph. The guy tells him it is bad news after he reads, “Come home at once, papa Justina is gone from us.”(A Place Where the Sea Remembers, Sandra Benitez, p. 108) So he gathers his things and goes to town for tequila and he blames himself for not being a good father and not being there for Justina when she was a little girl. He remembers allowing his second wife to push Justina out of the house; he cannot stand the pain. Whether we like it or not, conflict is a part of everyday lives. It can happen to anyone, from your friends to your family.

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