Across a Hundred Mountains Essay

The story “Woman Hollering Creek" by Sandra Cisneros describes the lives of Mexicans in a Chicago neighborhood. She depicts the life that women endure as Latino wives through her portrayal of the protagonist, Cleofilas. For Cisneros being a Mexican-American has given her a chance to see life from two different cultures. In addition, Cisneros has written the story from a woman’s perspective, illustrating the types of conflicts many women face as Latino wives. This unique paradigm allows the reader to examine the events and characters using a feminist critical perspective.

In A Mexican Self-Portrait, written by many authors, this article focused on the different lifestyles of the poor and rich woman in Mexico. The representations of women in Mexico for both high and lower classes in Latin America were very different. For lower class they were considered “tortilleras’’, however, one of the most well known was referred to as “La China”. La China was one of the most notable types portrayed in the “Mexican Self Portrait”. She was considered to be an unnamed independent woman of the popular class.

Dona Margarita married Juan Villasenor and they had Jose, Alejo, Luisa, Emilia, Lucha, Domingo, and Juan Salvador. Juan Salvador and Lupe were destined to find each other. Later Juan and Lupe would marry and have a family of their own.

During the Mexican Revolution, Mexico as a nation torn in many directions, people gave up simple farming lives to take up arms against causes that many of them did not fully understand. Gender roles during the period in Mexico were exceptionally degrading towards women. Having little more rights than slaves and treated as trophies or property more than human beings, women role in society was nothing near that of a man’s. In The Underdogs, Mariano Anzuela highlights the issue of gender roles by continuously illustrating the punitive role of women and their mistreatment. Augmenting Anzuelas work with citations from Oscar Lewis and Stephanie Smith will paint a picture of the degrading gender roles for women during the Mexican Revolution. Highlighted points brought up by Azuela are how men speak with and treat women, women’s place in society, and general disregard for women’s feelings.

Mexican women’s lives — their family life, their work, their educational opportunities, the health care they can expect, their social standing, political participation and especially their right — have changed over these hundred years. It was the fact that in the past, Mexican women were very sweet but passive and powerless human beings. Their lives revolved around home and family, and they were much subordinated to men as a famous Spanish proverb states, "El hombre en la calle, la mujer en la casa," which means, "men in the street and women at home". Mexican government has not haven good system to help protect women’s rights. Women in Mexico don’t have the same rights as men to keep their jobs. Violence against women

Selena Quintanilla was the daughter of Marcela and Abraham Quintanilla, Jr. She was born April 16, 1971, in Lake Jackson, Texas. Selena was the youngest out of three children. Her older siblings were Abraham III, and Suzette. Selena’s father discovered her talent one day while he sat in the living room playing the guitar and she came over and began to sing. Her voice was pure and perfect. “I could see it from day one”, her father said. Selena’s father quit his job in the plant he worked for and opened a restaurant where Selena performed every weekend with her brother and sister calling themselves “Selena y Los Dinos”. The restaurant went down after the Texas oil bust, putting Texas in a recession. Selena and her family then started touring all over Texas and the US performing at weddings and honky tonks.

Selena Quintanilla was born on April 16, 1971 in Lake Jackson, Texas. Her parents were Abraham Quintanilla and Marcella Ofelia Samora. She has one older brother, Abraham Quintanilla III and one older sister, Suzette Quintanilla.Selena Quintanilla Perez was a Latin recording artist born April 16,1971 in Lake Jackson, Texas and died March 31,1995 in Corpus Christi, Texas. With dying at the of 24 Selena didn't get to pursue her career very far. Yolanda Saldivar was the president and founder of her fan club but later then turned into a criminal. Selena was shot by Yolanda. You may ask yourself why would she have shot her. There is a story behind everything that happens. Yolanda was embezzling money and soon was going to get fired, before she

Selena (Quintanilla- Perez) was a Latin-American singer. She became famous because of her family’s band, Selena Y Los Dios. Her independent musical career as a singer thrived in the 80’s. She was born to Mexican- American parents, Marcela and Abraham Quintanilla, on April 16, 1971. She married Christopher Perez, guitarist and member of the band Selena y Los Dinos on April 2, 1992.

5) Once Beatrice and her sons arrived to the U.S and once they were settled down, they had to pay back the money for the plane tickets. What is your reaction to this?

The four young woman from Mexico who have lived most of their lives in the United States struggle with immigration problems. Their story of struggle and resilience compares to current struggles that we have going on in today's society in forms of race, class, resistance and current protest movements.

Unfortunately, working conditions for ‘wetback’ women in the borderland between the United States and Mexico were absolutely different from the way Alejandra Martinez supposed. Rosas discusses the consequences the Bracero Programs in Mexican which involved the separation of families, married women transformation into

The concepts of U.S- Mexican border, and boarders in general, is the main focus of author Gloria Anzalúda in her publication “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.” In some ways, this book is an autobiography that is written in a stream of consciousness with intertextual poems, songs, and stories. By using such techniques, Anzalúda is able to stress different aspects of living in a ‘borderland’ and also how the role expected of women is extensive and interconnected with the Catholic Church and Mexican cultural norms. In “Signs Preceding the End of the World,” a novel by Yuri Herrera, the main character, a young girl by the name of Makina, who defies the many of the general accepted behaviors for women in Mexico. The entire story revolves around her journey across the United States and Mexican border to find her brother who had gone over many years ago. In her quest she encounters gangsters, smugglers, and law enforcement, all the while leaving behind her life in Mexico. In this paper, I will explain how Makina, as a young woman from Mexico, engages with and contests the gender expectations demonstrated in Anzalúda’s text through the relationships with her boyfriend(s), entering into the places of the gangs, and her behavior towards the people she encounters along her journey.

In addition, another group of women with different circumstances is the Mexican American woman and in this article written by Enriqueta Longaues and Vasquez. They talk about a particular Latin woman called Chicana and La Raza. They state how Chicana women have a strong role but at the same time have a silent one. The continue on with the article describing the dependent on the men and when their husband are in a sense successful become very dependent but when they husbands are not instead of fighting the real problem, the husband instead takes it out on the family. This is common in the city.

From an award winning novelist Reyna Grande, an eye-opening memoir about life before and after illegally emigrating from Mexico to the United States. After Reyna Grande’s father leaves his wife and three children behind in a village in Mexico to take the dangerous journey to “El Otro Lado” or America the family’s life is turned upside down. He promised to soon return to the village with enough money to build them a dream home. However, the promise became harder and harder to believe after months of being gone turned into years. Another obstacle is thrown at the family as he asked his wife to join him, forcing Reyna and her two older siblings Mago and Carlos into the household of their malicious grandmother.

In this paper I will summarize “Sexuality and Ritual: Indigenous Women Recreating Their Identities in Contemporary Mexico” by Vara. Vara is describing her life and how in her culture it has been difficult for woman to have their own identities, because everything is dictated by men and for men. Her struggles are what led to the community of what it is today. She states, “It made me seek, research, question, in a word, investigate, in many other words, attempt to know why there was such limited and under-valued participation of women in some of the Tepoztlan’s community rituals” (Vara, 177). She is very descriptive about the rituals and challenges she faced and how was it that she overcame those challenges and now in Tepoztlan there are more opportunities for women, that in the past it only used to be for men.