Analysis Of `` Rewriting Myth `` By Patricia Elise Nelson

Malintzin had an important role in the ancient history and colonization of Latin America. She would rise from just a simple servant girl and slave, to become one of the key factors of the Spanish colonization of the indigenous natives in the New World. She helped translate for the Spanish conquistadors and even Hernando Cortés himself. Malintzin’s interpreting skills would prove crucial in the dealings between Hernando Cortés and the Aztec emperor Montezuma. Camilla Townsend uses the story of Malintzin to display the conquest of Mexico in a different aspect and first person point of view.

Matthew Restall, a Professor of Latin American History, Women’s Studies, and Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. He also serves the Director of the university’s Latin Studies. Throughout “Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest,” he discusses many false truths that have been passed down through history. For instance, he discusses, “The Myth of Exceptional Men.” “The Myth of Spanish Army,” and “The Myth of Completion.” For the sake of time, I will discuss three myths that correlate with class lectures and serve as the topic of this paper, “The Myth of Exceptional Men,” “The Myth of the King’s Army,” and the “Myth of the White Conquistador.” It should be noted that Restall speaks to his audience assuring us that his “...his purpose is not to degenerate this technique of historical writing completely...Nor do I mean to create a narrative in which individual action is utterly subordinated to the larger structural forces and causes of social change.” (4). He states that his intentions are to react to more than just the works of Columbus, Pizzaro, and Cortez.

The mythical rewrite is necessary to the demands of rewriting ideological and cultural norms that manage the theoretical framework. In Chicana/o culture three female shapes, La Malinche, La Llorona, and La Virgen de Gudalupe, separate the cultural borders of female behavior. Gloria Anzaldua proclaims in the Borderlands/La Frontera,

In “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria,” the incidents on the bus, in the hotel, and at the poetry involved prejudice and stereotypical misconceptions of Puerto Rican women. While Cofer was on a bus trip to Oxford University, a man “broke into an Irish tenor’s rendition of “Maria” from West Side Story” (Cofer 103). This implies that Latinas dealt with people who automatically assume that a Latina’s name is “Maria” or “Evita” based on a fictional movie. While at a hotel with a colleague, a middle-aged man called Cofer an “Evita” and he “began shout-sing a ditty to the tune of “La Bamba”---except the lyrics were about a girl named Maria” (Cofer 107). Then Cofer realized that “[she] was just an Evita or a Maria: merely a character in his cartoon-populated universe” (107). The men that sung stereotypical songs viewed Cofer as a sexual object and referred to her as an image displayed by the media.

You can see how Maria’s El Salvador is empty of people, full only of romantic ideas. Jose Luis’s image of El Salvador, in contrast, totally invokes manufactured weapons; violence. Maria’s “self-projection elides Jose Luis’s difference” and illustrates “how easy it is for the North American characters, including the big-hearted María, to consume a sensationalized, romanticized, or demonized version of the Salvadoran or Chicana in their midst” (Lomas 2006, 361). Marta Caminero-Santangelo writes: “The main thrust of the narrative of Mother Tongue ... continually ... destabilize[s] the grounds for ... a fantasy of connectedness by emphasizing the ways in which [Maria’s] experience as a Mexican American and José Luis’s experiences as a Salvadoran have created fundamentally different subjects” (Caminero-Santangelo 2001, 198). Similarly, Dalia Kandiyoti points out how Maria’s interactions with José Luis present her false assumptions concerning the supposed “seamlessness of the Latino-Latin American connection” (Kandiyoti 2004, 422). So the continual misinterpretations of José Luis and who he really is and has been through on Maria’s part really show how very far away her experiences as a middle-class, U.S.-born Chicana are from those of her Salvadoran lover. This tension and resistance continues throughout their relationship.

In “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria” Cofer shows the reader that Latin women are misrepresented in society and in the media, using the rhetorical appeals ethos, logos and pathos as well as allusions to popular culture and personal experience.

Mestiza consciousness embraces Chicana’s Native American roots by using Aztec symbols like the Coatlicue, the indigenous mother, to replace colonial symbols, while also acknowledging the male dominated

The concept of a hero has been around for many generations, and the meaning of a hero is defined in ways people grasp its idea. A hero can be a person who has a superpower and is willing to make a personal sacrifice for the benefit of others or can be an ordinary everyday person who just wants to help people out of his or her own heart. Linda Seger’s article, “Creating the Myth,” tackles the idea of a “Hero 's Myth,” and shows the ten steps of how heroes are transformed from an ordinary person to the Savior. On the other hand, Robert B. Ray piece titled, “The Thematic Paradigm,” emphasizes that in modern films, it is either having an “Outlaw Hero or an Official Hero,” which he uses three stages to demonstrates how they are different each other in the way they perform in the society. Further, the article, “Out of Character: Wonder Woman’s Strength Is Her Compassion - What Happened?” by Stevie St. John, explains how Wonder Woman was viewed as a compassionate woman in the 1940s and 1950s, and in the 2000s she changes into a more violent person. In this essay, I argue that a hero is subjective, and is defined by the villain or event that they had to adapt to suddenly.

“Beautiful and Cruel” marks the beginning of Esperanza’s “own quiet war” against machismo (Hispanic culture powered by men). She refuses to neither tame herself nor wait for a husband, and this rebellion is reflected in her leaving the “table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate (Cisneros 89).” Cisneros gives Esperanza a self-empowered voice and a desire for personal possessions, thing that she can call her own: Esperanza’s “power is her own (Cisneros 89).” Cisneros discusses two important themes: maintaining one’s own power and challenging the cultural and social expectations one is supposed to fulfill. Esperanza’s mission to create her own identity is manifest by her decision to not “lay (her) neck on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain (Cisneros 88).” Cisneros’ rough language and violent images of self-bondage reveal the contempt with which Esperanza views many of her peers whose only goal is to become a wife. To learn how to guard her power

What is ironic is that although the Spanish felt that Mexico’s population had to be converted because they were uncivilized and inferior, "mestizaje, the product of racial interbreeding with Indian, black, and mixed-blood women," took place. As a result, Mexicans share a rich mestizo cultural heritage of Spanish, Indian, and African origins. By raping the uncivilized Other, the Spaniards were in turn making themselves uncivilized. Those women represented nothing more but the medium through which the Spanish could vent their sexual desires. This was a major problem that Mexican women had to encounter.

Sandra Cisneros’s short story “Never Marry a Mexican” deals heavily with the concept of myth in literature, more specifically the myth La Malinche, which focuses on women, and how their lives are spun in the shadows on men (Fitts). Myths help power some of the beliefs of entire cultures or civilizations. She gives the reader the mind of a Mexican-American woman who seems traitorous to her friends, family and people she is close to. This causes destruction in her path in the form of love, power, heartbreak, hatred, and an intent to do harm to another, which are themes of myth in literature. The unreliable narrator of this story was created in this story with the purpose to show her confusion and what coming from two completely different

The story illustrates the overlapping influences of women’s status and roles in Mexican culture, and the social institutions of family, religion, economics, education, and politics. In addition, issues of physical and mental/emotional health, social deviance and crime, and social and personal identity are

The roles of women are useful to historians because they provide an insight into the life experiences, cultures, thoughts, and every day life of a historical period. Similarly this essay will examine the roles of women, which provide insight into the Aztec civilization’s many strengths. The Aztec child bearer/warrior, priestess and sexual being will be analyzed to display that gender relations were complementary that produced equality. The midwife and weaver reveal that the Aztec’s specialization proved successful through fields like medicine and the market. Finally the Aztec daughter and mother will be examined to show that the Aztec’s had a strong socialization system established through education and the family. For these reasons

The situation of women in the pre-Columbian era was like any other culture because men had power. The woman lacked rights, equality and autonomy. Often, women were treated as an object. In the case of one of the most developed pre-Columbian civilizations, the Aztecs, a situation occurred with the rights of women with Dona Marina, also known as the Malinche. She was a girl of the Aztec culture, who after a clash between tribes was surrender as a slave, because that was the tradition of those times. “Later, Malinche was again ceded as a slave, but this time to Hernan Cortes by the cacique of Tabasco, along with 19 other women, some pieces of another and a set of blankets” (Castillo, 2014). Afterwards, Hernan Cortes learned that Malinche spoke several languages and did not hesitate to use her as an interpreter in order to unite alliances with the indigenous peoples conquered by the Aztecs, thus facilitating the conquest of the empire.

Anachronologically deemed a feminist for her writings, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz stood in the New World as a defiant, female Catholic. Through her work, she displays her head-strong character, illuminating the hypocrisy that was flourishing in patriarchal Mexico while simultaneously creating metaphors that clearly showed how she viewed her situation. Moreover, through extenstive allusions, she displays her aptitude, proving that she had one true love in life: the love for learning. Perhaps doomed from the start because of her sex, any time Sor Juana delved into her passion she was bound to hear insolence from a traditional member of society, namely the Bishop of Puebla,