Cathy Queen Of Cats Racism Essay

Although Esperanza grew up in a very poverty stricken neighborhood, she didn’t let that define her as an adult and was able to be successful later on in life. Esperanza grew up in a place that was very looked down upon. On page 5, Esperanza was asked by a nun where she lived. After pointing to her house, the nun responded “You live there?” She was not only in an area that was clearly not nice, but she was also judged and she felt embarrassed about it. People who even just drove through her underprivileged neighborhood think of Esperanza and her neighbors as “dangerous. They think [they] will attack them with shiny knives. They are stupid people who got lost here by mistake” (18). This neighborhood wasn’t the type of place people wanted to be near or in. It was so run-down and such a seemingly threatening place, people would be scared just

It is something called stereotyping which is something everybody goes through, and it can be scary because what one person thinks can soon become the thoughts of a million others. They will believe that person because no one wants to disagree with the majority. It can cause a person to be singled out and left out of the group, and it’s obvious Esperanza is not going to let stereotyping get the best of her. The people around her are scared of her neighborhood because everyone there was brown or a different color than the rest of the streets. “Those who don’t know any better came into our neighborhood scared.”

In chapter twelve, Esperanza talks about the neighborhood she lives in, and how some people might see her neighborhood has being scary and dangerous. “All brown all around, we are safe. But watch us drive into a neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake and our car windows get rolled up tight and our eyes look straight (Cisneros 28). When a person is in the own neighborhood, they feel comfortable. When a person goes to a neighborhood that is not theirs, their guard is up, and they start to assay their surroundings. When they start analyze the area, usually stereotypes appear in the back of their minds. If they are in a predominantly African American or Mexican neighborhood, their

In Sandra Cisnero’s novella, The House on Mango Street, Esperanza sees the importance of learning about her sexuality as she is growing up from her childhood to adolescence. In the first vignette, “The Family of Little Feet,” Esperanza and her two other friends receive three pairs of “dancing shoes” which they all are excited about. They get the idea to put them on and walk around town showing off how beautiful the shoes are. They feel good and special in front of everyone up until Mr. Benny at the grocery store notices the girls and asks, “Your mother know you got shoes like that? Them are dangerous. You girls too young to be wearing shoes like that. Take them shoes off before I call the cops” he threatens (41). At first, Esperanza and her friends don’t pay attention to what Mr. Benny

The neighborhood is not exactly a pretty place as Esperanza describes it. She says, “here there is too much sadness and not enough sky. Butterflies too are few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful” (39). In the one year of Esperanza’s life that this book covers, she is raped, abused, and sees the death of the only person who would listen to her poetry- “Her name was Aunt Lupe and she was beautiful like [her] mother” (70). Her discontent with the neighborhood surrounding the house on Mango Street and the rough times that she experienced caused her to want to move away from

Cathy, a non-Latino girl, is the first person to befriend Esperanza on Mango Street. This quote reflects the racism theme of this novel because Cathy notes that her family is moving away because they blame the Latinos for making their neighborhood bad (the neighborhood was probably more Caucasian in the past). It also shows the way other cultures look down on the Latino people even though everyone living on Mango Street is on practically the same economic/social status.

In “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria,” Judith Ortiz Cofer illustrates several hardships she suffered due to the universal, misleading stereotypes propagated by the media. Cofer demonstrates various stereotypes that Latin women are subjected to, such as an experience in which she was regarded as a waitress at a California restaurant, and “the Hispanic woman as the ‘Hot Tamale’ or sexual firebrand” (63).She also states that she was taught to act like a woman when she was a teenager and encouraged to dress maturely, which made her peers laughed at her (64). At the end of the article, Cofer concludes that she hopes to change the

In all aspects of life, women are pressured to be someone they are not. They are put in situations that force them to chose a path of life. In “The House on Mango Street”, Esperanza is forced to think about leaving Mango Street in the future, because she is surrounded by women who are pushing her to become an adult.

Esperanza is new to the neighborhood, and was never proud of her previous houses, but the negative intonation that the nun uses on her makes her feel like she is being judged, not on who she is, but what her family can afford. There is the place Esperanza now has to call home and the degrading presumption that the neighborhood already has causes her to accept that she can’t change her image without money and let her personality shine through. She seems to accept her label as poor in the story, “A Rice Sandwich”, where she believes the special, also known as rich, kids get to eat in the canteen and she wants to be part of that narrative, so she begs her mother for three days, to write her a note to allow her eat in the canteen. When she couldn’t endure her daughter’s nagging anymore, she complied. Thinking this would be enough affirmation, Esperanza went to school the next with the note and stood in the line with the other kids. She wasn’t recognized by the nun who checks the list, and has to face Sister Superior, who claims that she doesn’t live far enough to stay at school and asks Esperanza to show where her house is. “That one? She said, pointing to a row of ugly three -flats, the ones even the raggedy men are ashamed to go into. Yes, I nodded even though I knew that wasn’t my house,”(45). Esperanza was compared to the most raggedy men, and had to accept

The first time Esperanza makes an appearance in the book, she is younger and easily manipulated, especially by her friends. Esperanza meets a girl named Cathy, a snobby girl that lived on Mango Street. When Cathy tells Esperanza “Okay, I’ll be your friend. But only until next Tuesday. That’s when we move away.” Then as if she forgot I had just moved in, she says the neighborhood is getting bad” (13) This was a racist statement towards Esperanza and her family, something she doesn’t quite understand yet because Esperanza thinks Cathy forgot they moved in, yet she was actually being racist. This is the first time Esperanza is exposed to racism in the book, therefore exposing her to the outside world. Later in the book, Esperanza meets Sally, a beautiful girl with shiny black hair, that all she seemingly just wants is to love, and Esperanza wants to be just like her. “I like your black coat and the shoes you wear, where did you get them? I want to buy shoes just like yours.” (82) Sally and Esperanza become friends, but later in the story, in the chapter Red Clowns, Esperanza is put in a dangerous situation where Sally walks off

“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

This quote intrigues me because it makes me connect to the author about life today. In this chapter Cathy shows who the truly is as a person. She thinks that just because Rachel and Lucy “smell” or look different than she does that Esperanza should not be friends with them. She does this quite often. I can infer this because of the author’s use of a simile. Cathy makes fun of her neighbors trying to act like she is better than them in a way. However, I think this quote shows Esperanzas true self. No matter what Cathy says about Rachel and Lucy, she likes them and no matter what they look like, she wants to be friends with them. This is a lot like today's society. There are some people who judge people on their looks, but, like Esperanza, there

Esperanza has hopes far beyond the stereotypical expectations of Chicanos within society at the time but her status and mindset does not match those goals. As far as her status, she is apart of the lower class class family who were dreamers and fed unrealistic concepts into their children minds of one day having this “dream” house but in all actuality, they knew it would never happen. For example, on page 4, Esperanza

     In The House on Mango Street, we see how the youth struggled with the discrimination being pushed on them by Whites. Esperanza describes how they lived in such a poverty-stricken area of the city, and did not interact with the Whites. She talks about how the Whites saw Mexicans as bad people who committed crimes. Esperanza shows how personal identity for Mexicans was made

“The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe is one of Poe’s greatest literary works that embodies his signature themes of death, violence, and darkness. Poe’s main character begins his narration of his horrible wrongdoings regarding them as a “series of mere household events” (Poe 705). However, this is where Poe’s satire and irony begins and the story progresses to show the deranged mindset of this character as he tries to justify his actions. As the main character proceeds to rationalize his crime, Poe is able to convey a sense of irony through his use of foreshadowing, metaphors and symbolism.