Life In The Age Of The Mimis By Judith Ortiz

In “The Semplica-Girl Diaries”, George Saunders makes an important statement about the role of materialism in the American Dream, and how this materialism may not be the key to happiness many believe it to be. Saunders tells of a middle class family that strives to meet the standards of their peers and find a happier life. The father, who acts as the narrator, believes that acquiring and spending money on material objects, specifically the Semplica Girls, will improve the family’s life by improving how the family’s financial situation appears to others. The father’s primary values are that wealth and social standing are crucial to attaining the good life, and he believes the purchase of the Semplica Girls will fulfill these values. However, it is clear from the family’s ultimate situation and the disapproval of the mother’s successful father, that the narrator’s beliefs are misguided and potentially damaging to the family.

In the first story “Life in the Age of the Mimis” Martinez explains to the reader that his hispanic sisters try to give up their culture and tradition to become valley girls. The author shows the reader that pretending can create delusions that can make one not themselves. In my own experience trying to fit in with people that don’t really get along with your true self is not a real friendship. For example, Martinez tells the reader “Marge and Mare made a conscious decision that they would be rich and white, even if their family wasn’t”(Page

Not keeping in touch with your cultural can make you feel lost because it is part of your ethnic background. It makes you feel like you just do not belong. Leticia Salais’s “Saying Adios to Spanglish” published 2007, Salais chose not to speak her native language in public because she was embarrassed by it and related it to poverty. Salais went to great lengths to hide her native language and culture from the public for professional gain not realizing that her native language and culture connects her to her ethnic background.

The novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez, illustrates these challenges. Throughout the novel, we see how different aspects of culture shock impact the Garcia family. In this essay I will discuss how particular events change each family member’s Dominican cultural values and identity.

One of the main sources of tension in How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, written by Julia Alvarez, are the sisters search for a personal identity among contrasting cultures. Many of the characters felt pressure from two sources, the patriarchal culture that promotes traditional gender roles and society of nineteen-sixties and seventies America. Dominican tradition heavily enforces the patriarchal family and leaves little room for female empowerment or individuality, whereas in the United States, the sixties and seventies were times of increasingly liberal views and a rise in feminist ideals. This conflict shaped the identities of the characters in Alvarez’s novel and often tore the characters apart for one another.

In "Response to Executive Order 9066" by Dwight Okita, and "Mericans" by Sandra Cisneros, both works resonate a theme of race barriers and discrimination. The first work is a poem written from the perspective of a Japanese girl that is bring sent to a relocation center. The latter work is a story written by a Mexican girl that is having some difficulties identifying with her culture. Although both stories are written in different contexts and scenarios, they both share themes of identity, discrimination, and the innocence of children.

Everyone knows that poverty can lead to feelings of shame and humiliation, but what many people don’t realize is that sometimes overwhelming feelings of shame and humiliation lead to poverty. In her article “In the Search of Identity in Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street,” Maria de Valdes goes as far as to refer to shame and poverty as a “syndrome” because she believes they’re so closely associated. “It is a closed circle,” Valdes asserts. “You are poor because you are an outsider without education; you try to get an education, but you can’t take the contrastive evidence of poverty and ‘it keeps you down.’” In other words, poverty and shame are an endless cycle because a person will be ashamed to be impoverished, but won’t be able to move up because shame will always hold them back. This can be seen in Esperanza’s mother, who didn’t finish school because she was too ashamed that she didn’t have nice clothes like the other girls. “Shame is a bad thing, you know,” she warns Esperanza. “It keeps you down” (91). Shame kept her down by preventing her from finishing school, and in turn her lack of education kept her from pursuing her dreams. Instead, she settled into the housewife life, which she still regrets: “I could’ve been somebody, you know” (91). She says it sadly, like she’s mourning the loss of what

“The Myth of the Latin Women” was writing by Judith Ortiz Cofer, a women born in Puerto Rico. Ortiz is a person who seems really Passionate about this specific subject. “The Myth of the Latin Women” points out the many stereotypes Latin women go through in their day to day lives. The things that upsets Ortiz is that there are so many people who are not a Latin background that don’t realize the importance of this issue. The main purpose of “The Myth of the Latin Women” is to get people to understand that their words will hurt someone and Ortiz convey this throughout the essay with the use of logos, ethos and pathos.

Traditions and old teachings are essential to Native American culture; however growing up in the modern west creates a distance and ignorance about one’s identity. In the beginning, the narrator is in the hospital while as his father lies on his death bed, when he than encounters fellow Native Americans. One of these men talks about an elderly Indian Scholar who paradoxically discussed identity, “She had taken nostalgia as her false idol-her thin blanket-and it was murdering her” (6). The nostalgia represents the old Native American ways. The woman can’t seem to let go of the past, which in turn creates confusion for the man to why she can’t let it go because she was lecturing “…separate indigenous literary identity which was ironic considering that she was speaking English in a room full of white professors”(6). The man’s ignorance with the elderly woman’s message creates a further cultural identity struggle. Once more in the hospital, the narrator talks to another Native American man who similarly feels a divide with his culture. “The Indian world is filled with charlatan, men and women who pretend…”

In “How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents” by Julia Alvarez, It’s shown how being engulfed into a new culture can cause people to struggle with keeping their own culture alive because they are around so many people that are living the American culture. Even though there are so many different races and religions in America, we all as Americans know how things work around here, therefore, it can be tough for a different culture to live out their own ways in such a mixed country. It’s impossible to adjust to a culture without changing and being exposed to cultural discrimination.

Ortiz-Cofer’s essay reveals that her insecurities causes herself to envy others. The toga, she is forced to wear, is a perfect example of her self-doubt making her jealous: “I felt foolish in my awkwardly draped sheet… my mother had no great skill as a seamstress…. Other Roman ladies [emerged]… looking authentic in sheets… that folded over their bodies like the garments on a statue by Michaelangelo. How was it that I always got it just slightly wrong, and worse” (14). The way the author describes her mother proves that she blames her mother for making her look different from the others and because of this she is insecure and becomes envious of the other girls. The girls make her feel foolish and insecure. Her feelings of insecurity exaggerates

In the story, Cisneros the author shows that these two young ladies shopping at flea markets for Barbie dolls, which shows that they are part of the lower class. “This and a dress invented from

Identity is at the core of Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, and Rhina Espiallat’s Where Horizons Go. All of these Diasporic literary works deals with the manner in which the characters negotiate their relationships between their current locations and their ancestral homelands. In each work the protagonists struggle to unionize there two parts of his/her identity, to bring together the ‘here’ (where they are now) and ‘there’ (their ancestral homeland).

The first generation contadini (p.3) (“southern peasants”) subsumed all of its energies beneath this guiding principle of the family, and derived great strength and satisfaction from it, but at the same time they passed on to their children and grandchildren 0 for whom this book is written – the conflicted psychology that comes from being suspended between two powerful and demanding cultures.

“She had no clothes, no jewels, nothing. And these were the only thing she loved: she felt that was made for them” (1). She comes from a poor family and she loves; she felt that she is one of the. She is jealous of others. This relates to the thesis because she thinks that her life is becoming good if she is rich women.