Summary Of The Virgin Of Guadalupe

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.

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.

Ramon Gutierrez’s When Jesus Came, The Corn Mothers Went Away is an exploration of the merging of Spanish, Franciscan and Pueblo Indian cultures throughout Spain's “frontier” in its colonial American empire before Anglo contact. Gutierrez builds a foundation for his analysis by discussing Pueblo Indian life prior to outside contact, Franciscan theology, and the class structure of Spanish communities in each of its respective book sections. He examines meanings of the cultural interactions of gift exchange, ownership, trade, sexual rights, labor, kinship, social status, religious beliefs, and honor among many others using marriage as a window. His interpretation of the complex cultural meanings of marriage illustrates the ways in which the

One of the most important and controversial figures in Mexican history and literature is La Malinche. La Malinche, also known as Dona Marina, Malintzin Tenepal or Malinalli, played a significant role in the Spanish Conquest as translator and political mediator to Hernàn Cortèz. Although her importance in the conquest is undeniable, her depiction in literature and as a woman have been up for debate and the interpretations of her have influenced Mexican feminism. The two well-known interpretations of Malinche’s story are polarized interpretations of the historical figure and

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.

The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez by John Rechy delves into the life of Amalia Gomez; a Mexican-American woman living in a poor rural area of Hollywood. The structure of her family is falling apart due to conflict between the characters and Amalia’s lack of involvement in their lives. Her youngest son Juan is a male prostitute known as a “maricÓn”, her daughter Gloria is falling dangerously close to following in Amalia’s footsteps, and her oldest son Manny although well intentioned starts to clone his father’s criminal tendencies even though he has no recollections of his father. Amalia’s selective perspective also leads to conflict within herself since she is content not knowing the truth as long as the false reality fits her ideal

In history, women had no value and were viewed as men’s property, yet women were essential to the conquest. In Castillo’s “Baptizing Tlaxcalan Women”, women were given away to the Spaniards as an alliance to become “brothers”; thereafter, women were not mentioned. Castillo explains how the natives wanted to please the Spaniards and “wish to give” them their daughters to marry. Women were given away to the Spaniards as objects with no significance. We can conclude that both Spaniards and Natives were violating women’s rights and discriminating them. In result of the union between indigenous women and Spanish men, the Spanish questioned and attempted to manipulate the Indians. The Spaniards intention of spiritual conquest is evident when they use the women as a bribe to convert the natives into Christianity. The Spanish men warned the Indians that if they continued practicing their religion and human sacrifice they would go to hell, but if they converted to the belief in one God they would go to heaven. However, the natives asked for acceptance and that the Spaniards desire of converting them would take time. In return, the

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 Virgin of Guadalupe is a syncretic figure between the Spanish and Indian cultures because, for one, the Virgin of Guadalupe is the symbolic mother, which rest between humans and God, in both the Spanish and Indian cultures. When the Spanish came to America in efforts to try and conquer the Native Americans, but failed to do so in the end, they began converted many of the Indians into their religion, Catholicism. Since mostly all Native Americans were converted into Catholicism by the time the Spanish had left, due to the Pueblo Revolt, the Virgin of Guadalupe had become the Indians Native American Mother. With many of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s features, for instance, her brown skin representing characteristics of the natives. Just as the

The ideal Mexican people are defined as the mestizo. The mestizo was turned into a subject of popular consumption with the aim of spreading Mexican manliness symbolically representing the values and attitudes of patriarchal figures, and is often pictured with his idealistic female counterpart (Carter 55). Mexico City developed under a convergence and clashing of cultures existing in one of the most heavily populated and concentrated cities in the world. It is characterized by fifty-six ethnic groups, divided only by the history of their origin. The major groups that are referenced throughout the history of Mexico City, and the country as a whole, are known as mestizos, criollos, and Indians. These three prominent groups, derived from the colonial caste system, are defined as those of mixed native and European ancestry, the descendants of the Spaniards, and the indigenous people, respectively (Chong 45). It is the existence of this classification system that greatly perpetuates what has become the mythical identity of modern day Mexico City. The visual language of the national male and female, the mestizo couple, denotes the selective criteria for prototypical individuals in forming the idealized nation, validating the exclusion and judgements of a racial and ethnic nature against indigenous people (Carter 55). The early repression of Mexico’s indigenous people under the control of the criollos led to their exclusion from modern society, and the cultural domination of the

Central to this family–centered culture was the Roman Catholic Church, a trademark of these peoples’ Spanish heritage. Alas, though these immigrant pioneers were brothers and sisters of the one true apostolic church in a predominantly Protestant Texas, they were still just Mexicans in the eyes of the Anglo St. Mary’s Catholic parish. Duron still has trouble understanding the discrimination at the pews as she remembers that whenever she went to mass ”they let the Mexican people on one side and the white people on the other side”, segregating the congregation right down the middle. The Chavez siblings actually recalled that the priest of St. Mary’s would occasionally give the Mexicans mass in a basement “hidden in the bottom” of the church whenever all the Anglos had left.

In Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s novel, Desert Blood, religion is a dominant element throughout the unravelling of a mystery in the border towns of Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, United States. From specific characters to the general culture of the areas described, the pervasiveness of the influence of religion becomes prominent to the reader. The ways in which it is dispersed through the novel are complex and diverse; however, they all come together to give the reader a need of a dissociation of traditional theology from the modern woman. This is accomplished through Alba’s use of conflict between the modernistic Ivon’s beliefs and other traditional characters’, and through the reoccurring theme of acts of evil being close to symbols of religion. Two characters that embody the traditionalist side of religion are Ivon’s mother, Lydia, and Father Francis, a local priest.

The Virgin is supposed to make them feel ashamed of anything that is Indian and to instead embrace the superior god and practices of European religion. Any sort of religious practices involving native gods are said to be evil, or of the devil and that practicing them will result in being sent to Hell. The threat of Hell is meant to encourage the Chicana/Chicano culture into rejecting all of the ideals and mythology that the Indian part of them identifies with. Gloria Anzaldúa talks about a spiritual experience that she had with a snake crossing her path in a forest, and how it “spoke” to her and that despite the feeling of that experience, she rejected the experience as “real” and used her white rationality to tell her that it was nothing but superstition (Anzaldúa, 36). This was later used as an example of how Chicanas have had their realities split into two forms; the india and the mestiza and how modern society expects them to reject the india part of

Throughout the 1900s there was high tension between the church and Mexico because the government did not highly favor religion. More specifically, Catholicism. Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory” is a novel based in the mid-1940s and captures the life of a priest on the run. A mysterious whiskey priest turns Mexico upside down as priests and the Roman Catholic during this time were despised. Graham Greene’s powerful novel is not only a story. Its basis in a historic time for Mexico and their religion makes applying the critical theory of new historicism beneficial in understanding the story as a whole.

‘Then you know my belief as to the direction and power of the storm, correct? Did you know at Fatima, The Mother of God stopped the pouring rains and stood before the sun? That’s why I have faith the storm is under God’s control. And despite your misgivings of my daughter, I know of her innocence. After all, am I not her mother?”