The Juarez Murders

“ I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” [p.119] In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, this issue is mentioned various times. There are three mockingbirds, Mayella Ewell, Boo Radley and Tom Robinson.

She is willing to stand up to her spouse in order to make sure there are no complications during the birth of her second child. She is slowly realizing what it is to be feminist due to the fact that she is willing to try anything to convince Juan Pedro. Although she agrees to lie about her bruises saying “she fell down the front steps” (Cisneros, 226), it is a step in the right direction to feminism. Ultimately, the visit to the doctor allows her to receive help. She is given a chance to escape. She accepts the opportunity as she begins to find out that she no longer has to take the abuse from Juan Pedro.

The chapter “Maricela,” in Paul Fleischman’s novel Seedfolks, illustrates how being a pregnant teenager could make a girl hate her life. Firstly, Maricela’s story takes place in a vacant lot, on Gibb Street, in East Cleveland, Ohio. The chapter presents Maricela, who is in a group for troubled, pregnant teens. The group is run by a woman named Penny. The beginning problem is that Maricela is a 16-year-old, Mexican, pregnant girl who hates her life and wishes her baby would die. The first rising action is Maricela‘s parents wanting her to have her baby. The next rising action is Maricela never getting invited to parties or asked out on dates. The third rising action is Maricela being forced by Penny to work in the garden. The final rising action

Chapter 55 is named "Women behind the Labels: Worker Testimonies from Central America" and includes an interview conducted by Marion Traub-Werner with a former maquile worker, Marie Meja (Hobbs and Rice 552). A maquile is a person who works in a maquila which is a factory that "assembles goods for export" (551). This chapter retells Marie's experiences working as a child labourer, teenage domestic worker, and a maquile worker (553). Marie discusses her experiences being a domestic servant in four houses where she received a range of treatment, pay, and both verbal and physical assault. Following her fourth house, after being sent to jail out of the spite of her señora Marie chose to transition into working as a food vendor and eventually as a maquile where she was exposed to further verbal abuse, unjust pay and work hours, and eventually parasites

On the night of January 19,1991 a murder occurred in Laredo, Texas. The Laredo Police made a gruesome discovery in a luxurious home where they discovered three individuals brutually murdered in their sleep. The three involved in coercing this murder were Miguel Angel Martinez, Miguel Venegas, and Milo Flores. Milo, son of an intellectual City Judge, Manuel Flores was a heavy user of drugs and influenced Martinez to try them. Moreover, Milo and Venegas were into drugs and satanism which played a significant role in the murder they committed. One day, the three individuals partied at Milo’s house where there was drugs and alcohol involved. Suddenly, Milo comes up with an idea to vandalize a house and gets an ax and two knives from his home. Milo

Macaria’s Daughter, by Americo Paredes, is a murderous tale of male dominance and female virtue where there is a sacrifice between an altar of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the marriage bed of two distinct cultures. This story is set in south Texas and surprises the reader with the murder of a beautiful young woman named Marcela. She is found in the bedroom, lying on the floor in a pool of blood, 30 to 40 knife stabs decorate her breasts, while the local men gaze indifferently on her lifeless body. Her husband, Tony, who is at the scene, hands over the knife to the local authorities, the Texan police, who are dressed in tall, spiffy Stetson hats.

A life in the city of Seguin, Texas was not as easy as Cleofilas, the protagonist of the story thought it would be. The author, Cisneros describes the life women went through as a Latino wife through Cleofilas. Luckily, Cisneros is a Mexican-American herself and had provided the opportunity to see what life is like from two window of the different cultures. Also, it allowed her to write the story from a woman’s point of view, painting a vision of the types of problems many women went through as a Latino housewife. This allows readers to analyze the characters and events using a feminist critical view. In the short story “Women Hollering Creek” Sandra Cineros portrays the theme of expectation versus reality not only through cleofilas’s thoughts but also through her marriage and television in order to display how the hardship of women in a patriarchal society can destroy a woman’s life.

In the annual household survey, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics earlier this year, it was reported that 84 out of 100 incidents of rape or sexual misconduct were reported by women (FiveThirtyEight). In most cases, when women immigrate to the United States they are either alone or have paid a great deal of money to have a smuggler help them on their journey to reach the US and Mexico border, which means that they are in a situation where they are very vulnerable, which can lead to them getting raped, or even murdered. Throughout the novel “Enrique’s Journey”, Nazario writes about how Enrique witnessed the rape of a seventeen-year-old girl named Wendy while heading to America. She too was immigrating when Chiapas, a gang group, took her. “‘If you scream,’ he says, ‘we cut you to bits.’ Then he rapes her.” (97). Having Nazario write about the gang rape of a young woman immigrating to America has a very powerful effect on the reader because it shows the trauma that thousands of women go through when looking for a better

Cleofilas in “Woman Hollering Creek” and Sandra in “His Story” are influenced by the women they meet or hear about in their communities. Sandra describes from her father’s perspective the status of women in their family. It is clear her father is upset that his only daughter is unmarried and is the only child of his six children to leave home. The father predicts the consequences of her behavior by recalling the female relatives whose lives ended badly because they went against the norms. “For instance,/ my father explains,/ in the Mexican papers/ a girl with both my names/ was arrested for audacious crimes that began by disobeying fathers” (Cisneros, “His Story”). The women in the stories are those who disgraced the family in one way or another. Sandra does not let the stories stifle her ambitions, even though they were meant to warn her. Just

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel is a powerful novel that serves as a great introductory guide to the Latin-American culture. The novel consists of primarily female characters, the De La Garza family, where each one portrays a female stereotype, or perhaps their role in the society. The setting of the story takes place during arise of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, which helps to further distinguish the roles of the women and how they go about living their everyday life. Like Water for Chocolate can be looked at as a story about two women, a daughter and a mother, Tita and Elena De La Garza. Tita, our protagonist, struggles against her mothers’ tradition, to “serve” her until the day she dies, without having a life of her own.

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

Women’s Escape into Misery Women’s need for male support and their husband’s constant degradation of them was a recurring theme in the book House on Mango Street. Many of Esperanza’s stories were about women’s dreams of marrying, the perfect husband and having the perfect family and home. Sally, Rafaela, and Minerva are women who gave me the impression of [damsel’s in distress].CLICHÉ, it’s ok though. It’s relevant They wished for a man to sweep them of their feet and rescue them from their present misery. These characters are inspiring and strong but they are unable to escape the repression of the surrounding environment. *Cisneros presents a rigid world in which they lived in, and left them no other hope but to get married.

The Dominican realizes that Marie has buried a dead baby and reports her to the authority, warning “You kill the child and keep it in your room.” Marie is taken to he authorities with false allegations that she has killed the baby for her evil reasons. He accuses, “You eat little children who haven’t even had time to earn their souls” (99). Marie notes after the Dominican took her away, “We made a pretty picture standing there. Rose, me and him. Between the pool and the gardenias, waiting for the law” (100). The new government showed less justice especially when it comes to women. Likewise, Josephine declares woman life in Haiti, “By the end of the 1915 occupation, the police in the city really knew how to hold human beings trapped in cages, even women like Manman who was accused of having wings on flame” (35). Women were not empowered as they were treated with

Living in Mexico throughout her teen years was very rough. Unlike other teenagers where their parents constantly provide for their children, Marisela’s life was a lot different than the usual parent- child relationship. She lived with her Abuela ( Grandma) Lupe, along with her 3 brothers and sister. She constantly had to take care of her brothers and sister at such a young age, that she became the mother-like figure of the

Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel explains women’s roles in northern Mexico during the turn of the nineteenth century. The novel takes place in northern Mexico on a family ranch where many family traditions are carried out. Also, the novel describes some of the typical foods that were prepared and fiestas that were celebrated in the Mexican culture around this time. However, the novel mainly focuses on the roles of females in Mexican society at that time. The novel goes beyond explaining women’s roles and also explains what took place in the Mexican family. Throughout the novel, readers learn the role of mothers, the conflict between personal desires and tradition, and typical foods, celebrations, and family traditions that were