Essay about The Mother Tongue by Demetria Martinez

Luz, the neighbor of Nelson’s family, in Daniel Alarcon’s “Second Lives,” had endured a change in personality over the years. She and her husband, Alejandro, were described as “the rare neighborhood couple with no kids, possessing no concept of the kinds of things children might like” (68). She loved to entertain the neighbor boys, Francisco and Nelson, but all of that changed when her husband left her for a woman ten years her senior. She hid herself away in her house out of shame, and was embarrassed to speak to any of the other neighbors. To the reader, she might seem like a paranoid and untrusting older lady, but upon further analysis, it is clear that Luz’s changing personality is the product of the circumstances of her past.

The author creates a mood of being irritating by her “…awful grandmother…” and brothers “…Alfredito and Enrique…” who are occupied playing outside as “… a B-Fifty-two bomber…” [paragraph 5] and her grandmother with a “… long, long list of relatives … names of the dead and the living into one long prayer…” [paragraph 10]. Including, the imagery provided in the short story described the character’s actions by watching her grandmother pray while she counts her grandmother’s mustache hairs. Later, an unknown lady and man start talking to her brother asking if she could take a picture, than judging by their looks, they assume they do not speak English but only

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.

Imagine living in a country where you know you could die at any moment but don’t know how much longer till it happens. That was how much of the population of El Salvador used to feel when the government could not control the big coffee corporations. These out of control corporations, highly feared that the people would want to revolt against them so they hired murderers to kill innocent people to spread fear in the minds of the people of El Salvador. Fear, hate, and sorrow were the common feelings felt by the poor and innocent major population of El Salvador caused by the evil wrongdoings of the government during October 1979 – 16 January 1992. This is how the main character, Jose Luis, of the novel “Mother Tongue” by Demetria Martinez, felt before escaping his beautiful yet over constantly dangerous country, which depended on its cash crop, coffee beans to sell on a foreign market as the country’s main income. However, following the stock-market crash of 1929, a drop in coffee prices became apparent and affected everyone in El Salvador, but the poor especially. Making things worse, the glorious United States was funding the men whom were doing all the innocent killings with more weapons and money to increase their military power. So for Jose Luis the safe haven that he had escaped to was also blatantly funding the war that was killing so many innocent people he knew and had forced him to escape for his own safety. With nowhere else to go in order to find safety the United

Based on Cisneros’ works of literature, gender roles in a Hispanic culture revolves around patriarchal rule. The repercussions of a patriarchal rule includes the limitations of female liberation and development. Cleofilas’ abusive situation exemplifies the limitations of her independence and development as she can not make her own decisions and has to solely depend on her husband. This situation is illustrated when Cleofilas explains that the towns are “built so that you have to depend on husbands... You can drive only if you’re rich enough to own and drive an own car. There is no place to go” (Cisneros 628). Cleofilas reveals that men are the dominant gender and have more authority, and that women are compelled to depend on them in her society. It is an exceptionally rare case that a woman can afford her own car, for the men usually control the finances in a household. Additionally, Cleofilas has nowhere to seek refuge from her husband. Although she yearns to return to her father’s home, she decides not to due to the social standards imposed on her. In her society, the act of returning home after marriage is socially unacceptable. She understands that her family will be viewed in a negative light if she were to return home, as seen when Cleofilas refers to her town as a “town of gossips” (627). Similar to other men in the society, Juan Pedro’s authority is shown through his abuse. Cleofilas recalls, “He slapped her once, and then again, and again; until the lip split and bled an orchid of blood” (626).

Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban tells the story about three generations of a Cuban family and their different views provoked by the Cuban revolution. Though part of the same family, an outsider might classify them as adversaries judging by relationships between one another, the exiled family members, and the differentiations between political views. Although all of these central themes reoccur over and over throughout the narrative, family relationships lie at the heart of the tale. The relationships between these Cuban family members are for the most part ruptured by any or a combination of the above themes.

Being a foreign born girl that belongs to a migrant can cause a hindrance on her growth, attitude, and personality. In the novel Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena Maria Viramontes, Estrella appears to be rather frustrated until she accepts her battles with help from Perfecto Flores to gain self-confidence and a positive attitude. Viramontes utilizes an abundance of metaphors and specific details to convincingly persuade the reader that the battles that Estrella had to face in her novel but is worth noting that Viramontes offers a variant tone in the development of Estrella’s character in her novel, Under the Feet of Jesus.

Culture is the way you act, react, and think, it is something that never stays the same but malleable. In Richard Rodriguez’s essay, “Blaxicans and other Reinvented Americans,” the author wrote about America combining cultures and how assimilation happens naturally to people even if the people do not know it.Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue” also examines how cultures are able to pass on and how people may use them for their future.In “Blaxicans and Other Reinvented Americans” and “ Mother Tongue”, both Richard Rodriguez and Amy Tan show that immigrants have helped shape the American culture by them interacting with on-coming immigrants and combining cultures and as a result, both sides leave with a new idea to combine the cultures or add on

“I see a minha mãe standing hand in hand with her little boy, my shoes jamming the pocket of her apron” (Morrison 4). The closed-class word “my” and the indefinite article “a” subtly propounds the emotional and geographic distance between Florens and her mother — a distance that paves our understanding of Florens’ character and the ways in which she is haunted by abandonment and expulsion from her maternal homespace. This early alienation is what shapes Florens’ character. What Florens doesn’t apprehend is that her mother’s choice to exile her is a protective gesture from Senhor D’Ortega’s sexual predation. Her mother is her savior in this scenario: “Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight. I knelt before him hoping for a miracle. He said yes. It was not a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human” (195).

Alvarez is always rooting for the underdog. She despises hierarchies and always imagines a world of equity and unity. She says happily, “everybody is part of la familia” (Heredia page 5). She is not a mother. Alvarez felt her childless life was a disgrace to her identity as a Latina. She pondered and questioned, “what does it mean to be a childless woman?” (5). That question induced her to an introspective state of mind. Consequently, she answered the questions she was seeking in her groundbreaking essay, “Imagining Motherhood.” Conversely, she did not get married until she was much older. Similarly, to her characters, she always felt out of place. She never had an attachment to any place or thing. The only attachment she had was to her own

For the following 3 months Miguel was meticulous about the life that Maria lived. They lived in their hometown, a ranch in Jalisco, Mexico. It was a woman’s task to prepare food for her husband and take it all the way to his work in the afternoon, but Miguel,

In Amy Tan's essay “Mother Tongue” she discussed the struggles she had to go through because her parents were considered non-bilingual since the way they spoke was considered not fluent. Tan discusses the tasks she did for her parents and states the struggles she went through because of it. If a person is not fluent it does not mean they are unknowledgeable or uneducated. There is a misconception that if people seem to not have the proper speech then it concludes that they do not understand the language, but that is not always the case. Just because they seem to not have the proper speech does not give people a reason to be belittling them. Tan uses education and family to discuss that the way a person speaks does not define

Mother Tongue by Amy Tan is about how the language we grow up affect us in some way throughout our lives. Only Daughter by Sandra Cisneros is about how being the only daughter in a family can affect our life. Both Amy Tan and Sandra Cisneros focus on how they wanted people to believe in them using repetition, tone and ethos. However, they both have a different impact on the audiences; in the way that they both stand up for their beliefs but in different ways. Reading “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan and “Only Daughter” by Sandra Cisneros the reader can feel how having someone so close that do not totally believe in your abilities can influence even your dreams in life.

In, Mother Tongue, an essay written by Amy Tan it shows the reader what her opinion of the English language is and how it shaped her as a person. Whether it was how she deciphered her test questions in her youth or how it impacted her thought process about everything that goes on in her day-to-day life. In addition Amy explains several social and socioeconomic problems that she has faced throughout her life.

In Amy Tan’s Mother Tongue, Amy described her experience of growing up in a Chinese immigrant family with broken English. In the essay Amy writes about her mother tells a story of a family matter back in China with incomprehensible English but she still considers it is easy to understand as she grew up listening to her mother’s English. She thinks that her experience of growing up in such limited language background influence her English speaking more than her peers. For example her understanding of logical class subjects like Math are much stronger than other kids. The author sees the perks of born and raised in such an environment but cannot help noticing public disrespect to people who speak limited English. Her mother as her closest example: she is scared to be disrespected for speaking broken English to her stockbroker, so she let Amy answer the phone. And the time when Amy gets answers immediately from the hospital but her mother endures disrespect and impatience because of limited English.