Literature on Latina Women and Sexism

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This paper describes the comprehensive analysis of the Latino problems that originated from sexism. In this paper, racial discrimination has been defined in terms of Latino literature presented in the form of poetry and fiction. The Mexican world was not welcomed in the US, and they encountered various challenges to survive in that very society after their immigration. In order to counter various threats produced by the white, many of the Latino women decided to adopt writing so as to raise their voices in the world of justice and to preserve their rights in the unilateral world. Various reasons were also indicated behind this whole scenario that was also tried to be alleviated from their social values. The most prominent and significant aspect of this literature was that it was always on the urge to diagnose social diseases in their own society so that they may try to rectify them and live a quality life.

The major portion of this paper is occupied by the comparative analysis of the Latino literature as produced by Cisneros and Anzaldua & Moraga. In this analysis, all challenges were described that were paved in the way of new immigrant Mexicans. Both products translate their condemnation against sexism and the prejudiced attitude of women of color. The other vivid thing in both the books was the identification of the dodging nature of men, and loyalty existed more in females than males. Similarly, Anna Castillo was another famous writer who instigated the feminine movements through her poetry and fiction. She was also a level-headed personality among Latino women writers because she managed to acknowledge the whole American society of Latino’s existence. The whole paper presents a comprehensive analysis of sexism and racial discrimination implemented against Latinos.

In their book ‘This Bridge Called My Back,’ Moraga and Anzaldua being the Latino Women, have presented a feeling of deprivation that they felt due to a hierarchy of sexism cherished mainly by the white women. Being literary personalities, they faced aggressive criticism during the production of literature by the same regime. The whole book presents the pathetic condition of Latino Women Writers who lost their confidence because of massive condemnation. It has also claimed in this book during a letter-writing to third world women writers that they faced potential challenges in contrast to the white women, though having almost the same calibers. In that letter, Anzaldua had called these dangers as obstacles, but not yet satisfied due to the intensive nature of these hindrances for which she further argued that the writer women like her had no right to deal with these dangers and they had to move along with them with no sense of freedom. She has also stated that in the world of literature, the woman of color passing through an embryonic phase of its societal development could not survive both in the white male mainstream world and in the white women’s feminist world. However, this trend was gradually changing with the emergence of the modern world. According to her views, that world was also almost void of the lesbian of color. She protested against their attitude towards their world in a much rigorous way because she stated that their rhetoric was completely ineffective for the white women. The reason behind this bias was that the white women did not want to admit the existence of Latino women in the white world. Even the educational institutes were telling the story of absolute racial discrimination against which Anzaldua fought by gaining excellence in English to expose the real faces of racist teachers (Moraga & Anzaldua 165).

The educational system, according to her, was so jaundiced that the Mexican students were taken as ill-mannered and non-responsive for healthy communication. Also, Spanish was not explained in grade schools. In order to compensate for this deficiency, Moraga wrote her poems in both English as well as Spanish, but at the same time, she was feeling this act as a swindle. In her poem, she has presented the same feeling and claimed that she thought of herself as obsessed with a foreign language and felt a serious gap between her and her own world. She aroused on herself and other women writers from North American backgrounds to be among writers’ class in such an unfavorable environment. Here, she has also presented the real approach of the white about them by describing the wording of the white man, which was:

‘Perhaps if you scrape the dark off your face. Maybe if you bleach your bones, stop speaking in tongues, stop writing left-handed. Don’t cultivate your colored skins nor tongues of fire if you want to make it in a right-handed corner’ (Moraga & Anzaldua 166).

Anzaldua proposed some solutions for combating such types of racial discrimination exercised by the white against colored women that included earning university degrees, adoption of male-women behavior, and abandonment of lesbian nature. In the literary world, they were supposed to maintain the gap so as to become a professional writer. She has also proclaimed that the future of her sister-writers was in danger, in spite of being well-acquainted with the literary knowledge. She also stated the potency of hurdles caused due to prejudiced behavior of the white culture, and they could not surrender even to the evolution of feminism, which showed their rude nature. She also argued that she, belonging to Third World, would be the only writer surviving in the professional writers’ regime (Moraga & Anzaldua 167).

While addressing to a crowd of white feminist writers, Luisah Teish defined Third World women in such words:

‘If you are not caught in the maze that (we) are in, it’s very difficult to explain to you the hours in the day we do not have. And the hours that we do not have are hours that are translated into survival skills and money. And when one of those hours is taken away, it means an hour, not that we don’t have to lie back and stare at the ceiling or an hour that we don’t have to talk to a friend. For me, it’s a loaf of bread’.

Moraga, in her poem, has sketched her miserable family status of life and has also indicated their incompetence to cope with her social values. Following the theory of Naomi Littlebear about hazardous complacency, she decided to write to protect herself against this danger (Moraga & Anzaldua 168).

Describing her justification for writing, she has adored the phenomenon of writing because she believed that the profession of writing played a vital role in overcoming her complexes caused by her real world. She argued further that she attained those fundamentals of life that she could not achieve in such a biased society. The writing equipped her society with those moral values that her forefathers could not gain and were treated like aliens. This profession, according to her, has also produced bondage between her world and the other worlds. She has also indicated the issue of lack of concentration during writing, describing various reasons, including the body dodge, a cup of coffee, and sharpening of pencils. She has also devised a solution for that issue, which was the fixation of the body with holding a cigarette. Similarly, she also has been diagnosed eating as the main reason for disturbance during writing. Other reasons of distraction indicated by her were going for a walk and finding keys (Moraga & Anzaldua 169-70).

In her book ‘Woman Hollering Creek,’ Sandra Cisneros has described the various short stories to reflect the lives of Mexicans as immigrants in the American Southwest. Cisneros has narrated the story of Cleofilas, who believed that she would live happily after getting married to Juan Pedro with the approval of her father. Cleofilas left her father and six brothers in Mexico and drove to ‘el otro lad with her husband. Cisneros further sketched the picture of the Cleofilas’ native town, where she had nothing to do except to join her relatives while playing cards. A weekly visit to cinemas for watching new movies was also her routine. The author has also described various extra-ordinary skills of the main character, i.e., Cleofilas. According to the author, she was a brave girl, but however, she could not take steps without the advice of her own mom. The surrounding environment of the main character was also obsessed with the notions of sexism and male-dominant culture. The neighbor ladies, Soledad and Dolores, were living on rent on the left and right sides of her house, respectively, and both were widows. However, both were possessing different attitudes. The author has stated here also the astonishing expression of Cleofilas when she, along with her husband, drove over the bridge with a different scenario, and it was also the first moment in her life that she did not shout as she did ever. There was another moment when her husband slapped her for the first time and then again and again. At that moment, she was quite still and was thinking of her own home environment where nobody did such a type of stupidity. Then, she tried to mitigate the pain of that moment by remembering her considerable value in her parent’s home. After that, her husband wept like a child this time and time, but she was still completely stunned at this incident because such type of moment never came into her life. After going through the process of love or sleeping, she used to regret her own decision of being married to him while offering him the food at the table. Similarly, while doing other tasks as being a lady and mother, she always used to remember the emergence of love among them. She described her husband’s features in some awkward words, perhaps due to his harsh attitude toward her. She also took him as an ill-mannered person who did not know the etiquette. On her return home after having a delivery case of a new son within the hospital, she observed the innovations in their room setting. She also imagined going back to her parent’s home, but some questions in her own mind stopped her. She concluded that her life was just like that television showing tragic episodes. Even, unlike the typical programs, there was no commercial in between that could serve as a relief in her life. Also, the end was too tragic, also here atypical to traditional stories. She was facing such a bad financial condition due to her husband’s clumsy nature that she was thinking of asking her father to give a loan for meeting the medical expenditures of her baby’s checkup. While crossing the same bridge again, the driver made them astonished by shouting loudly at that bridge, and he also felt excused for that afterward. During her conversation with that driver lady, she came to know that the lady driver had no husband and she was making her own. That lady driver went on laughing on the creek and also made her smiled. Across a stream called Woman Hollering Creek, Cleofilas immediately revealed that she had left the boring yet peaceful life she used to share with her father and six brothers for the tumultuous, lonely, desperate life of a woman with an abusive husband. So, this thinking of a Mexican girl denotes the customized sexism in the so-called world of civilization (Cisneros 44-56).

This tale of Mexican girls also points towards the dodging nature of the white and their prejudiced behavior towards Latino women. In the whole story, the elements of sexism have been described with rich colors.

Ana Castillo, a Chicago native with a Mexican background, came into action in the 1970s by starting poetry as a protesting tool against sexism, describing her own as:

‘Being of Mexican background, being Indian-looking, being a female, coming from a working-class background, and then becoming politicized in high school, that was my direction… I was a Chicana protest poet, a complete renegade–and I continue to write that way (Baker 59).

During the last two decades, Castillo has clearly stated the negative approaches towards Chicana feminism in her literature. She was an active Latino woman since her early period of college, where she organized Latino artists into a group called the Association of Latino Brotherhood of Artists. She also felt at that time to shape coalitions among Latinos residing in the US with the utilization of Chicana art. Her very first production, titled Otro Canto, described the socio-political sufferings that the Third World was facing. Then, her self-published book ‘The Invitation’ was produced in response to sexism in the Chicano movement. She, herself, claimed this book as a productive critique in which she has described how women were:

‘demeaned, misunderstood, objectified, and excluded by the politic of those men with whom I had aligned myself on the basis of our mutual subjugation as Latinos in the United States’ (Massacre 121).

She served a lot for defending Latino literature in which she vividly protested against sexism but in a decent manner. Likewise, Cisneros and other Latino writers, Castillo, had also contributed mainly to expanding Latino fiction and poetry. In her product ‘Massacre of the Dreamers’, her essay ‘The Mother-Bond Principle’ presented a critique on family involvement issues in these words:

‘As Xicanistas, female and male alike, whether we are biological mothers or not, we can learn to incorporate qualities customarily seen as inherent in mothering and apply them to how we treat ourselves, our relationships, and, of course, our children (204).

Castillo has also written for the online magazine Salon. Like other Latino writers, she also started her professional writing career with independent Latino presses. While addressing to PW, she has defined her whole literature in such words:

‘The kind of literature I write is not directed for the mainstream, although So Far from God did very well, and I’m hoping that we’re entering a new era now where it will be more and more the case that writers from the fringes occupy the mainstream’” (59).

Hence, it can be concluded from the Latino literature that they suffered much more due to racial discrimination and various other reasons for societal hegemony. These Latino Women writers had worked as the key figures to retain their culture and to defend against sexism and the rusty nature of racial notions and theories. However, their language caused somewhat hindrance in gaining timely fame among the global world, and that was why the literature was welcomed by the other worlds with some delay. This Latino literature has also caused a magnificent revolution in the world of America because this literature changed the typical thinking of the people and also acknowledged them about the biased notions of racism. Such a type of literature also proved as a rationale for channeling feminist movements later on. I strongly believe that Latino literature was quite composed and rational, even in its critical view.

Works Cited

Anzaldua, G. & Moraga, Cherrie. This Bridge Called My Back. New York: Kitchen Table.

Baker, Samuel. “Ana Castillo: The Protest Poet Goes Mainstream.” Publishers Weekly 1996. 59-60.

Castillo, Ana, ed. Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Americas, New York: Putnam, 1996.

Castillo, Ana, ed. So Far From God. New York: Norton, 1993.

Castillo, Ana, ed. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.

Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek. New York: Vintage Contemporaries. 1991.

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Literature on Latina Women and Sexism

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