In “Wildwood”, Junot Diaz presents a troubled teenager by the name Lola to have distinct conflicting values with her mother. Her mother has controversial Dominican norms and responsibilities. These norms are not what Lola wants to be. Her mother soon gets sick and increases Lola’s feelings to take action on how she wants to live her life. When Lola and her mom continue to carry their abusive conflict, Lola decides to run away to Wildwood. Lola does this because she is a lost soul with no foundation of who she really is. As she runs away from her “Domincaness” that she desperately needed change from, her mother finds her in Wildwood and returns her to the origin of a “perfect Dominican daughter” which is the Dominican Republic. Once there she …show more content…
Lola takes advantage of her deteriorating mother whose illness represents the declining hold of the norms over Lola. Since her mom “will have trouble lifting her arms over her head for the rest of her life,” Lola is no longer afraid of the “hitting” and grabbing “by the throat” (415,419). As a child of a “Old World Dominican Mother” Lola must be surrounded by traditional values and beliefs that she does not want to claim, so “as soon as she became sick” Lola says, “I saw my chance and I’m not going to pretend or apologize; I saw my chance and I eventually took it” (416). When taking the opportunity to distinguish herself from the typical “Dominican daughter” or ‘Dominican slave,” she takes a cultural norm like long hair and decides to impulsively change it (416). Lola enjoyed the “feeling in [her] blood, the rattle” that she got when she told Karen to “cut my hair” (418). She thought this was the feeling of freedom and finding out her new identity. To continue and amplify this feeling, the thought of nullifying her mother, who represents the hardship of keeping a distinct cultural background seemed like the way to go. This is when she travels to Wildwood to suppress the idea that she will remain a “slave” to a lifestyle that she does not belong
An example of Alvarez’s diary format states, I adore my First Communion shoes that I recently received. They are white, made of leather, and have just enough heel to make me look like a young lady (Alvarez 30). Furthermore, simply writing about shoes in a girl’s diary transforms into material that is used to make Maria Teresa a very genuine and relatable character. This informal and laid back style of writing that Alvarez uses, and how she unravels the personal life of these girls, is how she achieves normalization. This characterization is highlighted in Marta Vizcaya’s, “Remembering Dominican heroines in new novelistic context,” when she details Alvarez’s response to an interview question, I just assumed that they were no different than me.
Beli as a young girl wanted a change in her life. Beli as a kid pretty much had everything she needed but what she really wanted was change. She was tired of not having the ability to have her own bed, or not being able to the clothes she wanted. She wanted all of it to change, even in the novel “The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz, It talk about how “she always wanted throughout her Lost Childhood: to escape” she wanted to escape from the life she called normal, she wanted to change. Just like Beli, Lola her daughter wanted a change in her life.
“And I feel like the Queen of Water. I feel like water that transforms from a flowing river to a tranquil lake to a powerful waterfall to a freshwater spring to a meandering creek to a salty sea to raindrops gentle on your face to hard, stinging hail to frost on a mountaintop, and back to a river again.” ― María Virginia Farinango , The Queen of Water. The book that I read was The Queen Of Water by Laura Resau & Maria Virginia Farinango.
The reader can also compare Lulu’s situation to the one in the Becoming La Mujer by Maria Navarro, which also focuses on the difficulties a woman will face, such as sex. Women are faced with this problem everyday; to be sexually active means they are “whores” or “not pure” however, if they are still virgins they are considered to be “prudes”. Women are everyday victims of labeling. People will always associate you with your one mistake. In Becoming La Mujer, the woman who is presented in the article deals with judgement of her family like many other females may be face.
Of all the characters that Diaz writes about, Lola is on the one with the most good luck, even though Lola has some bad luck moments in her life, Lola life turns out alright, it’s the people in her life that have the bad luck or fukú, so the fukú that surrounds her doesn’t attack Lola as bad as it attacks the people she loves, so Lola is more fukú adjacent. Lola early life does begin badly, Lola is sexually molested at age eight, and when she tells her mother Beli about the rape, her mother tells Lola to “shut her mouth and stop crying”. (53) But the most bad luck Lola has is her contentious relationship with her mother. Beli is the Dominican’s version of Joan Crawford, “Beli Dearest”. Beli is physically and mentally abusive to Lola.
The setting allows the reader to understand how people without honour are seen as outcasts of the society and the existence of a woman’s virginity is seen as a measure of her honour, as well as a precious commodity, which can purchase the family’s social advancement, through a marriage of convenience. Ángela states that Santiago deflowered her, but since “…she looked for it in the shadows…”, even though “She only took the time necessary to say the name.” we question this piece of information and its reliability, due to it being precise but also vague at the same time. Due to their sister stating this, Pablo and Pedro Vicario are ordered to reinstate their “…sister’s lost honour…”, ironically by their mother, to meet the expectations of the community and it is up to them to spiritually retrieve their sister’s virginity by killing Santiago. This means the brothers cannot back down from “…the horrible duty that’s fallen on them…” as “…there’s no way out of this…”.
A texan woman, named Sandra Bearden was looking for a maid to complete housework and look after her son, so she traveled into a poor village in Mexico and met Maria. Maria, being only twelve years old, saw this as an opportunity to move to the U.S. and receive better education which produced a better life. Sadly, Maria’s dreams were crushed because Sandra began to take advantage of her both physically and mentally. Her punishments for not working included: pepper spray in the eyes, a bottle broken against her head, jamming garden tools up her private areas,
Alvarez and her family have a lot of trauma considering there lives in the dominican republic and living under the dictator,through it all alvarez's parents raised a daughter who would share their story in a fashionable matter that told the story how it was.
Ever since the end of their short-lived, “romance,” things have only been looking down for the former threesome. Despite being wildly beautiful and commanding the attention of men everywhere, Maritza’s love life was just a big ball of hurt; she just didn’t compare to other Dominican women in the sense that she let herself be slapped around by the men that she was dating instead of slapping them around herself-like Oscar’s sister, Lola, and his “Mami ” would’ve done. Throughout the years, Olga fared even worse than Maritza, gaining several pounds until she matched the weight of Oscar herself, the bad “no-love karma,” that hit Oscar left her so undesirable that, to paraphrase, not even her boobs were good enough to look at. Such was life, such was their lives...extraordinarily bad “no-love” lives is what they all lived and so with how bad love went for him, Oscar turned to other, geekier things for
This caused her to alienate herself since her mother asked her to keep a part of herself hidden from the world by binding her and making sure no one found out she menstruated ealy (Anzaldúa 1983, 221). This will later isolate her further but ultimately lead her to reflect on the racism that surrounds her. In addition, Anzaldúa’s identity also suffer because she denied her heritage and the traditions that with it. She mentions that she felt ashamed of her mother and her loud tendencies, it is an archetype that most Hispanic mothers are loud by nature, and the fact that her lunches, or “lonches”, consisted
The Rhetorical Analysis of “The Myth of the Latin Woman” There are many examples of incidents happened because of cultural differences. Some of them are short, single events, while other follow a person or social group for decades. Professor Judith Cortiz Cofer describes the second example in her essay The Myth of the Latin Woman that was originally published in Glamour in 1992. The author focused on the stereotypical view of Latin women from the perspective of the personal experience as a Puerto Rican girl and woman in the USA. Cofer based her essay on examples from her own life and observations of the problem in a broader sense.
First of all, Lola is given several chances to change the effects of her actions, and uses these chances to prevent death from occurring—death being a strong force governed by fate. Lola was able to change her actions each time she went
Throughout The Call of the Wild, many different types of relationships were formed. Sometimes they were loving, they were also sometimes harsh, in some cases they were even only good for one member of the relationship. Jack London does a great job of demonstrating multiple types of relationships with many different people. In the book, Buck 's first relationship is a loving one with a judge and his family.
Margaret Atwood’s short story, “Lusus Naturae” portrays the story of a woman who has to face the problem of isolationism and discrimination throughout her whole life. In this short story, the protagonist very early in her life has been diagnosed with a decease known as porphyria. Due to the lack of knowledge at the time, she did not receive the help required to help her situation. Thus she was kept in the dark, her appearance frightens the outsiders who could not accept the way she looks, slowly resulting in her isolationism physically and mentally from the outside world. This even caused her to separate herself from the only world she knew her family.
Throughout the development of this book, many themes and ideas about the book develop to help explain the characters and why they made the decisions they made. It is clear that one’s identity back in those days was connected to one’s gender and so I argue that even though the relationships between opposite genders seem more positive in the book, the same gender relationships are more stable even in their different degrees of tension. We first see this through an observation of the relationship between Lola and her mother Belicia.