Myth Of The Latin Woman Essay Research

Myth Of The Latin Woman Essay, Research Paper

The principal notion about life revealed in this essay is that in Western

societies the Latin Women are viewed stereotypically as a sex object

or selfless housewives and obsequious workers. Otherwise, some people

believe and perpetuate stereotypes about particular ethnic groups while

in reality those myths can be related to few members of that ethnic group.

In this essay the author Judith Ortiz Cofer discusses how she has

been treated by different people in different countries due to their

conception of her as a Latin woman. The author refers to the several

incidents where she has been viewed stereotypically as a person who is

capable of doing only a very simple job or being an object that satisfies

a man’s lust. She says that from her childhood, because she was a female,

she was kept under strict surveillance by her parents and was schooled

how to behave as a proper senorita. Because of her background she had to

be dressed up as a Puerto Rican girl. As she says it was obvious that

for the others this kind of dressing seemed vulgar. It is clearly that

from her childhood the author has been surrounded by the circumstances

in which a female human being must fit into demands of her society. The

author’s culture and traditions were not the same with the American

culture, and as a result, the girl was grown up on the verge of two

different customs. As the author says, the way of dressing of the Latin

women gives American men a wrong massage about these women. It happens

because they apply their own culture and customs to the traditions of

other ethnic group. Vivid colors of clothes and brilliance of jewelry

sometimes are signals of the easy accessibility of a woman for a Western

man. From those attributes was created a myth about Hispanic woman as

the hot tamale or sexual firebrand.

The author recalls stories that she heard in her house during her

childhood about sexual harassment that Puerto Rican women endured in

factories where they were seen as if sexual innuendo was all they

understood. She also describes her own experience of being seen

stereotypically when the boy who took her to her first formal dance

kissed her and without having received a passional response remarked,

I thought you Latin girls were supposed to mature early. Here we see

not only a stereotypical view of the Latin women but also consideration

of those women as something that is able to ripen like a fruit or

vegetable. The incident with a young boy on the bus who was singing

Maria from West Side Story also seems to have left a bitter taste at

the author, You can leave the island… and travel as far as you can,

but if you are a Latina, the island travels with you. The event at the

hotel seems to be the culmination of the essay. Here a man who seems

to be well-educated and respectable sings a dirty song to amaze the

author and people around. It is obviously that the author was deeply

embarrassed in this incident and she remarks that if non-Hispanic woman

were in her place, the same man would not show such disrespect because

she could be somebodys wife or mother, or at least somebody who might

take offence.” But for this man she was just “an Evita or a Maria:

merely a character in his cartoon-populated universe.”

To support the opinion that the Latin women in the United States are