Marry a Mexican, Highlighting Underlining Things Essay. Essay

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Marry a Mexican, " highlighting underlining things essay. We talked patterns follow class: animal images, food images, religious images, discussion race color.

Point: The narrator Clemencia has been scarred by her previous relationships with men and the image of men given to her by her mother.

Evidence: Clemencia says: "I'll never marry…Mexican men, forget it…For a long time the men clearing off the tables or chopping meat behind the butcher counter or driving the bus I road to school today, those weren't men. Not men I considered potential lovers. ..I never saw them…my mother did this to me" (Cisneros 69).

Explanation: Clemencia's feelings about Mexican men, although she is Mexican herself, have their roots in both class-based and personal prejudice -- American society relegates Mexicans to largely subservient positions but she has also witnessed the gender-based prejudices within Mexican culture directed at her mother.

Point: There are invisible class differences between Mexicans not immediately apparent to Americans.

Evidence: The narrator compares her father and mother: "a Mexican girl who didn't know enough to set a place for each course at dinner, nor how to fold cloth napkins…[at my mother's house] all the dishes cracked and chipped, nothing matched…[my father] left behind a house neither poor nor rich but thought itself better than both" (Cisneros 69).

Explanation: The narrator's mother was poor; her father was middle class and left Mexico because of his bad grades at university.

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They came from very different classes and this ambiguity has similarly affected the narrator's unstable sense of self.

Point: As an artist, the narrator sees herself as outside of traditional class dynamics.

Evidence: The narrator says: "I'm amphibious. I'm a person who doesn't belong to any class" (Cisneros 71).

Explanation: By escaping class, the narrator hopes to escape her race and her mother's fate -- this also drives her to have hopeless relationships with married white men.

"Never marry a Mexican:" Instability of class and the self

The narrator of Sandra Cisneros' short story "Never Marry a Mexican" is internally conflicted because of her unstable sense of self. Growing up, Clemencia was the offspring of a poor, second-generation Mexican-American woman who was unhappily married to a formerly middle-class first generation Mexican-American man. Clemencia's father felt he had married beneath him socially. His attitude gave Clemencia's mother a sense of contempt for her Mexican-American origins. These feelings were transferred to her daughter who witnessed the dynamic between her parents and the images of Mexican-American culture to which she was exposed. However, Clemencia's career choice of becoming an artist only further served to destabilize her sense of self, given that it meant she lacked a secure sense of class alliance.

The provocative title of the short story is deeply ironic because Clemencia is Mexican by birth. However, throughout her….....

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