Response to Mericans, by Sandra Cisneros
The short story “Mericans,” by Sandra Cisneros, was first featured in the book Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. This story, while quite short, engages with a variety of themes, including hybridism of identities, religion, and the relationship between the dominant white culture of North America and the “Other” upon which he “gazes.”
The short story “Mericans,” by Sandra Cisneros, was first featured in the book Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. This story, while quite short, engages with a variety of themes, including hybridism of identities, religion, and the relationship between the dominant white culture of North America and the “Other” upon which he “gazes.”
All
of the “action” of this story takes place either inside or directly outside of
the famous shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, located atop the Hill of
Tepeyac. This shrine houses the tapestry
mentioned in the text (“La Virgen de Guadalupe is waiting inside behind a plate
of thick glass.”), which according to Catholic belief was found by the Indian
Juan Diego. Importantly, this hill was a
holy hill for the natives before the arrival of the Spaniards, as it was meant
to be the home of Tonantzin, the mother goddess of Aztec beliefs. As Mary Pat Brady points out in her article “The
Contrapuntal Geographies of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories,” the
hybrid nature of the Virgin, as both a Catholic (Creole) religious figure and
as a syncretic Aztec/Catholic figure is important to understand when considering
the use of the Virgin as a symbol (in any work, or in Mexican culture considered
more widely). She writes, “The Virgin of
Guadalupe emerges then not only as a means of evangelization and domination and
a mechanism through which the Creoles appropriated the Christian symbols and
religious power of the Spanish, but also a symbol of defiance and resistance to
whom corridos would eventually be
sung hailing her as the “Queen of the American Indians” (126).
By
situating this story at the site of the shrine to Guadalupe, Cisneros immediately
introduces the idea of a “hybrid” or syncretic religious and cultural practice,
thus highlighting the hybrid nature of the narrator’s (and her brothers’)
culture. The narrator (and protagonist)
of this story is a young Mexican-American girl in Mexico, occupying the hybrid
space of the “exile” who has returned to the native land. She is one of the “grandchildren born in that
barbaric country with its barbarian ways,” and is thus looked upon differently
by the population of Mexicans that live (and were born) in Mexico.
Beyond
occupying this hybrid place, the narrator also occupies a site of
marginalization – she is a woman (girl) in a culture famous for machismo, which we see in the way that
her brothers treat her. For them, to
call her a girl is her “brothers’ favorite insult now instead of “sissy.” Their games, created with the seemingly sole
intention of excluding her, are constantly changing, so that even as she learns
the rules (and stands a chance to “compete”) they are changed. We see, for example:
I’ve already made up my
mind to be a German when Keeks swoops past again, this time yelling, “I’m Flash
Gordon. You’re Ming the Merciless and
the Mud People.” I don’t mind being Ming the Merciless, but I don’t like being
the Mud People. Something wants to come
out of the corners of my eyes, but I don’t let it. Crying is what girls do.
As we see, this marginalized status
has the effect of creating self-hatred within Michele—a phenomenon similar to
that which Frantz Fanon describes in his writings, in which the oppressed person
attempts to emulate the oppressor, having accepted their view of their own
superiority.
This
relationship between men and women, however, is further complicated by the fact
that all of these siblings occupy a space of marginalization and hybridity. They are all banished from the religious
shrine (though Michele does briefly venture in, only to be shooed away soon
after). Even the delights of the space
outside of the shrine are forbidden to them:
We must stay near the
church entrance. We must not wander over
to the balloon and punch-ball vendors.
We cannot spend our allowance on fried cookies or Familia Burrón comic
books or those clear cone-shaped suckers that make everything look like a
rainbow when you look through them. We
cannot run off and have our picture taken on the wooden ponies. We must not climb the steps up the hill
behind the church and chase each other through the cemetery. (170)
This place of marginalization and
hybridity is made most clear at the end of the story, in which a pair of
visiting tourists, obvious to the narrator through clearly gendered visual cues
(“Ladies don’t come to church dressed in pants.
And everybody knows men aren’t supposed to wear shorts”), approach the
children, give them treats, and ask in broken Spanish to take their picture. In a scene heavily reminiscent of one from
Amy Tan’s “Rules of the Game,” it is obvious that they see these young children
as something essentially “Mexican,” a sure cultural marker to be photographed,
displayed, and viewed by others as proof of a “real” experience. The spell of “authenticity” is broken,
however, when the tourists realize that their young subjects speak
English. One can hear their confusion (and
perhaps small amount of indignation) in their response to this realization: “But
you speak English!”
The
response of the narrator’s brother – “we’re Mericans,” is enlightening, for it
reveals, in one clever word, the liminal culture of these young children – not quite
“Mexicans” and not quite “Americans,” but rather something hybrid, both a mix
of the two words and a version of “American” that appears to be missing
something.
Works Cited
American Literature , Vol. 71, No. 1 (Mar., 1999), pp. 117-150
Response to So The Mexicans Are Taking Jobs From Americans, by Jimmy Baca
Reading Baca’s (1977)
poem, it becomes quickly obvious that much about the current political climate,
the typical “dialogue” between various parties, the polemics related to
immigration (illegal and otherwise), have not changed very much at all. There are still many people who believe that
Mexicans take jobs from Americans and others who claim that immigration
strengthens our economy and results in a net increase in jobs. In this poem, Baca inserts himself forcefully
into the conversation, using bitter humor and sarcasm to make the point that
not only are Mexicans not “taking jobs from Americans,” but more importantly,
that such topics of conversation take our collective attention away from
larger, more important, more pressing issues.
The poem opens with a series of humorous (and violent)
images, exaggerating a stereotypical representation of a Mexican, taking the
accusation that “Mexicans Are Taking Jobs from Americans” to a new level of
absurdity, thereby exposing the underlying absurdity of the original
accusation. We read:
O Yes? Do they come on horses
with rifles, and say,
Ese,
gringo, gimmee your job?
As the speaker supposedly goes “about trying to find”
these job thieves, “asking just where the hell are these fighters,” he makes an
important discovery that further reveals the absurdity of this basic
accusation. Essentially, he discovers
that the important question, the important struggle, is not that of Mexicans
vs. Americans, but rather a much more elemental story in which the poor (of all
colors) are being taken advantage of by the rich. The entire question of jobs being stolen by
anyone, he seems to purport, is simply a “bait and switch,” and means by which
to take attention away from the true crimes happening in the country. We see, for example, that:
The rifles I hear sound in the night
are white farmers shooting blacks and browns
whose ribs I see jutting out
and starving children
We also read that these
injustices are not only perpetrated upon the “blacks and browns,” but that poor
whites are affected as well:
I see the poor marching for a little work,
I see small white farmers selling out
to clean-suited farmers living in New York
who’ve never been on a farm,
To a great extent, it
seems that the speaker’s point aligns neatly with similar points made by Howard
Zinn in his political writings, in which he points out that rich whites (the
“powers that be”) have often encouraged racism and ethnic hatred as a means by
which to foster division between groups that ultimately have much more in
common than differences between them.
They do so, Zinn (and others) show, as a means of preventing any real
challenge to their own hegemony. In
Chapter 3 of A People’s History of the
United States, Zinn quotes Edmund Morgan, a scholar on American History,
who writes:
"If freemen
with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope,
the results might be worse than anything Bacon had done. The answer to the
problem, obvious if unspoken and only gradually recognized, was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from
dangerous black slaves by a screen of racial contempt." (my italics)
Essentially, this poem seems to make a similar point,
namely that anger against Mexicans for “taking jobs” is a way for the rich
elite to distract from the real problems for people other than themselves. Everyone, it seems, who isn’t a member of the
rich, elite class, is being taken advantage of by them:
Below that cool green sea of money
millions and millions of people fight to
live,
search for pearls in the darkest depths
of their dreams, hold their breath for years
trying to cross poverty to just having
something.
The real words, he
tells us, behind their accusations, are much, much colder, and much more
direct:
. . . let them die,
and the children too.
Clearly this poem is overtly political and quite angry, as is much of Baca's work, including other poems that we have seen in this class. As Leonor Ulloa points out, "If we encounter violence, bitterness, and denunciation in the poems that reveal to us scenes of life in prison or of the social disadvantages of minorities, we also find a sincere desire for change and a hope for justice in the future" (my translation). While in this poem we don't perhaps see overtly the "hope for justice" (in his language), it seems clear that the denunciation and the "calling out" of political rhetoric seem to call out for a change, and for the hope that things might some day be different.
Works Cited
de Ulloa, Leonor A. Review of Immigrants in Our Own Lands by Jimmy Santiago Baca. Hispamérica , Año 10, No. 30 (Dec., 1981), pp. 150-151.
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