The Myth of the Latin Woman

How important is your ego? Would you talk about the compliments you get about the way you handle the stuation while writing an essay about harrestment and labeling you face? The first and most important problem I’ve came across while reading Cofer’s essay was this. The method she had used while writing the essay is effecting the whole story negatively. The whole essay gets lost in personal ego and casts out every single “real” story. The essay seems very angery but as she sees herself as a professional, educated person, we only see a glance of this anger. The essay of Cofer simply puts “stereotypical conclusions people make about Latin people” on table. From the beginning till the end, we see Cofer troubling to choose a side between being a Latina like her culture tells her to be or an educated, professional American woman. As we read the essay, we come across things like “…being a Latina is sometimes a very good thing…” (par. 2) which generalizes the whole America as a mean nation. As she confesses later in the essay using the words to describe her feelings towards cultural clothes “I often feel humiliated…” (par. 4) which makes me feel like Cofer had her times where she hated being a Latina and times where she hated America for labeling Latinas. The starting barely differs from the rest of the essay because we see a strong Latin woman defending her culture and then we see a woman humilizing her culture using the terms “hopeless” and “vulgar” for her thoughts about what the other girls at school were “thinking” when they saw her with the clothes she wore for Career Day (par. 5). While griping about how her nationality comes before her profession, she writes “…performed by a Chinese priest…” (par. 3). The usage of that word is unrelated to the topic and very unnecessary. That puts the Cofer to the same level of the people she gets angry at. When I first understood that, it hit me. In her mind, she wasn’t asking for respect, she was demanding it. Since she