The Myth Of The Latin Woman

“And God said, ‘love thy neighbor, because the two of you are more alike than you think.’” Nowadays in society, people tend to place labels not only on themselves but on others, in order to build walls to separate and divide all of humanity into classes. Sometimes these walls can grow taller than the one that Trump wants to build, but there are some things that, no matter who you are, can allow for there to be similarities among those classes. Shackling bonds present in both film and literature can serve to be examples for this idea. These examples can be found in Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, and in Isabel Allende’s, And of Clay we are Created, and The Myth of the Latin Woman: / Just Met a Girl Named Maria written
In the short story, Cofer, the narrator, recalls moments in her life in which she has been stereotyped as a Maria or Evita over the top stereotypical Latina “hot tamale,” and how she dealt with those situations(Cofer). As a Latin American woman, she was brought up in a home in which the ideals and morals of “proper senoritas” was often conflicting with that which what was displayed by the older women in her life. As a young girl, she saw how the attire which was seen as formal and appropriate to most Latin women differed greatly from that of the Anglo woman, and she was conflicted because she had no one to model herself by. As she grew older, she questioned why she was expected to “ripen, not just grow into womanhood like other girls,” and later came to the conclusion that some men and even women outside of the Latin community would only see her as an object of sex, not thinking of whether or not she would be offended by their comments(Cofer). The film also demonstrates this through Fermina Daza’s father Lorenzo. Lorenzo, after forbidding his daughter from marrying the man she loved due to his low standard in society, explains to his daughter that she is simply too beautiful to go to such waste and that he has high expectations of her. He believes that she could not be so beautiful to not marry a man of wealth, and hopes only for his daughter to do so. Fermina is seen as a possession or prize, by her father, and he exploits this fact in order to marry her off to a wealthy doctor by the name of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, but not before convincing her that Florentino was a man unsuitable to even be considered as a suitor. Both the film and short story’s protagonists have experienced the weight of their shackles that their culture placed on them, however they were able to overcome them through their own