Free Essay on The House on Mango Street and How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents

The House on Mango Street is a book that describes the life of Esperanza. This is a young Mexican American girl. She navigates the challenges of growing up and begins to come up with her own identity. As she is on the path of self-discovery, the people living in Mango Street deeply inform her developing worldview. Throughout the book, she gets advice from her mum and neighbors, and closely observes the lives of other women living in the neighborhood. She confronts issues of gender and sexuality. The first chapter of Sandra Cisneross book The House on Mango Street presents a young girls coming-of-age in a arguably harsh environment telling the tale of her familys constant migration as they look for profoundly better living conditions, where we dont have to pay rent to anybody, or share the yard with the people downstairs, or be careful not to make too much noise, and there isnt a landlord banging on the ceiling with a broom.

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Thesis statement: The actions and interactions of the protagonist, Esperanza in the book The House on Mango Street demonstrates the characters commitment in changing and resistance to the conventional stereotypic perceptions on gender and sexuality.

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is a novel written by Julia Alvarez. It describes the life of the Garcia Family. This is a Dominican family that goes to live in the U.S. They go there as immigrants and their experiences are described in the book. The novel talks of four girls; Carla, Sandra, Yolanda and Soffa who are part of the Garcia family. Their father participated in a coup de tat (to overthrow the Dominican leader Trujillo) and after the conspiracy fails, he has to run away from his country for safety reasons. That regime was very corrupt and oppressive. The girls start experiencing a new kind of life in their exiled country. As the novel progresses, the girls have to overcome very many challenges, including language barriers, cultural, social differences in the U.S., assimilation problems, inability to speak two languages fluently and their past.

In the book, the house on mango street, Sandra Cisneros explains the challenges faced by American women of Mexican descent in a society that perceives them as inferior beings. He gives a story of a young woman growing up in a society that besides being dominated by men perceives and judges the women for their external cognitive rather than their inner self. Cisneros describes the challenges that Latino women have to endure in their daily lives for them to be fairly and equally treated. Esperanza faces a slew of obstacles and disadvantages that are unique to growing up in a place like Mango Street, but there are other issues she deals with that are far more universal, especially her blooming sexual interests. The women in her society are overly concerned about their looks. They believe that they have to be attractive in order to be noticed by the men. In the society, the perfect flawless man, should be a person who is able to provide for his family and has manly characteristics such as domineering, fierceness and bravado whereas a perfect woman is one who commits herself fully and entirely to her family and to the husband as well; that they should be weak, feeble and frail. She refuses to grow up under mens domination. She stands up against sexuality and gender discrimination even if majority of the others seem to get along. In How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, sexuality is a major issue and is experienced by all the four girls. Her cousin to remove her pants teases Yolanda and in return he will give her a doll, later on, Rudy, his boyfriend tells her she is sexually unresponsive and cold. She later divorces with her husband John. Sofia rebels against her father by using her sexuality. Carla detests and abhors sexuality while Sandras perception of sexuality is negatively and adversely affected when she sees his father making out with a drunken woman. The sisters feel trapped between Dominican sexual and gender normal typical rules, strengthened within ideologies of traditional Catholic, and the unrestrained licentious American norms and the supporting of equality of both sexes in all aspects of public and private life standards of behavior.