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Today everyone was gone except me and max d, it was pretty awesome.
We talked very in depth about the sculpture above. Its a pair of shiny metal forceps clasping a wooden jalapeño, the box is of the same material as the jalapeño, and there is a mirror which may or may not see your own reflection in.
The plain, cold, [reflective?], hard forceps (america) are grabbed on to the intricate, detailed, layered, colored jalapeño, symbolizing mexican or latin culture. One interpretation is that Americans select several key aspects of a culture, and latch on to those aspects and create a stereotype for that culture, reaching in with the forceps and pulling out only one part of the much broader picture. You can see some of the jalapeño squishing through a gap in the forceps, this illustrates the force Americans [we] use when defining [and potentially 'othering'] another group or culture. The mirror adds another perspective, because when you look at the sculpture from the right angle, you see yourself through this depiction of how stereotypes are created, it makes you think about yourself in accordance with all of this. However, there is a way to avoid putting yourself in that mirrored alignment with the forceps, and thats by moving so you dont see the mirror at all, then you are at the same level as the wooden box. The box is made with the same intricacy and depth as the jalapeño, and by moving to this level, you are embracing the culture fully, and not using the forceps and the American view to disfigure or squeeze the culture into something its not.
We spent the last 15 minutes of class talking about the first chapter. We talked about the family tree, and how the de la Torre family side is very white, and apperently proud to have that whiteness because the connecting lines are solid and everyone is listed. However, the García family has more diversity. The line connecting them with the Spanish is dashed, and full of question marks. It says that one member had a son with a "farm hand" women, and it also has a place for "33 other Garcías", but it doesnt go through the trouble of naming any. The García family seems to be full of less honor, or integrity because of these factors, this will most likely come up at some point in the book.
We finished class by talking about Yolanda, and how she is trying to find her real home. She is obviously connected very strongly to D.R. latin culture, because of her love of guavas and such, but she is also very obviously separated because she can barely speak spanish any more, and her family constantly hints at that. Yolanda also feels very attached to the states, because she has spent most her life there, and she buys into the act of typical American stereotyping when the two field workers approach her, she immediately assumes they are dangerous and want to hurt her.
Key Lines:
p. 12 "Yolanda never felt at home in USA"
p. 13 "What language does yolanda love in?"
p. 5 - weird story about yolandas parents (dad)
p. 7 "Yolanda might not go home to USA"
I thought it was particularly interesting to look at Yolanda's interaction with the Campesinos after our discussion of "The Birth of a Jalepeno". Our discussion of the sculpture revolved around how stereotypes are built that obscure your view of someone where they can't be looked at without the baggage of the artificial constructions that have been built around them. Although the men are nothing but kind and helpful to Yolanda, she is immediately paralyzed by fear and decides they are there to hurt her, "They are now both in front of her on the road, blocking any escape. Both- she has sized them up well- are strong and quite capable of catching her if she makes a run for it… She considers explaining that she is just out for a drive before dinner at the big house, so that these men will think someone knows where she is,"(19). She can't view them through their gestures or actions as she would other people but instead has built such a strong mental construction of people who "wear ragged work clothes stained with patches of sweat; their faces are drawn" that she completely unable to interact with them as is evidenced by their final exchange as she tries to pay them for their work.
The main ideas in Freud’s theory of family drama are evident in the story, The Kiss. From the beginning, it is clear that the father wants his girls to celebrate his birthday without their husbands so that for one night “they turned back into [his] girls” (24). This request reveals the father’s desire to be patriarch of the family and his fear of his daughters losing their innocence and replacing him with their husbands, a main Freudian theme. It is clear that the father feels he has been replaced when, at the family gathering “surrounded by his daughters and their husbands…he seemed to be realizing that he was just an old man sitting in their houses, eating up their roast lamb, impinging upon their lives” (36). Despite the father’s replacement by the girls’ husbands, you still see the daughters vying for their father’s love. To reconcile with her father after choosing Otto’s love over her father’s love when she ran away, Sofía claims she will “throw the old man a party he [will not] forget” (33). Sofía’s goal to regain her father’s affection is also evident at the end of the story during the kissing game. When Sofía realizes that her father “never guessed her name…in his daughter count,” she tries to make him notice her by giving him an “open-mouthed kiss in his ear” (39). In vying so desperately for her father’s love, she oversteps the type of affection she is supposed to give her father and consequently “[shames]” him (39). In this family scene the central themes of Freudian family drama are certainly present, suggesting that the family is normal and does not have psychosis!
Today in class we discussed chapter one and (briefly) chapter two of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. We opened with a discussion of Yolanda Garcia and her "antojos"- deep-seeded desires and cravings. These included guavas, independence (she wants to travel alone, and is making a decision to move permanently to the Dominican Republic), the "simple life," and a home (a place where she really belongs, since she doesn't feel quite at home in the US, yet struggles with her Spanish, indicating a lack of comfort in the DR and with her hispanic background as well). The question of whether she would be able to find any of these things in the Dominican Republic was then raised, and we concluded that in all likelihood she would not. For one, she's more comfortable speaking English; in the scene beginning on page 19, she speaks in English, the language of power, and not Spanish, her native tongue, to two Dominican men who, although she initially fears and stereotypes them, ultimately help her with her car. This moment harkens back to what the poet she met at Lucinda's party said to her, that "in the midst of some profound emotion, one would revert to one's mother tongue" (13). Additionally, she wants to disregard family, yet the DR operates on family networks. We added that in some ways, Yolanda is like the palmolive woman (the woman from America on the advertisement for palmolive soap), because they both belong to the same, industrialized, capitalistic culture. Switching gears somewhat, we started talking about the beginning of chapter two and the "Freudian Family Drama," in which Freud assumes patriarchy is a naturally occurring thing, daughters vie for their father's love, sons are competing with the father for the mother's love (Oedipus complex), and that the father will eventually be replaced by a husband, the mother by a wife. This replacement is the coming of age, loss of innocence. If any of these go wrong, then one has psychosis. These relationships are supposed to remain innocent, which requires that all of the id impulses remain in the unconscious.
Since we didn't really close our discussion on the connection between the woman on the palmolive add and Yolanda during class, I decided to look at it on my own. The one assertion we made - that the palmolive add represented American capitalism - is certainly true, as is the fact that Yolanda is unwillingly and inextricably connected to that capitalistic system. Yolanda is part of the American consumer culture that the advertisement depicts; she's part of that stereotypical appearance-driven white-dominated mentality that still lingers in American society, despite its anachronism (like the poster, which I believe Dr. Witt said was from sometime around the fifties). What I found most interesting, however, was the fact that Yolanda has almost everything possible to avoid resembling the Palmolive woman - when we first meet her, she is "shabby in a black cotton skirt and jersey top, sandals on her feet, her wild black hair held back with a hairband… like one of those Peace Corps girls who have let themselves go to do dubious good in the world" (3-4). Ironically, Yolanda's cousins, who remained in the Dominican Republic, resemble the Palmolive woman more than Yolanda does - Lucinda, for instance, with her "designer pantsuit and frosted, blown-out hair," is a perfect archetype of American consumerism. And yet, ironically, and despite her best efforts otherwise, it is Yolanda who truly embodies American culture (as we see in her interaction with the working men), whereas her cousins only have the appearance of it.
See Larger Image Here
In class, we talked a lot about how Freud's "Family Drama" theory relates to the characters depicted in How the García Girls Lost their Accents. The theory of the family drama states that if one cannot eventually switch their infatuation from their father to another man in their lives, in a healthy manner, then psychosis will result. Our discussion included asking the question of whether or not Sofia is going to be able to overcome her feelings towards her father and the appropriate way to treat him in order to stay away from the state of psychosis. Towards the end of the discussion we realized that maybe it is not so much Sofia's fault that she has these feelings so much as it is her father's fault for keeping his children in a false state of innocence that simultaneously takes away their ability to become independent/dependent on a man other than their father. Throughout, we see the father taking actions such as not allowing the husbands to come with their wives to dinners and other family occasions. By not having the husbands present, the father is making a statement that he still maintains patriarchal power over the girls and that their moving on to a different life with a different male figure is somehow not healthy or right. In response to these limitations, we see Sofia struggling to work out her feelings towards her father and Otto. When Sofia kisses her father, an action that could've been harmless if she hadn't reached a more mature age, we see that her confusion in this over sexualized act is met with no answers or corrections as her family stays quiet acting as if it were normal (39). We also delved into the fact that the father is not completely to blame for wanting to keep his daughter's innocent because of his lost pride due to being kicked out of the DR and the negative impact that that blow had on him. Although the father's intentions may have initially been good, his attempts to keep the "satin ribbon" wrapped tightly and their innocence bound to them, he also suffocates them and makes his daughter's have a warped sense of daughterhood and sexuality, ruining them in the end (29).
Today in class we talked about storytellers and conventions/family rituals relating to storytelling. By looking at the storytellers in our own families, some of whom are funny and sarcastic and others of whom are controlling and nostalgic, we came to the conclusion that storytellers are keepers of family history. We explored the idea that every family has its own rituals surrounding storytelling which vary from lots of interjections and jokes to stony silence from the listeners. We also noticed that in many families there are certain people who are not the holders of the family history and are not allowed to tell stories because their stories are of things that the family does not want to remember.
After our brainstorming, we explored Mami's role in the García family as the keeper of the family's history. We discussed how Mami needs to validate her daughters' choices and her parenting skills, as seen in her desire to end her story about Yo with her being a natural poet (46). We also look at Mami's need for external affirmation from an outside listener. All of the listeners to her stories are males who are the counter-parts to her daughters (Clive-Yolanda, analyst husband-Carla, new father-Fifi, doctor-Sandra). We concluded that the reason Mami needs affirmation is because she receives a lot of questioning and critiques from her daughters on the inside. We then explored the idea that Mami leaves certain parts out of the stories and only remembers what she wants to remember how she wants to remember it (64). It is clear Mami is building a particular narrative to conform to her vision for the family when she does not include a story about Sandra from the past and when she tells Clive about Yolanda's innocence (50, 48-49). Despite Mami's attempts to create an American narrative for her girls, she is still complicit in Papi's "old world" vision for the girls as seen when she tries to keep them innocent by removing all sexualization from her stories.
After all our discussion, the ultimate question posed at the end of class was: Despite Mami's progressive narrative of the American Dream in which the daughters symbolize success, are the daughter's truly capable of ever attaining this success because of their parents' desire for them to partially remain in the "old world"?
In this chapter, the mother plays the greatest role. She presents herself as someone who wants attention, especially towards the daughters counterparts and is very controlling. Throughout this chapter one sees that the mother tries to maintain this control over the family, the stories, and who the attention is pointed towards. We all see who the mother really is and how she reacts to certain stories from the past. On page 51, the mother speaks of the daughters break down, from a long time ago. As the reader one notices how the mother becomes uncomfortable, "She folded and refolded her kleenex into smaller and smaller squares". This shows how the mother is uncomfortable about the past that she wants to "forget". The reading than shows another sign of her nervousness when the doctor keeps asking her questions, "she made a fist of what was left of her kleenex". This shows anger and the nervousness that the mother has for this past. She becomes so uncomfortable that she tries to change the subject towards the rest of girls, because she does not want to reflect on the bad in the families past, "There are four girls, you know". She tries to take the focus off her daughter because she is embarrassed of the daughters past.
Throughout this chapter, the mother tries to control everything that is told, an example is on page 52 where Alvarez states, "then glanced over at her husband as if unsure how much they should disclose to this stranger." The mother tries to control everything that is heard and said. Later in the reading the author writes, "the mother raced on. she wanted to get to the end of this story" because people are interrupting her and she wants to control the story and the situation. Another part is on page 54 where the author writes, "the mother looked over at the husband and wondered what he was thinking about" which shows how the mother wants to know everything because she wants to once again control the situation.
The mother also shows how she very much likes the attention, so throughout this chapter there is this whole idea about how she really is only telling the story to the daughters counterparts, because the daughter know the actually stories and the truth about them. However, the counterparts do not know, so the mother tries to control these stories by telling her versions and at the same time one notices that she very much likes the fact that she has power in these moments because she controls the outcome of each story. An example of where she shows that she likes the attention is when, "the mother looked up and realized that the hushed audience was staring at her. She blushed. The lover chuckled and squeezed her arm". The fact that she blushes and giggles when she is up on stage shows that as a natural human reaction, she enjoys the attention.