Sandra Cisneros's "Eyes Zapata," Zakaria Tamer's "Sheep," Nawal al-Saadawi's "In Camera," Hanan
The predominant similarity between Sandra Cisneros's short story, "Eyes of Zapata," and Nawal al-Saadawi's "In Camera," is that both narratives deal with the oppression of women who fail to conform to the limited roles that society constructs for their gender. Such oppression takes many forms in each of these tales. In Cisneros' story, the protagonist is ravaged by both the effects of war and the repercussions it produces for her husband, a military leader. In al-Saadawi's narrative, the protagonist is both physically and intellectually persecuted in very overt, gruesome methods. An examination of both of these works reveals the fact that due to the nature of the oppression the lead character endures in Cisneros' writing, this tale is unequivocally a love story, whereas the nature of the oppression endured by the protagonist in al-Saadawi's story reveals that it is…...

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Works Cited

Cisneros, Sandra. "Eyes of Zapata" Woman Hollering Creek. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. 1991. Print.

Al-Saadawi, Nawal. In Camera. Print.

Chicano
Sandra Cisneros and the Cultural Construction of Latin-American omanhood

Sandra Cisneros stands as one of the most formative Chicana writers of her generation. She has inspired many other Chicano novelists, poets, and essayists because of the critical and popular success of her first novel, The House on Mango Street. However, despite the book's attempt to give validity to a more positive view of Latin American culture, as it exists in the United States, Cisneros' novel and her subsequent works have not stinted in their criticism of certain aspects of Hispanic life and reality, such as the inequality between the sexes.

Cisneros is an author, and he first novel attempted to give a certain beauty and dramatic weight to the innocent perspective of a young, Latina girl. The work 'argued' that young Latina life was interesting and a culturally significant topic for modern fiction. However, Cisneros is also quite critical of the role…...

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Works Cited

Castillo, Ana. Massacre of the Dreamers. University of Mexico Press, 1995.

Cumpian, Carlos. Armadillo Charm. Tia Chucha Press, 1996.

Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

Looking at her mother she concludes that education is a supportive element for personal freedom and also happiness. ironically, her mother is another woman trapped in her house. Esperanza will finally comprehend that she is free to do what she wants to do.
A very unpleasant episode of sexual abuse and two deaths in her family are shocking episodes which push her closer to maturity. Their negative emotional impact make her desire to leave Mango Street even greater. As she develops emotionally she understand that her way out is represented by writing. She is talented and she might make something in this direction. At the end of the book the character understands the meaning of the witch's words. She realizes that sooner or later she will be strong enough to leave Mango Street, but the place is already a piece of her heart, an important part in her identity, of…...

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Bibliography:

Chesla, E.L. Sandra Cisneros' The house on Mango Street, Google books, Retrieved December 6, 2009 from  http://books.google.com/books?id=b47BrsM60CkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Sandra+Cisnero%27s+The+House+on+Mango+Street#v=onepage&q=&f=false 

Cisneros, Sandra, The house on Mango Street, Vintage, Later Printing edition, 1991

Novel units, The house on Mango Street, 2006

"Sandra Cisneros," retrieved December 6, 2009 from http://www.sandracisneros.com/

Thus, Clemencia stood for everything the American's wife is not, and that included being a Latino. It became evident in the story, however, that despite her insistence that she was influencing and reinforcing her identity to her lover, she did not realize that she is rapidly becoming part of the culture she tried to avoid in her home. Her cruel and insensitivity as a married man's lover opposed the moral values and beliefs that Clemencia's Latino culture considered essential and foundation of Latino identity. In her attempt to become a truly authentic, 'untainted' Latino, she was actually being acculturated gradually by her lover to the American culture as she becomes centered on the idea that she was actually influencing him when in fact, her lover changed her to become more modern and American, neglecting her values, thereby neglecting her true Latino identity....

House Mango Street Sandra Cisnero"(book) the question paper: Is book represe
It would be exceedingly difficult to represent all of Latino culture in any book, regardless of how talented the author is. Nonetheless, Sandra Cisneros is that rare breed of author for whom, particularly as it relates to her unique blend of poetry and prose, virtually nothing is impossible. She has been hailed as "a major literary talent" (Cruz, 2010, p. 56). One of her most revered works, The House on Mango Street, details her life and those around her who grew up in the continental United States. Virtually all of the characters (and the vast majority of people that the characters interact with, for that matter) are Latino. Still, the Latino culture is, if nothing else, extremely diverse and as variegated a group of people as one can find on the earth itself. This fact takes on a particular…...

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References

Cruz, F.J. (2010). On the "simplicity" of Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street. Critical Insights. Database: Literary Reference Center. Retrieved from eds.b.ebscohost.com.library.gcu.edu:2048/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer

Dubb, C.R. (2007). Adolescent journeys: finding female authority in The Rain Catchers and The House on Mango Street. Children's Literature in Education. 38: 219-232.

Renner, C. (2005). The House on Mango Street. School Library Journal. 51(7), 44-45.

Wissman, K. (2007). "Writing will keep you free": Allusions to and recreations of the fairy tale heroine in The House on Mango Street. Children's Literature in Education. 38: 17-34.

Sandra Cisneros's short story "Woman Hollering Creek," and "Still I ise," a poem by Maya Angelou both make statements about race, power, and gender in America.
Cisneros is a Chicano author and Maya Angelou is an African-American author and poet.

Brief Text Summaries: "Woman Hollering Creek" touches on issues like domestic violence and the subjugation of women. "Still I ise" celebrates black female identity in a culture that is both racist and sexist.

Although different in both form and intent, Cisneros's "Woman Hollering Creek" and Angelou's "Still I ise" both reveal the intersections between race, power, and gender in American society.

Topic Sentence 1: The intersection between gender, race, and power is one of the most salient themes in both Cisneros and Angelou, as both write from the perspective of minority females.

Focus on Cisneros

Example 1: " ... there isn't very much to do except ... to watch the latest telenovela episode and try to…...

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References

Angelou, M. (n.d.). Still I rise. Poem. Retrieved online:  https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/still-i-rise 

Cisneros, S. (n.d.). Woman hollering creek. Retrieved online:  http://www.iaisp.uj.edu.pl/documents/1479490/29437798/Cisneros-Woman-HC-_02_V._Popescu.pdf 

Garcia, A. (2014). Politics and indigenous theory in Leslie Marmon Silko's 'Yellow Woman' and Sandra Cisneros' 'Woman Hollering Creek.' In Folklore, Literature and Cultural Theory. Routledge.

Higashida, C. (2011). Reading Maya Angelou, reading black international feminism today. In Black International Feminism. University of Illinois Press.

However, there is also danger to the sexuality that lies behind sweetness, as when a girl Sally, marries a marshmallow salesman to escape an abusive father, entering a union that seems as bad as the home she is leaving.
A final symbol of the novel is that of play -- few adult women, except for the insane Ruthie, are seen enjoying themselves over the course of the novel. Girls can play at jump rope and look at clouds, but they worry about how the burdens and cares of an adult life -- like abusive or absent husbands, children, and money worries -- will weigh them down, as their bodies mature. Men are shown playing and gambling, but women must put their own pleasures aside for fathers, husbands, and brothers. Early on in the novel, Esperanza comments how even in her family the boys and the girls tend to separate as…...

structure and content of the outline met the objectives of the assignment. I narrowed down the topic further to differentiate between Angelou and Cisneros because I recognized that Angelou sends her readers an optimistic message of self-empowerment, while Cisneros opts to use the medium of traditional storytelling more as a warning to women about how patriarchy strangles their power and self-reliance. Essentially, both send the same message using different media and different tones.
ace and gender are features that often determine access to power in a society. Moreover, race and gender are critical to personal identity formation, just as they locate an individual in the stratifications of the society.

Sandra Cisneros's short story "Woman Hollering Creek," and "Still I ise," a poem by Maya Angelou both make statements about race, power, and gender in America.

Author Backgrounds: Cisneros is a Chicano author and Maya Angelou is an African-American author and poet.

Brief Text…...

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References

Angelou, M. (n.d.). Still I rise. Poem. Retrieved online:  https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/still-i-rise 

Cisneros, S. (n.d.). Woman hollering creek. Retrieved online:  http://www.iaisp.uj.edu.pl/documents/1479490/29437798/Cisneros-Woman-HC-_02_V._Popescu.pdf 

Garcia, A. (2014). Politics and indigenous theory in Leslie Marmon Silko's 'Yellow Woman' and Sandra Cisneros' 'Woman Hollering Creek.' In Folklore, Literature and Cultural Theory. Routledge.

Higashida, C. (2011). Reading Maya Angelou, reading black international feminism today. In Black International Feminism. University of Illinois Press.

And it is the tragedy of not knowing that Marin imagines in the story's last paragraph, when she envisions the family he left behind in Mexico as they "wonder, shrug, remember" the pretty boy who vanished and was "never heard from…again."
Cisneros arranges "Geraldo No Last Name" around two basic structural facts. One is the filtering of the story through Marin's consciousness, so that the subject of the story is not really Geraldo's brief life and death -- it is about what somebody like Marin thinks about when she contemplate somebody like Geraldo. And the second fact is, of course, the emphasis given to the different elements of what Marin considers: in some sense, the sad fact of Geraldo's death is subsidiary to the sad facts of his actual life as an illegal worker in a foreign country, who will die without ever seeing his family again. The fact that…...

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Works Cited

Cisneros, Sandra. "Geraldo No Last Name." In Wyrick, Jean. Steps to Writing Well. New York: Cengage, 2013. Print.

Cruz, Felicia J. "On the 'Simplicity' of Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street." Modern Fiction Studies 47:4 (2001): 910-946. Print.

Harlow, Barbara. "Sites of Struggle: Immigration, Deportation, Prison and Exile." In Calderon, Hector and Saldivar, Jose David, (Editors) Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Raleigh-Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Print.

Chesla, pp. 1). Even though Hispanics have had to adapt to the American landscape if they wanted to thrive in the U.S., Hispanic communities have done a great job at keeping their customs and traditions.
One can actually say that Cisneros put a lot of her real life experiences into the character of Esperanza. The author has always felt that the men around her have attempted to impose themselves, pressing her to assume a typical female role. This is seen in "The Family of Little Feet" in several instances. Mr. Benny threatens the girls that he'll call the police if they don't leave. Also, he says that it is dangerous for them to be walking around with high-heeled shoes. It is obvious that Cisneros had had trouble developing in a community where women were not necessarily considered equal to men. Certain men have even went as far as comparing women…...

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Works cited:

1. Chesla, Elizabeth L. Sandra Cisneros' The house on Mango Street. Research & Education Assoc., 1996.

2. "Sandra Cisneros." Gale Literary Databases. 2003. . 29 Mar. 2010.http://204.56.132.81:2071/servlet/GLD/hits?r=d&origSearch=true&o=DataType&n=10&l=d&c=1&locID=txshracd2501&secondary=false&u=CA&t=KW&s=2&NA=sandra+cisneros

3. "Sandra Cisneros (1954-)." Short Story Criticism. Ed. Anna Sheets. Vol. 32. Detroit: Gale, 1999. 1-53. Literature Criticism Online. Gale. Del Mar College. 27 March 2010

"Sandra Cisneros." Gale Literary Databases. 2003. . 29 Mar. 2010.http://204.56.132.81:2071/servlet/GLD/hits?r=d&origSearch=true&o=DataType&n=10&l=d&c=1&locID=txshracd2501&secondary=false&u=CA&t=KW&s=2&NA=sandra+cisneros

Marry a Mexican, " highlighting underlining things essay. e talked patterns follow class: animal images, food images, religious images, discussion race color.
Point: The narrator Clemencia has been scarred by her previous relationships with men and the image of men given to her by her mother.

Evidence: Clemencia says: "I'll never marry…Mexican men, forget it…For a long time the men clearing off the tables or chopping meat behind the butcher counter or driving the bus I road to school today, those weren't men. Not men I considered potential lovers. ..I never saw them…my mother did this to me" (Cisneros 69).

Explanation: Clemencia's feelings about Mexican men, although she is Mexican herself, have their roots in both class-based and personal prejudice -- American society relegates Mexicans to largely subservient positions but she has also witnessed the gender-based prejudices within Mexican culture directed at her mother.

Point: There are invisible class differences between Mexicans not…...

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Works Cited

Cisneros, Sandra. "Never marry a Mexican." Full text available:

[3 Nov 2013]http://www-classic.uni-graz.at/bibwww/summerschool/reader/CSAS/texts/Mod2_Heide_170709_SandraCisnerosNeverMarry.pdf

The novel opens seven years after Gabo's mother, Ximena, was murdered by coyotes -- or paid traffickers -- during an attempt to cross the border. Her mutilated body was found, her organs gone -- sold most likely. Because of the fear surrounding this border town and the lure of the other side, all of the characters become consumed with finding afa. These people are neglected and abused. Like other fiction works on this topic (such as Cisneros's The House on Mango Street), The Guardians (2008) is rich in symbolism and flavored with Mexican aphorisms. The novel also shows the reader how complex and perilous border life is when you're living in between the United States and Mexico.

The book is important when attempting to understand the challenge of the border town life and it is, at the same time, a testament to faith, family bonds, cultural pride, and the human experience…...

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Reference:

Giroux, Henry A. (2001). Theory and resistance in education (Critical studies in education and culture series). Praeger; Rev Exp edition.

San Juan (2002) states that the racism of sex in the U.S. is another element of the unequal political and economic relations that exist between the races in the American democracy. Women of color may even be conceived as constituting "a different kind of racial formation" (2002), although the violence inflicted against them as well as with familial servitude and social inferiority, testifies more sharply to the sedimented structures of class and national oppression embedded in both state and civil society (2002).

San Juan (2002) goes on to explore the articulations between sexuality and nationalism. "What demands scrutiny is more precisely how the categories of patriarchy and ethnonationalism contour the parameters of discourse about citizen identities" (2002). How the idea of nation is sexualized and how sex is nationalized, according to San Juan (2002), are topics that may give clues as to how racial conflicts are circumscribed within the force field of national self-identification.

Sexuality, San Juan (2002) suggests, unlike racial judgment is not a pure self-evident category. He states that it manifests its semantic and ethical potency in the field of racial and gendered politics. In the layering and sedimentation of beliefs about sexual liberty and national belonging in the United States, one will see ambiguities and disjunctions analogous to those between sexuality and freedom as well as the persistence of racist ideology.

Fiction's Come a Long Way, aby
The development of fiction from its nascent stages until today's contemporary works is a storied one. Many features mark contemporary fiction and differentiate it from the classics of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries: For one, modern writers use different perspectives to narrate: In some works, the narrator switches from third-person omniscient to first person, and in some contemporary works, even the challenging second-person. Experimentation in styles also marks contemporary fiction: Nabokov, perhaps fiction's greatest ever stylist, has written one novel penned to ladies and gentlemen of the jury, and another as literary criticism on a purposefully mediocre poem. (Nabokov: Lolita and Pale Fire).

ut one of the most pronounced shifts in fiction over these centuries has been the move from stuffy, high art to a fixation on and immersion in pop culture. George Eliot, for instance, in "Daniel Deronda," interspersed a very staid narrative with…...

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Bibliography

Cisneros, Sandra: Woman Hollering Creek. New York: Vintage.

Cisneros, Sandra: Mexican Movies. New York: Vintage.

Cisneros, Sandra: Barbie-Q. New York: Vintage.

Johnson, Samuel: Rasselas. New York: Oxford.

Zapata
Chicana Identity in "Eyes of Zapata"

In her 1991 collection of stories entitled oman Hollering Creek and Other Short Stories, Sandra Cisneros offers some compelling insights into the cultural lives, personal experiences and romantic endeavors of an unrelated selection of Mexican-Americans. Cisneros' compilation of narratives are unrelated in plot but linked together by common themes, specifically themes concerning the female experience in this cultural context. The story entitled "Eyes of Zapata" is especially engaging on this subject, depicting the trials faced by Ines as she attempts to reconcile her love for a man with this man's responsibility to his revolutionary cause. In doing so, this story that revolves around the actions of a Mexican cultural hero paints a portrait of woman whose sacrifices made her no less heroic.

The relationship between Ines and Zapata is perhaps only secondary in this story to the relationship between Ines and herself. A story emblematic of…...

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Works Cited:

Cisneros, S. (1991). Woman Hollering Creek and Other Short Stories. Vintage.

Todorova, N. (2007). Women's Desire in the Fiction of Sandra Cisneros. http://lcpdams.librarycompany.org:8881/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=8179&local_base=GEN01

Esperanza transforms into a girl who wants nothing else but to leave the house on Mango Street and all the neighbors behind into a woman with a real sense of responsibility to the people in her neighborhood. She goes from thinking only of herself to really considering the lives of those in her community. This sense of responsibility and her set of values show that Esperanza has transcended even herself.

Esperanza's most important transformation is, arguably, her transformation into a real writer. In the beginning of the story, Esperanza can only imagine stories in which she is one of the characters; however, by the end of the story, Esperanza is able to imagine stories that don't involve her -- and this denotes that she is becoming a real writer and a true artist. It is ironic that through her writing she is able to detach herself from her neighborhood while, at…...

Refined Thesis Statement:

In Sandra Cisneros's "The House on Mango Street," the female characters navigate a myriad of hardships, ultimately demonstrating resilience and the strength to overcome adversity.

Elaboration:

I. Identifying Hardships:

The women in "The House on Mango Street" encounter a range of challenges, both external and internal. These include:

- Material deprivation: Many of the characters live in poverty, lacking access to basic necessities such as adequate housing and healthcare.
- Social marginalization: The characters face discrimination and exclusion based on their gender, race, and economic status.
- Cultural oppression: Traditional gender roles and societal expectations limit the women's opportunities and restrict their expression.
- Psychological....

Chicano: A Multifaceted Identity

The term "Chicano" is a multifaceted term that encompasses a rich and complex history, cultural heritage, and social experiences of Mexican Americans in the United States. It originated as a slang expression used by Mexican immigrants in the early 20th century to refer to themselves. Over time, it evolved into an assertion of identity and a symbol of both resistance and pride.

Origins and Etymology

The word "Chicano" has its roots in the Nahuatl word "Xicano," which referred to the indigenous people of the Aztec Empire. After the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the term was used by Spaniards to....

1. Zora Neale Hurston's narrative in 'How It Feels to Be Colored Me' and Sandra Cisneros's 'Barbie-Q' both explore the theme of identity through the lens of childhood experiences, yet they diverge significantly in their portrayal of racial and economic challenges. Hurston's essay reflects her journey from a relatively sheltered childhood in Eatonville, Florida, to the harsh realities of racial discrimination in Jacksonville, highlighting her resilience and self-acceptance. Conversely, Barbie-Q focuses on the economic constraints and cultural assimilation pressures faced by a young Latina girl, using the iconic Barbie doll as a symbol of unattainable American ideals. This comparison reveals....