Topic > Voices of a Chicano Movement: The Novel 'Puppet'

The Chicano Movement was a movement that inspired thousands of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans to courageously take a stand against discriminatory oppression. For years the Chicano movement has fought for the rights of Mexicans. The novel Puppet a Chicano embraces code-switching as a liberating combination that helps characters escape duality and preconceptions to constitute a new Chicano identity. A novel is made bilingual on purpose as a way to rebel against Anglo society. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay“We are a synergy of two cultures with varying degrees of Mexican or Anglo-Saxon. I have to internalize the boundary conflict that sometimes I feel like one cancels out the other and we are nothing without meaning. Growing up Mexican-American I always knew I was different, I stood out not just because of the color of my skin or because I was a woman, it was something else that was always there but not fully seen or understood. I was different because of the responsibilities and burdens that were given to me the moment I came into this world. Trapped between two worlds, with two customs, two languages ​​and two very different perspectives, I was always caught in the middle without knowing what the best solution was. Family dynamics always establish the role of what a young woman should look like, how she should behave, and how she should be. where he is in society and in his family. Culture shapes our beliefs. We perceive the version of reality that it communicates. Mujeres dominatos, con conceptos, predefined concepts that exist as indisputable, unchallenged, are transmitted to us through culture. As a young girl, I was always asked to behave properly, be respectful, and obey my elders. It wasn't anything new to me, it was the way I was raised for as long as I could remember. As I grew up, I started to form my own ideas and opinions. Listening and obeying are two very different things; I've never been good at it either. Even though my mother always planted those traditions from a young age, I always wondered why, why I had to listen to and obey traditions that I didn't necessarily understand or agree with. That's when I developed my double consciousness, at the age of fifteen I knew there were cultural values ​​I wanted to keep just as there were traditions I wanted to get rid of. Developing my mestizo consciousness at such a young age was difficult, my parents didn't understand me and I didn't understand what I wasn't going to achieve. “The new mestiza faces the situation by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. Learn to be Indian in Mexican culture, Mexican from the Anglo perspective. Learn to navigate cultures. It has a plural personality, it operates in a pluralistic way: nothing is excluded, the good, the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. It not only supports contradictions, but also transforms ambivalence into something else. Developing what worked for me and how I would implant these beliefs was not easy, to this day it is a constant struggle. It's hard because part of me wants to continue to follow the cultural traditions that my ancestors before me left behind, and the other part of me, my American part, wants to set an example and be a role model for my sisters younger. While I know that keeping those traditions alive will make my parents happy, I also know that some of those traditions have sometimes held me back and scared me from reaching my full potential. I don't want to completely cut ties with my culture, but I don't want tonot even assimilate it completely. Being caught in the middle can become difficult and can cause tension between me and the family. While I know that I will continue some of my cultural values ​​and traditions, I also know that I must assimilate in some way to survive in a predominantly white, male society. Being Mexican-American in America today means working twice as hard, it shows that there is more to you than dark skin, gang influence and the famous illegal stereotype that follows you. Being brown is hard, but being brown with ovaries in America today is like having a handprint on your forehead that says: uneducated, welfare seeker, and another statistic. By slowly driving a wedge between ourselves, we assimilate without realizing what we are doing. In a way creating another version of ourselves, the Anglo version. This comes from our intuition, a sixth sense, often created by what we witness from others. Reading body language, tone and facial expressions helps create that Anglo version of ourselves as a reflection, without realizing it. The desire to belong, the desire to fit in, and the desire to maintain those traditions can create barriers along the way. But if there's anything I've learned it's that boundaries exist anyway, the hard part is where you choose to stand and whether you're willing to choose a side or decide for yourself. In my culture or in any Latin culture, selfishness is condemned, especially towards women; humility and selflessness are considered a virtue” Stop, what are you doing, why don't you help more, leave it alone, that's not how I want it done, don't bother doing it if you're not going to do it right. Growing up in a traditional Mexican family, gender roles were always enforced, coming from a family with three sisters, my father always expected housework to be done without his help. While my mother, my sisters and I shared the housework, he did nothing but criticize. Stuck between two cultural identity roles, one with the belief that women's place is in the home and the second with; This is America if you don't like something change it. I was facing possible conflicts and arguments between listening to my father and my mixed-race double consciousness. The simple act of doing something for myself first was seen as selfish. There's more to me than my skin color, there's more to me than my physical characteristics, and there's more to me than my gender. Walking the road of self-discovery isn't easy, but nothing worth working for is ever easy. Taking inventory of my life has been the best and hardest task so far, but I refuse to run, I refuse to give up, and I refuse to let my people be devalued and my people define who I am and I'm building to to be. Living in the greatest nation in the world, also known as the land of opportunity, can also be seen as the land of great obstacles. We live in a nation founded by immigrants for immigrants, yet something as brutal as going back to where you came from still exists today. But I'm in my homeland, my parents may have entered illegally, but I was born and raised in America, this is my home. Controlling my language means having control over which language I choose to speak, telling me that speaking Spanish is not allowed is asking to control a part of my identity that speaks for itself. America wants you to do this, America wants you to do that, and America disapproves of people like this, people like you. Just like a dentist tells you what to eat, how to floss, and how you should brush your teeth. America does the same by informing us.