Marry a Mexican, Highlighting Underlining Things Essay.

¶ … Marry a Mexican, " highlighting underlining things essay. We 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 immediately apparent to Americans.

Evidence: The narrator compares her father and mother: "a Mexican girl who didn't know enough to set a place for each course at dinner, nor how to fold cloth napkins…[at my mother's house] all the dishes cracked and chipped, nothing matched…[my father] left behind a house neither poor nor rich but thought itself better than both" (Cisneros 69).

Explanation: The narrator's mother was poor; her father was middle class and left Mexico because of his bad grades at university. They came from very different classes and this ambiguity has similarly affected the narrator's unstable sense of self.

Point: As an artist, the narrator sees herself as outside of traditional class dynamics.

Evidence: The narrator says: "I'm amphibious. I'm a person who doesn't belong to any class" (Cisneros 71).

Explanation: By escaping class, the narrator hopes to escape her race and her mother's fate -- this also drives her to have hopeless relationships with married white men.

"Never marry a Mexican:" Instability of class and the self

The narrator of Sandra Cisneros' short story "Never Marry a Mexican" is internally conflicted because of her unstable sense of self. Growing up, Clemencia was the offspring of a poor, second-generation Mexican-American woman who was unhappily married to a formerly middle-class first generation Mexican-American man. Clemencia's father felt he had married beneath him socially. His attitude gave Clemencia's mother a sense of contempt for her Mexican-American origins. These feelings were transferred to her daughter who witnessed the dynamic between her parents and the images of Mexican-American culture to which she was exposed. However, Clemencia's career choice of becoming an artist only further served to destabilize her sense of self, given that it meant she lacked a secure sense of class alliance.

The provocative title of the short story is deeply ironic because Clemencia is Mexican by birth. However, throughout her life she has not dated Mexican men, partially because she wishes to be different than her mother, who married young and chafed against the judgmental attitude of her higher-born Mexican husband. "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). The narrator longs for a different life than her mother.

The reason for her mother's unhappiness lay in the class differences between herself and her husband. This is starkly apparent when the narrator compares her father and mother: "a Mexican girl who didn't know enough to set a place for each course at dinner, nor how to fold cloth napkins… [at my mother's house] all the dishes cracked and chipped, nothing matched… [my father] left behind a house neither poor nor rich but thought itself better than both" (Cisneros 69). Even though her father worked in the typical occupations of unskilled Mexican immigrants when he came to the United States, he gave himself 'airs' and Clemencia's mother resented this treatment. When he was dying, her daughters perceive her as neglecting both him and themselves.

In response to her mother's attitude, Clemencia strives to escape class pressures entirely by becoming an artist, which is neither lower nor middle-class in the view of Middle America. This also becomes a way of escaping her definition as a Mexican-American woman -- she is a bohemian artist first and foremost, living in a cheap apartment but selling art to wealthy patrons. "I'm amphibious. I'm a person who doesn't belong to any class" (Cisneros 71). The narrator's language is significant -- the word 'amphibious' suggests that she almost sees herself as a different, animal species.