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  • Essay / Voices of a Chicano Movement: The Novel “Puppet”

    The Chicano movement was a movement that inspired thousands of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans to take a courageous stand against discriminatory oppression. For years, the Chicano movement fought for Mexican rights. Puppet a Chicano novel embraces code-switching as a liberating combination that helps characters escape duality and preconceptions in order to constitute a new Chicano identity. A novel is deliberately made bilingual to rebel against Anglo-Saxon society. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay “We are a synergy of two cultures with varying degrees of Mexicanness or Englishness. I have to internalize the border conflict and sometimes I feel like one cancels out the other and we mean nothing. 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 still there but not really seen or understood. I was different because of the responsibilities and burden placed on me from the moment I came into this world. Stuck between two worlds, with two customs, two languages, and two very different perspectives, I was always caught in the middle, not knowing which was the best path. Family dynamics always define the role of what a young woman should be, how she should act, and where she fits in society and in her family. Culture shapes our beliefs. We perceive the version of reality it communicates. Women dominant, con conceptos, predefined concepts that exist as incontestable, uncontested, are transmitted to us through culture. As a young girl, I was always asked to do the right thing, be respectful and obey my elders. This 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 began to form my own ideas and opinions. Listening and obeying are two very different things; I was never good at it either. Although my mother always implanted these traditions from a young age, I always wondered why, why should I listen to and obey traditions that I didn't necessarily understand or agree with . This is when I developed my double consciousness, at the age of fifteen I knew that there were cultural values ​​that I wanted to keep just as there were traditions that I wanted to get rid of . Developing my mixed race consciousness at such a young age was difficult, my parents didn't understand me and I didn't understand what I couldn't get. “The new mixed race gets by by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she functions in a pluralistic mode: nothing is excluded, the good, the bad and the ugly, nothing is rejected, nothing is abandoned. Not only does it maintain contradictions, but it also transforms ambivalence into something else. Developing what worked for me and how I would implement these beliefs was not easy, it is still a constant struggle today. It's difficult because part of me wants to continue following the cultural traditions that my ancestors before me left behind, and the other part of me, my American side, wants to lead by example and be a role model for my young people sisters. Although I know that keeping these traditions alive willmy parents happy, I also know that some of these traditions have sometimes prevented and scared me from reaching my full potential. I don't want to completely cut ties with my culture but I don't want to completely assimilate either. Being caught in the middle can become difficult and cause tension between the familia and myself. Although I know that I will maintain some of my cultural values ​​and traditions, I also know that I must assimilate in a certain way in order to survive in a predominantly white male society. Being Mexican-American in America today means working twice as hard to prove that you have more to offer than brown skin, gang influence, and the notorious illegal stereotype that follows you. Being brown is hard, but being brown with ovaries in America today is like having a print on your forehead that says uneducated, welfare seeker and another statistic. Slowly creating a gap between ourselves, we assimilate without realizing it. In a sense, creating another version of ourselves, the Anglo-Saxon version. It comes from our own intuition, a sixth sense, which is often created by what we witness from others. Reading body language, tone and facial expressions helps create this Anglo-Saxon version of ourselves as a reflex, without realizing it. The desire to belong, the desire to fit in, and the desire to maintain these traditions can create obstacles along the way. But if there's anything I've learned, it's that boundaries will exist no matter what, the hardest part is knowing where you choose to stand and whether you're willing to pick a side or decide for yourself. In my culture or in any Latino culture, selfishness is condemned, especially about women; humility and selflessness are considered a virtue. Stop, what are you doing, why don't you help more, let it go, this isn't how I want it done, don't bother doing it if you don't not. It’s the right way. Growing up in a traditional Mexican household, gender roles were always enforced, coming from a household with three sisters, my father always expected housework to be done without his help. While my mother, sisters and I shared household chores, he only criticized. Stuck between two cultural identity roles, one with the belief that a woman's place is in the home and the second with; This is America if you don't like something change it. I was faced with possible conflicts and arguments between listening to my father and my mixed-race double consciousness. Just doing something for myself first was considered selfish. There is more to me than my skin color, there is more to me than my physical features, and there is more to me than my gender. Embarking on the path 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 yet, but I refuse to run away, I refuse to surrender, and I refuse to allow a devaluation of my people and my people that defines who I am and who I am building to be. Living in the greatest nation in the world, also known as the land of opportunity, can also be considered the land of great obstacles. We live in a nation that was founded by immigrants for immigrants, but something as brutal as going back to where you came from still exists today. But I'm in my home country, my parents may have come illegally, but I was born and raised in America, this is my home. To control my tongue is to control the language in.