Latinas as Girls and Mothers: Acknowledging their Depictions in Literature

 The first time I said the word Latina aloud, I was 18 years old. Of course, I understood Spanish from an early age, but never spoke it until being bilingual became beneficial on a resume. Perhaps, as a child, my family talked too much and too loud, and I was defiant. Or perhaps, I was shy and had a hard time squeezing my words through so many booming personalities.

Or perhaps, as a young girl, I observed quickly that what was spoken in schools and on television wasn’t what we spoke at home. How the people with big cars and even bigger, white-painted houses looked, wasn’t how we looked. Or that the beloved heroes of my favorite stories held no appearance, or culture similar to what I knew.

Yes, my prejudice against my Puerto Rican roots might have started there. 

By not speaking, maybe I thought I wasn’t complicit with where I came from. There weren’t characters like me or my family in the literature I consumed, and as a child I assumed being unrepresented meant undesirable. I am an avid lover of the scary and the romantic, and so badly, even in my youth, did I want that to include stories like mine as well. Maybe then that undesirable feeling would go away.

Sandra Cisneros gave me exactly that in The House on Mango Street. And once I thought I had the guidebook on how to write like a “Proper Latina,” Monica Ojeda crushed all my preconceived notions in her boundary breaking novel Jawbone.

I often wonder why it is that to be comfortable in your identity means to suffer through coming to terms with it first. As if who we inherently are is an embarrassment. And in terms of representing that sentiment, Cisneros and Ojeda both explore how young girls navigate their way through adolescence and “coming to terms” with themselves, and their Latina womanhood. What it means to be a young Latina girl observing your mother and existing within the community. What it means to be part of a whole. And the aftermath of leaving that collective. 

 The House on Mango Street, composed of forty-four chapter vignettes, is told through the observations of Esperanza Cordero, a young Chicana writer who considers herself to have more potential than what Mango street allows her (Cisneros, 2004). Despite each vignette being a short glimpse into the neighborhood, Cisneros is economical, telling readers just enough to have a solid clue into what kind of people these characters are. All the descriptions are through Esperanza’s voice, and there’s a bluntness that comes with youth that Cisneros utilizes. Esperanza describes the people around her with their core attributes such as young Marin who gets all dressed up to never leave the house or a Spanish-speaking mother who cries when her baby speaks English (Cisneros, 2004). 

While brief, readers only receive a single page or two for each character Cisneros brings into Esperanza’s story. But through describing them by their greatest overarching feature, the reader knows all they need to in order to understand their role on Mango street. By the end of the book, Cisneros has given a full 360 view into the community Esperanza comes from.

Jawbone follows a group of six highschool girls—led by dynamic duo Anneliese and Fernanda—and their highschool English teacher Miss Clara (Ojeda, 2022). After school, the girls find ways to manage their boredom by playing games and telling scary stories in an abandoned building (Ojeda, 2022). It is Anneliese who truly leads, telling the most graphic stories and coming up with the wildest games (Ojeda, 2022). However, Fernanda encourages Anneliese’s behavior, and the two share the closest connection in the group. Though, over time the pair's connection becomes more convoluted, more muddled in the lines of intimacy, and Anneliese brings her horrific fantasies to further lengths. Using real modern and online horror, Ojeda brings to life the true terror of an unhinged teen girl with a cult-ish following.

Meanwhile, newly hired teacher Miss Clara suffers traumatic anxiety from her odd relationship with her deceased mother and her previous students breaking into her home (Ojeda, 2022). Feeling violated, Clara harbors a fear of adolescents that enters the realm of Lovecraftian cosmic horror (Ojeda, 2022:183). A fear of what they can do. A fear of what adolescents can become. A fear Anneliese senses and capitalizes on. Especially when her closest friend Fernanda wavers in loyalty to her. She knows what two dogs to pit against each other. 

Jawbone is a story rich with raw truths and deep understandings of female connections, especially between those of friendships and of mothers. Of clique-culture, and how the fear of being removed from the community is worse than the abusiveness within it. Ojeda understands that even when surrounded by family there is a loneliness in adolescence that aches to be rectified. Chosen companionship. Soul sisters rather than blood. Someone who understands, but not forced into connection via shared parents.

A best friend. 

“You don’t pick your sisters and that’s not my fault. You don’t pick your sisters, you just get them…someday I will have a best friend of my own” (Cisneros, 2004:8-9).

While the two books differ greatly in genre—one following a coming-of-age narrative within a community and the other depicting a slice of adolescence in the lens of horror—I believe that their intersections reveal a break from the norm that lends to the greater story they tell. With great skill, both authors fragment the traditional writing form, relaying the overarching plot in a series of non-linear narratives. By breaking up their narratives each writer has also taken a step back from the clean-cut, linear demands of academia and literature. This aligns with their themes of adolescence as that stage of life is also unpolished. Moments from childhood are akin to the dramatic ups and downs of a heartbeat monitor; Cisneros and Ojeda simply follow the pulse. 

Have you ever heard a child tell a story? Rarely do they start from the beginning.

Usually, children start in the moment that is most relevant to them. Who started the fight, where they are blameless, where it hurts, where they were during the action etc. Never the set-up-to-the-action context beforehand. Cisneros and Ojeda put us in the “endings” of their stories before we get to the beginning. Though, upon first opening the book one may not know they’ve just seen the ending until they continue on. This is a stylistic choice by Cisneros to show us how far Esperanza’s come versus Ojeda who does this to show where Fernanda is going to end up. Esperanza’s desire for more than the fate of Mango street. Fernandas position at the top of the social food chain to being kidnapped and afraid of death. We see this and must pry further to uncover the how and why they get to where they are at the end.

As the vignettes continue in The House on Mango Street the patterns of how this neighborhood of characters perpetuates and maintains its woes begin to show. While it is not bluntly called by name by Cisneros, within Latino cultures lies the unspoken concepts of machismo and marianismo. Machismo is much more recognized, and even joked about in popular culture via the term “Macho-man,” as it directly ties back to the widely known concept of the patriarchy. The big, strong, tough guy. The belief that a man is head of household,  and the commanding force of society is not new, but strongly upheld in Latino culture. What’s more so unspoken is marianismo, which is the culture in which women accept and even uphold machismo, by passing down the gender roles of submissiveness to their daughters and uplifting only their sons. Which is why on Mango Street a Puerto Rican boy named Louie is free to roam the streets, and even steal cars; whereas his older female cousin, Marin, must watch Louie’s younger siblings and cannot go farther than the front porch of the home (Cisneros, 2004:23)

And once again Cisneros doesn’t call marianismo culture by name, but she shows it through all the women of Mango street each living in the cycle. It begins with Esperanza describing her great-grandmother as “a wild horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn’t marry. Until [her] great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off” (Cisneros, 2004:11). From that point on, her great-grandmother, whose name Esperanza inherits, “looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit with their sadness on an elbow” (Cisneros, 2004:11). This scene is the set up to the themes to come in this book. The name Esperanza, derived from the Spanish verb esperar, quite literally means to wait. To hope for something to happen. Subtly, in her main character's name Cisneros captures the essence of what many of the female characters in the book are doing. Waiting for something better to happen. The shared feeling of entrapment, lost potential, and need to escape. Esperanza’s mother laments that she “could’ve been somebody,” having the skills of a singer, knowing multiple languages, and being educated (Cisneros, 2004:91). It’s implied that by becoming a wife and a mother she lost the ability to revel in such things. Esperanza’s mother, as well as other older women in the neighborhood, all tell Esperanza to leave (Cisneros, 2004). To go to school and make something of herself (Cisneros, 2004). 

Break the cycle.

This leads the book itself to turn into a circle, with Esperanza rewriting the beginning of the novel as an educated writer looking back on her past. The vignettes thus signify her flashbulb memories of the street, their shortness lending to her memory of only the most significant moments. 

However, this is where my slight critique begins. Less so of Cisneros, and more so of this overall concept of Latinos needing to “leave their roots” to be successful. This trope of “girl comes from a rough neighborhood, leaves, works hard, gets good.” But “getting good” just means becoming middle class. Suburb people. Being comfortably wealthy enough to have a pool, but still not expected to donate to charities. Additionally, there is a consistent poetic beauty in the way Cisneros tells Esperanza’s story. Even the trauma is poetic. And while the voice is beautiful, and inspiring, I feel POC writers need to “pull their punches” in a way when discussing oppression-related trauma. This censorship in which POC writers must ease their readers into difficult subjects, lest they be accused of “trauma-dumping” or “harping on an issue settled decades ago.” We’ve got to make the uncomfortable musically and poetically comfortable, and leave the explicit and grotesque to Stephen King. 

To be blunt, writers of color are often tugged toward palatability and niceties in consideration of a white audience. Depictions of Latina characters are dampened down to: sad, silent, and waiting by a window. Within that context Monica Ojeda raises the question:

Why do girls always have to behave?

There’s a ferocity to women that Ojeda not only understands but amplifies. While Cisneros remains on the safe side of depicting roughness, Ojeda gives the true, disturbing graphic. The truth of our humanity that’s too taboo and scandalous to admit aloud:

Just how nasty we can be.

Additionally, another element that my peers and I also found ground-breaking was that the Latinas in Jawbone are already upper-middle class and suburban! Stepping away from the stereotypes, Ojeda’s characters are essentially bored rich girls, not the itching-for-more, impoverished Latinos we’ve come to expect in Latino adolescent narratives. And like thrill addictions, these girls need higher and higher risk activities in order to stay entertained. At least, that’s what ring-leader Anneliese tells them. There’s a detachment that comes with wealth and too much time of your hands, and as games shifted from who could scream the loudest, to slapping one another, to throwing oneself down stairs, to balancing on thin, high beams, and ultimately biting a soul sister as hard as one can, the imaginations of young girls left unchecked can go wild (Ojeda, 2022).

However, imaginations do not exist in a bubble and are absolutely influenced by outside sources. And Ojeda bases the scary stories Anneliese tells the group of girls and the cosmic godly horror she creates on real 2005 to modern Internet culture. 

While The House on Mango Street contains a timeless, cultural collective feel, Ojeda presents the reality of an entire young generation. How the Internet has changed society also affects the literary world. Specifically, as I’ve stated ad nauseam to my peers, the concepts of horror have changed from fear of the paranormal such as demons or ghosts. With the rise of True Crime culture, people are realizing that what is truly terrifying is the potential and the fact of what human beings are capable of doing to one another. As stories of serial killers and videos of graphic gore circulate online, consumers consistently need worse and worse scenarios to maintain that thrill of being scared. Anneliese is just a representative of someone who enjoys and embodies this feeling. The potential desensitization of an entire generation to empathy and the allure of violence. 

Anneliese conjures this concept of a “White God” in this potentiality, describing whiteness as “represent[ing] that which merely by showing itself anticipates terrible things that cannot be known” (Ojeda, 2022:183). She presents the case that white, not black, is the color of horror (Ojeda, 2022). It is the color of silence that “when it appears, you know something awful is about to happen…because it can be easily perverted and contaminated” (Ojeda, 2022:183). This is the context Anneliese uses to explain Miss Clara’s fear of young girls in her pseudo-manifesto. Youth is white, “an age that represents the void, a lack of definition, but also a great many possibilities, the potential to be” (Ojeda, 2022:185). Children are ripe for contamination, especially in this Internet era. They have the potential to be cruel. The potential to become like other, dangerous, people. Children have a blankness where they can become anything. 

But for young girls, the first stain they wear is the life of their mothers. And in this tainted ideology, Ojeda presents a somewhat warped version of marianismo in which it is not the mother dooming the daughter to a life of unhappiness, but the daughter doing so to the mother.

“Everyone engenders their murderers, but only women give birth to them” (Ojeda, 2022:23).

Marianismo here presents itself as the idea of mothers slowly dying as soon as they birth a daughter, as a daughter becomes her mothers shadow (Ojeda, 2022:28). Motherhood is thus a series of “doppelgänger[s] about to disappear so her double could exist” (Ojeda, 2022:28). Women pass down themselves to their daughters, giving everything that is theirs to their daughter until they cease to exist. Therefore, this form of marianismo is a mother's passing down of resentment to their daughters. For once again, women have become trapped by producing offspring, as to have a daughter is to lose yourself to her. A daughter gains all the future and the potentiality a mother might have had, which burns its brightest during her teenage years, and is smothered when she too, becomes a mother.

Jawbone rotates in structure and perspective, revolving between 3rd person POV’s of Miss Clara and Fernanda, quick chat-log dialogue scenes, and Anneliese's own writing. Frequently, sections of the novel are without paragraph breaks, adding to the overall anxiety of the piece as the reader seemingly has to hold their breath through the walls of text. By the next paragraph break the reader is gasping for air, for release from the depths of these women’s mind spirals. The short dialogue scenes are where Ojeda puts her own spin with the expected poetic nature of Latino writing. The short, vague bits of text are like poetry, in which the characters ask riddles, repeat certain phrases over and over, and describe each other’s relationships in language “flowery” yet keeping in theme with a horror novel, such as:

“Why do girls shower with their best friends? Why do they greedily watch over them? Why do they love them so much that they would rather see them dead?” (Ojeda, 2022:68). 

However, in my opinion, the narrative break of Anneliese’s essay and poetry writing is the most excellent choice of Ojeda’s overall. She is the only character who the reader doesn’t see directly into her mind, but she gets to speak directly to us. Lending to her cult-leader type personality, she only reveals the elements of herself that she wants to. As such, Anneliese controls the narrative just as she controls all of the other characters in the story.

I have always admired authors who write via the perspectives of young people, but in the sense of uplifting how much knowledge adolescents truly have. Just as I behaved, childhood is a time of observation. Of soaking up the surrounding world and trying desperately to understand it. 

I have attempted this time and time again in my own works. But toeing the line between maintaining a childish voice, and how children truly think can be rather difficult as an adult. We lose some of those simple conclusions about life. Therefore, I feel it becomes a matter of listening to the community around you. Afterall, you can’t capture a voice if you don’t bother to hear it. So, I find myself as a bit of a thief as a writer. I listen to ways my nieces see the world, and my grandparents, and my overworked siblings, and my fellow university peers. And from their mouths comes a plethora of perspectives that I pocket away; personalities and voices that live within me like a village of ghosts.

By reading these two works I’ve come to understand that The House on Mango Street and Jawbone exist on opposite ends of the same spectrum. One views the growth from adolescence and from one’s maternal culture as a trial to be overcome. The other views the same concepts in their most horrific sense, as something to be feared. To reminisce, or a scary, cautionary tale. I feel it is in the middle of these two ideas that I exist as a writer. 

While my love leans toward the short story format and the quick flashes of life it provides, like Cisneros, I aim to present myself in a manner like Ojeda. Explicit. Raw. 

Real. 

I long for a mixture of the musical and the chaotic. I write about the complexities of identity, gender, religion and my Latino culture. Mainly circling the stories of women, but also how these concepts affect children and men too. I write about little girls with monsters in their frizzy hair, and how their mothers have to beat them out. Or about how men, in fear of losing their masculinity, can become entrapped by sexual icons and lose everything they once had. And even though my stories exist in the revolving realms of horror, magical realism, and my own depictions of real life, I hope to carry within them my cultural background, my own personal Mango street, but refrain from censoring myself. As a Latina writer, I’ve got to be louder.

And make myself be known.